Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 393 Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism Daniel DiMassa Worcester Polytechnic Institute Abstract: Scholarship of visual culture has expanded the parameters by which we define literary realism. Using Goethe’s Farbenlehre as a touchstone for realists’ theories of vision, Elisabeth Strowick’s Gespenster des Realismus (2019) shows that the real is anything but synonymous with the prosaic. Realism is preoccupied with uncanny spaces that are generated by the (haunted) eye of the beholder. Just how far do the limits of realist representation stretch: does it accommodate the metaphysical? If so, the bounds we tend to see between it and the literature of the Goethezeit would begin to recede. Taking up the example of Adalbert Stifter, the present paper argues that the poetic program of the Austrian writer’s Bunte Steine (1853) aims at a practice of spiritual vision that emerges out of Romantic theories of God and nature, specifically, those at the heart of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s early theology. The paper rests on two lines of argumentation: (1) it demonstrates that the apparently pious novellas of the Bunte Steine , in particular, Bergkristall and Granit , exercise withering critiques of Christianity. (2) a close reading shows that the positive philosophy we find articulated in the preface to the Bunte Steine overlaps in compelling ways with the doctrine of intuition outlined and developed by Schleiermacher in Über die Religion (1799). The result - a reading that revises our view of Stifter’s natural philosophical commitments - underscores unexpected affinities between Romantic metaphysics and the practices of realist representation� Keywords: realism, Romanticism, vision, Bunte Steine , Adalbert Stifter, Friedrich Schleiermacher 394 Daniel DiMassa Realism, unlike Romanticism, does not prize things for what they could be - nor for what they are � Above all, Realism prizes the observation of things� Does this make it reducible to a school of empiricism? Not always. Scholars have shown that the sight implied by European Realism of the nineteenth century often operates according to more than standard theories of objective vision� Goethe’s Farbenlehre (1810), for example, revised longstanding theories of objective vision by suggesting that the eye plays a decisive role in the construction of reality (Crary). Subsequent theorists of vision, including German Realists, sought accordingly to conceive of the world as perceived by subjective vision. Elisabeth Strowick, reflecting on the Farbenlehre ’s peculiar language of Augengespenster , has recently charted how Goethe’s theory of color contributed to residues of Realism that we have long sensed but rarely articulated. By her reading, the world as construed by German Realists is anything but prosaic. It is an uncanny world where reality is in the haunted eye of the beholder� 1 In the present paper, I bring to light a religious-philosophical dialogue that manifests continuities across Romantic and Realist thought. Like Crary and Strowick, I deem Goethe and his contemporaries to be crucial models for this dialogue; yet it is not their theories of subjective vision that prove influential. On the contrary, it is their investment in concepts of nature, intuition, and objective vision� Concentrating on the Austrian realist, Adalbert Stifter, and his novella cycle, Bunte Steine (1853), I show that Stifter’s program of Realism - to the extent it is identifiable with that cycle - emerges out of a theory of vision whose roots are both Romantic and Goethean. By placing Stifter in dialogue with Friedrich Schleiermacher, we see how the religious and metaphysical preoccupations of the Goethezeit retain central significance well into the middle of the century. In the process, we see Stifter anew. He emerges neither as a pious Catholic (Downing, Swales and Swales), nor as a physico-theologian (Geulen), but as a naturalist and skeptic whose preoccupation with vision aligns him with Goethe, Schleiermacher, and self-identified Spinozists from the turn of the century� Stifter is one of the most famously embattled figures of the German-language canon. His texts, like those of, say, Kleist, defy classification. Realism is probably the most apt taxonomical umbrella under which to place his work, but not without provisos (Begemann and Giuriato 197). However we classify him, he exasperates us for the attention his texts lavish on seemingly trivial objects� A poet of “Käfer und Butterblumen,” as Friedrich Hebbel