Literature & Theology, Vol. 25. No. 1, March 2011, pp.

2031
doi:10.1093/litthe/frq070 Advance Access publication 17 January 2011

Linda Freedman
Abstract
For the radical death of God theologian, Thomas J.J. Altizer, William Blakes
epic and prophetic poetry instigated a redemptive Christian vision. Altizer,
writing in the 1960s in America, was concerned with nding a theology that
suited his time, one that would participate in a reversal of the alienation and
dehumanisation he saw as the plague of his own highly technological and
urban society. In Blake, he found not only a theology but also a vital poetics
for theology; Blake was, for Altizer, a unique Christian visionary whose
language and form created a new living myth, invaluable to the contemporary American theologian. This article discusses the importance of Blakes
poetics for Altizers radical apocalypse of belief and assesses the theological
and literary stakes of his project.

In the 1950s and 1960s Blake found his moment in American counterculture.1
Allen Ginsberg had taken Blake as the model for his prophetic poetry and
persona as early as 1948, helping to establish him as a leading light for countercultural poets and artists. Aldous Huxley took Blakes line The Doors of
Perception as the title for his classic novel of American counterculture (1954),
also inspiring the band, The Doors, and inventing a popular and much
echoed notion of a psychedelic Blake that went hand-in-hand with
mind-altering drugs. Gary Snyder was soon to claim Blake as an inspiration
for ecological awareness and radical change in Four Changes (1970) and
Ronald Johnson would later claim Blake as a possessing spirit during the
composition of his poem Radi Os (1977). Indeed, when the term counterculture was brought into public use in 1969 by Theodore Roszak, the arguments for it were consciously Blakean and his book took, as its epigraph, a line
from Blakes Milton.2
Blakes role in American 1960s counterculture raises questions as to the
relationship between inception and reception. What does it mean to talk of


Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies, Selwyn College Cambridge, UK.

Email: lf301@cam.ac.uk

Literature & Theology # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved.
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TOM ALTIZER AND WILLIAM

BLAKE: THE APOCALYPSE
OF BELIEF

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21

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an author and/or artist in terms circumscribed by space and time? The Blake
that Ginsberg lauded had already been shaped by a mythography that bound
him together with Walt Whitman and Hart Crane as a gure of prophetic
truth. Blake had, from his very rst appearance in American culture in
the 1840s, been consistently associated with radicalism and reform. The rst
Blake poem we know to have been reproduced in America was The Little
Black Boy that was printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on
10 March 1842 under the editorship of Lydia Maria Child, who used
her control of the paper to widen the appeal of Abolitionism. In each instance
of American reception, reproduction and imaginative interpretation or
adaptation there are themes that illuminate the immense applicability of
Blake to his readers and the personal and cultural contexts that shape
their reading of him. Blakes American reception says so much about the
culture in which it occurs partly because his poems actively encourage
imaginative response and partly because many of the strands of religious radicalism current in Blakes own milieu had found their way into American
society from the start and had in turn helped shape the mythography of the
painterpoet.
The radical theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer is rarely mentioned as part of this
discussion, but he has every right to a place. Altizers responses are both personally and culturally conditioned. He was born in West Virginia, he taught at
Emory University in Atlanta and is currently Professor Emeritus of New York
State University at Stony Brook, where he worked for a time with the extraordinary Blake scholar, David Erdman. His reading of Blake shares Erdmans
fervid desire to read transcendence in immanence and is also indebted to
Northrop Fryes seminal mid-20th century re-evaluation of Blakes mythic
structures as well as the idea of myth as a coincidence of the sacred and profane
advanced by Mircea Eliade, whom Altizer met after leaving his Divinity
School training in Chicago, and who he still considers one of his single biggest
inuences and sources of support.3 It is necessary rst to offer some contexts
for reading Altizer on Blake and then explain why Altizer found Blake
invaluable to his own personal theology, in order to draw some conclusions
about the relationship between Blakes poetic vision and Altizers radical sense
of an apocalypse of belief.
Altizer is arguably a pre-eminent gure for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary study of literature and theology. Partly, this is because of the grace
with which his work eschews the constraints of singular academic discipline.
Trained as a theologian, he is also an English scholar. Recalling his arrival at
Stony Brook, Altizer writes in his memoir: I found that I had been appointed
simply because I was a theologian, for it is literature itself which demands a
theological explication.4 He had already pursued this philosophy in his book
on Blake, which is as much a literary as it is a theological work, dedicated to

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LINDA FREEDMAN

the Christian theologian must learn to treat the artist as prophetic seer, a visionary
whose work recalls a new epiphany of the Spirit. So long as theology and the
Christian community maintain the priestly conviction that revelation is a
once-and-for-all event of the past, it will be closed to the prophetic faith that
revelation continues in history, and continues in such a way as to challenge the
most deeply cherished certainties of faith.6

In Altizers thought processes, Blake is a singular but not solitary gure.

