[pt] O presente trabalho tem como objetivo evidenciar, sobretudo, nos romances O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo e Caim o que nomeamos de teologia ficcional de José Saramago e como ela liga-se à temas da reflexão teológica. Inicialmente, é preciso percorrer um caminho que torne possível afirmar a literatura como autêntica expressão teológica mesmo em formato não teórico. Assim, discute-se a relação entre os dois saberes na história, aproximações e distanciamentos. No entanto, verifica-se a necessidade de afunilar a discussão em torno da ficção romanesca buscando demonstrar o seu potencial teológico. Com este pano de fundo, adentra-se o universo saramaguiano procurando desvendar como se dá a sua construção. Tendo o ateísmo declarado do autor como pressuposto influente na escrita dos romances, percebe-se como ele usa a Bíblia e carnavalizando-a desloca as afirmações do sentido tradicional operando uma verdadeira construção teológica desconstrutiva. Seguindo este percurso, são destacados, especialmente nos romances chamados bíblicos, o conteúdo da teologia ficcional saramaguiana que, mesmo diferindo da reflexão teológica, relaciona-se com ela, na medida em que, revê questões que a interessam. / [en] The objective of this present work is to evidence, especially in the novels The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, what can be classified as the fictional theology of José Saramago, and how this is connected to the themes of theological reflection. To begin, it is necessary to follow the route that enables us to positively identify literature as an authentic theological expression, even in a non-theoretical format. In this way, the relationship between these two forms of historical scholarship , both in rapprochement and detachment, is discussed. However, there is a need to narrow the discussion to fictional novels in order to demonstrate its theological potential. With this backdrop, we penetrate the universe of Saramago seeking to unravel how its construction takes place. Having the author s declared atheism as a presumed influence in the writing of the novels, one perceives how he uses the Bible and carnivalizes it to replace the claims of its traditional meaning by using a true deconstructive theological construction. Continuing in this same direction, the content of the fictional theology of Saramago is highlighted, especially in the so-called biblical novels that, despite their differentiation from theological reflection, are actually related to it insofar as they retrace questions that are of interest to it.

In this doctoral dissertation I examine the development of Kierkegaard's sense of vocation as a Christian creative artist by research into his journals and published works, as well as investigating how this was influenced by his scriptural hermeneutic. I then attempt to sketch some starting points for a theology of Christian creative artwork contextualised within modern theological aesthetics by drawing upon this examination. I argue that Kierkegaard began writing without documented reflection on his intentions and communicative methodology, but was nonetheless a religious author from the start of his career, as his text The Point of View for my Work as an Author later claimed. I trace how he began with a more "indirect" approach in his writing and gradually developed a theory of "indirect communication", though there were more "direct" elements present in his work from the beginning (the "first authorship"), yet as he continued in his authorial career he became ever more "direct" in his mode of communication (the "second authorship"), until it eventually became exclusively more "direct" religious writing (the "attack on Christendom"). I conclude that the most concise and complete formulation of Kierkegaard's mature conception of his task as a Christian artist becomes "to communicate Christianity in Christendom" in a more direct mode-to explain straightforwardly what authentic Christianity is in an age of cultural, purely nominal religion. I allow that this task is in some ways unique to his own historical situation but contend nonetheless that a consideration of it is profitable for contemporary theology because of the many different ways that he attempted to carry it out. In Kierkegaardian terms, and following on from resources in Kierkegaard and his use of scripture, I argue constructively from all of this that more "direct" communication is the more valuable form of communication to the Christian creative artist for theological reasons, but that more "indirect" communication can still be useful, in the task of communicating creatively through art.

The thesis is organized as two sections of two chapters each: the first section establishes a theoretical framework of a broad and reinvigorated Christian sacramentality within which to situate the second—an investigation of the theories and practice of the mythopoeic art of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in this sacramental light. The first chapter acknowledges the thoroughgoing disenchantment of modernity, an effect traced to the vanishing of a sacramental understanding of the world, and then explores the history of the sacramental concept that would seek to be reclaimed and reconceived as a possible means of the re-enchantment of Western culture such as in the recent work of David Brown. An appreciative critique of Brown's work is offered in chapter two before proposing an alternative understanding of a distinctly Christian and reinvigorated sacramentality anchored in the Incarnation and operating by Transposition. A notion of sacramental vision is developed from the perceptual basis in its classic definitions, and a sacramental understanding of story is considered from a theological perspective on the infinite generativity of meaning in texts, along with recent theories of affect and affordance. The second half of the thesis expounds the views of mythopoeia held by Lewis and Tolkien in order to show how they are not only compatible with but lead to a sacramental understanding of story as developed in part one, with mythopoeia affording the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of reality, awakening it into focus in distinctly Christian ways (chapter three). The final chapter demonstrates how their mythopoeic theories are exemplified in their art, examining specific ways Till We Have Faces and The Lord of the Rings afford the recovery of a potentially transformative vision of various themes central to them. In closing it is suggested that such a sacramental understanding of story may contribute to the re-enchantment of Western culture, not to mention the re-mythologization and re-envisaging of Christianity, whose significance in these regards has been hitherto mostly unrecognized.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2011 Aug 15

Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.