Novalis A Sketch
by
Violet Plincke
An
essay first printed in the journal,
Anthroposophy a Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science,
Vol. 3, No. 3, Michaelmas, 1928.
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 Violet Plincke
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The quotations from the
Hymns to the Night
are taken from W. Hastie's Translation
(Hymns and Thoughts on Religion, 1888).
The extracts from
The Disciples at Saïs
from the translation of F.V.M. and U.C.B. with an introduction by
Una Birch, 1903. The
Fragments
are my own translation. — V.P.
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“ALL is seed” —
Novalis once wrote in his note-book. These words hover round us when
we read his unfinished novel
Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
his essay entitled
The Disciples at Saïs,
or his
Fragments,
properly so called. It is seed that will have to await a distant future
before it can germinate and develop into leaf, blossom and fruit. Even his
Hymns to the Night,
the
Spiritual Songs
and the poems dedicated to the Blessed Virgin — pure and perfect
in their compilation though they be — are but “seed,”
because they are pregnant with a spirituality that points to a still
far future, when the inner forces of man will have reached an
altogether different degree of alertness, intensity and
purposefulness. To read Novalis is to stand on tip-toe, with bated
breath, feeling the beat and flutter of wings. Dawn is calling
us.
Novalis left the earth before the close of his twenty-ninth year
and some are inclined to conjecture what his work — planned on
so vast a scale — would have been if ... But such conjecture is
false. Every effort to penetrate more deeply into his thoughts leads
to one firm conviction: no length of years would have helped to give
final maturity to these gleams of the future. The time had not yet
come (the end of the eighteenth century) for anything more than hints
of the approaching inter-penetration of spirit and matter to be
given, and so Novalis died when the basket of precious seeds he
offered to humanity was full.
Turning to his recorded life, we find that
numbers of facts are available. But they are not very helpful for the
understanding of his work — with the exception of one
all-decisive event and two or three others which mark periods in his
short career. His early childhood seems to have indicated little
vitality and an over-retiring disposition. At the age of nine he was
the victim of a catastrophic illness which was like a great upheaval
in a frail constitution; yet the result was an awakening, as his
friend Tieck says. The child's powers of understanding were
immeasurably quickened and in his later years, Novalis astonished
people more than once by his lightning like grasp of whole
domains of knowledge and life. Nine years later we find him at the
University of Jena. His life is centred in Schiller; he has glowing
enthusiasm for this “educator of the coming century.”
“Destiny gave him (Schiller) the divine gift of turning all
that he touched into the purest gold of a refined humanity”
— this is how Novalis formulates his impression of Schiller.
Schiller's
Letters on the Æsthetic Education of the Human Race
enthralled him and he made himself an apostle of the statement that
“truth and beauty are one and the same; reason is the
sole name and salvation which man can attain here on earth.” As
time went on, Novalis recognised the difference between Schiller's
nature and his own and broke free from the bonds that had fettered
him to Schiller. Yet the great moral impulse of Schiller is a chapter
of decisive significance in Novalis' life.
Somewhat later, Novalis encountered Fichte.
All Jena was at that time teeming with excitement about Fichte's
work. Schelling said that
“The philosophy of Fichte was like lightning; it appeared only
for a moment but it kindled a fire that will burn for ever.”
The very title of his book,
Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publikum
über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. Ein Versuch die
Leser zum Verstehen zu zwingen —
gives us a glimpse into the intimate workings of his mind and heart.
In his Fragments, Novalis makes frequent
reference to Fichte, for example:
“It is possible that Fichte is the
inventor of an entirely new mode of thinking for which language has
not yet found a name.” “Fichte's demand for simultaneous
thought, action and observation is the ideal of philosophising; if I
fulfil this demand, I begin to realise the ideal.”
“According to Fichte, ‘I am’ is the result of the
universe. In order to state ‘I am,’ I must presuppose the
whole universe; vice versa, the absolute statement of the
‘I am’ is at the same time the statement of the
universe.”
Fichte had dared,
as no thinker before had done, to take the Ego as the starting-point
of his philosophical investigations. To him, all being and
development of the universe were the result of an interplay between
the ‘I’ and the ‘Non I.’ In the process of
investigation, the latter thinned down into a more and more
shadow-like existence, since all reality was identical with
activity and activity belonged solely to the Ego.
