Novalis
and his
“Hymns to the Night”
Lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin,
“Matinee” 26 October 1908
Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in
profound sense can only be created because the largest part of
the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with
material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the
entire historical development of humankind. What will be
presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how
spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely
announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but
that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult
truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times
through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can
find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual
fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and
experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with
a world view we could call theosophical and from which they
worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in
harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in
Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth
century.
Not
even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that
through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an
awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these
Hymns — so complete, as it was only possible in the last three
decades of the eighteenth century — in an all encompassing
manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific
truths.
Out
of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von
Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has
the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the
impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of
Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high
culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth
century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or
she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one
could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the
physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally
established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to
this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living
proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this
self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching
the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical
`standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis
never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative
traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take
into consideration, that this family always had an open
receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming
into contact with unknown people.
When we study Novalis' biography — it is in itself a work of
art — and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as
having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his
civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which
knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a
mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he
actually became a delight in this career for those whom he
worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the
mathematic-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation
of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be
controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent
mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a
spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner
development.
When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the
elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where
relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis,
where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the
mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him
with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation
when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics
became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it
flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of
power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his
mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many
people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains
cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this
spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we
would not meet in one or other of the most important
intellects.
Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the
kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what
Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a
Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a
particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one
can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the
physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the
German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could
give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous
one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences
of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his
soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his
soul.
Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's
soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave
the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a
fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the
evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into
unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world.
He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these
spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived
a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its
impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed
a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars,
surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night,
appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual
truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant
appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when
during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state.
During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to
Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became
valuable.
What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear?
How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world,
which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely
in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose
knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the
result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this
soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one
wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these
experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and
Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely
unrefined comparison.
During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a
thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one
could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call
this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von
Kühn — that was her name — something like the
lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The
moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it
wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual
abilities.
Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it,
obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer
experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience
in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if
we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present
materialistic time. People say science must be based on
documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete
on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely
present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science,
have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by
presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an
illusion. The poetry is nice — they say — but show us the
documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where
Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at — so the “Novalis
adherents” said — various letters Sophie von Kühn
wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every
line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! -
concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.
In
Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered
Goethe — and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't
comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable
than documents which can be dug up — because all documents can
lie — whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will
not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him,
despite all his science.
What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed
away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate
her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he
separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of
Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul
experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose
enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.
Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie
von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly
symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out
of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into
the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul
bond.
(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the
first
two Hymns
at this point.)
So
far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which
Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the
everlasting elements of wisdom.
You
might often have heard that such reaching into the higher
worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of
existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric
times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world,
only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down
into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms
still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral
world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding
to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when
the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions
of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet
happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange
between night and day — while nothing was influenced by any
interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death.
Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was
no sense of death in this prehistoric past.
Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods
and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the
spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly
bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant
and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the
spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they
recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings
before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of
a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its
impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of
the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt
to become disenchanted by the world of nature.
This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to
Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his
spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and
in him rose what he called his “magical
idealism”.
(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn,
fourth Hymn
from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)
In
this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods
moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because
spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He
perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and
how the human beings during this time placed death as their
earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through
fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.
Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis
could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at
that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended
to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual
original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in
this universal womb of creation from which everything
descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held
itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace
downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it
also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the
spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this
Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in
heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once
again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with
the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical
body.
Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the
life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual
origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of
death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be
solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden
in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of
Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a
new impulse is given to humanity.
This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him,
from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star
which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the
actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night
of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the
riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary
individual wanted to learn — through the memory of earlier
lives — what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified
for the world.
(In closing Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) recited the
ending
of the fifth
and the
sixth
Hymn.)
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