Antony Williams - "Cosmic Cosmic Marionette" oil on canvas

Antony Williams’ painting “Cosmic Cosmic Marionette” suggests discussions ranging from Gnosticism to science fiction to comparisons with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” 

In the painting, Adam and Eve are puppets (marionettes), while Satan is a sort of sock puppet; all three characters being manipulated by a space alien. But for what purpose?

For Milton, that’s no alien but rather a just and loving God using the Fall as an instrument to advance his love and Grace.  Humans must experience a fall in order for Grace to have a subject to work upon.  As John Bunyan states:

Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty.

We can’t be saved unless we sin. God provides the “theatre” and cause of our sin, while also offering the path to redemption from that sin, though His Grace.  Do people have any free agency in this process? One might wonder that if sin, grace and redemption are foreordained and driven by God’s will, as it were, then what is the point?

The “science fiction” reading of the garden story drives the consideration of these difficult ambiguities, and readers are confounded as they entertain Gnostic notions of an “evil” (or anyway morally ambiguous) alien conducting mad scientist experiments—compare the Prometheus Alien film and Nathaniel Hawthorne's story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Is God a mad scientist?  Indeed, is God… God?

Milton has been called “the first poet of space,” and Paradise Lost has been called the first modern science fiction story. Through his science fiction (if that’s what Paradise Lost is) does Milton advance orthodox, heterodox, Gnostic, or heretical exegeses of these matters?

Readers perplexed by these questions should do well to consider the ambiguities themselves—that is, rather the consideration of these ambiguities is the true subject of the “experiment.”  Considering the shifting medium of myth and language—let alone our precarious situation in the universe—can we hope to arrive at some kind of happy resolution in pursuing these questions? Little wonder in his sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent” Milton concludes, “they also serve who only stand and wait.” Simply existing in our curious spiritual state, moreover in our nearly imponderable situation in relation to space and time—these are materials of a fantastic cosmic adventure!

Meantime, to view one among many possible Highbrow insights into these matters, please click HERE.

Curious about helpful sociological distinctions that provide resolution? Please click HERE.