once wrote, Stifter and his poetics of the small have spawned insults that have won their own fame. Perhaps the primary reason he remains so ambivalent a figure is the apparent Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 395 provincialism of his work. His texts smack of nostalgia, quietism, and a piety that reads as almost dim-witted. Such impressions seem to be confirmed by his paltry support for the revolutionary events of 1848� Thus could Arno Schmidt, with a certain rectitude, describe Der Nachsommer as the “Magna Charta des Eskapismus” (210). There are times when Stifter would seem to justify such judgments, as when Eric Downing writes that his appeal to Christianity in the preface to Bunte Steine is “unavoidable and highly embarrassing” (31). That is to say nothing of the novellas themselves, littered as they are with salt-of-theearth types whose Christian faith appears prettily idealized. And yet the list of Stifter’s admirers complicates such views. Among them, for example, we find the likes of Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche - not exactly Christian simpletons� Furthermore, recent scholarship complicates the notion of Stifter’s parochial religious sensibility. For while it is true that titles like Adalbert Stifter und das christliche Weltbild (1959) were once standard fare, there have been movements away from such positions. 2 Among the more illuminating statements on Stifter’s religious sensibility is the following excerpt, which I cite despite its length, because it intimates the scope of the problem with relative concision: [Stifter] kennt Religion als Kirche, als Apparat und Institution, die durch ihre Amts- und Würdenträger repräsentiert wird; er kennt kirchlich verfasste, kirchlich organisierte Religiosität und ihre Praktiken, die in den persönlichen Bereich hineinreichen […]; er kennt vergleichsweise freie, subjektive Formen von Religiosität, die aber doch noch an einem personalen Gottesbegriff festhalten; er kennt religiöse und metaphysische Sehnsüchte bzw. Bedürfnisse unbestimmterer Art, Sehnsüchte nach übergreifenden Sinn- und Ordnungserfahrungen, vagere Vorstellungen vom Göttlichen, die mit einem personalen Gottesverständnis dann nur noch wenig zu tun haben; er kennt schließlich eine Lebens-, Welt- und Naturfrömmigkeit, die ohne einen Gottesbegriff i.e.S. auskommen kann und von der aus sich vielleicht sogar eine Nähe zu Arthur Schopenhauer und Ludwig Feuerbach ergeben könnte. (Begemann and Giuriato 279—80) Despite their sheen of naive faith, the novellas of Bunte Steine - which represent the most programmatic of Stifter’s forays into the territory of a Realist poetics - embody the last and most radical of the religious models that Begemann outlines, i�e�, of the Naturfrömmigkeit that borders on that of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, but on that of Goethe, too� Nowhere is that more true than in Bergkristall , which presents the most saccharine face of piety in the collection. It is the story of two siblings who lose their way in the mountains on a snowy Christmas Eve. On the journey home from their grandparents, a squall forces them off course. They spend the night 396 Daniel DiMassa on the glacial ice of the mountain� In the morning they meet a rescue party, make their way home, and in doing so seal the happiness of their town’s holiday. The tale conjures powerful feelings of Geborgenheit and Gemütlichkeit , but its narration exposes anxieties that go unresolved� Signs of such anxieties surface in eccentricities of the narration, first of which is a prolix introduction that is peculiar for the attention it devotes to the domestic traditions of the Christmas holiday� As Jochen Berendes points out, it amounts to an ethnographic account of an Austrian Christmas for an Austrian readership (195). The excesses of the narration are at their most apparent in the descriptions of the holiday’s lights: the introduction catalogs nearly every source of light� The visit of the Christkindlein is (1) “ein heiteres, glänzendes, feierliches Ding.” On Christmas Eve, when twilight sets in, the faithful (2) light lanterns, “und meistens sehr viele.” The gifts from the Christ child are presented to children (3) “bei dem herrlichen schimmernden Lichterglanze.” The faithful carry (4) lights along dark paths as they hurry to a church that towers over them with its (5) windows illuminated in the darkness. All this effulgence reaches its high point in the final sentence of the introduction: (6) “Weil dieses Fest so lange nachhält, weil sein Abglanz so hoch in das Alter