It is exactly two hundred years ago that Byron, Percy Shelley, and his wife, Mary Shelley, were sequestered by a Swiss lake, hemmed indoors by the most wintery summer modern man had endured. We now know, as they did not, that “the year without a summer” was caused by the previous year’s eruption of Mount Tambora far away in Indonesia. That restless mountain had launched, up to forty kilometers in the air, enough ash to cover the entire surface of Britain knee-deep. But it was the extraordinary propulsion of sulphuric gas, translated into a giant stratospheric screen of acid droplets, which chilled and darkened the days, halting the 1816 harvest in the ground from the Carpathians to the Berkshires. Thus constrained from outdoor pleasures, Mary Shelley wrote the great novel of humanity and technology, which she partly named after the Greek deity Prometheus—the fore-thinker—who brought fire to mortal men.

Amid its many themes, Frankenstein confronted readers with the consequences of humans’ compulsive hubris, as Dr. Frankenstein’s knowledge outruns his wisdom. Though blessed with god-like insight into the secret spark of life, Frankenstein is not endowed with foresight—from the moment of his creative act, a litany of unintended consequences steadily overwhelms him. This is, broadly speaking, the same principle as the fall of man that unfolds in the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Genesis, rejecting stewardship for autonomy and grasping for God’s purview without his omniscience, man’s arrogant presumption brings him shame and alienation. Frankenstein is horrified by his own creature—“now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart”—but, later, his native Alps rouse a starkly contrasting emotion. “The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side—the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around, spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear, or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise.” This was the archetypal experience of Romanticism: the sublime. To experience the sublime was to be overwhelmed by that which was gloriously beyond the reason and artifice of man.

As European Romantics engaged in the pseudo-religious veneration of majestic nature, across the Atlantic, a similar infatuation with astonishment-inducing natural sights drew some Americans to Niagara Falls and, eventually, the Grand Canyon. These places, to employ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous phrase, were “commensurate to [their] capacity for wonder.” For many Americans, they were also shrines of a civil religion that located American exceptionalism in its vast and awe-inspiring landscape. But even as Mary Shelley wrote her tale of a thousand cautions, America had settled its second and last war of independence and began to develop a different defining characteristic. As the technological harnessing and manipulation of nature on a grand scale became seemingly central to the new republic, Americans were given a new focus of astonishment: “technological majesty,” as the late and legendary scholar of American history Perry Miller described it, or, in the formulation of MIT’s David Nye, “the technological sublime.”

“For almost two centuries,” Nye states, “the American public has repeatedly paid homage to railways, bridges, skyscrapers, factories, dams, airplanes, and space vehicles.” The raw power and grandeur in American industrial innovation, and the awe and wonder it provoked from the steamboat to the steel mill, connected technological development with an aura of civilizational triumph, further enshrining a technological determinism—which assumed both the rightness and inevitability of technologically-driven progress—in the American character. The idea of technology as a tool with which America would push mankind into a new era was another pseudo-religious concept that was indivisible, just as the sublime visions of American wilderness and paradise had been, with the dream of America as a New Jerusalem. Antebellum America was a place in the grip of both popular evangelical revival and a civil religion of American progress. Though far from identical phenomena (and sometimes at odds), they had a common concern with the imagery and reality of redemption, and, in Perry Miller’s view, elements within both helped form a formidable tide of perfectionism. As the perceptive writer on technology and religion, Michael Sacasas, summarizes, “Americans blended, almost seamlessly, their religious affections with their veneration for technology until finally the experience of technology took on the unifying role of religion…a remarkable faith in technological progress that has been periodically rekindled by one sublime technology after another.”

Such a vision had all the more power because variants of Christianity had long associated technological determinism with millennial expectation. In most orthodox Christian theology, it is decline that marks the general path of human history, alongside a simultaneous spread of God’s grace through the gospel until it touches all nations and this age ends. This gave many Christians an identity as pilgrims, not empire-builders. One does not build a house on sand. But it was also easy for some Christian groups to take their optimism at the inevitable progress of the gospel and apply it to the world in general. On the one hand, they emphasized the image of God in which (the book of Genesis teaches) man had been made, and, on the other, regarded a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth (i.e. the millennium) as something that people could and would usher in, not wait for. As historian David F. Noble claims in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, this theological bent, starting in the Middle Ages, “situated the process of recovery in the context of human history and redefined it as active and conscious pursuit rather than merely passive…expectation.”

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