by Gene Ward Smith

Responding to Jim Laycock's September 1986 argument that Lucifer deserves to be patron saint of science, Gene Ward Smith — a mathematician at UC Berkeley — reached back to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1820 preface to "Prometheus Unbound" to show that the comparison between Satan and Prometheus has literary precedent, and that Shelley explicitly extended it to Christ as well. In his poem, Smith notes, Prometheus not only resembles Satan but is also, and deliberately, a Christ figure.

The post is a model of Usenet at its best: brief, erudite, and pointing the conversation somewhere it had not been. Shelley himself, writing in the aftermath of Milton, saw the rebel Titan and the rebel angel as both nobler than the God who punished them — and in Prometheus Unbound he gave his titan the added dimension of suffering, sacrifice, and eventual liberation that made him resemble Christ as much as Satan.

Comparing Satan and Prometheus goes back at least as far as Shelley. In the introduction to Prometheus Unbound — which I recommend to both humanists and Christians — Shelley writes:

"The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest."

In Shelley's poem, Prometheus is not only like Satan in Paradise Lost — he is also and explicitly a Christ figure. One of the torments of Prometheus is to view the sufferings of Christ and then the history of Christianity:

Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears!
Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death,
So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,
So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.
O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak,
It has become a curse. I see, I see
The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just,
Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee,
Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home,
An early-chosen, late-lamented home;
As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind;
Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:
Some — Hear I not the multitude laugh loud? —
Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms
Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles,
Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood
By the red light of their own burning homes.

Colophon

Written by Gene Ward Smith, UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. Posted to talk.religion on September 9, 1986. Message-ID: [email protected].

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Written as a direct response to Jim Laycock's "Lucifer is the Patron Saint of Science and Philosophy" (talk.religion, Sep 3, 1986). The verse quoted is from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820), Act I — public domain.

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