The Radical Theology of Prometheus Bound; or, on Prometheus' God Problem

Prometheus Bound (PV) is a meditation on God par excellence, second only perhaps to the Bible or Paradise Lost. It is, accordingly, the only extant tragedy from the ancient world featuring the most characters as gods. For this reason it stands out in a genre fixated principally on human suffering, where ‘death carries overwhelmingly more weight than salvation’. Gods, of course, do not suffer like humans: Prometheus, the play's protagonist extraordinaire, may be subject to an eternity of punishment for stealing fire from Zeus, but his pain, real and visceral as it is, differs from ours in that it lacks the potential closure of death. It is perhaps justifiable then to suggest the play's focus is not just the awful things gods are capable of doing to one another (just like humans), but rather the meaning of such behaviour without the ultimate consequence (death). That is, the portrayal of Prometheus suffering and Zeus menacing redounds equally to the type of characters they are as to simply what they are. Whereas the former aspect is of psychological or political interest, the latter is a theological concern. And PV is theological in its implications as much as it is political. Hence the question: What type of theology does it convey? The answer is complex.In the modern world PV has primarily been read for its political allegory—as a meditation on oppression, or martyrdom for the intellectual cause. Eric Havelock's translation and study of the play, to cite an illustrative example, was called The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (1950). Many critics therefore argue that the play articulates the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus in terms of freedom versus authoritarianism. As Shelley famously wrote in the prologue to his Prometheus Unbound, the imprisoned Prometheus represents ‘the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (1820). Marx and Goethe felt similarly. This position aligns Prometheus with the forces of enlightenment and progress over against the brutality of Zeus's authority.