hinauf reicht, so stehen wir so gerne dabei, wenn die Kinder dasselbe begehen und sich darüber freuen” (Stifter 183—85)� The last of these statements is crucial for at least three reasons� The reference to the holiday’s Abglanz marks the culmination of the introduction’s catalog of light; it reflects the centrality to Stifter of perception, in particular of vision; and it betokens the crystalline title of the tale. The experience of the children atop the mountain will show that this characterization of Christmas aims at an epistemological critique of religious faith� We sense already, when the siblings Konrad and Sanna lose their way in a snowstorm, that their faith carries no currency beyond the bounds of their community. The children wend their way through a mountain forest, looking for a familiar signpost - a memorial to a fallen traveler - but cannot find it. Konrad is sure they will, because the black of the post’s iron cross “immer heraus ragen wird” (210). The image is a repetition of the narrator’s description of the children’s village, which is recognizable by the red shingles of the church steeple, which “aus dem Grün vieler Obstbäume hervor ragt, und […] weithin ersichtlich ist” (185). But neither church nor cross is visible in the children’s crisis. The community professes a god who is not to be found. The narrative is keen to reinforce the point, as when the children exert themselves to climb over a wall of ice: “Jenseits wollten sie wieder hinabklettern. Aber es gab kein Jenseits” (220). The lines suggest the absence of a hereafter, even in their visual arrangement: the sentences detached from paragraphs reflect an existence without ground. The experience of desolation reaches its climax when the children set up camp Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 397 in a mountain cave. Snow emits light as if it had absorbed daylight and now reflected it. Stars glimmer. There is even the shimmer of the Northern Lights in the night sky. The dazzling lights of nature stand in contrast to the many lights of the holiday, for as the narrator points out, not a single light from the village reaches the children atop the mountain (224). Together, the disappearance of the memorial post, the church steeple, and the lights of the town signal a gaping absence: of Christ, of the Church, of Christmas� There is an obvious objection: one might contend, as Martin and Erika Swales do, that the stars and the Northern Lights are a confirmation of faith. The lights of Christmas would seem thereby inscribed into the fabric of the universe (Swales and Swales 195—96). It was a star, after all, that led the Magi to Christ. Furthermore, Sanna eventually tells her mother that she witnessed the Christ child in the night sky. Yet there is good reason to resist the Swales’ contention, as does Christian Begemann, who sees in the discrepancy between the narrative and its interpretation by Sanna an obstacle to the assignation of religious significance ( Zeichen 318—19). Begemann’s skepticism gains traction if we align it with the inquiry of Strowick, who argues that we ought to understand Stifter’s engagement with light, color, and perception as an appraisal of Goethean thought (103—04). Consider, on that note, how the emblems of Goethean color theory find themselves transformed in Stifter’s novella. The rainbow on the alpine meadow at the outset of Faust II , a transformation of Goethe’s 1809 painting of the color wheel, emerges as a nocturnal vision in Bergkristall : amidst a night of white, black, and gray, the children witness the dazzling play of color in the sky. The Northern Lights, a reflection of the earth’s gases, appear to the children in the shape of a bow. They are the negative image of the Faustian rainbow. Even the insight inspired by Faust’s vision - “Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” (l. 4727) - is repeated in Stifter’s description of the Christmas holiday� It is the Abglanz of the holiday, after all, which persists into maturity. That repetition in Bergkristall is laden with significance. Inasmuch as it signals the mediated character of knowledge, the Faustian rainbow underscores the potential failure of the subject to recognize nature for what it is. Indeed, this is the lesson of Sanna’s misinterpretation. To read the novella as a confirmation of faith is to repeat her mistake. Bergkristall suggests that faith in a personal deity emerges from a (mis)interpretation of vision. 