Fichte was of
significance in the life of Novalis because he not only brought a new
richness into his being but touched a chord which was the innermost
essence of his mind and Spirit: Fichte awakened Novalis to the
realisation of the depths of the Ego and of the all-transforming,
sovereign power of the moral impulse. In the Fragments, we read:
“The system of morality must become one with the system
of Nature. We must become magicians in order to be truly moral. The
more moral we are, the more we are in harmony with God, the more
united to God. Only through the moral sense does God become audible
to us. The moral sense is the sense of existence — not affected
from without — the sense of union, of the highest harmony, of a
life freely chosen and yet within fellowship; it is true sense of
divination.” And again: “The moral sense is a sense of
the absolute creative power, the generative freedom, the infinite
personality, the singular divinity within us.”
The application of the moral sense to all research, all science,
was a subject ever-present in the mind of Novalis. He spoke of the
“moralisation of the universe” in anticipation of the
knowledge in which the wall between the moral world and the laws of
Nature is broken down and they are recognised as one — as
indeed the wall is cleft when an act of cognition pierces the veil of
the sense-world. Only when the outer world is permeated by the moral
sense will man be enabled to enter into the intimate understanding of
Nature which must arise if he is to experience the earth with her
living creatures not as a place of exile, but as a familiar homeland.
All human life is the pursuit of an ever-increasing
interpenetration of the Spirit within and
without. “The individual soul must be understood as being in
harmony with the cosmic soul. What is Nature? An encyclopaedic,
systematic index or plan of our Spirit. Why should we rest content
with the mere enumeration of our treasures? Let us investigate them,
elaborate them and put them to manifold use. The destiny which
oppresses us is the indolence of our Spirit. By expanding and
developing our activity, we will transform our own selves into
destiny.” “The world is at all events the result of an
interaction between me and the Godhead. All that is, all that
becomes, proceeds from spiritual contact.” “We shall
understand the world when we understand ourselves for the world and
we are integrating halves. We are God's children, divine seeds. What
our Father is, that we shall sometime be.”
One landmark in the life of Novalis is, as we have seen, the
illness and subsequent awakening during his childhood. Somewhat later
came the contacts with Schiller and Fichte. But these facts fade into
the background when we realise the significance of his meeting with
Sophie von Kühn — a child of twelve.
Novalis was drawn to her at first sight. His brother Erasmus speaks
of her as a ‘heavenly creature’ and all who knew her were
full of wonder at her beauty. Any attempt to describe the nature of
her inner being is fruitless. Her letters and diaries seem childlike;
yet who would venture to judge of the soul of such a child by the
external expression given to it in her diaries and letters? She fell
ill and grave fears for her life were entertained by those around
her. We are told that Goethe had heard of Sophie von Kühn and
that he went twice to see her during her illness. Hopes for her
recovery grew more and more slender and finally, two days after her
fourteenth birthday, she passed away.
The news fell on Novalis like a dull, heavy blow. It was not
unexpected for he had anticipated it for days beforehand. A few weeks
later, his favourite brother Erasmus died and he felt that the link
binding him to earth was broken. His one desire now is to follow
Sophie into the realms she inhabits. He doubts not but that it rests
in the power of man's free-will to cut life short merely by the
strength of desire for the cessation of earthly existence.
“Sophie is my religion now — not merely my love.”
He feels that he can transform every inner and outer happening of his
life into Sophie. His memory of her is like a sacred lamp in his
being which he tends and cherishes with constantly renewed spiritual
effort. There are times when he realises her presence in every
action. When the preoccupations of daily life draw a veil over her
image, he is aware of this as of something that ought not to
be. She has ceased to be a memory only of an earthly love; she is a
veritable guide into the spiritual world and so reigns supreme in his
daily life, sublimating it to new stages of translucency and strength.
As we study the life of Novalis before and again after the death of
Sophie von Kühn, we can
find nothing parallel to this sudden awakening of spiritual forces.
Turning the pages of his works, we find certain poems written before
the gateway to new worlds had been opened to him by Sophie's death.
