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The long wait is freighted with both pleasure and pain. What pleases us is the hope that nurtures us by its small touch, like a fire-warmed stone held in the hand. What pains us is the uncertainty of that hope and the possible futility of our waiting, a frigid wind that seems to blow even the immovable stars past us.
The verb wait obsessed me these past weeks of Advent, not only because we were counting the days until Christmas morning but also because 2023 was the first year we observed Advent as an intentional season. To read again and again the gospels’ Nativity scenes and Matthew’s 42 generations of the Messianic lineage; to pray, “Lord Christ, come,’ over the dinner table and in the mornings’ darkness ; to ponder the unbound, eternal God gifted to us as a newborn more helpless than even our infant son; to play both the mournful and overjoyed hymns of deliverance on the piano with family gathered and listening; these were the weight of Advent, for us. They were our ways to wait, and to yearn.
There is, of course, an absolute German word for yearning like this: sehnsucht. It does not translate easily because it combines three words which English separates—yearning, longing, and pining. Individually, these are synonyms of desire. Together, they are desire intensified and pinpointed, they are sehnsucht.
The Mythic Face of Desire in Henry von Ofterdingen
As fits such an über-German word, sehnsucht received its most iconic symbol from the German Romantic Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg—pen-name Novalis—in his 1802 novel, Henry von Ofterdingen: the blue flower, or blaue blume. This symbol opens the unfinished künstlerroman and obsesses the protagonist, Henry, though he cannot understand why:
“‘It is not the treasures which have awakened such an inexpressible longing in me,’ [Henry] said to himself. ‘There is no greed in my heart; but I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write or think of nothing else. I have never felt like this before; it seems as if I had a dream just then, or as if slumber had carried me into another world. For in the world where I had always lived, who ever bothered about flowers?’” (from the Palmer Hilty translation)
We have only just met Henry, and we know little about him or his sleeping parents. Foremost, we know that “the moon’s glimmer lit up [his] room,” and that he thinks of the flower and the wandering stranger who told him of it. When Henry yearns for the blaume blume, the intensity of his sehnsucht baffles him: “Often I feel so rapturously happy; and only when I do not have the flower clearly before my mind’s eye does a deep inner turmoil seize me,” he thinks. “I would think I were mad if I did not see and think so clearly.”
The blaue blume will soon spur young Henry to travel across the enchanted pre-modern Germany where the novel is set. By the blaue blume, he will hear the songs, tales, and testimonies from the land’s assorted people as he mounts his destiny to become a wandering poet. But first, Henry must encounter the flower itself. It comes to him in a dream, towering and alien in its beauty:
“Dark blue cliffs with bright veins arose at a distance; the daylight round about him was brighter and milder than ordinary daylight, and the sky was dark blue and wholly clear. But what attracted him with great force was a tall, pale blue flower, which stood beside the spring and touched him with its broad glistening leaves. Around this flower were countless others of every hue, and the most delicious fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and gazed upon it with inexpressible tenderness.”
The instant he beholds it, Henry is altered by the blaue blume. Henry is unmade and then transformed—in a breath, in the speed of myth—by the offering of the blaue blume: “[the flower] all at once began to move and change; the leaves became more glistening and cuddled up to the growing stem; the flower leaned towards him and its petals displayed an expanded blue corolla wherein a delicate face hovered.”
This face is Mathilda, the young princess whom Henry hasn’t yet met but will seek, love, and mourn before the novel ends. Novalis transcribes her sweet countenance into the corolla of the blaue blume and so embeds her into Henry’s otherworldly yearning—she is the face of his consuming desire, at first from afar but then more literally once they meet. By this sehnsuct, Henry’s dream has become more true than the waking world to which he returns. When he takes to the road to begin searching for Mathilda, he begins to complete the desire that so baffles and entices him.
The face of desire, aflame in the dream and in the world—count the Magi crossing from the east beneath a bright, lone star.
