Hymnen an Die Nacht

Some tentative, unsystematic thoughts on Novalis’ Hymnen an Die Nacht.  A meditation, if you like, on this great poetical work.  The work of the day, the poet and philosopher’s self-chosen “day job,” the grand task set out in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, especially in Klingsor’s fairy tale, of transforming the material world into poetry, Novalis’ “Magical Idealism,” is shattered by the cruel and senseless death of his teenage love, Sophie von Kühn.  But this tragedy, which would have been mirrored in the second part of Heinrich had Novalis himself lived to write it, is in fact the great revelation of the spiritual world, which lies beyond the joys of nature, especially the joy of eros that the living Sophie represented.  Novalis takes us on the journey from waking life in the world of day, to the inner world, and beyond that, to the world of sleep and dreams, and finally, to the awakening of the soul (here I am borrowing from the vocabulary of the Mandukya Upanishad). Death, and the despair that Novalis feels in its presence, the dark night of the soul, which leaves the poet unable to go forward or return to the past, is the door to the world of the spirit and eternity.  The hour of darkness, the hour “when darkness reigns,” the hour of the cross, is also the hour when “the son of man is glorified,” and the way is opened for the poet and for all of us to the enter Father’s house, the kingdom of eternal love.  This is the great poetic and universal message of the Hymnen, which, for me and for so many others, continues to be an inexhaustible source of hope of light