Then we pass on to the
Hymns to the Night,
The Disciples at Saïs
or
Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
and we find it very difficult — nay almost impossible — to
realise that these are the writings of the same man. And in truth
they are not. Sophie drew her lover after her through the portal of
death which became to him the portal of initiation. Ever after he
drank of a fountain of inspiration which brought a new man to birth
within him. In olden days passing through the portal of initiation
meant that the candidate discarded his old name and received a
new one, as an indication that the old within him was blotted
out and that the new, expressed in the new name, was henceforward to
determine his life.
Where did Sophie lead her lover, what are the secrets she
disclosed to him? As her Spirit set out on its journey through the
starry worlds, she revealed to Novalis the secrets of the
night:
“Yet away I turn
myself to the holy, ineffable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world,
sunk in a deep vault below; desert and solitary is its place. Deep
sadness breathes through the chords of the breast. In drops of dew
will I sink down and mingle with the dusk. The depths of memory, the
wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the short joys and vain
hopes of the whole span of life, come forth in grey robes, like the
evening mist after the setting of the sun. In other regions of space
Light hath pitched its cheerful tents. What if it should never come
again to its children who wait for it with the faith of innocence?
“And now what
springs there up at once so full of presentiment beneath the heart
and swallows up the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take pleasure
in us, dusky Night? What hidest thou under thy mantle that comes
invisibly but in strength, to the soul? Precious balsam drips from
thy hand, from the bunch of poppies it holds. Thou raisest again the
heavy wings of the soul. Darkly and unutterably we feel ourselves
moved. Terrified, I behold an earnest face which bends to me softly
and devoutly and beneath infinitely tangled locks it shows a Mother's
dear youth.
“How poor and
childish does the light seem to me now! How gladdening and blessed
the departure of day! Is it only because the Night draws thy servants
away that thou didst sow in the wide fields of space the gleaming
spheres to announce, during the hours of thy absence, thy omnipotence
and thy return. More heavenly still than those flashing orbs seem to
us the infinite eyes which Night hath opened within us. They see
farther than the palest of those numberless hosts; unneedful of the
light they glance through the depths of a loving heart which fills a
higher space with unutterable delight. Praised then be the Queen of
the world, the high revealer of holy worlds, the guardian of blissful
love — she sends me to thee — tender Beloved, lovely Sun
of the Night. Now I wake, for I am thine and mine; thou hast
proclaimed Night to be Life; thou hast made me man. Consume my
body with Spirit-glow, that air-like I may commune with thee closer
and closer and the bridal Night last evermore.”
All the hymns, in their succession, resound with new praises of
the Night and her mysteries. The fifth Hymn brings a majestic picture
of the golden age of humanity. But when it began to pass away and
cruel hardening of body and mind was spreading ever further, so that
the clutch of death was cramping and terrorising man, then the Divine
Child was born on earth in order to renew the world. A new, strange
life sprang up like flowers in His surroundings. A bard, born under
the bright sky of Greece, journeys to Palestine in order to pay homage
to the Divine Child. Prophetically, he concludes his rapturous song:
“In
death the eternal Life is shewn forth plain
Thou art the Death that makes us whole again.”
Years pass and the time of Golgotha has come.
“Those loved lips drained the dark cup of unutterable
sufferings. In terrible anguish, the hour of the birth of the new
world drew near. He struggled hard with the sorrows of old death, and
the burdens of the old world lay heavy upon Him. Yet again He looked
with a kindly glance to His Mother, and then the loosening hand of
Eternal Dove came, and He slept. For a few days there hung a deep
rest over the foaming sea and the quaking land. The beloved ones wept
countless tears. The mystery was unsealed and heavenly spirits rolled
the old, old stone from the dark grave. Angels sat by Him as He
slept, shaped in tender forms from His dreams. Awakened in new Divine
glory, He ascended the heights of the new-born world. With His own
hand He buried the old body in the tomb He had left — and then
His Almighty Hand laid upon it the stone which no power shall ever
remove.
“Thy dear ones still weep tears of joy, tears of gladness, tears
of affection and of infinite gratitude by Thy grave. Ever and ever
again, they see Thee rise from the dead, and see themselves with
thee.”
