by Gene Ward Smith
Responding to Jim Laycock's September 1986 argument that Lucifer could be read as patron saint of science, Gene Ward Smith of 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. Smith then notes that Shelley's Prometheus also bears Christ-like suffering inside the poem.
The post is brief but source-bearing. It matters because it moves the thread from provocation toward literary memory: Satan, Prometheus, and Christ become figures to compare carefully rather than names to collapse into one slogan.
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 as part of the Good Works Library Usenet archive project, March 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; the source text is public domain.