The star which these wise men sought in Matthew 2 shares some illumination with the blue flower Henry seeks. Both are supernatural signs placed to allure those on earth; both are condensed, beautiful displays of great power; both inspire their witnesses to travel without counting the steps needed to reach them; and both herald the greatest relief. For both Advent and Henry von Ofterdingen, it’s crucial that neither the star nor the blaue blume are deliverance these men yearn to receive.
Henry finds relief to his sehnsucht in Mathilda, his love, muse, and (temporary) deliverance. “Henry felt the rapturous prophecies of first joy and love at the same time,” the novel describes it: “It was no accident that I saw her at the end of my journey, that a blissful festivity surrounded the supreme moment of my life,” Henry thinks. Novalis illustrates the fulfillment of Henry’s desire in a dream of the princess rowing across a “deep blue stream” which harmonizes with his first vision of the blaue blume.
The Magi sought “the king of the Jews” whom their lodestar signaled, and when they found him, they had both “overjoyed” hearts of worship and rare gifts. Matthew 2 doesn’t describe the length or intensity of their journey to the infant Christ in Bethlehem, mentioning only that they’d come “from the east” on belief in the prophecy of Micah 5. But you don’t need to be a novelist to imagine that theirs was a hard journey, or to guess that the distant star obsessed these learned men, tantalizing them with hints of the joy they sought. By its light, they almost certainly yearned for the “ruler” which the star heralded.
The Blaue Blume as an Advent Light
If the blaue blume is akin to the Magis’ star (for all the idiosyncratic question marks of Novalis’s near-Christian Romanticism), we can read it as a potent symbol for the waiting and yearning of Advent.
The burning desire which the blaue blume inspires without relieving suits well the wait of the groaning earth which Advent intones. “O come, o come, Emmanuel,” begs the hymn: “ransom captive Israel / that mourns in lonely exile here / until the son of God appear.” Christ’s people—Jew and Gentile, the living and the dead, all of us—lived in spiritual captivity as they watched the horizon for His advent. This somber waiting, the passive act of a sinful world which can only hope for its redemption to arrive at some moment, as promised, informs the minor key of the grave hymns we love, and it grounds the first candle lit for the Advent (if you don’t mind my idiosyncratic Protestant reading). The first candle symbolizes our unseeing hope by its vulnerability as much as its illumination; it is meager, fragile light in these dark evenings.
But the blaue blume also lights the way of those who must seek their desire on the road: Henry, the Magi, all Christians called to love. It spurs on even the sojourner. By Part II of Henry von Ofterdingen, Henry is aimless and despondent as he travels “the narrow path leading into the mountains.” Mathilda has died, and “[Henry] no longer hopes for anything.” Weeping among the trees and stones in grieving, self-imposed, the narration now describes Henry as “a poor pilgrim.” And though Matthew records little of the Magis’ return to their own country after laying their eyes and gifts upon Christ, it’s likely they returned as newly-made pilgrims and would have felt like exiles even in their own beds, even among their own families. Knowing the rapturous completion of Christ while living in our un-raptured world has this effect, I’ve noticed.
Christians as wayfaring strangers passing through a desolate world is an image I’ve written about before, and the blaue blume deepens its sense of eternal homesickness. The poet Hannah Hubin, writing in Ad Fontes, calls the symbol “the longing for perfection—for the last fullness of things.” Once Henry finds the blaue blume in Matilda, Hubin explains, “Love is no longer merely practiced and pursued; it is finally grasped, fully known, face to face.”
Love, fully known. Fullness, finally grasped. How couldn’t Henry desire this? How couldn’t we?
Novalis supplants the novel’s waking world with the dream-world of the blaue blume, Hubin continues: “the true and full longing of the dream is more real in the end than the first waking world,” so that “the dream that Heinrich receives becomes the real world, and the seemingly real world to which he awakes is less true than his dream.”
This seems the clouded, airy speech of poets, maybe. The “dream” as real and “the seemingly real world” as dream is one of those German-Romantic subversions for the fluttering of heartstrings, perhaps?
