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Frankenstein and Dracula Are Theology Books · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to The Theology Made Podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at how Frankenstein and Dracula are theology books.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's one in the morning in November, and it's been raining in Ingolstadt for hours.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: A man is standing over a table in a rented room at the top of a house.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's in his early 20s, thin in the way people get when they stop remembering to eat.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he hasn't been outside in longer than he can remember.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: His eyes are red.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: His hands are unsteady.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And for the better part of two years,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: he's been visiting charnel houses and dissecting rooms,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: carrying things home in a bag and working on them in this room by candlelight.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The rain keeps going.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: His candle is nearly out.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the thing on the table opens one eye.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what he does.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't scream.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't reach for a knife or a notebook.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: He looks at the yellow eye and the working chest and the black lips of
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: the creature he has spent two years assembling.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: He turns around.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: He walks out of the room.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: He goes down the stairs.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He lies on his bed in his clothes.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he tries to go to sleep.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the moment.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that goes wrong in this story across the next 200 pages goes wrong
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: because of what a man did on a staircase.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know his name.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's a decent chance you spent your entire life attaching it to the wrong body.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Frankenstein is the man on the stairs.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The thing on the table never gets a name at all.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that error, the one almost everybody makes, is a small version of a much bigger one.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because we have also attached the moral of this book to the wrong crime.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: To understand what Mary Shelley was actually arguing about, You have to start with a volcano.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: In April of 1815,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: a mountain called Tambora on the island of Tsubawa,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: in what is now Indonesia,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: erupted with more force than any eruption in recorded human history.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: It threw enough material into the upper atmosphere to dim the sun across
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: the northern hemisphere.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Crops failed in New England,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: grain prices doubled in France,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: and in parts of Europe the following year,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: there was frost in June and snow in August,
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: and people called it the year without summer.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why,
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: in June of 1816,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: five people were stuck indoors at a rented villa on Lake Geneva,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: watching it rain for days.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The house was the Villa Dilda.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: In the house,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: the tenants were Lord Byron,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: who was 28 and famous and had recently left England under a cloud.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And with him was his personal physician, a young man named John Paulette Aubrey.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Down the road was Percy Shelley Clare Claremont and an 18-year-old woman named Mary Godwin.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Who had run off with Percy two years earlier and who was carrying the name Shelley
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: without yet having a legal right to it.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: The rain did not let up.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And two things came out of that room.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And between them, they built almost everything the Western world thinks about monsters.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Paul and Aubrey took a fragment Byron had abandoned and turned it into
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: a story called The Vampire,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: published in 1819, which took the vampire out of the Balkan peasant folklore.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Made him an aristocrat in evening clothes who moved through drawing rooms and ruins women.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Every vampire you have seen in a tuxedo traces back to a bored doctor in a rainy villa.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Mary Godwin?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, she wrote Frankenstein.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was 18 years old.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Her mother had died of an infection 11 days after giving birth to her.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Her father,
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  SPEAKER_00: William Godwin,
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  SPEAKER_00: was a philosopher who had argued in print against marriage and in a lot of readings
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: against God.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: She had grown up in a house where the reasonable existence of a creator was
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: a live debate at the dinner table, and not a settled matter.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's one more thing,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: and it's the thing that turns this book from a scary curiosity into something else.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: In February of 1815,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: 16 months before that rainy week,
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  SPEAKER_00: Mary had given birth to a daughter, two months premature.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The baby lived about two weeks.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: On the 19th of March,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: she wrote in her journal that she had dreamed her little baby came to life again.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: That it had only been cold and that they had rubbed it before the fire and it lived.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then she woke up and it wasn't true.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now hold that dream next to what she wrote the following summer.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: A dead body, a fire, warmth applied by human hands, and a life that comes back.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to talk about Frankenstein as though a clever teenager invented a spooky premise.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what she actually did was take the most private grief of her life.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing she wanted more than anything and follow it all the way down
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: to see what would happen if she got it.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here's a version of this book that most think of.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Frankenstein is a warning about science.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: A man goes too far.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: He plays God.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nature punishes him.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't meddle in things you do not understand.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been a standard reading for so long that
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: the word Frankenstein now functions as a prefix you can attach
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: to any technology you dislike.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a problem with that reading.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it starts with the missing detail.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mary Shelley never tells you how he does it.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's no procedure.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's no equipment inventory.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's no lightning bolt, no lever, no scorn on the roof.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: All of that comes from the movies.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: In the novel, Victor Frankenstein explicitly refuses to describe his method.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: He tells the man he's confessing to that he won't share it
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: because he doesn't want anyone else to attempt it.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Which means the single most important technical detail in the history
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: of science fiction is a blank space.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're writing a book whose thesis is, this science is wrong, that's an odd move.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: You would show the transgression.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: You would make the reader watch the line get crossed.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: But Shelley skips it entirely.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what she doesn't skip, though, is the aftermath.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: She gives the flight from the room a full page.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: She gives Victor's dream that night in which he embraces his fiancée,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth, and she turns into the corpse of his dead mother.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: She gives you his sickness afterwards, months of it, nursed by his friend Henry.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: She spends her novel's detailed budget on a man's reaction to what he's made.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there's the epigraph.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: In every copy of Frankenstein,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: since the first edition in 1818,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: opens with three lines from Book 10 of Paradise Lost.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: They're Adam's words spoken after the fall and the worst hour of his life.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Did I request thee, maker from my clay, to mold me man?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a complaint against God.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is a creature turning to his creator and asking what right he had.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which means she wanted you reading the whole book with that question running underneath it.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And she does not leave it at the epigraph.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Halfway through the novel,
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: the creature finds a leather case in the woods with three books in it.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them is Paradise Lost.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he reads it, but he reads it as history.
