Famous is the breach of oath which Francis II committed against Emperor Charles V. Not later, when he ripely weighed his promise, but at once, when he swore the oath, King Francis took it back in thought as well as by a secret protestation documentarily subscribed before his councillors; he uttered a perjury aforethought. Francis did not show himself disinclined to buy his release, but the price that Charles put on it seemed to him too high and unreasonable. Even though Charles behaved himself in a sordid fashion when he sought to extort as much as possible, it was yet shabby of Francis to want to purchase his freedom for a lower ransom; and his later dealings, among which there occurs yet a second breach of his word, prove sufficiently how the huckster spirit held him enthralled and made him a shabby swindler. However, what shall we say to the reproach of perjury against him? In the first place, surely, this again: that not the perjury, but his sordidness, shamed him; that he did not deserve contempt for his perjury, but made himself guilty of perjury because he was a contemptible man. But Francis's perjury, regarded in itself, demands another judgment. One might say Francis did not respond to the confidence that Charles put in him in setting him free. But, if Charles had really favored him with confidence, he would have named to him the price that he considered the release worth, and would then have set him at liberty and expected Francis to pay the redemption-sum. Charles harbored no such trust, but only believed in Francis's impotence and credulity, which would not allow him to act against his oath; but Francis deceived only this—credulous calculation. When Charles believed he was assuring himself of his enemy by an oath, right there he was freeing him from every obligation. Charles had given the king credit for a piece of stupidity, a narrow conscience, and, without confidence in Francis, counted only on Francis's stupidity, i. e. conscientiousness: he let him go from the Madrid prison only to hold him the more securely in the prison of conscientiousness, the great jail built about the mind of man by religion: he sent him back to France locked fast in invisible chains, what wonder if Francis sought to escape and sawed the chains apart? No man would have taken it amiss of him if he had secretly fled from Madrid, for he was in an enemy's power; but every good Christian cries out upon him, that he wanted to loose himself from God's bonds too. (It was only later that the pope absolved him from his oath.)
It is despicable to deceive a confidence that we voluntarily call forth; but it is no shame to egoism to let every one who wants to get us into his power by an oath bleed to death by the unsuccessfulness of his untrustful craft. If you have wanted to bind me, then learn that I know how to burst your bonds.
The point is whether I give the confider the right to confidence. If the pursuer of my friend asks me where he has fled to, I shall surely put him on a false trail. Why does he ask precisely me, the pursued man's friend? In order not to be a false, traitorous friend, I prefer to be false to the enemy. I might certainly, in courageous conscientiousness, answer "I will not tell" (so Fichte decides the case); by that I should salve my love of truth and do for my friend as much as—nothing, for, if I do not mislead the enemy, he may accidentally take the right street, and my love of truth would have given up my friend as a prey, because it hindered me from the—courage for a lie. He who has in the truth an idol, a sacred thing, must humble himself before it, must not defy its demands, not resist courageously; in short, he must renounce the heroism of the lie. For to the lie belongs not less courage than to the truth: a courage that young men are most apt to be defective in, who would rather confess the truth and mount the scaffold for it than confound the enemy's power by the impudence of a lie. To them the truth is "sacred," and the sacred at all times demands blind reverence, submission, and self-sacrifice. If you are not impudent, not mockers of the sacred, you are tame and its servants. Let one but lay a grain of truth in the trap for you, you peck at it to a certainty, and the fool is caught. You will not lie? Well, then, fall as sacrifices to the truth and become—martyrs! Martyrs!—for what? For yourselves, for self-ownership? No, for your goddess,—the truth. You know only two services, only two kinds of servants: servants of the truth and servants of the lie. Then in God's name serve the truth!
