Politics & Power Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel slips a quiet blade between faith and culture: once you step into “the world of language,” religion stops being a lived guarantee and becomes a text among texts. He isn’t just describing an academic habit. He’s asserting a jurisdiction. Art and “liberal education” don’t merely study religion; they reframe it, translating revelation into narrative, symbol, genre. That’s why his phrasing is so firm - “necessarily.” Interpretation isn’t optional; it’s the entrance fee.

The pairing “mythology or…Bible” is the provocation. “Mythology” suggests a comparative, even leveling gaze: Greek gods and Christian scripture occupy the same museum wing, arranged by motifs and metaphors rather than truth claims. Yet Schlegel doesn’t say “myth” as a cheap debunk. As a Romantic, he’s alert to myth’s power: not falsity, but a dense, image-driven way a culture thinks. Calling the Bible “Bible,” meanwhile, concedes its special status as a canonical book, but still a book - language made portable, quotable, teachable, detachable from altar and ritual.

Context matters: early 19th-century German Romanticism is obsessed with how meaning is made - by philology, by translation, by historical consciousness. The modern educated person increasingly meets religion the way they meet Homer: mediated by reading, criticism, and aesthetics. Schlegel’s subtext is a warning and a promise. The warning: education dissolves immediacy; you can’t unsee the scaffolding once you study the words. The promise: religion, re-entering as art, can regain intensity not as doctrine but as imagination with cultural consequences.