Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote as Novalis, trained as a mining engineer, worked in the Saxon salt works, was engaged at twenty-two to a girl of twelve who died three years later, and was himself dead of tuberculosis at twenty-eight. Almost everything he wrote was published posthumously by Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
The programme he sketched in fragments is what the Jena circle meant by Romanticism, and it is a philosophical position before it is a literary style. The world has been disenchanted by an analysis that explains everything and means nothing; the task is to romanticise it — to give the commonplace a higher meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance. This is not escapism but a claim about knowledge: the imagination is a cognitive faculty, and poetry reaches what discursive reason cannot. The blue flower of his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen became the emblem of the whole movement.
Christendom or Europe, written in 1799 and suppressed at Goethe's advice, is the political text. It narrates medieval Christendom as a period of genuine unity in which a common faith held Europe together, describes the Reformation as the fracture that made religion national and then private, and the Enlightenment as the terminal stage in which reason emptied the world of significance and left revolution and calculation behind. It ends looking for a new age in which faith and knowledge are reconciled and Europe becomes one again.
Whether this is reactionary is the argument that has followed it. It supplied nineteenth-century Catholic and conservative writers with their whole picture of the Middle Ages as an organic order destroyed by individualism — the picture Adam Müller systematised, that reached Carlyle and the Gothic revival, and that still organises a great deal of anti-modern writing. It is also, plainly, not a programme for restoration: Novalis expects the new unity to lie ahead rather than behind, and the essay is closer to a Romantic philosophy of history than to a manifesto for the old regime.
His Fichte Studies, unpublished for a century and a half, contain a serious critique of Fichte's self-positing I from someone who had absorbed it completely.