The fifth Hymn to the Night closes with a triumphant song:
“O
joy that Life is lasting
To endless life above;
Now larger longing tasting,
With sense transformed in love
The starry world melts flowing
Into life's golden wine,
To feed our souls a-glowing,
Till we as starlight shine.
“And
Love is freely given;
Nor is there parting more;
The full life rolls in Heaven,
A sea without a shore!
One night of bliss unending,
One everlasting Hymn
While God's face o'er us bending
Shines sun-like, never dim.”
Not only were the starry expanses and
prophetic vistas of a new humanity, radiant with divine love,
beginning to be as familiar to Novalis as an old home — nay,
the Eternal Virgin, the Cosmic Soul began to beckon to him from where
She is veiled, where She works and weaves in the realms of Nature. In
The Disciples at Saïs,
Novalis tells of the manifold ways pursued by those who seek Her —
the veiled Isis. “All things lead me back into myself ...I rejoice
in the wonderful collections and figures in the study halls; it
seems to me as though they were only symbols, veils, decorations,
enshrouding a Divine Being; and this is ever in my thoughts. I do not
seek for them, but I often seek in them. It is as though they might
show me the path to a place, where, slumbering, lies the Virgin for
whom my spirit yearns. ... How much longer I shall stay here, I know
not. It seems as though I should remain for ever. I scarcely dare to
admit it to myself, but the conviction forces itself only too deeply
upon me. One day I shall find here what incessantly moves me; she is
present. When I go about here in this belief, everything induces a
higher semblance, a new order, and all is directed towards One Goal.
Each object then becomes to me so intimate, so dear, and what yet
appears to me as curious and strange, suddenly becomes like a
household word.”
We hear, too, the words of a young poet: “Only the poets
have felt what Nature can be to man, and one might well say that in
them Humanity finds its most complete expression and therefore each
impression is transmitted unsullied in all its endless modifications,
towards all sides, through the crystal clearness and activity of
their spirits. ... Does not all Nature, even as the countenance and
the gestures, the pulse and the colour, express the condition of that
superior, wonderful Being we call Man? Does not the rock become
individual when I address it? And what else am I than the river when
I gaze with melancholy in its waves and my thoughts are lost in its
course? Only a serene exuberant spirit can understand the plant-world,
and animals are only to be known by a merry child or a savage. Whether
anyone has yet understood the stones or the stars, I know not, but
such an one must certainly have been a gifted being.”
After a long pause he continued: “To understand Nature we
must let Nature evolve to the fullest in us. For this enterprise we
must make up our mind to be determined solely by divine aspirations
towards beings that resemble us and to distinguish their essential
characteristics. For verily all Nature is only comprehensible as the
instrument and medium of the intelligence of a reasonable Being. A
thoughtful man turns to the primary functions of his being, to the
creative speculation, back to the point where production and
knowledge exist together in the most wonderful state of flux, to that
generative moment of peculiar bliss, of inward auto-conception. If he
be absolutely sunk in the contemplation of this original
phenomenon there spreads out before him, like some unlimited pageant
of rising seasons and places, a history of Nature's evolution and
each point that establishes itself in the boundless fluidity will be
a new revelation to him of the Genius of Bove, a new volume of the
Thou and the I. The punctilious description of this inner world
history is the true theory of Nature. Through the inter-coherence of
his own world of thought and its harmony with the universe, a system
of thought arises spontaneously as the true image and formula of the
Universe. But the art of peaceful Meditation, of generative cosmic
speculation is difficult.”
It would be quite wrong to think that Novalis
— as a poet to whom no heights were inaccessible — would
have rested satisfied with a merely rhapsodical indication of the
necessity to discover the traces of the Cosmic Soul and Spirit in the
minutest workings of Nature. On the contrary, we find him entering
into the most tortuous paths of physics and chemistry in order there
to espy the innumerable metamorphoses of the same forces which were
active within his own innermost being. “Strange,” he
says, “that the innermost of man has up to the present received
such scant consideration and a treatment so devoid of spirit. The
so-called psychology is one of the masks which have taken the place
of the true images of the gods in the sanctuaries. How inadequately
man has made use of physics for the study of the inner life and,
vice versa, of the inner life for the study of the outer
world!”
