The Brahmin's False Virtue
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São estes sacerdotes dos Gentios Em quem mais penetrado tinha enveja; Buscam maneiras mil, buscam desvios, Com que Tomé não se ouça, ou morto seja. O principal, que ao peito traz os fios, Um caso horrendo faz, que o mundo veja Que inimiga não há, tão dura e fera, Como a virtude falsa da sincera.
These are the priests of the heathens, in whom envy had struck deepest; they seek a thousand devices, they seek evasions, so that Thomas may not be heard, or may be put to death. The chief among them, who wears the sacred threads across his breast, contrives a horrendous crime, so that the world may see that there is no enemy so harsh and fierce as false virtue is toward the true.
Tethys narrates the martyrdom of the Apostle Thomas in India. The Brahmin priests, consumed by envy, plot his death; their leader frames him with an invented crime.
Tethys is telling Gama the legend of the Apostle Thomas in India. The Brahmin priests, jealous of his growing following, cannot beat him in the open, so they scheme in secret: a thousand "maneiras" and "desvios," ways and dodges, to silence him or have him killed. Their leader, marked out by the sacred thread worn across the chest, fabricates a crime and pins it on Thomas.
The sting is in the last couplet, and it is aimed wider than India. The worst foe of real virtue is not open vice but virtue counterfeited: the man cloaked in the outward signs of holiness, the priestly thread on his breast, who uses that very authority to frame an innocent. Camões, writing amid the Counter-Reformation, lets the reader feel the edge turn back toward his own Church as much as toward the Brahmins.
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