From his debut in Hilarotragoedia (1964) and already in the writings of the 1940s posthumously collected in Ti ucciderò mia capitale (2011), theological discourse in Giorgio Manganelli's work appears as a constitutive element of his creative universe rather than as a merely satirical repertoire. His private library confirms his interest in biblical theology, mysticism, apocrypha, and the history of religions (Francucci, 2018).
Within a horizon marked by gnostic and apophatic motifs, this study approaches Manganelli's texts as a literary reworking of theological negativity. In his work, God appears as absent, deferred or reduced to a formal function; yet this withdrawal does not lead to contemplative silence. Instead, it generates a proliferation of gods, non-gods, pseudo-scriptures, infernal spaces and divine sanctuaries, in which divine and infernal hierarchies are disrupted and recomposed as unstable series.
The comparison with Meister Eckhart is framed not in terms of influence but of structural correspondence. In Manganelli, what preserves transcendence in the apophatic tradition is reversed into a negativity that still generates sacred figures while emptying out their doctrinal foundation. This negativity is also inscribed in the body, a privileged site of theological reflection. In his prose, the body becomes a zone of transit between the organic and the numinous, bound to digestive and scatological dimensions where creation and decomposition tend to coincide (Paolone, 2002).
Hillman's notion of psychic polytheism (Hillman, 1975) offers a further interpretive key. The collapse of the monotheistic God opens in Manganelli onto an inner pantheon, where divine figures no longer guarantee revelation but give symbolic form to psychic conflict. Manganelli thus transforms the crisis of transcendence into a mythology of psyche and body, turning literature into the place where apophaticism becomes both a subversion of sacred hierarchies and a form of embodied theology.