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  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't know it's a poem.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: He compares himself to Adam and finds the comparison doesn't hold because Adam had
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: a maker who walked in the garden with him.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the creature reaches for the other option in the book.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: He says he ought to have been Adam,
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: but instead he's the fallen angel, driven out from joy for no misdeed.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: For no misdeed.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the charge.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole book in the creature's own mouth in the middle of the novel.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Frankenstein is not a story about a man who made something he should not have made.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a story about a father who left.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: So look at that sequence again.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: The creature is born and he is abandoned within about 90 seconds.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: He learns language by watching a family through a gap in a wall.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: He teaches himself to read.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: He nurses an old blind man's household in secret for months,
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  SPEAKER_00: chopping their wood at night while they sleep.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when he finally works up the nerve to introduce himself,
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  SPEAKER_00: he chooses the blind man on purpose because the only human being in
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  SPEAKER_00: the novel capable of receiving him kindly is the one who cannot see his face.
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  SPEAKER_00: The old man welcomes him.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: When the man's children come home, they see him, and it ends the way it always ends.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And every violent act the creature commits happens after that.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: He asks Victor for exactly one thing, a companion.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Victor agrees.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then destroys her half-finished while the creature watches through a window.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Shelley knew the theological weight of what she was doing.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: She was writing inside a live public fight.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Between roughly 1814 and 1819,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: two surgeons at the Royal College of Surgeons in London ran a bitter public argument
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: about the nature of life itself.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: John Abernathy held that living matter required something additional.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some vital principle superadded to the physical arrangement.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: William Lawrence held that life was nothing beyond the organization of the matter itself.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lawrence was the Shelley's personal physician.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was in their house.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Mary was not speculating about ideas she had read in a magazine.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: She was writing down the argument going on in her own parlor,
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  SPEAKER_00: and her contribution to it was this.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose Lawrence is right, and you can build one.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose the hard problem is solved.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: You still have to answer the creature
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Victor never answers.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: He dies on a ship in the Arctic without answering.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the correction.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: The book is not asking whether we can make life.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's asking what we owe the thing we make.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Milton's God answers Adam.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Shelley's Victor.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to bed.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: In a private asylum in Perfleet on the north bank of the Thames,
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: east of London, there's a patient in a padded room who keeps a ledger.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's 59 years old.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Powerfully built.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And his mood turns over without warning.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: His doctor has invented a word for him because the existing vocabulary, it just doesn't fit.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Zoophagus.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Life-eating.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: The patient catches flies.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: When he has enough flies, he uses them to attract spiders.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he eats the spiders.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then he wants a kitten.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And his doctor will not give him one.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when the doctor presses on him why, the patient says the same sentence over and over.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: The blood is the life.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's Renfield.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: He's in Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what's very interesting about that line.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not his.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's Deuteronomy 12, verse 23.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it appears in the middle of the passage about how the people
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: of Israel are permitted to eat meat,
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  SPEAKER_00: but under one condition,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: which is that they must never consume the blood, because the blood is the life.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Take the meat, leave the life alone, pour it out on the ground.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Stoker put a verse from the Torah about the prohibition on drinking blood into
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: the mouth of a madman who wants to drink blood,
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: and then he builds a 400-page novel on top of it.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was raised in the Church of Ireland and spent most of his working life as
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: the business manager for the actor Henry Irving in London.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was a Protestant,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: writing a book that runs on Catholic sacramental thinking,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: and he researched this for like seven years.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the research shows,
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: once you know what to look at,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Dracula stops being a monster story with some religious props lying around
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: and becomes a sustained argument about what blood is for.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the novel, it's really organized around the ledger.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in the ledger are two columns.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: In the first column,
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Lucy Westenra,
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: a 19-year-old woman in Whitby who is dying of something no doctor can figure out.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of several weeks, four men open their veins for her.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Arthur Holmwood, who loves her.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: John Seward, who proposed to her and was turned down.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Quincy Morris, the Texan, who also proposed and was also turned down.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Abraham Van Helsing, who's a stranger to her and who does it twice.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Four men who have nothing to gain,
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  SPEAKER_00: one of whom she has personally rejected,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: lying down next to her and giving her what is in them so she can keep going.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Then the second column, the Count, who takes.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the entire morality of the book.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: The same fluid moving in two directions, given and taken.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And every character in Dracula is sorted by which direction they move blood.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the scene where this becomes undeniable is in chapter 22.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's Leviticus chapter 13 verse 45.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is the law given to a person with a skin disease who is required to leave
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: the camp,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: cover the lower half of his face,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: and cry out that word so that others know to keep their distance.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Stoker took the cry of the leper outside the gate and put it in the mouth of
