The most eloquent Dante critic of the twentieth century, Erich Auerbach, says in his 1946 book "Mimesis" that the portrait of the Florentine nobleman Farinata degli Uberti in the Inferno is so powerful psychologically that it makes Farinata's placement in the Comedy's theological scheme (as an example of heresy) unimportant: "The image of man eclipses the image of God".
It doesn't begin to account for a detailed and nasty theological scheme he has regularly espoused over many years.
Tarkovsky's theological scheme is not as clear-cut: Alexander is an atheist who turns to God, but salvation depends on persuading a witch to sleep with him, or so he's told by the Nietzsche-quoting postman who arrives bearing telegrams and perhaps a divine message or two.
With equal nuance, Paul Jesson's tremendous Cardinal Wolsey is a sybaritic hypocrite but still heart-breaking in his fall, while Lydia Leonard's Anne is a sexual and theological schemer – the plays intriguingly explore the theory that Henry's succession needs gave an opening to Protestant plotters in his court – who later takes on true tragic force.
So, in the grand scheme of wacko theological attention-seeking, when Don Julian was run out of the barrios for preaching to venerate Christ by decorating a secluded island with creepy dolls, he was actually being pretty reasonable.
A normative element is also indicated in classification schemes that preserve theological distinctions, such as that between natural and revealed religion.
A medieval master sculptor, for example, received the program for a complex scheme of church sculpture from theological advisers, and Renaissance contracts for sculpture were often extremely specified and detailed.
By contrast, the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798 1857), from a positivistic and materialist point of view, devised a different evolutionary scheme in which there are three stages of human history: the theological, in which the supernatural is important; the metaphysical, in which the explanatory concepts become more abstract; and the positivistic i.e., the empirical.
"For the Union scheme I had one fixed idea, a single unified scheme which would bring theological subjects and closely related secular subjects in convenient juxtaposition" (p. 24).
Any nannies employed under this scheme will not be required to have any training outside of the compulsory theological seminary schooling.
The political and cultural roles of the church in particular, the supranational character of the papacy, the immunity of clerics from the state's legal and fiscal apparatus, the church's intolerance and intransigence in theological and institutional matters, as well as its wealth and property constituted the central problems in the reform schemes of Italy's nascent intellectual movement.
