by W.D. James

A Review of Christendom or Europe? by Novalis (with introduction by Michael Martin)

Angelico Press acquired or otherwise subsumed Philosophia Perennis Press, one of only a very few publishers of Traditionalist books, several years ago. Their combined list of books and authors is stellar. One of their most recent offerings is a reissue of Novalis’ (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) Christendom or Europe? (2024). While they did not spring for commissioning a fresh translation, the high point is an introduction by Michael Martin which takes up about half of the volume. It also includes Novalis’ Spiritual Songs translated by George MacDonaldⁱ—curses be upon whoever would attempt to surpass his translation.

I already had a hard copy of the Novalis essay and bought this new edition mainly for the introduction. Martin heads up the Center for Sophiological Studies and is a leading ‘sophiologist’ in contemporary theological circles. Martin traces the type of sophiology he represents back to the Old Testament where Sophia (Wisdom) is “God’s handmaid at the Creation of the world and likewise attends his abiding presence in it.”ⁱⁱ In the modern era, it has been most associated with several thinkers of the Russian Silver Age such as Vladimir Solovyov and Mikhail Bulgakov. Essentially, Sophia is understood as the Divine Feminine and is the personification of the wisdom of God which is also present and discernable in nature, as Creation, and represented by the three Marysⁱⁱⁱ of the Gospels. Martin distinguishes this line of interpretation from Gnostic sophiology which typically sees Creation as a problem.

On Martin’s understanding, Sophia is actualized when we contemplatively discern the Beauty of Creation. Hence, she is associated with the idealization, or even theosis, of nature: matter, form, and spirit all coalescing. Novalis himself speaks of the “beautiful Lady of Christendom.”^iv As Martin notes in his introduction, this brings Christianity very near pantheism or panentheism. He is seemingly very comfortable in that territory; his blog is entitled The Druid Stares Back, after all. So, we’ve got Hebrew mysticism, Greek wisdom, Catholic and Orthodox theology, and Pagan naturalism all coming together in this spiritual sweet spot. Nice. The introduction also provides much of what we would want to know about the background of Novalis. His family was steeped in the tradition of German Pietism as represented by Johann Arndt (one of my favorites), the mysticism of both the Theological Germania and of the humble shoemaker Jacob Boehme. He became a central member of the Jena circle, which included, or had association with, other luminaries of early German Romanticism such as the Schlegels, F.W. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin who were generally disciples of Goethe. Novalis also became a geologist to help out with the family business of salt mining. Martin speculates that his time spent underground may have contributed to his contraction of tuberculosis which eventually took his young life.

But it is his romantic theology which primarily interests Martin. Novalis’ essay focuses on the demise of a shared European culture and spiritual world represented by medieval Catholicism and its eventual reemergence (in a new form). The future Christianity he looked forward to would be mystical and speak what Martin terms the “language of immanence.” Bringing his sophiological insights to bear on the romantic project, Novalis and the romantics in general, but especially, in addition to the Jena circle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, are seen as reinterpreting or reengaging with nature so as to discern the immanent divine.

Novalis’ tale is one of the blossoming of a spiritually unified Europe where each aspect of life was saturated with religious meaning, calm, and peace, creating a spiritual realm under the care of the universal Church and her priests. His unabashed nostalgia for the Catholic Middle Ages disgruntled many of his romantic peers, in firmly Lutheran Germany; Goethe counselled against publication of the essay (which was withheld until decades after Novalis’s death). It’s clear that what he is extolling isn’t really a dogmatic Christianity. He takes it that religion is natural, or that nature (Creation) is supernatural, and hence the normal condition for humans is to live in a spiritualized environment. Likewise, the future Christendom he foresees is not a matter of top-down dogmatic orthodoxy. This is why he sees such a Christendom as inevitable—the Spirit will work itself out.

Martin quotes Novalis announcing “The world must be romanticized. Then one will again find the original sense,”^v its inner reality. If God is equally present everywhere, and in everyone, then it is the poets who have the task of drawing forth the divine wisdom within Creation. As Martin sees it, religion is the telos of romanticism.

