On ‘The religion of the visible Universe’: Novalis and the pantheism controversy

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Notes

¹For a recent account of the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ and its significance for the development of modern German philosophy, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) 44–83. For another account that locates this debate firmly within the history of the reception of Spinoza by German intellectuals in the eighteenth century, see David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1984).

²Dilthey deploys a conceptual scheme involving three rival ‘world-views’, naturalism, the ‘idealism of freedom’ and ‘objective idealism’, as a way of understanding the history of philosophy. The ‘idealism of freedom’ is identified with traditional theism and F. H. Jacobi, the central figure in the ‘Pantheism Controversy’, is listed as an advocate of this ‘world-view’ (see Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 8: Weltanschauungslehre: Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1960) 108). ‘Objective idealism’, on the other hand, the view with which Dilthey is most sympathetic, is associated with the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher (ibid., 113–14). Goethe, Hegel, Schelling and Schleiermacher all responded in various ways to the ‘Pantheism Controversy’. For Dilthey's sympathy with ‘objective idealism’ see my ‘Dilthey's Philosophy of Religion in the “Critique of Historical Reason (1880–1910)”,’Journal of the History of Ideas, 66 (2005) 265–83. The classic case is made in Otto F. Bollnow, Dilthey: Ein Einführung in seine Philosophie, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1955).

³On Herder and Goethe, see David Bell, Spinoza in Germany; on Schelling and Goethe, see Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); on Schleiermacher, see Albert L. Blackwell, Schleiermacher's Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982) and especially Julia A. Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher's Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). On the impact of the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ on German idealism, particularly on Hegel, see Dale Evarts Snow, ‘F. H. Jacobi and the Development of German Idealism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 25 (1987) 397–415 and Peter Jonkers, ‘The Importance of the Pantheism-Controversy for the Development of Hegel's Thought’, Hegel-Jahrbuch, 11 (2002) 272–78.

⁴Frederick C. Beiser, alone among recent commentators, has fully recognised the importance of the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ from the early Romantic movement that includes Novalis. See The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) 171–86. However, Beiser views Romantic metaphysics not as an attempt to respond to the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ as such but rather as an attempt to synthesise the conflicting standpoints of Spinoza and Fichte. See, ibid., 178–80.

⁵Novalis refers to the 1789 edition of this famous work in a letter of April 1791 to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer. See Novalis: Schriften, edited by R. Samuel, H.-J. Mähl and G. Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1988) Vol. 4, p. 85. All references to Novalis are to Novalis: Schriften, edited by Richard Samuel et al., 4 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–88). The citations begin with a fragment number (following a §), a Roman numeral indicating the volume, and the page number(s). Where applicable, I have relied upon the recent translation of the ‘Fichte-Studien’, Novalis: Fichte Studies, edited by Jane Kneller, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The pagination of the latter volume is given following a semicolon.

⁶For a compelling portrait of the enthusiasm for Spinoza in the 1790s, see Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 174–5. David Bell captures the traditional negative image of Spinoza thus: ‘This then is the general picture of Spinoza given by his antagonists: atheism, fatalism, pantheism and materialism, portrayed in a way that results in a morally abhorrent and philosophically absurd world-view.’ See Spinoza in Germany, 6.

⁷In the remainder of the essay, I use the terms ‘Spinoza’ and ‘Spinozism’ interchangeably to refer both to the actual Spinoza and his views, and to the somewhat different versions of both that were popularised by the ‘Pantheism Controversy’.

⁸See §82:

In most religious systems we are considered as members of the divinity, which, when they do not heed the impulses of the whole, when, acting unintentionally against the laws of the whole, they go their own way and do not want to be members, are treated medically by the divinity – either healed in a painful way, or cut off.

(II, 450)

⁹See Bell, Spinoza in Germany, 17–19.

¹⁰Beiser offers a compelling account of the radical Lutheran aspects of the eighteenth-century reception of Spinoza. See The Fate of Reason, 48–52.

¹¹Beiser also suggests this metaphysical motive as a reason for Novalis' enthusiasm for Spinoza. See German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) 416–17.

