NOVALIS (pseudonym of FRIEDRICH LEOPOLD VON HARDENBERG). — Born at Wiederstedt on 2 May 1772, died at Weissenfels on 25 March 1801. An exceptionally sensitive poet and writer, he was among the earliest creators of the moral and lyrical world of Romanticism.
In place of dazzling classical brightness, he sets the mysterious night, silent messenger of “immense mysteries”; in place of the restlessness of light, the “celestial flight” of the night, understood and hypostatized as a symbol of the infinite (Hymnen an die Nacht, 1797–99); a more intense equilibrium between man and nature is transfigured into a kind of lyrical magic in Glauben und Liebe (1798); the end of earthly sadness, the termination of human solitude before Christ’s gentle gaze, are sung in Geistliche Lieder (1799–1800). Also exquisite are the fragments of the novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798) and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterlingen (1799–1801).
In Christenheit oder Europa (1799) and in other fragments and writings, he reveals his weariness with his 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 Church’s unified community in the vision of a new “Catholicism” (which for N. is not entirely Roman in form); against the religious anarchy of the modern age, he returns nostalgically to the common interest that bound together the “Gothic” age, to the splendid world of the Middle Ages in which a serene trust united man with man and in which peace arose from veneration of the Christian message.
Thus, in an age that was still essentially marked by the Enlightenment, N. laid the theoretical and psychological foundations of a specific mystical-ascetic Romanticism for which “sin is the true evil of the world.”
BIBLI: it is very extensive; only the recent bibliography is given here, from which one may proceed back to the earlier works. H. Ritter, N. Hymen an die Nacht, Heidelberg 1930; E. Hederer, N. F. von H. Christentheit und Europa, Monaco 1936; M. Beheim-Schwarzbach, N., Stoccarda 1939; H. Fautock, Die Sprachteorie Fr. von H., Berlino 1940; I. von Minnierode, Die Christusanschauung des N., ivi 1941; H. Kamla, N. Hymen an die Nacht, Kopenhagen 1945; M. Bessert, N. et la pensée mystique, Parigi 1947; K. Goldammer, N. und die Welt des Ostens, Stoccarda 1948; J. Droz,
L'Allemagne et la Révolution Française, Parigi 1949, pp. 395–98, 459–75.