Faith & Spirit Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel doesn’t so much argue for God as he redraws the map of reality so thoroughly that the alternative looks like thin air. “Eternal life and the invisible world” aren’t framed as distant metaphysical prizes; they’re presented as domains with a single address. The insistence of “only” (twice, like a hammer) signals a Romantic impatience with Enlightenment neatness: reason can catalogue the visible, but it can’t house the soul.

The provocative twist is the phrase “abyss of individuality.” An abyss suggests depth that defeats measurement, even terror; individuality suggests the irreducible “this-ness” of a person. Schlegel fuses them to imply that what we call the self isn’t a sealed container but a plunge into something bottomless, and that bottomlessness is God. It’s a way of rescuing individuality from the modern fear of being just another interchangeable unit. In God, spirits don’t dissolve into mushy unity; they “dwell,” a domestic verb that implies shelter and intimacy rather than erasure.

Calling God “the only infinite plenitude” turns scarcity into a spiritual diagnosis. The world feels fragmented; desires multiply; meaning leaks. Schlegel’s subtext is that the modern subject is starving on finite substitutes - aesthetics, politics, even philosophy - unless rooted in an inexhaustible source. Historically, this lands in early German Romanticism’s push to reunite art, faith, and inner life after the shocks of revolution and rational critique. It’s less church doctrine than a manifesto for depth: the invisible isn’t elsewhere, it’s accessed by radical inwardness oriented toward the divine.