¹²This idea reappears much later in these notes in §536, where Novalis writes that ‘God in the proper sense’ is ‘the common sphere of object and subject’ (II, 263; 160).

¹³On this latter aspect of early post-Kantian thought, see Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 96–104, 107–9. These metaphysical motivations for ‘Spinozism’ resurface in one of the so-called ‘Logological Fragments’ of 1797–8. Novalis asserts that ‘The association of Spinozism and hylozoism would bring about the unification of materialism and theism’ (II, 529). Similarly, in some of his last writings in the Allgemeine Brouillon (1798–99), he speaks favourably of ‘Spinozism’ at several points (§§914, 958; III, 443, 451). Spinoza's conception of ‘God’ appears here as well (§1098; III, 469).

¹⁴According to Beiser, the main attraction of Spinozism for the Romantic generation was Spinoza's ‘attempt to rationalize religion’. As he puts it: ‘Spinoza's famous dictum deus sive natura, his identification of God with the infinitude of nature, seemed to resolve the conflict between reason and faith, which had preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout the Enlightenment’ (see The Romantic Imperative, 175). While Novalis would, no doubt, have welcomed such an achievement, he nowhere indicates that he appreciated Spinoza for harmonizing modern scientific rationality and traditional religion.

¹⁵On Novalis's reaction to Schelling's Spinozistic Naturphilosophie, see Beiser, German Idealism, 429.

¹⁶All indications are that Schelling returned the favour, lampooning the more traditional religious sensibilities of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in his 1799 ‘Epikurisch Glaubensbekenntnis Heinz Widerporstens’. See George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 55.

¹⁷Beiser maintains that the key to the Romantic reconciliation of Fichte and Spinoza lay in Herder's revised version of Spinozistic naturalism, which made possible a harmonization of the former's emphasis on freedom with the latter's monistic views. See The Romantic Imperative, 181–4. However, Novalis's strong reservations regarding monistic naturalism would seem to preclude any direct influence from Herder on his ultimate position.

¹⁸For clear summaries of Spinoza's particular conception of God, see R. J. Delahunty, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 1985) 125–30, and Alan Donagan, ‘Spinoza's Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 343–82.

¹⁹On the tension between Novalis's own basic metaphysical and religious intuitions and this conception of the ‘moral God’, see Beiser, German Idealism, 417–18.

²⁰This notion of a primal or archetypal human being has a long history in Platonic and Christian thought. See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004) 131–4, 138–41, 143–4.

²¹Hans-Joachim Mähl maintains that it was actually after Novalis's mystical ‘Sophien-Erlebnis’, which occurred some time following the completion of the ‘Fichte-Studien’, that Novalis adopted this more anti-naturalistic view of God. On Mähl's reading, this experience induced Novalis to develop a more metaphysically robust conception of this ‘ideal world’ than would have been warranted on his earlier, Kantian-Fichtean position. However, as the passages examined above from the ‘Fichte-Studien’ show, Novalis was always reticent about Spinoza's naturalism and tended to identify God with a transcendent ‘moral’ or ‘ideal’ reality. See Hans-Joachim Mähl, Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis (Heidelberg: Winter, 1965) 294–7.

²³The ideal of ‘becoming God’ is found throughout Novalis's writings. O'Brien, in a recent study, takes this as evidence of Novalis's ‘irreligion’. See William O'Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) 220. This reading, however, is too strong. In the first instance, it ignores Novalis's emphasis on the role of regulative principles in moral life and in philosophy more generally. Second, it overlooks the Eastern Christian soteriology of ‘divinization’ or ‘deification’, traceable at least as far back as Irenaeus. See Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and A. M. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). It is also useful to note that Lessing, the central figure in the ‘Pantheism Controversy’, was a serious Patristic scholar whose work on the ancient doctrine of deification had a significant impact on German Idealism. See, for example, the discussion in Toshimasa Yasukata, Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment: Lessing on Christianity and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For an example of Lessing's forays into Patristics, see ‘Von der Art und Weise der Fortpflanzung und Ausbreitung der christlichen Religion’, in Werke: Vol. 5/1: 1760–6, edited by Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1990) 426–46. There is no indication, however, that Novalis had any direct acquaintance with Lessing's works in this area. The classical source for the notion of deification is Plato. See Daniel C. Russell, ‘Virtue as ‘Likeness to God’ in Plato and Seneca’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004) 241–60.

