Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel imagines religion as the very element, like air or water, within which a truly ethical person lives and moves. Ethics, by itself, can become a cold calculus of rules; encircled by religion, it becomes animated by a living atmosphere of meaning. The verbs and images matter. To be encircled is not to be shackled but to be immersed, sustained, and permeated. An element sustains life; so too, for Schlegel, does a religious horizon sustain moral consciousness.

He calls that encompassing medium a luminous chaos, a paradox meant to dethrone the Enlightenment craving for tidy systems. Chaos signals inexhaustible variety and spontaneity; luminous marks it as revealing rather than obscure. Divine thoughts and feelings do not line up into a neat syllogism; they surge and interpenetrate, disclosing truths that structured reason alone cannot capture. The name for this inner climate is enthusiasm, from the Greek for being filled with a god. It is not mere excitement but a reverent, creative participation in something larger than the self, an energy that fuses thinking, feeling, and willing.

This vision belongs to early German Romanticism, where Schlegel, alongside figures like Novalis and Schleiermacher, sought to heal rifts left by Enlightenment abstraction. Kant had grounded morality in reason and duty; the Romantics wanted to restore warmth, intuition, and inwardness without abandoning seriousness. Religion, for them, was less dogmatic proposition than living experience, a sense of the infinite within the finite that could suffuse art, love, and ethics.

Calling the ethical person an ethical man reflects the era’s language, but the point aims beyond a gendered subject: moral life reaches its fullness when rooted in a spiritual sea. Enthusiasm becomes the signature Romantic virtue, the bright turbulence in which conscience breathes, imagination creates, and finite beings orient themselves toward the infinite.