The fate of Europa (herself feminine in German) hangs in the balance. Without a unifying spiritual power welling up naturally across Europe, Novalis sees only military conflict between the modern states – which emerged in the wake of Christendom’s fall – and cultural degeneration ahead. Martin notes the “anarcho-Christian and antinomian strains in the essay.”^vi Novilis himself affirms “Genuine anarchy is the creative element of religion,” yet he sees the need for a concrete spiritual institution to replace the now ruined papacy.^vii

This reemergence would be what Martin terms a “kairotic event,” which would denote a New Age of the Spirit centered on the Divine Feminine. This would represent a bottom-up development both in that the divine action taking place emerges from Nature and in that it would be facilitated by individuals, who have ears to hear, organically building a culture which embodied its values. He ends his introduction on this optimistic note: “The regeneration of Christendom, then, as magical idealism, as Kairotic reality, is always already happening.”^viii

To illustrate more concretely the style of Novalis’ spiritual vision, let’s look at Song XII from poems included in this edition:

Earth’s Consolation, why so slow?

Thy inn is ready long ago;

Each lifts to thee his hungering eyes,

And open to thy blessing lies.

O Father, pour him forth with might;

Out of thine arms, oh yield him quite!

Shyness alone, sweet shame, I know,

Kept him from coming long ago!

Haste him from thine into our arm

To take him with thy breath yet warm;

Thick clouds around the baby wrap,

And let him down into our lap.

In the cool streams send him to us;

In flames let him glow tremulous;

In air and oil, in sound and dew,

Let him pierce all Earth’s structure through.

So shall the holy fight be fought,

So come the rage of hell to nought;

And, ever blooming, dawn again

The ancient Paradise of men.

Earth stirs once more, grows green and live;

Full of the Spirit, all things strive

To clasp with love the Saviour-guest,

And offer him the mother-breast.

Winter gives way; a year new-born

Stands at the manger’s alter-horn;

‘Tis the first year of that new Earth

Claimed by the child in right of birth.

Our eyes they see the Saviour well,

Yet in them doth the Saviour dwell;

With flowers his head is wreathed about;

From every flower himself smiles out.

He is the star; he is the sun;

Life’s well that evermore will run;

From herb, stone, sea, and light’s expanse

Glimmers his childish countenance.

His childlike labour things to mend,

His ardent love will never end;

He nestles, with unconscious art,

Divinely fast to every heart.

To us a God, to himself a child,

He loves us all, self un-defiled;

Becomes our drink, becomes our food–

His dearest thanks, a heart that’s good.

The misery grows yet more and more;

A gloomy grief afflicts us sore:

Keep him no longer, Father, thus;

He will come home again with us!

Here Christ comes to us essentially through Creation as satisfaction of our desires, our drink and our food. The Eucharist romanticized. Nature is always blooming and always inaugurating the paradise of we humans.

As I indicated, I had read Christendom or Europe? before. Combined with Martin’s introduction and the specific set of poems included, this time through it served as a sort of revelation of what the Divine Feminine or an immanentist spirituality is. That became especially clear when I started listing out concepts that were important to Novalis as illuminated by Martin. Here is the list (along with the masculine contrary):

Feminine (masculine)

Inner (outer)

Immanent (transcendent)

Beauty (truth)

Spirit (letter)

Intuition (reason)

Heart (head)

Mother Church/mediatrix (Church militant)

Freedom (obedience)

Peace (struggle)

Faith (Knowledge)

Harmony (order)

Wisdom (law)

I may be mistaken in my choice of some of the masculine elements as neither Novalis nor Martin tend to make the contrast as hard and as explicit as I have just now.

Nevertheless, to see the congruence of all the terms on the left was enlightening to me. A style of spiritual vision becomes clearer. Both authors emphasize this aspect. Of course, masculine and feminine are opposites but they are also complementary: each calls forth the other and the union of the two is fruitful. Hence, it seems to me that a fully satisfactory spiritual vision and vocabulary would need to encompass both the feminine and the masculine sets of concepts.

However, the feminine has been ignored and (as Martin says) submerged, so we probably need to give special attention to recovering that. Also, it now strikes me how much the Catholicism (culturally, as lived by the mass of the people) of the Middle Ages emphasized the feminine aspect. This also makes sense of Novalis’ contention that the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the “press of business life,”^ix essentially modernity, have been especially hostile to just this aspect of our spiritual existence.

i The author of Phantastes, a classic of modern mythopoeic literature, and a huge influence on C.S. Lewis.

ii Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, forward by Adria Pabst, Angelico, 2015, p. 2. Pabst is himself an interesting thinker and associated with both with ‘radical orthodoxy’ theologically and ‘blue labour’ politically.

iii Mary the Blessed Mother of God (Theotokos) and Seat of Wisdom, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Marth who chose the better thing and left the dishes undone.

iv Novalis, Christendom or Europe?, introduction by Michael Martin, Angelico, 2024, p. 32.

v Ibid, p. 15.

vi Ibid, p. 17.

vii Ibid, p. 49.

viii Ibid, p. 29.

ix Ibid, p. 35.