Initially, he keeps company with Hegel and Nietzsche; later this extends to
Joyce, Milton and Dante. Blake is always special for Altizer partly because of
the apocalyptic effect he had on Altizers own personal theology and partly
because, with the possible exception of Finnegans Wake, his later work is the
only thing that offers Altizer an imaginative reconciliationand not just a
philosophical means of approachto the crisis occasioned by the death of
God. This last and most obviously controversial idea, which takes Nietzsches
famous phrase as its starting point, denes the radical theology of which
Altizer was part and is at the heart of the challenge he perceives to the
most deeply cherished certainties of faith.
Opening his book on Blake, which was rst published in 1967, Altizer
says that he would like to think of it as a product of the new theological
mood in America. The 1960s was a decade that saw serious, if relatively
short-lived, challenges to historic Judeo-Christian theism.7 H. Richard
Niebuhr arguably inaugurated a new age of theological thinking with his
essay on Radical Monotheism (1960). Gabriel Vahanian brought Nietzsches
phrase into popular currency with The Death of God: The Culture of Our
Post-Christian Era (1961). Three international theological bestsellers were the
English Bishop John A T Robinsons Honest to God (1963), the Canadian
Pierre Bertons The Comfortable Pew (1965) and the American Harvey Coxs,
The Secular City (1965). Altizer was therefore one of a group of diverse theological thinkers who either proclaimed the death of God or insisted on a
wholly secular interpretation of the Bible. The death of God movement
exploded mid-decade when Time magazine ran several articles on it in 1965

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close reading of poetry and dened by a narrative arc of fall and redemption.5
What Blake led him to believe is not just that literature may need a theological
explanation but that theology may need the imaginative properties of literature for its sustenance and renewal. Implicit in the truce that Altizer declares
between radical poetics and radical theology is a sense that epic and prophetic
poetry may be fundamentally necessary to the visionary realisation and possible resolution of the theological problems posed by modernity, particularly
the problem of belief in a world in which God has died.
He maintains that:

THE APOCALYPSE OF BELIEF

23

Just as crucixion harbors resurrection, so the disappearance of God turns out to

be Gods nal revelation. In the modern or late modern world, God is totally
present as absent; or, conversely, absence in the presence of God.10

Paradoxically, death is not disintegration but an incarnational event. The

nothingness that Altizer envisions is embodied. The seeds of this belief are
present in, and I think integral to, his work on Blake. It manifests itself most
obviously in the emphasis Altizer places on embodied experience as a fundamental part of Blakes apocalyptic vision. For Blake, he argues, experience is
the essence of regeneration. Jersusalem tells an apocalyptic story of the passage
through/Eternal Death! And of the awaking to Eternal Life.11 The emanation
Jerusalem progresses through postures of innocence, experience and liberation.12 The darkness of regeneration, expressed in the bent form of
Jerusalem and the anguished cries of Los, nds its balm, or light, in the
embodied experience of generation, or sex, which is eventually equated
with the incarnate body of Christ:
And the Religion of Generation which was meant for the destruction
Of Jerusalem, become her covering, till the time of the End.
O holy Generation!
Of regeneration!
O point of mutual forgiveness between Enemies!
Birthplace of the Lamb of God incomprehensible!13

Blake emphasises the Edenic landscape of regeneration through a predominantly green background in this plate. In the centre of the marginal illustration

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and featured the question in bold red Is God Dead on the front cover in
1966. Unsurprisingly, the death of God movement, which was part of a tidal
wave of counter-cultural trends, generated a huge amount of criticism.8 Older
radical theologians such as Niebuhr and Tillich were pushed towards conservatism, conservative theologians responded with hostility, and ordinary
Americans bought bumper stickers proclaiming My Gods not dead! Sorry
about yours!
But Altizer always insisted that he was a Christian theologian. For him, to
say God is dead afrms the centrality of the crucixion to Christian theology.
In other words, he claims that Christianity knows more deeply than any
other religion the violence of coincidentia oppositorum. This, for Altizer, is at
the heart of every modern epic that knows creation as fall and rupture as true
genesis or origin. In Blake, for example, Altizer claims the fall is present as a
pull into chaos. But it is a darkness that precedes the light of redemption.9 So,
to say that God is dead recognises nihilism as something that is not only
present in the modern world but also present as its most profound reality.
He writes:

