Does knowledge force people into guilty acts? Are ethical disasters, as well as material, emotional and spiritual benefits, its inevitable result? Unstated but implicit, tacit yet as frightful and alluring as a beautiful serpent coiling about a tree, these questions haunt three Western myths that have attracted fresh, considerable and increasing attention over the past couple of centuries, those of Adam and Eve, Prometheus and Faust. The questions themselves are as old as Western philosophy. They animate Western theology. Plato, in his fourthcentury BC Protagoras, condemns the Promethean brand of technological knowledge, if unaccompanied by political savvy, as sloshing into a social mess. St. Augustine, in his sixth- century Confessions, describes all men and women as the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, whose gobbling at the tree of knowledge of good and evil doomed them to banishment from paradise. Disobedient munching led to inescapable sinning. The Faust myth looks trickier along these lines, chiefly because its versions disagree. The sixteenthcentury Faust book is not Marlowe, is not Goethe, who had not read Marlowe when he wrote Faust: Part One. Their attitudes toward “forbidden” knowledge do not match up, though some penalty seems required in each case for prying into the divine cupboard: one suffers, or causes others to suffer, for sneaking a peek at God's secret stash.

Crucial to each case is the premise that knowledge is a pivotal advance over merely knowing things. One may know information and grasp facts, however these are defined, without feeling an irresistible compulsion to act. Knowing about an in- progress genocide, for instance, may no more affect one's natural indolence than observing that an afternoon is bright and sunny. Knowledge, however, impels one beyond informational lassitude. It seems to be a state of understanding or misunderstanding, rather than of rote recall. It insists that one take action, or abstain from action, or appreciate a situation— with the impulse often equally powerful in each direction— on the basis of information and facts, and even misinformation, a not quite begging- the- question definition because it presupposes a developing ethical outlook: the information and facts or even false data at one's disposal have come to be perceived as good or bad or beautiful or ghastly, and something must be done, or not done, about them.