Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel is doing the Romantic thing: treating belief systems less like doctrinal packages and more like imaginative machines. Calling ancient mythology and Christianity "witty and grotesque" isn’t a cheap insult; it’s a diagnosis of how the sacred survives in narrative form. Myths teem with metamorphoses, divine pranks, talking animals, virgin births, resurrections, and cosmic bookkeeping. Taken literally, they can look absurd. Taken symbolically, they feel charged. Schlegel’s point is that the charge comes from mysticism: the refusal to collapse meaning into a single, rational explanation.

The pairing is deliberate. In late-18th- and early-19th-century Europe, Christianity was both cultural infrastructure and intellectual battleground, while classical myth was being reclaimed by poets and philosophers as a rival archive of symbols. Schlegel collapses the hierarchy between them: both operate through images that are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, offering revelation by way of the strange. "Witty" signals not jokes but a kind of conceptual agility - stories that outsmart literal-mindedness. "Grotesque" signals the body, the monster, the impossible: the places where reason blinks.

Subtext: modernity’s confidence in disenchantment is itself a little naive. The mystical doesn’t disappear; it returns as aesthetic experience, as the uncanny. Schlegel also smuggles in a defense of poetic knowledge. If the sacred looks grotesque, that’s because it speaks in excess - in symbols big enough to hold contradiction. For a Romantic poet, that excess isn’t a flaw. It’s the point.