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Related writers
Mary Shelley
HG Wells

The Myth of Frankenstein

The following essay contains an analysis of the Myth of Frankenstein in literature which seeks to explain the paradigm with reference to historical, social, and religious contexts.

Some persons may find it shocking with regards to their own values, because it deals with philosophical and theological issues too. Every time such analyses are attempted, they are bound to conflict with beliefs, and the more documented they are, the more they are seen as personal or biased attacks. Keep in mind that the intention is not to offend, but to describe. Nonetheless the Myth of Frankenstein is primarily the tale of the conflict of views between some religious bodies and the scientific community. In this battlefield where bigotry and intolerance more often than not ended up in trials, arbitrary emprisonment, libel, lobbying, and death, what am I then? A war journalist, nothing else.

Related works
Frankenstein
The Fly
Reanimator
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Island of Docteur Moreau
Invisible man
The time machine

mythology* : the tales, parables, legends and stories of a religion that describe and defend the principles of the faith using metaphors

Origins of the Myth of Frankenstein

The role of science is a topic that has been discussed in literature for many centuries. In fact, it is a debate that started in ancient Greece, with the Myth of Prometheus. Prometheus tried to steal the fire from the gods - thus earning an eternal doom.
The Myth was amplified by Plato ; it is believed that the tale of Atlantis is an utopia, a tale where the political analysis remains the main intent of the writer. It has apparently only one clear message: scientific progress is a threat to society and should be vetoed.

Religions and Science

It is then the Catholic church who carried on the fight against scientific and technical progress. To a large extent, the issue is based on the need for the church to strengthen its own mythology, but also to reduce the role of scholars and probably to prevent the economic changes fathered by technology (in the organisation of labour, for instance). The dogma of the Catholic Church suffered indeed from Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin; scientific progress to a large extent reduced the church's influence because it showed technical inaccuracies in the mythology, whereas faith and religion should primarily be concerned with moral values and not scientific truth.
This is probably due to the intention of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages to hold the truth on all matters, and not just on matters of faith - or branding everything a matter of faith.
It is during the 16th Century that the Inquisition was founded, and this coincides with a rise of science in Europe, which survived what we would call today a religious dictatorship.
Technical progress was restricted during the Middle Ages, when the guilds were regulating very severely the workmarket, and it was only because the first printed book was a Bible that Gutemberg got away with it.
Some religions coped well with scientific progress, like Islam in the centuries of splendor (700-1200) where astronomy, medicine, chemistry made incredible progress, while at the same time religious power was moderate and a factor of growth for Islam. In other geographic areas, like Central America, scientists were working with the high religious authorities - their astronomic knowledge was impressive; the same happened in India with the development of mathematics. Therefore, there is no strict opposition between science and religion... Read also Dan Brown's Angels and Demons about the traditional conflict between science and catholicism.
Let's say it's a probably a Catholic thing as Protestantism was never inclined to restricting the rise of scientific knowledge, probably because technical progress helped the concentration of wealth (read Max Weber's "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism").

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