Frankenstein and the creation problem
Anthony Boulton writes about the symbolism of a complex fictional character
Ostensibly, Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein is sensationalist pulp-fiction – ripe for exploitation by production companies making X-rated films – but the symbolism tells another story.
Victor Frankenstein, a meddling scientist over-educated to believe in his own omnipotence, has constructed a ‘Creature’ that is morally superior to the human model in one important respect. The Creature only behaves badly when its natural desire for love and acceptance is cruelly spurned, solely on account of its unconventional appearance, whereas human beings can behave badly without the slightest provocation or justification.
I remember a Czech lady describing how the invading German forces in 1938 started to beat up passive onlookers. She complained: ‘We weren’t offering any resistance, so what reason did they have to assault us?’
When the Creature complains to Frankenstein about its treatment at the hands of nasty, vicious human beings, Frankenstein pompously replies: ‘Man is the noblest creation of God’ – to which the Creature responds with heavy sarcasm: ‘What a work!’
Mary Shelley’s pessimistic view of humanity must resonate because, to my knowledge, it has never been seriously challenged since publication – but is it true? Even religious people who accept ‘creationism’ appear to believe that we are beings ‘under construction’, unformed, a blank cheque to be completed by our own efforts. Hence the self-improvement movement, which gathered pace in the nineteenth century and has progressed now to the point that people speak of ‘reinventing’ themselves, as malleable as a character in a television soap opera who is subject to the whim of a scriptwriter.
Yet the Bible tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God, so ‘like creates like’. Unless we believe we possess the power to overturn the will of God, we must be still as God created us, and our desire to make of ourselves our own creator, the cause of all our problems. This is the ‘Creation Problem’ – with its persuasive and toxic cycle of guilt, fear, punishment – which is underpinned by something called ‘judgment’. This judgment is often confused with wisdom and substituted for truth, in spite of consisting of conclusions and decisions based upon shifting and arbitrary criteria.
The question must then arise – how is our true divine nature to be uncovered under the layers of self-created falsity? The mystics give us pointers. Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) states: ‘God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.’
The late Jesuit priest and mystic Anthony de Mello put a modern version of this in his much recommended book Awareness: ‘As one man said, “I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it”…That is what spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you.’
A clue to the unlearning process is contained in the spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471), in which he tells us: ‘God reveals to the humble-minded in one instant that which cannot be learnt by ten years study in the schools.’
I remember reading of a Christian hermit who was in the habit of spending many hours of contemplation sitting in front of a line of beech trees. In due course this hermit acquired some ‘odour of sanctity’, so much so that princes and prelates of the church beat a path to his door and plied him with questions regarding the means by which he had attained his present state of enlightenment: Which spiritual directors had he taken instruction from and which teachers had he followed?
The bemused old man could only reply: ‘The only teachers I had were the beech trees.’
The foregoing may appear to turn this world upside down, but is it conceivable that it would then be the right way up?
Comments
Please login to add a comment