3 It suggests, moreover, that the subjectivity responsible for such misinterpretation is nourished and reinforced by communal life� Consider, as Berendes points out, how the novella’s introduction characterizes the celebration of Christmas as an act of the community’s consensus. Opening with the possessive descriptor, “Unsere Kirche,” the narration continues, “die katholische Kirche begeht den Christtag als den Tag der Geburt des Heilandes,” “die Mitternachtsstunde als die 398 Daniel DiMassa Geburtsstunde des Herrn” (Berendes 195). As Berendes writes, the narration is more concerned with “volkstümliche[r] Praxis” than with the doctrine of the holiday (195). The role of the community in the persistence of religious interpretation is particularly evident, however, once the children have been saved and returned to their village. Repeatedly, the adults of the village invoke God: (1) “Gebenedeit sei Gott” (234) (2) “so gut wir es vermögen, und so gut uns Gott helfe” (234) (3) “so können wir in Gottes Namen aufbrechen” (236) (4) “Gott sei Dank” (237) (5) “danke Gott auf den Knieen” (238) (6) “Ja, danken wir Gott, danken wir Gott” (238) Piling one upon the other, the invocations reflect two other quirks of speech in the novella� First, they recall the catalog of light in the story’s introduction. There is, in fact, a structural parallel between the two fits of pleonasm: each lexical cluster contains roughly six items (depending on how one counts) and together the clusters, appearing before and after the primary events of the narrative, form a bookend to the novella. Second, the villagers’ proliferation of mindless references to God recalls the seventeen times that Sanna, blindly following her brother’s instructions, had replied “Ja, Konrad.” Just as Sanna’s blind faith in her brother was misplaced, so too is the faith of the villagers. Their god, like the holiday lights to which he forms a bookend, was absent on the mountain� 4 That critical portrayal of revealed religion manifests elsewhere in the Bunte Steine in arguably more incisive ways. Granit presents the narrative of Christian salvation history as downright brutal. The novella’s narrator relates the trouble that ensues when, as a child, he allowed a traveling dealer of pitch to smear his feet with oil. After walking into his house and staining the floorboards, his mother exclaims, “Was hat denn dieser heillose eingefleischte Sohn heute für Dinge an sich? ” (26). The use of the adjective eingefleischt rings odd: in what way, after all, can one be an eingefleischter Sohn ? As they do elsewhere, the excesses of Stifter’s narration manifest what is implicit in the text: eingefleischt , literally incarnate , points to the phenomenon of the incarnation � 5 The narrator is a Christ figure who happens also to be heillos , i.e., god-forsaken. The affinity to Christ illuminates the events surrounding the mother’s exclamation� The child’s submission to having his feet oiled reads as a ritual of anointing� The name Christ, after all, is Greek for “the anointed one,” and Christ submitted to the ritual of anointing in Holy Week (Matthew 26). It is in this light that the events that follow are to be interpreted: the mother carries her son to an adjoining room, grasps a bundle of reeds, and beats the child’s feet so violently that pitch spatters her, her son, and the entire room (26—27). The story stages a domestic Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 399 transformation of the events of Holy Week, up to and including the passion of Christ� 6 What kind of god, the tale of the son and his brutal mother asks, allows his son to be so violently mangled? An earlier version of the story, Die Pechbrenner , makes the same case in yet more painful form. There, a boy, Joseph, also suffers torments like those of Christ. During an outbreak of plague, his father sends away a lost, hungry family for fear of infection. Joseph tracks down the family, finds shelter for them, and supplies them secretly with food. Amidst these acts of charity, Joseph’s family contracts the plague and the father discovers his son’s acts of well-intentioned disobedience. He thus brings Joseph to a rock ledge, removes the ladder with which the boy climbed the ledge, and gives him a choice: jump to his death or starve to death� Once the father has abandoned his son, and Joseph realizes it is no mere exercise, he calls for his father - repeatedly - to no avail. These calls echo those of the crucified Christ: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ” (Matthew 27: 46). The displacement of the paschal mystery to the realm of the domestic aims to focus Christian eyes on the brutal whims of its god. It is in this