Moral Interest and Religious Truth: On the Relationship between Morality and Religion in Novalis

Abstract

Whereas it is obvious and well‐known that the relationship between morality and religion plays an important role in Enlightenment discourse, it has not yet been properly recognised that this is equally true for the view of some early Romantics such as Friedrich von Hardenberg. An investigation against the Kantian background shows the moral‐religious relationship, as established by Novalis, to be an implicit reaction to the problems which are contained in the ‘Moraltheologie’ of the Enlightenment period. Kant, largely sharing a neological approach, tends to reduce religion to morality and even to instrumentalise the former for the sake of the latter. Hardenberg responds to the difficulties implied in this conception by liberating religion from any reduction and instrumentalisation, but, remarkably, not at the expense of his moral concern, and while retaining an intimate relation between religion and morality. Novalis's view can be explained by referring to his notion of indirect pursuit of goals, through which it is also related to his Early Romantic concept of art.