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LINDA FREEDMAN

Every real response to that embodiment is nally a theological response, for the
naming of the Nothing has always been a theological naming, even if a reverse or
inverted naming, for the Nothing is ultimately inseparable from the Godhead
itself. Already this is deeply known by a pure mysticism, certainly known by the
deepest mysticism of the ancient and medieval worlds, but it is not fully actualised
in either pure thinking or the imaginative vision until the advent of the modern
world.15

So, for Altizer, to assert the death of God is not to end the notion of
godhead, as Americans aunting their bumper stickers might have feared,
but to begin a theological process of naming the darkness that he believes
to be the true presence of godhead in the modern world. Altizer cannot be
without literature and philosophy in this process. His argument is utterly
dependent on the vision he understands to be present in Blake, Joyce or
Mallarme and the language born from Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,
to name just a few of his most important inuences. Yet, he persists in identifying the need for theology to catch up with its sister disciplines. For theology, as for the world, acknowledging the death of God should ultimately be
afrmative and apocalyptic action.
Death of God theology signals an apocalypse of belief in two distinct
yet crucially related senses. The rst thing to understand is that, for Altizer,
apocalypse is always a double motion, simultaneously enacting the crisis
of ending and the unveiling of a new beginning. The re-founding of
Christianity in atheism is a response to modernity, as traditional forms of
practice and faith are undermined by rapid technological developments,
urban growth and cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima
and Vietnam. In this wasteland, belief is generated through the interior apocalypse of individual consciousness, which journeys into the very depths of
psychological darkness and makes absolute negation the province of
afrmation.

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is Adam, one arm gesturing to an ascending female, perhaps symbolising the

emanation Jerusalem, the other towards a descending male, perhaps symbolising the perturbed Albion. Blakes goal, Altizer suggests, was the creation of a
Christian epic that would celebrate the whole of history as the human body of
the eternal Jesus, whose death makes possible a genuine metamorphosis or
kenotic transformation of godhead.14
That Blakes gures exist on both an experiential and abstractly symbolic
plane is, I think, of great importance to Altizer. His clearest statement of the
embodied nothingness of godhead emerges in a much later and more profoundly abstract work. Seeking to clarify his theological persuasions, Altizer
explains:

THE APOCALYPSE OF BELIEF

25

Instead of the study and rationalisation of God, theology therefore becomes

a way of knowing the void at the heart of contemporary existence. It was in
this respect that Altizers discovery of Blake proved most illuminating. Writing
again in his memoir, Altizer offers us the following as a way of understanding
Blake as a source of theological inspiration:

Yes, Blake has been my deepest theological model . . . this is a way of knowing
the deep darkness and the ultimately negative abyss of the Godhead, one which
has never entered any of our theologies, and thereby it is a way of entering the
absolute nothingness and the absolute nihilism of our world, and entering it
through a Christian even if radical vision, for Blake was the rst Western seer to
envision an absolute nothingness, or to envision an absolute nothingness as an
absolute totality. Blake could be known as a madman even to many of his friends,
and until a century after his death in 1827, literary criticism commonly judged his
work to be a consequence of madness, yet such madness can be known as holy
madness, and one which is the inevitable consequence of a deeply prophetic
vocation.16

Altizers identication with Blakes holy madness is both personal and cultural. Personally, madness had always haunted him. He confesses:
I have often agonised that insanity is inherent in my family. One uncle murdered
his son, another committed suicide, and my father was a deep alchoholic
throughout his adult life. Nor was madness alien to our matriarch, who feigned
inrmity throughout the time that I knew her, and who ruthlessly dominated her
family . . . This was simply my given world as a child, a world in which the
normal could only be known as abnormal.17

As part of his ministerial training for the Episcopal Church he was required to
take a psychiatric test. The test, which was supposedly the most advanced of its
kind, yielded a diagnosis of insanity and the young Altizer was told that he
could expect to be in a psychiatric hospital within a year. This prediction was
strangely liberating. At last he had conrmation of a predilection he had long
suspected and identied with and, in a strange way, his exclusion from the
ministry helped form his vocation in theology as he began to align madness

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Theology is a naming of darkness, and the deeper the darkness the deeper the
naming that can occur, hence I have long been hypnotised by Blakes naming of
God as Satan, that very Blake who gave us a more comprehensive vision of Satan
than any other seer, and who could know our own selfhood as an embodiment of
Satan. Is this because Blake was the rst seer to envision the death of God, and
because it is the dead body of God which Blake most deeply knew as Satan, a
totally repressed and alienated body, and yet a body which is the body of a wholly
fallen totality?

