Faith & Spirit Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Reason gets you the human; passion smuggles in the divine. Lichtenberg, the Enlightenment scientist with a satirist's knife, flips the usual hierarchy in eight words. His era treated reason as the grown-up faculty - the tool that drags Europe out of superstition. He grants that point, then undercuts the triumphalism. If "man" is what you can measure, argue, and systematize, then man is plentiful. But the experience people keep naming "God" - awe, dread, ecstasy, devotion - arrives through the parts of us that refuse to stay in a laboratory.

The line works because it's not a conversion pitch; it's a diagnostic. Lichtenberg isn't saying passions are more reliable than reason. He's saying they're more metaphysically productive: they generate absolute claims. Passions don't just color perceptions; they manufacture necessities. Fear wants a providence. Longing wants a meaning. Guilt wants a judge. In that sense, God is less a conclusion than a byproduct, a figure assembled from the raw material of intensified feeling.

There's also a sly warning embedded in the compliment. If God is "in the passions", then God is also vulnerable to whatever passions are trending: fanaticism, romantic idealism, collective rage. The Enlightenment dream of pure rational autonomy was always a little dishonest about what actually moves people. Lichtenberg's scientist cred makes the provocation sharper: even the most empirical mind admits that the strongest arguments for transcendence aren't arguments at all. They're experiences looking for a name.