God helps those who help themselves

Help yourself so God can help you is a proverbial call to take the initiative into their own hands and to leave no other. Warns against too much to leave in coping with life on the gods, higher powers, or other people.

Origins of this idea can already be found in the ancient phrase Σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει (Syn Athena kai Cheira Kinei. "With Athena and start moving your hands !") That prompts beside the prayer in times of need for stirring the own hands.

Clearly this makes the fabulist Aesop ( 600 BC ) as in the fable " The ox drivers and Hercules ," as the stuck in the mud ox driver does nothing, as only the gods for assistance should be sought, prompting him Hercules finally appears with the words "Put your hands on the wheel and drive the whip on your team, to implore the gods but only when you yourself have done something; otherwise you will call them in vain. "

This idea sounds in the among the Roman authors Terence ( 185/195-159 BC) and Cicero ( 106-43 BC), the traditional Latin maxim Fortes fortuna ADIUVAT ( " the courageous is helpful in Fortuna. " )

The New Testament deals with this idea in a peculiar shape. In the tradition of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11 EU), the devil enters the starving because of fasting Jesus contrary to the suggestion that he should still help himself by making bread out of stones. As the son of God he was open to this possibility as a kind self-help, and God will, as in the second temptation of invulnerability guarantee him help. Jesus has this combination of self and God's help here at the beginning of his earthly ministry back as well as at its end on the cross, where the laughing stock of the quantity and the hierarchs culminates in the sentence: " He saved others, himself he can not save. " ( ( Mk 15,31 EU) parr )

In the Islamic tradition, the Prophet expressed on the question of the relationship between faith in God and their own actions: " Should I tie my camel and trust or not trust and connect " with " binding it to and trust ( in Allah )! "

In German, the phrase is the first time in the Baroque poet Georg Justus Schottelius (1612-1676) figure: "Man, help yourself, so hilfet with God. "

With Schiller's turn at William Tell " the brave God helps " calls for resistance against the tyranny of Reichsvögte on Gertrud her husband Werner Stauffacher.

Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) bringing the troop of the Upright Seven with the salutation of Fähndrich the intuition of Calvinist Swiss Confederates in a rather humorous manner, on an ironic denominator: " ... whenever the fatherland is in danger, they start very gently, to God to believe; only leis for everyone, then louder and louder, until the other one betrays and then round up a whimsical theology, whose first and only principal sentence reads: . those who help themselves God helps "

The phrase has been established in numerous languages ​​, so called Help a company founded in 1824 and the legal resistance after the accession of Charles X in France for the protection of the Constitution against absolutist aspirations Aide -toi, le ciel t'aidera (French, " yourself so helps the sky ").

A Russian proverb says accordingly, " На бога надейся, а сам не плошай. " ( " Na Boga nádejsja, a sam ne plosháj. " " God is God, be yourself but also not bad.

At present, a tendency to consistently and literally into the Atheist flipped version of the turn around in book titles like those who help themselves, otherwise it does not, Help yourself, otherwise helps no one: The art of living happy or cancer - those who help themselves, otherwise you will help no one ( 2001).