“Hamann’s own religious conversion in London took the form of discovering in himself all the crimes of the children of Israel: just as they stumbled and fell and worshipped idols, so he fell into hedonism and materialism and intellectualism and fell away from God; and as the balm of divine grace enabled them to rise and return to the Lord and repent their sins and resume their painful pilgrimage, so he too returned to his Father and the Christ within him, was born again, wept with bitter contrition and was saved.  The story of the wanderings of the Israelites, the Reisekarte, he declared, was the story of his life, his Lebenslauf.  This was the inner sense of the biblical words.  He who understood them understood himself – all understanding of anything whatever was self-understanding, for the spirit alone is what can be understood, and to find it man need only, and must only, look within himself.  God’s word was the ladder between heaven and earth sent to aid weak and foolish children – it alone would vouchsafe them a glimpse of what they were and why they were as they were, and what their place was, and what they must do and what avoid.  The Bible was a great universal allegory, a similitude of that which was occurring everywhere and at every instant.  So indeed were human history, and nature properly understood – understood with the eyes not of analytical reason but of faith, trust in God, self-examination, for all these were one.”

Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment (London: Random House 2000), p.266