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LINDA FREEDMAN

I am Orc, wreathd round the accursed tree:

The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning gins to break;
The ery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro the wild wilderness,
That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps,
To make the desarts blossom21

The desert is both a symbol of severance and possibility. When Orc symbolically makes desert dust out of the tablets of stone that were handed to Moses

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with a prophetic vocation that could only have life outside of the established
structures of religion. Culturally, Altizers appreciation of holy madness is
both part of a longstanding tradition of antinomian enthusiasm (one could
draw a parallel here with Emersons desire to be made nobly mad by the
kindlings before [his] eye of a new dawn of human piety18) and profoundly
indebted to his Calvinist heritage, which grounded the notion of religious
conversion in the individual experience of spectral possession, demonic wrestling and the abasement thought to precede divine glorication.
When Altizer employs Blake as a theological guide, it is with a strong sense
of his anti-establishment and antinomian tendencies and their intrinsic connection to the holy madness that helps him identify his own exiled theology
with Blakes prophetic and artistic vocation. The God that Blake names Satan
is the one created by the church of history, enshrined in its laws and mythologised in Blakes poetry as Urizenic repression. In his memoir Altizer suggests
that the 1960s was a decade in which this revelation gained particular relevance, as left-wing American radicals could identify America itself as Satanic
in its imperialism, its capitalism, its racism and its war in Vietnambut they
could also feel America to be vibrantly alive with the radicalism of the arts and
theology. In The New Apocalypse he suggests that recapturing Blakes late
18th-century view of America as the epiphany of a new heaven on earth
(which culminates in the mature book of Jerusalem) is the rst aim of the
mid-20th century American apocalyptic theologian. Altizer acknowledges
that Blake comes to abandon the political hope instilled in him by the
American Revolution, but he insists that Blake will never abandon the symbolic gure of America even if he will never again associate the historical birth
of America with an apocalyptic death of God.19
One way of understanding Altizers sense of Blakes poetic rendering of the
American scene is through the metaphor of the desert.20 In America: A
Prophecy, the Prometheus-Christ gure of Orc, who is also the embodiment
of the revolutionary re of America, appears as a blasphemer and destroyer of
Mosaic law. He proclaims:

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at Sinai, he echoes Moses own response to the sinning Israelites, aligning

contemporary religion with idolatry; he unleashes the punishment of scattering frequently used by the Old Testament God on the organised religion of
the Church;22 and he destroys the dead book that is both constitutive and
representative of the clerical establishment. If severance requires a deliberate
creation of desertto stamp and scatter law into a dust-land shorn of the
repressive ties of historypossibility is described in terms of natural organic
energy and the transformation of that dust land into the fecund earth of
futurity as the decay of history nurtures the life of the present moment.
Altizers reading of Blake celebrates the idea that America must, in the mid20th century, appear as a desert and a desert shorn of the vegetation of history.
But, he continues, a desert can also be a gateway to the future; . . . we must
follow Blake in wholly abandoning the cosmos of the past, and pass with him
through the agony and the triumph of the death of God.23 In an early essay
on the new death of God theology, Altizer suggests that America has so far
been denied its theological vocation because it lacks the deep roots in the past
that have been an essential presupposition for theological creativity. In
Altizers mind, the myth of American exceptionalism is still strong and as he
imagines his homeland as a cultural desert, he also envisions this desert as the
prime condition for newness. Need we wonder he says, that it was America
which was the rst country to respond to psychoanalysis, that it was the
American poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who helped initiate a decisive
revolution in European poetry, or that it has been America which has been
most open to modern scientic thinking?24 The redeeming hope of the
contemporary wasteland lies in Altizers sense that darkness (in this case the
vulgar positivism of modern American society) is never without the hope of
light. America is the desert that can bloom.
If apocalypse, for Altizer, is a coincidence of opposites, expressed as
Christian atheism, the naming of God as Satan, light as darkness and desert
as fecund earth, Blake speaks most pertinently to the apocalyptic moment
because his prophetic vision is the only way of making paradox into a holistic
reality. It is hard to overstate the importance of coincidentia oppositorum to
Altizers theology. Indeed, it is the unifying feature of all the literary and
philosophical works that he nds inspirational. Partly, Altizers love of Blake
is born from the feeling that he was the rst to envision the death of God and
therefore the rst to create a truly modern epic. But it is also born from a
theopoetic response to the texture of Blakes composite art. So, what does
Altizer mean by vision? Style is an issue here. Altizers real passion is for Blakes
later works, which eschew the deceptive simplicity of the early Songs and
Sketches in favour of a deliberately obscure and disjunctive narrative. It was
through his book on Blake that Altizer felt he truly became a writer and his
style has frequently faced the same charges of obscurity and difculty as

