The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake
The Trinity of orthodox Christianity is harmonious. The Trinity for Blake is, conspicuously, not a happy family: the Father and the Son do not get on. It might be thought that so cumbersome a notion is inconceivable before the rise of Romanticism but the Ophite Gnostics of the second century AD appear to have thought that God the Father was a jealous tyrant because he forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and that the serpent, who led the way to the Tree of Knowledge, was...
Search in google:
What is the creator of the world were evil? What if Christ, the Son, were the antagonist rather than the ally of the Father? Nuttall tracks this subversive theology from the Gnostics of the second century, through its flickering reappearance in Marlowe and Milton, to its full development in Blake.
List of PlatesList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1IBlake: The Son Versus the Father4IIRaising the Devil: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus22iCalvinists and Hermetists22iiFlying Men and Gnostics41IIIMilton71iSatan's Shield71iiMilton's Theodicy: The Argument from Freedom86iiiThe Garden as Maze101ivThe Fortunate Fall116vArianism, Monism, Materialism136viThe Invisible Christ161viiThe Language of Trees: Unstable Mythologies171IVBlake192iGodly Nudists192iiThe Matrix of Blake's Thought200iiiBlake and Milton224ivAntinomian Blake239vContraries257Index273