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: a respectable married Englishwoman in a drawing room.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And every reader in 1897 who had sat through
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: a Sunday service knew exactly what they were hearing.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a scene that produced this car,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: which comes one chapter earlier,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: and which is the reason the book was disturbing to its first readers in
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: a way we might miss now.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Seward walks in on it.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: The count has opened a vein in his own chest and he's holding the back
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: of Mina's neck and forcing her face against it.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Seward reaches for a comparison and comes up with a child holding
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: a kitten's nose down into a saucer of milk.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that image was not available by accident.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: For roughly a thousand years before Stoker,
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Western Christianity had an entire visual tradition of Christ's open side as
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: a source of nourishment, wounds that feed a breast offered to the church.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: The standard emblem for it was the pelican,
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: which medieval naturalists believe pierced its own chest to feed its young
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: with its blood.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It shows up on carved lecterns and stitched into vestments all over Europe.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Aquinas wrote a Eucharist hymn that addresses Christ directly as the merciful pelican.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So an open chest, a held head, a mouth brought to the womb.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stoker knew what that picture was,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: and so he built the most horrifying scene in his novel by taking the central image
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: of Christian devotion and running it In reverse,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: so that the one who opens his chest is feeding on the one he appears to be feeding.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last piece,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: which is underneath everything else, the Count cannot function without dirt.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: He ships 50 wooden boxes of Transylvanian earth to England aboard the Detmer
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: because he can only rest in his native soil.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the men hunting him spend the second half of the novel Tracking down
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: and sterilizing those boxes one at a time using the host.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the count, fully assembled, and he requires two things to exist.
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  SPEAKER_00: The earth to lie in and blood to move.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Dust and blood.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which happens to be the two substances the Bible uses when it explains what a human being is.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 2 verse 7, the man is formed from the dust of the ground and then God breathes into him.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Leviticus 17,
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: verse 11, The life of the flesh is in the blood, and God has given it for atonement.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Dracula is a man built out of the exact materials of Genesis, but running in reverse.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: He has the dust without the breath,
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: he has the blood without the giving,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: he has permanence, and he has appetite, and he has no life in him at all.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's what you get when eternity is separated from communion.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So take the two of them together.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think they're asking the same question from opposite ends.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Both books arrive at a counterfeit.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Victor Frankenstein, he counterfeits Genesis.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: He takes the dust,
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: he assembles the body,
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: and where the breath should go, he puts something he refuses to name.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then, in the hour when the thing needed to make her most, he leaves the room.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Count, he counterfeits Easter.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: He offers exactly what the resurrection offers, which is a body that death does not hold.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he charges for it the currency of other people's lives.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: His immortality has to be fed.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: It runs on subtraction.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And every year, he continues the cost by someone else's years.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Laid against those two, the Christian claim is specific on both counts.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it runs the other direction on both.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Against Victor, it says the maker stays.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: The doctrine is not that God assembled a world and stepped back to see what would happen.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is that he walked in the garden in the cool of the day,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: and later took the dust on himself,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: and later still would not leave even when leaving was the reasonable move.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Adam's complaint in Paradise Lost,
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: the one Mary Shelley put on our title page, gets an answer in Milton.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Take your Frankenstein's creature, he never gets one, against the count.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: It says the blood is given and not taken,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: and this is the reversal Stoker's own novel is built to make you feel.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Count opens a vein to enslave.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: The four men around Lucy's bed open veins to keep a woman alive who owes them nothing.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the older image behind both of them is a man who says on the night
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: before he dies that this is his blood and hands it over and does not take a drop
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: of anyone else's.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: The scar on Mina's forehead does not fade gradually.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: It vanishes in the instant the Count dies.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: On the road below the castle with Jonathan Harker's knife across his throat
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: and Quincy Morris dying in the snow a few feet away.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you notice what Stoker did?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else's death is what clears it.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, neither of these authors were writing devotional literature.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Mary Shelley was raised by a father who had argued his way out of God,
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: and she never argued her way back in any conviction.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bram Stoker was a theater manager who wanted to sell books.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, neither one of them were building a sermon.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why the book works.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: They were not trying to defend anything.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: They were following a question honestly to the end of it.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the question, it turned out to be theological.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because the question of what makes a person alive and who owes what to
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: whom has always been theological, whether or not anyone in the room is praying.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: So every October, we put these two back on the shelf by the door.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: A man on the table with the wrong name and a man in a castle who needs dirt to sleep in.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: We tell ourselves we keep them around because they're frightening or just fun to read.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the frightening part of Frankenstein is not the creature.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a father going down a staircase.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the frightening part of Dracula is not the teeth.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's being offered forever and finding out what it costs.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Theology Made podcast.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: If this was helpful or encouraged,
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.