Buddhist Romanticism

marriage never took place. The following year he started work as a
manager of the salt mines in Saxony. Still, he found time to continue his
philosophical and religious readings, in particular the writings of the mystic
Christian, Jakob Böhme. He also commenced work on two novels—Heinrich
von Ofterdingen and The Novices of Sais—but only the second was anywhere
near completion when he died.
In 1800 he contracted tuberculosis, which was to prove fatal. During
Novalis’ final illness, Schlegel reported having kept him well-supplied with
opium—which was available in tincture form in those days—to ease his
pain. As his end neared, Novalis had little strength even to read. As he
wrote to a friend, “Philosophy lies next to me only in the bookcase.” 4
After his death, Schlegel and the Romantic author Johann Ludwig Tieck
published his novels. They also kept his poetry in print, and for many years
Novalis’ reputation was primarily as an author and poet.
Another friend extracted passages from Novalis’ unpublished
philosophical writings and printed them as a collection of fragments, but
these left no great impression. Only in the 1950’s and 60’s were his
philosophical essays edited and printed in their entirety. And thus it wasn’t
until the middle 20th century that he came to be appreciated as a
philosophical thinker of great breadth and originality.
Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)
Born in Hanover, the youngest son of a
Lutheran pastor, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich
Schlegel was apprenticed to a banker at an
early age. Unhappy with this occupation, he
pleaded successfully with his parents to be
allowed to study law at the university in
Göttingen, where his elder brother, August,
was already studying the classics. The two
brothers began to study aesthetics and
philosophy together—Friedrich later
commented that he read all of Plato in the
Greek in 1788. From 1791 to 1793, he
continued his study of law in Leipzig, where
he met Novalis and Schiller.
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