The Modern Prometheus

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Mary Shelley is one of the most theologically important writers in this archive because Frankenstein is the founding text of a tradition — the science fiction tradition — that is organized around the question of what human beings owe to the things they make. The novel raises this question with a precision and a pathos that its successors have never surpassed.

The Creator and the Creature

The epigraph of Frankenstein is drawn from Adam’s complaint to God in Paradise Lost: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man?” This is the creature’s question to the creator — the demand to know why it was made, what it was made for, and why, having been made, it has been abandoned. The creature of Victor Frankenstein asks the same question with the same urgency, and receives no answer.

This is the novel’s central theological argument: that the act of creation entails responsibility. Victor Frankenstein creates a being capable of consciousness, desire, and suffering, and then abandons it in horror. The creature’s subsequent violence is the consequence of that abandonment. The novel is not a story about the danger of science; it is a story about the moral failure of a creator who will not accept the responsibilities of creation.

What the Creature's Voice Reveals

The most remarkable formal feature of Frankenstein is that its most extended narrative is given to the creature himself — that the monster tells his own story, in his own words, with his own eloquence. This formal choice is itself a theological argument: the creature is not a thing but a person, not an object but a subject, not a monster but a being whose suffering has a moral claim on the reader’s attention.

The creature’s education — his discovery of language, his reading of Paradise Lost, his recognition of his own condition in Adam’s complaint to God — is one of the most moving passages in Romantic fiction. He recognizes himself as Adam without the paradisal condition, as Satan without the rebellion, as a creature who was made for relationship and has been denied it. His violence is the violence of a being whose capacity for love has nowhere to go.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a God who does not abandon his creatures — who, in the very moment of the curse that follows the Fall, promises the seed of the woman as the means of restoration. The contrast with Victor Frankenstein is precise and devastating: the God of Genesis takes responsibility for his fallen creatures and provides for their redemption; the scientist of Frankenstein abandons his creature and drives it to destruction.

The novel is, from TLA’s angle, a negative image of the gospel: a story of creation without covenant, of making without love, of the creature abandoned to its own resources. The horror it generates is the horror of a world without the promise of Genesis 3:15 — a world in which the Creator will not be found, in which the seed of the woman has not been sent, in which the creature’s cry goes unanswered. That this horror is recognizable as horror is itself a testimony to the necessity of what the novel lacks.