Others, again, serve the truth also; but they serve it "in moderation," and make, e. g., a great distinction between a simple lie and a lie sworn to. And yet the whole chapter of the oath coincides with that of the lie, since an oath, everybody knows, is only a strongly assured statement. You consider yourselves entitled to lie, if only you do not swear to it besides? One who is particular about it must judge and condemn a lie as sharply as a false oath. But now there has been kept up in morality an ancient point of controversy, which is customarily treated of under the name of the "lie of necessity." No one who dares plead for this can consistently put from him an "oath of necessity." If I justify my lie as a lie of necessity, I should not be so pusillanimous as to rob the justified lie of the strongest corroboration. Whatever I do, why should I not do it entirely and without reservation (reservatio mentalis)? If I once lie, why then not lie completely, with entire consciousness and all my might? As a spy I should have to swear to each of my false statements at the enemy's demand; determined to lie to him, should I suddenly become cowardly and undecided in face of an oath? Then I should have been ruined in advance for a liar and spy; for, you see, I should be voluntarily putting into the enemy's hands a means to catch me.—The State too fears the oath of necessity, and for this reason does not give the accused a chance to swear. But you do not justify the State's fear; you lie, but do not swear falsely. If, e. g., you show some one a kindness, and he is not to know it, but he guesses it and tells you so to your face, you deny; if he insists, you say "honestly, no!" If it came to swearing, then you would refuse; for, from fear of the sacred, you always stop half way. Against the sacred you have no will of your own. You lie in—moderation, as you are free "in moderation," religious "in moderation" (the clergy are not to "encroach"; over this point the most vapid of controversies is now being carried on, on the part of the university against the church), monarchically disposed "in moderation" (you want a monarch limited by the constitution, by a fundamental law of the State), everything nicely tempered, lukewarm, half God's, half the devil's.
There was a university where the usage was that every word of honor that must be given to the university judge was looked upon by the students as null and void. For the students saw in the demanding of it nothing but a snare, which they could not escape otherwise than by taking away all its significance. He who at that same university broke his word of honor to one of the fellows was infamous; he who gave it to the university judge derided, in union with these very fellows, the dupe who fancied that a word had the same value among friends and among foes. It was less a correct theory than the constraint of practice that had there taught the students to act so, as, without that means of getting out, they would have been pitilessly driven to treachery against their comrades. But, as the means approved itself in practice, so it has its theoretical probation too. A word of honor, an oath, is one only for him whom I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, i. e. a hostile word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the foe does not give us the right.
Aside from this, the courts of the State do not even recognize the inviolability of an oath. For, if I had sworn to one who comes under examination that I would not declare anything against him, the court would demand my declaration in spite of the fact that an oath binds me, and, in case of refusal, would lock me up till I decided to become—an oath-breaker. The court "absolves me from my oath";—how magnanimous! If any power can absolve me from the oath, I myself am surely the very first power that has a claim to.
As a curiosity, and to remind us of customary oaths of all sorts, let place be given here to that which Emperor Paul commanded the captured Poles (Kosciusko, Potocki, Niemcewicz, etc.) to take when he released them: "We not merely swear fidelity and obedience to the emperor, but also further promise to pour out our blood for his glory; we obligate ourselves to discover everything threatening to his person or his empire that we ever learn; we declare finally that, in whatever part of the earth we may be, a single word of the emperor shall suffice to make us leave everything and repair to him at once."
In one domain the principle of love seems to have been long outsoared by egoism, and to be still in need only of sure consciousness, as it were of victory with a good conscience. This domain is speculation, in its double manifestation as thinking and as trade. One thinks with a will, whatever may come of it; one speculates, however many may suffer under our speculative undertakings. But, when it finally becomes serious, when even the last remnant of religiousness, romance, or "humanity" is to be done away, then the pulse of religious conscience beats, and one at least professes humanity. The avaricious speculator throws some coppers into the poor-box and "does good," the bold thinker consoles himself with the fact that he is working for the advancement of the human race and that his devastation "turns to the good" of mankind, or, in another case, that he is "serving the idea"; mankind, the idea, is to him that something of which he must say, It is more to me than myself.
To this day thinking and trading have been done for—God's sake. Those who for six days were trampling down everything by their selfish aims sacrificed on the seventh to the Lord; and those who destroyed a hundred "good causes" by their reckless thinking still did this in the service of another "good cause," and had yet to think of another—besides themselves—to whose good their self-indulgence should turn: of the people, mankind, and the like. But this other thing is a being above them, a higher or supreme being; and therefore I say, they are toiling for God's sake.