“You Will Be Like God, Knowing Good and Evil. Or: The New Fall of Man,” Kladderadatsch (June 26, 1870)

In this satirical image from the anti-clerical Kladderadatsch, a Jesuit Satan offers the apple of infallibility to a witless Pope Pius IX. The image was meant to lampoon the Catholic Church’s soon-to-be-declared doctrine of papal infallibility, which pertained only to matters of faith and morals – and not to all knowledge, a common misunderstanding at the time. Counterpoised to this “new fall of man” is the state of grace figured by the shining light of reason and the certain knowledge that it offers to all those willing to be brightened by it. At play in this image are very clear intimations of what constituted unapproved and approved ways of knowing: what knowledge was subordinate and dominant, what was unworthy of knowing and what was worthy. We see here, then, a shift toward the truth of human understanding in the adamant secularization of German knowledge in the modern period.