The research analyzes the use of metaphors, allegories, comparisons and examples, rhetoric resources addressed to the senses, passions and imagination of listeners, in Vieira's sermons "As Cinco Pedras da Funda de Davi". The figures compel the incitation of the listener's psychic dynamism. It was found that the images used are coherent with the Lenten liturgy and the sacramental hermeneutic reading of reality oriented by teleology. It was also verified that the use is based on Aristotelian-Thomistic rhetoric and philosophic-psychology, a knowledge of understanding man as totality, and that the power of word, figuratively, provides the elaboration of experience and behavioral change.
History of Psychology; Rhetoric; jesuit priest Antônio Vieira