Os Continentes, os Conjugati e os Outros: identidade cristã e a instituição da sexualidade divina nos escritos de Agostinho de Hipona (Séculos IV e V)

Abstract

This thesis has as main goals to analyze the creation of a sexuality, which I denominate of divine sexuality, from five controversial treatises attributed to Augustine (354-430), bishop of the region of Hippo in North Africa (395-430 ). The treatises written between the fourth and fifth centuries and understood as a discursive field are De Vera Religione, Confessiones, De Bonno Coniugalli, De Sancta Virginitate and De Civitate Dei, which were analyzed through a historical hermeneutics and presuppositions of Discourse Analysis . The argument developed throughout the thesis is that at the moment of systematizing the Christian religion as a system of beliefs and practices adopted voluntarily, Bishop Augustine of Hippo, anchored by the pastoral power, proposed a christian identity that, from the contact with neoplatonism, it was proposed to be stable, substantial and fixed in contrast to the multiple identities, which were in stand by mode to be triggered according to circumstance. It is the attempt to impose a hierarchical identity on one that is structured in lateral arrangements. In this context, the elements linked to sexuality were used by the Bishop of Hippo as identity tracer, so that, influenced by Michel Foucault, I propose that the device of Augustinian sexuality creates the divine sexuality that should characterize in a permanent way the catholic christian identity orchestrated by the bishop of Hippo. That is to say, considering that a considerable part of the pastoral power comes from the fight against religious dissent, the augustinian sexuality device fictionalizes the governmental rationalities of the episcopate exerted by Augustine in forging a sexuality oriented towards the continence, that antagonizes to the pleasure and proposes itself fixed and natural. This divine sexuality was antagonistic to the plastic sexuality (pleasure-oriented) that characterized the traditional communities of the Roman Empire.