"Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth"
About this Quote
A good novel, Schlegel suggests, lands with the same audacious promise as the Lord's Prayer: not escape from the world, but its transfiguration. The comparison is mischievous in a very Romantic way. He borrows Christianity's most charged line - "thy kingdom come... on earth" - and uses it as a yardstick for narrative satisfaction, quietly elevating fiction from pastime to a quasi-spiritual technology. Not salvation later, but meaning now.
The intent is polemical. Early 19th-century German Romanticism was busy arguing that art could do what institutions were failing to do: re-enchant a rationalized, post-Revolutionary Europe. Schlegel is writing in the aftermath of Enlightenment confidence and amid political turbulence; the old guarantees of order look shaky. So he frames the novel's ending as a secularized apocalypse: the moment when scattered episodes snap into a felt totality, when characters and readers experience a sudden coherence that life rarely supplies.
The subtext is both flattering and accusatory. Flattering, because it crowns the novelist as a kind of lay theologian, capable of staging moral worlds and smuggling metaphysics into plot. Accusatory, because it implies most novels don't earn their endings; they paste on a "kingdom" - closure, justice, harmony - the way piety can paste hope onto history. It's a sly reminder that narrative can counterfeit redemption as easily as it can imagine it.
Schlegel's line works because it exposes the real appetite behind storytelling: not just to know what happens, but to believe the world can be made legible, even briefly, on human terms.
The intent is polemical. Early 19th-century German Romanticism was busy arguing that art could do what institutions were failing to do: re-enchant a rationalized, post-Revolutionary Europe. Schlegel is writing in the aftermath of Enlightenment confidence and amid political turbulence; the old guarantees of order look shaky. So he frames the novel's ending as a secularized apocalypse: the moment when scattered episodes snap into a felt totality, when characters and readers experience a sudden coherence that life rarely supplies.
The subtext is both flattering and accusatory. Flattering, because it crowns the novelist as a kind of lay theologian, capable of staging moral worlds and smuggling metaphysics into plot. Accusatory, because it implies most novels don't earn their endings; they paste on a "kingdom" - closure, justice, harmony - the way piety can paste hope onto history. It's a sly reminder that narrative can counterfeit redemption as easily as it can imagine it.
Schlegel's line works because it exposes the real appetite behind storytelling: not just to know what happens, but to believe the world can be made legible, even briefly, on human terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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