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LINDA FREEDMAN

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonishd at me.

Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. The Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness and love28

Altizers statements about godhead rest on the imaginative enactment of coincidentia oppositorum. It is of ultimate signicance, he claims, that major late
modern poets, beginning with Blake, could evoke, enact and embody the
absolute alienness or absolute emptiness of godhead itself. It cannot be, therefore, that this nothingness is alien to our real thinking and as all the deepest

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Blakes. Like Blake, Altizer is both repetitious and discordant, imposing a sense
of paradox on the reader through style as much as content. I am tempted to
conclude that Altizer feels apocalyptic theology can only be realised through
stylistic reication of the void that is its central theme.
Altizer encourages this conclusion when he suggests that Blake makes us
feel our way into darkness. Vision allows a way into a fallen world that is
forged through a more comprehensive engagement with darkness than sight
alone can admit. In this respect the composite nature of Blakes visual and
verbal creations is crucial. Commenting on the rst plate of Europe, in which
the Father-God thrusts his ngers down to illuminate the darkness below,
Altizer writes that already Blake could know our senses as now being so
disordered that they are wholly isolated from one another, and only touch
can nd a passageway out of our fallen world.25 He suggests this as a fundamental reason for the importance of painting and design in prophetic poetry; for Altizer, the totality of sight directed towards the image or icon is
inseparable from the feeling of touch.26
Visionary poetry therefore allows us to feel our way into the void of modernity through imaginative enactment. Altizer insists again and again that Blake
is able to know God as Satan, Heaven as Hell and Creation as Fall. What he
means by this invocation of epistemology is a sensory, visionary apprehension
of an ultimate and profound nothingness that paradoxically resists naming and
cries out to be named. Imaginative enactments of abyss begin with Blake, he
says, although they are not yet at their end.27 This rewriting of epistemology
as poetic enactment is key because it is hard to make sense of Altizers theology if one approaches it any other way. Despite his insistence on demarcation and explanation and his recurrent recall to literary and philosophical
examples, the force of Altizers theology lies in a poetics that is able to trick
the mind, or open it, into recognising nothingness as something and something more profound than anything else. Blakes words in Jerusalem seem
particularly appropriate:

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apocalyptic and prophetic traditions have known the abyss as the very enactment of God, so genuinely apocalyptic enactments are purely positive and
purely negative at once, therein embodying a coincidentia oppositorum as their
centre and ground.29
By now, I hope it is clear how Blakes imagery and form helped develop
Altizers sense of theology as a naming of darkness or void and why this felt
particularly relevant to his personal and cultural sense of apocalypse as a dual
event in which fallenness is never disassociated from the possibility and reality
of regeneration. At this stage, the lingering uncertainty surrounds the focus of
belief when God is deadmust we believe in something? Partly, this can be
answered by approaching belief as a matter of dispositionjoy in struggle,
light in darkness, afrmation in negation. But as Niebuhr noted at the beginning of the decade that saw Altizers theology grow, to draw a distinction
between theology as an abstract discourse about the objective reality of God
and a discourse about the subjective activity of faith may well be false.30 The
temperament of Altizers theology bears an intrinsic relation to its object.
Thus, he claims ultimate nothingness as the something of godhead in a way
that one can either accept as the poetics of coincidentia oppositorum or disregard
as logically impossible.
Logic is not Altizers style. Indeed, the preoccupation with logos is one of
the problems he nds endemic in orthodox theology and Blakes resistance to
enlightenment thinking is one of his most attractive features. It is through
poetics and not logos that we can best understand Altizers debt to Blake. If
the disappearance of God is Gods nal revelation, absence is the presence of
God so it is only in the void of darkness that we can afrm belief. Altizer is
possibly closest to Blake in his feeling that the void must somehow be named
as Blake does in Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion.
For Mark C. Taylor this is where Altizer betrays his own theological vision.
Taylor agues that to remain true to himself Altizer must guard the silence he
cannot avoid breaking and allow theology to die with God and darkness to
remain nameless.31 The problem with this criticism is that it misses the incarnational basis of Altizers theology, which is, in effect, a Christology, a way of
knowing godhead through the violence and regeneration enshrined in crucixion and resurrection. For darkness to remain nameless, it must also remain
disembodied, as embodiment itself is an act of naming and knowing. Thus,
Altizer is able to claim that in proclaiming Jesus alone Blake creates a truly
modern imaginative vision.32
There is a sense in which the truce that Altizer declares between radical
poetics and radical theology relies on a rather problematic assumption that
darkness always equates with godhead. So, the act of naming that is poetry and
the act of naming that is theology become coeval. This is fundamentally what
makes Altizers theology both exciting and difcult. Altizer embraces literature