²²In §590, he writes that God is the ‘sphere of virtue’ (III, 368).

²⁴The importance of Hemsterhuis for Novalis's emerging position with respect to the relation between God and the world has been noted by Christine Weder in ‘Moral Interest and Religious Truth: On the Relationship between Morality and Religion in Novalis’, German Life and Letters 54 (2001) No. 4: 291–309. This connection is noted on pp. 297–300.

²⁵For an exhaustive and illuminating account of Novalis's reception of Plotinus, see Hans-Joachim Mähl, ‘Novalis und Plotin’, in Jahrbuch des freien Deutschen Hochstifts, edited by Detlev Lüders (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963) 139–250. See also Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972) 87–93. Beierwaltes examines the reception of Plotinus by other pivotal figures in the philosophy of the ‘Goethezeit’, including Schelling, Hegel and Goethe himself (83–153).

²⁶Another letter, also to A. W. Schlegel, from December 1797 also refers to the Dutch philosopher (IV, 239).

²⁷This account of ‘moral’ in Hemsterhuis is derived from Hans-Joachim Mähl's invaluable introduction to Novalis's ‘Hemsterhuis-Studien’ (II, 314). For another account of Hemsterhuis's influence of Novalis, particularly on his moral-political philosophy and the concept of a ‘golden age’, see Mähl, Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters, 266–83.

²⁸For a history of this conception of the ideal order as immanent in nature, see Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia perennis, 209–11.

²⁹Mähl offers a cogent reading of Novalis's views of Plotinus as suggesting a new synthesis of Kantian idealism and realism. See ‘Novalis und Plotin’, 177–80. See also Beierwaltes, Platonismus, 88–90. Beierwaltes emphasises the role that Plotinus's theory of emanation plays in Novalis's attempts to formulate a new ‘physics’.

³⁰Other passages from Allgemeine Brouillon that mention the ‘moral sense’ or ‘moral organ’ include §197 (III, 275) and §552 (III, 361–2).

³¹ Pace Beierwaltes, who maintains that the ideal order, intuited within nature, is somehow or other an imaginative construction of the poet-philosopher. See Platonismus, 90.

³²The classic account of Novalis's ‘magical idealism’ is Manfred Frank, ‘Die Philosophie des sogenannten ‘magischen Idealismus’, Euphorion 63 (1969) 88–116. For a more recent account, which emphasises Novalis's continuing debts to Fichte, see Johannes Ullmaier and Stephan Grätzel, ‘Der magische Transzendentalismus von Novalis’, Kant-Studien, 89 (1998), No. 1: 59–67.

³³A good example of the way in which ignorance of the meaning of hieroglyphs led to complex theoretical developments is Friedrich Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, published in four volumes between 1810–12. For an illuminating account of Creuzer's work and the academic disputes that it occasioned, see George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany, 127–45.

³⁴This aspect of Novalis's characteristic position finds a precedent in the work of J. G. Hamann (1730–88). See Beiser, The Fate of Reason: 20. Beiser relates how Hamann's views where anchored in a mystical vision or conversion experience. His summary of Hamann's position sounds like it could have been written by Novalis: ‘If all natural events are divine symbols, then the supernatural will not transcend the natural but be embodied in it. All true physics will be religion, and all true religion will be physics’ (21).

³⁵Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 218.

³⁶Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translated by Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 41.

³⁷This point is also noted by Haering in Novalis als Philosoph (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1954) 338–9.

³⁸ Pace O'Brien, who argues that Novalis's rejection of biblicism and on the exclusivity of the Incarnation as a revelation of God is tantamount to irreligion. See Novalis: Signs of Revolution, 218–20.