Not so, praise God. That dismissal would be too comfortable for we who live in the world groaning for completion. This is the gospel translated, refracted. If life in heaven with Christ is the eternal, complete source of our sehnsucht, then life as His people on earth is passing like a dream. Love and fullness, known and grasped.
Don’t take this threaded root only from me: Hubin also connects the blaue blume to (among other Christian novelists) C.S. Lewis, who himself cherished the image as an inspiration and signpost of desire: “That desire for the flower is the desire of a homesick man for his own country,” Hubin writes of Lewis’s attachment to the symbol. In “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis himself writes,
“If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.”
The “symbolical,” Lewis continues, is often a keen and impassable desire that we attempt to assuage by saying it is beauty. He calls it a “desire for our own far-off country” and “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.” Hubin adds that “throughout [Lewis’s] life, the blue flower remained just out of reach, possession always marked by desire.”
And—leading us back again to Novalis—Lewis points out that we’d like to distance the soulful Romantics precisely because the sehnsucht they emphasized is so strong, so painful, that “you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.” All three of these names for desire exist in Henry von Ofterdingen, but they exist there as poetry from the world beyond.
“And precisely in this delight of revealing in the world what is beyond the world,” Henry says to Klingsohr, an older poet, “of being able to do that which is really the original motive of our being here, therein lies the fountainhead of poesy.”
Rapturous Relief
Henry von Ofterdingen, I should add, ends in incompletion. Novalis died in 1801 before he could finish writing the novel, so that it remains mostly an enchanted, disjointed collection of tales, poems, dialogues, and icons. Much like the blaue blume itself, Henry von Ofterdingen allures but cannot satisfy the reader with full completion.
Of course, Novalis didn’t plan for the novel to remain unfinished and be published posthumously; tuberculosis was a tax collector no Romantic welcomed nor survived. His own concept of poetry, delivered at length in the dialogues between Henry and Klingsohr, rejects incomplete practice: “Not the material but the execution is the purpose of art,” Klingsohr says. No doubt, Novalis meant to execute full from all the material he’d gathered in Henry von Ofterdingen, so that it would never be left as “a pitiful empty jingle of words without a spark of true poetry,” which Klingsohr warns against.
Henry von Ofterdingen is a not mere jingle of words, but it is certainly incomplete and so cannot relieve the sehnsucht it dreams. As Hubin writes, “It is with the concept of fullness that the novel would have ended.” Henry will have no advent, for there can be no more poesy or future birth in his story.
What a sweet relief—what joy—that our own Advent has already delivered Christ. What rapture, that He will return by the same promises that first brought Him by virgin birth into a lowly, oppressed people. His lonely star is the perfected blaue blume, and His name completes God’s presence with us at last.
This bliss is the twinned pleasure of waiting in Advent, like an impossible double-vision of the eastern and western horizons at both sunrise and sunset. Christ has come. He is coming again. The sehnsucht for the awaited Messiah is the same desire for His return. Rapturous paradox, grace poured out: yearning for Christ the babe deliverer and the eternal king is like a trembling homesickness that suffuses the very night of a long-awaited homecoming.
Novalis, in an off-handed sense and in his bones, likely understood this. At the end of Henry von Ofterdingen, Henry meets an ambiguous female spirit who leads him from his mountain wanderings toward a ruined castle where he has never been. In a page-long exchange, he pelts her with questions and she replies with simple mysteries. Their final couplet haunts me, heavier each time I reread it:
“Where are we going?” Henry asks.
“Home, all the time,” she replies.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I pray your Christmas was merry and complete.
I’ve quoted Hannah Hubin at length from her Ad Fontes essay, and so it’s only right to also mention that she is a lyricist and poet also, and that her All the Wrecked Light concept-album is an intriguing experience of Psalm 90, courtesy of its several Nashville songwriters and its understated theological voyage: