"Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous"
About this Quote
Schlegel fuses ethics, humanity, and education into a single movement of becoming. Goodness is not a static list of virtues but a dynamic ascent, a progressive approximation to the divine. The word God here does not point to a distant, authoritarian deity; it evokes the Absolute that Romantics sought in art, love, and thought - a unity of truth, beauty, and goodness. To call a person good is to say that their life is oriented toward that unity and that they are steadily reshaping themselves to reflect it.
This is Romantic Bildung, self-formation as a lifelong task. Education is not mere schooling but the cultivation of the whole person - intellect, feeling, imagination, moral will. To educate oneself is to enlarge one’s freedom, refine one’s sensibility, and integrate one’s powers until they harmonize. Such self-cultivation has a sacred aura in Schlegel’s milieu because it mirrors creation itself; the self becomes a co-creator, bringing order and meaning out of chaos, participating in the divine creativity that sustains the world.
To be human, then, is not to have arrived but to be on the way. Humanity at its best is a process, an infinite striving. That is why the expressions coincide: becoming God, being truly human, and educating oneself describe the same trajectory. The language courts paradox, especially to listeners trained to separate God from man. Yet German Romanticism, shaped by Spinoza’s immanence and Fichte’s self-positing subject, often treats divinity as something realized in living activity rather than grasped in dogma.
There is also an ethical charge. Goodness is measured by the energy and sincerity with which one undertakes self-transformation, not by conformity. The divine is not monopolized by institutions; it is cultivated in the individual who studies, creates, loves, and acts with integrity. The destiny of the person is not subservience but elevation - to become more Godlike by becoming more fully, consciously, and beautifully human.
This is Romantic Bildung, self-formation as a lifelong task. Education is not mere schooling but the cultivation of the whole person - intellect, feeling, imagination, moral will. To educate oneself is to enlarge one’s freedom, refine one’s sensibility, and integrate one’s powers until they harmonize. Such self-cultivation has a sacred aura in Schlegel’s milieu because it mirrors creation itself; the self becomes a co-creator, bringing order and meaning out of chaos, participating in the divine creativity that sustains the world.
To be human, then, is not to have arrived but to be on the way. Humanity at its best is a process, an infinite striving. That is why the expressions coincide: becoming God, being truly human, and educating oneself describe the same trajectory. The language courts paradox, especially to listeners trained to separate God from man. Yet German Romanticism, shaped by Spinoza’s immanence and Fichte’s self-positing subject, often treats divinity as something realized in living activity rather than grasped in dogma.
There is also an ethical charge. Goodness is measured by the energy and sincerity with which one undertakes self-transformation, not by conformity. The divine is not monopolized by institutions; it is cultivated in the individual who studies, creates, loves, and acts with integrity. The destiny of the person is not subservience but elevation - to become more Godlike by becoming more fully, consciously, and beautifully human.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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