"In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible"

Within language, art, and the context of a liberal education, religion undergoes a transformation from lived reality to representation, taking on the form of mythology or the Bible. Schlegel suggests that when religious ideas enter the domain of language and the arts, whether literature, philosophy, or historical study, they are no longer confined to their original spiritual function or direct experience. Instead, they become objects of reflection, narrative, and interpretation.

Mythology here signifies the broad array of religious stories and symbols that, once part of vital communal rites and personal belief, have now entered cultural consciousness as narratives and archetypes. The Bible, religion’s written form for much of Western civilization, similarly ceases to exist merely as the Word of God; it becomes a text for study, a source for literary forms and philosophical discourse, a collection of myths, parables, and ethics. Both mythology and the Bible embody religious truths, but when filtered through the lens of liberal education and artistic creation, they become accessible as imaginative and intellectual products, rather than as unmediated divine revelation.

Schlegel’s assertion underlines how the arts and humanities do not discard religious content; rather, they transform it. Poetry, theater, painting, philosophy, each can draw on religious narratives and images, seeing them as deep wells of metaphor and meaning rather than immutable doctrine. This process does not deny the power or significance of religion but acknowledges a shift in our relation to it: from faith to interpretation, from practice to contemplation.

Religion, experienced personally or as communal truth, is lived. When it passes into language and art, it expands into myth and scripture, where it can be critically explored, aesthetically appreciated, and reinterpreted for each generation. Thus, in the pluralistic world of language and the humanities, religion’s mythic dimension is not less real but differently real, offering meaning through art and scholarship rather than through direct worship or belief.