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LINDA FREEDMAN

as theology; but he unwittingly directs us to embrace his theology as literature.

Theology needs God or godhead but poetry can surviveand indeed does
surviveas a naming of darkness that is not theological and it is in this sense,
perhaps, that Blakes work most fully enacts Altizers radical apocalypse of
belief which spells the death of God and the life of literature.

6
7

9
10
11

12

13
14

See J.J. Krippal, Reality against Society:

William Blake, Antinomianism and the
American Counterculture, Common
Knowledge 13 (2007) 98112.
T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter
Culture: Reections on the Technocratic
Society and its Youthful Opposition
(New York: Doubelday, 1969).
H.N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of
William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); M. Eliade, Sacred and
Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W.R.
Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1959).
T.J.J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A
Theological Memoir (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2006), p. 25.
T.J.J. Altizer, The New Apocalypse: The
Radical Christian Vision of William Blake
(Aurora: The Davis Group Publishers,
2000).
Altizer, The New Apocalypse, p. 4.
See S.E. Ahlstrohm, The Radical Turn
in Theology and Ethics: Why it
Occurred in the 1960s, The Annals of
the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 387 (1970) 113.
See, for example: Honest to Christ: A Lay
Christians Reply to Dr Robinsons Honest
to God (Chichester: L.E. Bunnett, 1963).
Altizer, New Apocalypse, p. 42.
Altizer, Living the Death of God, p. xv.
W. Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the
Giant Albion (London: Tate Gallery,
1991), pp. 134, 1.12.
The illustrations to plate ve show the
female gure ascending through ve
different states. Blake, Jerusalem, p. 22.
Blake, Jerusalem, pp. 140, 7.6467.
Altizer, New Apocalypse, p. 96.

15

16

17
18

19
20

21

22

23
24

25

26
27
28
29

30

T.J.J. Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing

(Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2003), p. xi.
Altizer, Living the Death of God,
pp. 1623.
Altizer, Living the Death of God, p. 2.
Cited in Alice Felt Tyler, Freedoms
Ferment: Phases in American Social History
to 1860 (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1944), p. 177.
Altizer, New Apocalypse, p. 159.
See D. Jasper, The Sacred Desert: Religion,
Literature, Art, and Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004), pp. 14260.
W. Blake, America: A Prophecy, The
Continental Prophecies (London: Tate
Gallery, 1995), pp. 27141, p. 99, 10: 18.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a
city and a tower, whose top may reach
unto heaven; and let us make a name, lest
we be scattered abroad upon the face of
the whole earth. King James Version,
Gen. 11.4.
Altizer, New Apocalypse, p. 150.
T.J.J. Altizer and W. Hamilton (eds),
Radical Theology and The Death of God
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin,
1968),
pp. 289.
W. Blake, Europe: A Prophecy,
Continental Prophecies, pp. 141287, p. 218.
Altizer, Living the Death of God, p. 76.
Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, p. 5.
Blake, Jerusalem, pp. 136, 5.1621.
Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing,
pp. 12340.
H.R. Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and
Western Civilisation (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska, 1960), p. 3; Lisa
McCullough and Brian Schroeder (eds),

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REFERENCES

THE APOCALYPSE OF BELIEF

31

Thinking through the Death of God: A

Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer
(Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2004).
Mark C. Taylor in the preface to Living
the Death of God, p. xviii.

32

31

T.J.J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus

(London: SCM, 1998), p. x. Jesus
alone is the translation of the Greek
motto on the title plate of Jerusalem.

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