two cultures still

...In seeking to bring a lifetime's literary study to bear on the moral challenges inherent in society's astonishing technological advances, his effort is much to be commended...

...Can anyone or any institution, in this culture of unfettered enterprise and growth, seriously propose limits on knowledge...

...The essay on science begins with the "tragic hero" J. Robert Oppen-heimer, the "frail, fedora-wearing Prometheus [and...

...In the stories he tells, man transgresses again and again a limit set by God, or gods: It is clear that no vision of the human project can hope to restrain human ambition and curiosity unless it has a religious perspective...

...Books Two Cultures Still By Saul Rosenberg The British novelist and scientist C.P Snow famously suggested nearly forty years ago that the West had unfortunately developed not one intellectual culture but two...

...This part of the tale was excised from later tellings of the Greek myths, to parlous effect...

...Shattuck's bugbear is Sade's intellectual rehabilitation by French literary critics...

...All said, Forbidden Knowledge does no more than suggest—elegantly, at times—that we have a problem...

...This is to do no more than formulate, somewhat inarticulately—cer-tainly not to answer—the question at hand: Given that science can so powerfully alleviate certain miseries hitherto attendant on the human condition, how do we determine which expressions of that power are appropriate...

...How do we distinguish between pornographic and erotic art...

...But you do have to recognize the questions...

...Comparing Christopher Marlowe's treatment in the 1590s with those of the German playwrights Goethe and Lessing two centuries later—in which Faust is not damned, but saved by God's grace—Shattuck shows us how the Enlightenment's faith in man's ability to penetrate the world's mystery greatly diminished the sense of absolute limits on knowledge...

...string theory, a physicist today might have to forgo a thorough grasp of other branches of physics (let alone a working knowledge of literature), professional literary academics have returned the compliment with a vengeance by disappearing into the obscurities of "cultural materialism" and the like and leaving Chaucer and Shakespeare to the creative-writing classes...

...And visitors to the Dead Sea in Israel may still see a pillar of salt— the very one into which, as tradition has it, Lot's wife was transformed...

...Since then, the march of specialization has only intensified...

...On one side were the scientists, who could not distinguish Jane Austen from Agatha Christie...

...Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden...

...All the more reason, then, to welcome Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (St...

...Are there," Shattuck opens by inquiring, "things we should not know...

...But Part II begins, and the book begins to fall apart...

...This is essentially a parochial quarrel with (admittedly depressing) trends in Shattuck's particular corner of academia: It's hard to get excited about the ready availability of cheap editions of a pretentious and hifalutin 18th-century pornographer in a world where it's easier for a minor to buy a copy of Hustler than a pack of cigarettes...

...He begins the search for answers with an account of the idea of forbidden knowledge in Greek literature (Prometheus' theft of fire from Zeus) and the Bible—Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the builders of the tower of Babel seeking to make themselves equal with God, and Lot's wife looking illicitly on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah...

...In each instance, curiosity is destructive...

...I t's a shame Shattuck didn't leave his book there, for it would have been a very fine book...

...on the other, the artists, ignorant of such fundamental notions as the second law of thermodynamics—and never the twain could happily meet again...

...Shattuck then pursues his cautionary tale into detailed literary case studies of masterpieces of the Western tradition in which "forbidden knowledge" is given definitive treatment...

...Shattuck doesn't even set out the questions basic to a serious discussion of the issue: Can one's behavior be corrupted by fiction...

...Paradise Lost, Faust, Frankenstein, and other works remind us that the question of limits on human inquiry has always been at the center of Western culture...

...Many of us know of Prometheus, who illicitly gave fire to man, and Pandora, who brought grief and evil into the world...

...The first takes up the moral implications of the atom bomb and new developments in recombinant DNA that suggest eugenic possibilities beyond the dreams of Hitler...

...Shattuck's emphasis on Oppen-heimer's racking sense of guilt and a casual remark in the foreword suggest he believes the bombing of Hiroshima may have been unneces-sary—but he develops no argument to persuade us of this...

...When he takes up recombinant DNA and gene-mapping, Shattuck solemnly emphasizes the medical and moral risks implicit in any eugenics program, only to observe that the Human Genome Project will, on the other hand, contribute "welcome therapies for cruel diseases...

...His greater contribution, however, comes when he gets properly outside his subject and demonstrates that the tradition is as blind to the problem of forbidden knowledge as it is aware of it...

...Perhaps Shattuck offers no solution because he does not speak from a perspective that can provide one...

...Certainly, its secular vision cannot help us with "forbidden knowledge," and perhaps, because it is all he appears to have to work with, neither can Shattuck...

...Shattuck's particular concerns are, first, the irresponsible celebration by literary critics of the violent pornography of the Marquis de Sade and, second, the appropriateness of research into genetic engineering and weapons of mass destruction...

...Whether the Enlightenment and the 200-year departure from a religious world-view it ushered in has brought us, thus far, more good than ill is an open question...

...You don't have to agree with Kristol to have an intelligent view of pornography's dangers...

...If, to become deeply versed in superSaul Rosenberg is associate editor of Commentary...

...There are two essays here...

...Shattuck is a fine storyteller, and so the retelling of great stories from our tradition is enjoyable for its own sake...

...The Bible has sexually stimulating passages: Should it be banned...

...Shattuck makes a similar point in his discussion of Faust, the necromancer who sold his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge...

...God confounds the language of the Babel-builders and they fall into dissension, their tower in ruins...

...Irving Kris-tol dealt trenchantly with these questions 25 years ago when he wrote that pornography's "whole purpose is . . . to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension"—and that pornography could therefore corrupt one's humanity as surely as the great books can enrich it...

...The second addresses questions of art and censorship through the horrific writings of the Marquis de Sade...

...It is only a shame that his discussions of science and public policy are as disordered and unsatisfying as his treatment of the theme of "forbidden knowledge" in Western literature is elegant and rich...

...Shattuck, a professor of French literature at Boston University at the end of a laureled career, worries that "curiosity strikes us far more as the beginning of wisdom than as the beginning of sin"—and that this may not bid fair for our cultural health...

...Have we lost the capacity to perceive and honor the moral dimensions of such questions...

...chastened Frankenstein" who masterminded development of the atom bomb...

...Which is a shame: Forbidden Knowledge should have proved C. P. Snow wrong, and it has proved him right...

...In his last case study, "Guilt, Justice and Empathy in Melville's Billy Budd and Camus's The Stranger" Shattuck shows how the empathy that can disable moral judgment must also be considered forbidden knowledge...

...To understand is to forgive, as the proverb goes, but perhaps we can't afford to understand—and must merely con-demn—the frame of mind of Camus's protagonist Meursault as he shoots a man unprovoked...

...Few know that, in the original, the two episodes were connected: Zeus sends Pandora to earth in retaliation for Prometheus' insubordination...

...The essay on pornography is no better...

...Or perhaps Shattuck, a literary man, has merely failed to make himself expert in science or the ethics of science, or in the history and philosophy, if there is such a thing, of pornography...

...Martin's Press, 368 pages, $26.95), a meditation on the moral limits of intellectual inquiry ranging so freely over the entire sweep of Western literature and modern scientific discovery that it is as if Snow had never spoken...

...And each essay is a mess, in which Shattuck circles hopelessly around his subject rather than addressing it...

...For Prometheus without Pandora is truth without consequences, and Shattuck's whirlwind tour through the great overreachers and disobey-ers of Western civilization demonstrates that a kind of blindness about the consequences of forbidden knowledge shadows the progress of the tradition from its very beginnings...