Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Religion here isn’t a rulebook; it’s an atmosphere. Schlegel’s image of faith “encircling” the ethical person “like his element” frames morality as something you breathe, not something you consult. That metaphor matters because it shifts ethics from compliance to immersion: the good life isn’t achieved by tallying duties but by living inside a medium that saturates perception, desire, and judgment. He’s making a Romantic move against the cool confidence of Enlightenment rationalism, which often treated religion as a set of propositions to be accepted or rejected. Schlegel wants religion to function less like geometry and more like weather.

Then comes the provocation: “luminous chaos.” Chaos is normally what ethics tries to tame; Schlegel insists it’s exactly the point. The divine, for him, is too expansive to be domesticated into tidy doctrines. Yet it’s “luminous,” not dark: a swirl of thoughts and feelings that confuses the accountant’s mind but clarifies the soul’s orientation. The subtext is anti-bureaucratic and anti-pedantic. If morality is only law, it becomes bloodless; if religion is only creed, it becomes brittle.

Calling this state “enthusiasm” is also tactical. In Schlegel’s era, “enthusiasm” could be praise or warning: spiritual intensity that might inspire art and virtue, or tip into fanaticism. He courts that risk deliberately. Ethical life, he implies, requires a charged inner climate - not mere correctness, but a kind of sacred voltage that makes goodness feel inevitable rather than negotiated.