Faith & Spirit Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel is running a classic Romantic jailbreak: he breaks the Christian monopoly on divinity and hands “God” back to the developing self. The provocation isn’t just the word God; it’s the adverb progressively. Divinity here isn’t a thunderbolt or a birthright, it’s a curriculum. In Schlegel’s framing, “good man” isn’t merely moral, it’s aspirational: goodness is the capacity to grow, to refine perception, to widen sympathy, to intensify consciousness. That’s why he collapses “to become God,” “to be man,” and “to educate oneself” into a single loop. Humanity isn’t a finished species; it’s a project.

The subtext is a quiet revolution against inherited authority. If education is the engine of becoming, then priest, prince, and tradition lose their veto power over what a person can be. The line also smuggles in a distinctly German idealist confidence: the self doesn’t just learn about the world, it participates in shaping meaning, even reality, through thought and culture. “God” becomes shorthand for the highest integration of intellect, imagination, and ethical agency.

Context matters: Schlegel writes in the wake of the Enlightenment’s dismantling of old certainties and alongside early Romanticism’s hunger for transcendence without returning to orthodoxy. It’s also a defense of Bildung, that German idea of self-cultivation as destiny. Read this way, the sentence is less mysticism than cultural politics: the modern person as an ongoing work of art, with education as the sacred practice.