"The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion"
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“The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion” doesn’t flatter clergy so much as it redraws the emotional hierarchy that religion claims to operate under. Schlegel, a Romantic-era poet and critic, is speaking from a culture newly suspicious of inherited authority and newly hungry for inward experience. Compassion is the Enlightenment-friendly virtue: humane, legible, social. Schlegel deliberately steps past it. The “genuine priest” isn’t defined by warmth or pity, but by allegiance to a vertical axis - a felt relationship to the absolute that outranks horizontal fellow-feeling.
That’s the provocation: compassion is not dismissed as bad, just as insufficiently transcendent. The line implies that a priest who is merely compassionate is, in a sense, stuck at the level of ethical sentiment. The real clerical temperament, Schlegel suggests, is powered by something more intense and less comfortable: awe, reverence, fear of God, devotion, even a kind of spiritual hunger. It’s an argument for priesthood as a vocation of metaphysical seriousness rather than social service.
The subtext is also a warning. “Something higher” can ennoble compassion, turning it into steadfast care that doesn’t burn out. It can also override it, justifying cruelty in the name of doctrine, purity, or destiny. Schlegel’s word choice - “always feels” - makes this less a moral prescription than a psychological diagnosis: genuine religious authority, he hints, comes from being emotionally possessed by the infinite, not simply moved by other people’s pain. In Romantic terms, the priest becomes a specialist in the sublime.
That’s the provocation: compassion is not dismissed as bad, just as insufficiently transcendent. The line implies that a priest who is merely compassionate is, in a sense, stuck at the level of ethical sentiment. The real clerical temperament, Schlegel suggests, is powered by something more intense and less comfortable: awe, reverence, fear of God, devotion, even a kind of spiritual hunger. It’s an argument for priesthood as a vocation of metaphysical seriousness rather than social service.
The subtext is also a warning. “Something higher” can ennoble compassion, turning it into steadfast care that doesn’t burn out. It can also override it, justifying cruelty in the name of doctrine, purity, or destiny. Schlegel’s word choice - “always feels” - makes this less a moral prescription than a psychological diagnosis: genuine religious authority, he hints, comes from being emotionally possessed by the infinite, not simply moved by other people’s pain. In Romantic terms, the priest becomes a specialist in the sublime.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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