Faith & Spirit Quote by Giacomo Casanova

Casanova slips on the philosopher’s robe here, but he wears it like a gambler: to raise the stakes, to unsettle the table, to win a little freedom. The sentence is built as a paradox with a punchline. God is framed as the ultimate “principle” propping up all the smaller rules humans live by, then immediately stripped of any governing rule Himself. That reversal isn’t just metaphysical; it’s a sly attack on the clerical demand that everything must have an explanation, a first cause, a doctrine you can memorize.

The key move is psychological. If God needed to know His own “principle” in order to conceive Himself, He would be dependent on something prior to Him - a humiliating demotion from absolute to contingent. Casanova is poking at the same itch that animates his life story: the suspicion that systems claiming total authority (church, court, morality) are often held together by a verbal trick. The quote’s intent is less to deny God than to deny the bureaucracy of God, the idea that divinity can be audited like an account book.

Context matters: an 18th-century celebrity moving through salons, prisons, pulpits, and beds, Casanova lived in a Europe where Enlightenment skepticism and public piety coexisted in tense cohabitation. This line flatters reason while keeping a rake’s grin. It suggests: if even God can’t be reduced to a principle, why should you be forced to live by someone else’s?