The Rudolf Steiner Archive

21. Novalis Matinee

following a lecture on Novalis by Rudolf Steiner

Music (Harmonium)

[ 1 ] Where does the wealth of worldly wisdom come from in a being who did not begin writing until 1797 and died in 1801, not yet three years old? One must not overlook such phenomena.

[ 2 ] Recitation: Novalis’ “Die geistlichen Lieder” recited by Miss von Sivers.

[ 3 ] Novalis was born in 1772 in Oberwiederstedt into a noble family in Central Germany. Not yet thirty years old, he was having his morning snack one morning as usual. Lost in higher realms, he sat there and asked for music at eight o’clock; his soul soared on the sounds of the music, then fell asleep. He slept for four hours, and after noon, the death of our Novalis occurred and passed before his soul like other events in life.

[ 4 ] A life like Novalis’s is like a memory of past lives and experiences.

[ 5 ] Oetinger, a Swabian pastor, was a theosophist in a small circle. He was visited by a materialist who rejected virtually every ideal. Oetinger, however, recognized that a time would come when everything that radiated spirituality would be acknowledged.

[ 6 ] (While studying in Jena, Novalis also attended Fichte’s lectures.)

[ 7 ] Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave evening lectures in Jena. The hall was lit by just two candles. He strode into the hall with a confident stride. The students sat before him. Fichte solemnly blew out the two candles and said—and he repeatedly emphasized this to his listeners: “The physical light is now extinguished; now the spiritual light alone shall reign.”—The austere Fichte had a sense for the spiritual.

[ 8 ] In the last third of the nineteenth century, there lived a man who understood Schiller. He wrote a fine little book about Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters. It was neither recognized nor understood by his contemporaries. He broke his leg, but he was too malnourished to survive a broken leg. He died. Such was the lack of recognition and attention accorded to a man who understood Schiller in this way. (Dr. Steiner said, “I knew a man well, and so on,” when he began to speak of this man.)

[ 9 ] For Novalis, mathematics became a great poem. Matter flowed along the great mathematical lines and became an expression of divine thought.

[ 10 ] Novalis approached everything in his field of expertise with a practical hand, more practical than his superiors. (Unjust leniency is not divine love; one should not be uncritical.)

[ 11 ] Recitation: Novalis’s “Marienlieder,” recited by Miss von Sivers. Music (harmonium)