NOVALIS (pseudonym of FRIEDRICH LEOPOLD VON HARDENBERG). — Born at Wiederstedt on 2 May 1772, died at Weissenfels on 25 March 1801. A most sensitive figure of poet and writer, he is among the first creators of the moral and lyrical world of Romanticism.
To the dazzling classical sunlight he substitutes the mysterious night, silent messenger of “immense mysteries,” to the unease of light the “celestial flight” of night understood and hypostasized as a symbol of the infinite (Hymnen an die Nacht, 1797–99); a more intense balance between man and nature is transfigured into a kind of lyrical magic in Glauben und Liebe (1798); the end of earthly sorrow, the termination of human solitude in the face of the gentle gaze of Christ are sung in Geistliche Lieder (1799–1800). Exquisite things are also the fragments of the novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798) and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799–1801).
In Christenheit oder Europa (1799) and in other fragments and writings he reveals the weariness of his own rationalistic age: against Jacobin egalitarianism he defends the hierarchical principle, against secularism he advocates the mystical union of king and citizens, against Protestant fragmentation he extols the unitary community of the Church in the vision of a “new Catholicism” (which for N. is not entirely in the Roman form), against the religious anarchy of the modern age he returns with nostalgia to the common interest that bound together the “Gothic” age, to the splendid world of the Middle Ages in which a serene trust linked man to man and in which peace arose from reverence for the Christian message.
In an age substantially still Enlightenment-oriented, N. thus laid the theoretical and psychological foundations of a specific mystical-ascetic Romanticism for which “sin is the true evil of the world.”