Faith & Spirit Quote by Heinrich Heine

Heine’s line smuggles a blade inside a shrug: sin isn’t denied, it’s invoiced. “Of course” does the heavy lifting, turning the most charged question in Christian moral life into an administrative certainty. God becomes less a judge than a functionary, forgiveness downgraded from miracle to customer service. The audacity is the point. Heine isn’t merely being naughty; he’s exposing how easily piety can be converted into a loophole for the educated, the charming, and the already-convicted.

The joke lands because it twists the intimacy of faith into labor relations. Calling forgiveness “His job” implies a contract: I misbehave, You absolve. It’s satire aimed at the bourgeois comfort that treats religion as risk management, a moral insurance policy that lets you indulge now and settle accounts later. Underneath is Heine’s long-running suspicion of institutions that promise transcendence while enabling complacency.

Context matters: Heine lived at the crossroads of Romantic yearning and modern disenchantment, a Jewish-born German who converted to Protestantism in part to navigate social and professional barriers. That biography makes the line stingier than simple blasphemy. He knows how belief can be sincere and also instrumental, how “conversion” can be both spiritual theater and survival strategy. The quip is Heine’s way of puncturing a system that asks for performance, then sells absolution to the best actor.

It’s funny because it’s rude; it lasts because it’s diagnostic. The sentence catches a timeless temptation: treating grace as entitlement and calling it faith.