Novalis conceived a plan for a peculiar encyclopaedic work in which
experiences and ideas from all the different sciences were mutually
to elucidate, confirm and strengthen each other. As
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
was to represent the stages of the development of the poet, so Novalis
hoped to write six other novels which were to give expression to his
views on physics, everyday life, action, history, politics and love.
He was aware of the necessity for collecting hosts of facts which
should embody and illustrate the fundamental ideas of his conception
of the world. Travels were planned to Greece, to Norway, to Scotland.
Life with the promise of ever new vistas of knowledge seemed to claim
him again.
Unceasing wonder fills us as we learn, page by page, the
directions along which the genius of Novalis worked. The
lightning-like quickness of apprehension which had characterised his
mind ever since the illness at the age of nine, seemed to be
immeasurably enhanced. His thoughts go to the very roots and shoot up
to the stars; they are ever in the central heart of things —
where life and death are one.
Can we wonder that words like these flow into his pen when he
thinks of man: “Man is the higher Sense of our planet, the star
which connects it with the upper world, the eye which it turns
towards Heaven.” And again: “Man is a sun, his senses are
the planets.” “There is only one temple in the world and
this is the human body. Nothing is holier than his sublime form.
Bowing before men is an act of homage to this revelation in the
flesh. One touches heaven when one touches the body of man.”
Novalis felt all human life to be the fulfilment of one
uninterrupted mission — the shaping, the education of the
earth. All life then becomes divine service. “All our
affections seem to be nothing but practical religion. The heart
appears to be as it were the religious organ. Perhaps the higher
product of the creative heart is none other than Heaven. ...”
“More sacred
books can be written than those we already possess. One thing only is
needed: that the spring of religion be quickened within us again.
Prayer, which in the religious domain is the equivalent of thought in
philosophy, must glow again till it seeks an outlet in speech —
and that will be a true sermon.”
“There is no
religion which is not Christianity,” we read in one of the
Fragments. “It is among men that one
must seek God. In human happenings, in human thoughts and feelings,
the spirit of heaven reveals itself most clearly of all. Martyrs are
spiritual heroes. Every human being has his years of martyrdom.
Christ was the greatest martyr of the human race. Through Him,
martyrdom has received a significance of infinite depths and
holiness.”
The longer we allow the thoughts of Novalis to
hover around us and the more deeply we allow them to sink into us,
the more clearly do we realise how all his being was permeated
through and through with music. Rudolf Steiner expressed it thus, in
a lecture on
The Psychology of the Arts
(Dornach, April 9th, 1921):
“The fundamental element of Novalis' poetic
work is music — music, the world of artistic sound which is
revealed by cosmic harmony and which is the creative force that works
into the human being from out of the Cosmos in the most intimate of
all ways.” And turning to Novalis' works, we find again and
again, reference to music and the musical element. So for example:
“Nature is an Aeolian harp, a musical instrument the sounds of
which are keys of higher strings within us. All method is rhythm; if
one has grasped the rhythm of the world, one has comprehended the
world. Every human being has his own individual rhythm. ... Every
sickness is a musical problem, and the cure is the musical solution.
The briefer and more perfect the solution, the greater the musical
gift of the physician. ...”
On Lady Day, 1801, when the wings of death approached Novalis, he
begged his brother to play some music on the harpsichord. He passed
over during sleep, his brother's music accompanying his entrance into
the spiritual world. Soon after Sophie's death he had written in his
diary: “I have noticed that it is evidently not my destiny that
I should achieve anything here. While still in my blossom I must
detach myself from all. Only at the very end I must learn to know the
best in the well-known and familiar — myself too. Now I learn
to know myself and to enjoy this — that is why I must go
now.” His prophetic words were fulfilled.
When a century had elapsed after the death of Novalis, the seed
of his heritage began to germinate and grow. Rudolf Steiner once
said: “What is given now as anthroposophical spirituality lived
in Novalis.” As the Disciples at Saïs sought Isis, so
Novalis had set out in search of the veiled Goddess. When the
mysteries of the Night had revealed themselves to him, Cosmic Wisdom
— the Divine Sophia — began to pour into him and make him
her own. All his life was spent in reaching out for clearer and
clearer visions of Anthropos — the TRUE MAN. In very truth
Anthroposophia weaves and lives in the work of Novalis.
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