respect, too, that Stifter emerges as a belated interlocutor of Goethe and his philosophical peers� Although Christian theology of atonement (e.g., Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur deus homo ) had long since developed arguments for the necessity and goodness of Christ’s crucifixion (cf. felix culpa ), enlightened philosophers of the eighteenth century were often scandalized by divine violence and bloodlust in Judeo-Christian scripture� Voltaire, for example, wrote the drama Saul as a criticism of the prominence of sacrificial violence in the Hebrew Bible. Goethe, meanwhile, though so partial to the Hebrew scriptures that he wished to throttle Voltaire for his mockery of them, nevertheless bemoaned the apparent violence of the deity - as a child in response to the earthquake in Lisbon, and as an adult in the “Prometheus” ode. Kleist, too, of course, figured in the same discourse. Das Erdbeben in Chili , for all else that can be said of it, is fundamentally an expression of horror at the linkages of religion and violence - less than a century since Leibniz had published the Théodicée � The treatment of Christianity in Bunte Steine thus turns out to approximate, as Uwe Steiner has suggested, what we find in novellas like Das Erdbeben in Chili and Die Marquise von O (173). 7 This demands that we inquire after just what sort of god it is to whom Stifter appeals in the preface of Bunte Steine. Considered an early manifesto of German Realism, Stifter’s preface is not an obviously theological statement� It is an apologia of his predilection for apparently trivial things� In structuring that apologia Stifter relies on the correlative pair of the individual ( Einzelne ) and the universal ( Allgemeine ) as justification for his judgments� Phenomena he deems small are those that attract attention to 400 Daniel DiMassa themselves and divert attention from the universal; phenomena he deems grand are those that point beyond their individuality to the universe and its laws. Pursuing the conviction that nature’s laws are discoverable through observation of phenomena, Stifter begins to sketch the principles of an epistemology. It is here that the text comes closest to a theology: Weil aber die Wissenschaft nur Körnchen nach Körnchen erringt, nur Beobachtung nach Beobachtung macht, nur aus Einzelnem das Allgemeine zusammen trägt, und weil endlich die Menge der Erscheinungen und das Feld des Gegebenen unendlich groß ist, Gott also die Freude und die Glükseligkeit des Forschens unversieglich gemacht hat, wir auch in unseren Werkstätten immer nur das Einzelne darstellen können, nie das Allgemeine, denn dies wäre die Schöpfung: so ist auch die Geschichte des in der Natur Großen in einer immerwährenden Umwandlung der Ansichten über dieses Große bestanden. Da die Menschen in der Kindheit waren, ihr geistiges Auge von der Wissenschaft noch nicht berührt war, wurden sie von dem Nahestehenden und Auffälligen ergriffen und zu Furcht und Bewunderung hingerissen: aber als ihr Sinn geöffnet wurde, da der Blik sich auf den Zusammenhang zu richten begann, so sanken die einzelnen Erscheinungen immer tiefer, und es erhob sich das Gesez immer höher, die Wunderbarkeiten hörten auf, das Wunder nahm zu. (11—12) The infinity of the universe - provided for by God - ensures that the search for knowledge is an unending quest. God is mentioned, but the role of the Christian deity in this cosmology is far less integral to the argument than the twin claims Stifter makes of physics and epistemology: (a) the universe is infinite and (b) we come to know the universe through a special practice of vision. It is upon these points, after all, and not upon the existence of a deity, that the argument in favor of small things rests� 8 Nevertheless, the preface to Bunte Steine has led frequently to the attribution to Stifter of a lapsed Christian worldview. Erika and Martin Swales, for example, write of Stifter’s indebtedness to Catholic Austria and to Weimar Classicism (especially to Herder) to explain his preoccupation with scientific inquiry, which they deem a philosophical “act of Christian worship” (28). Eva Geulen, referring also to Stifter’s program of inquiry into nature’s laws, writes that the “only concept of nature that could sustain this project is the early Enlightenment notion of physicotheology, the belief in natural history as the ordered unfolding of a meaningful universe” (588). With Darwin’s landmark work of 1859, Geulen sees Stifter’s project on the brink of catastrophe. Eric Downing, meanwhile, surmises that Stifter’s mention of God in the preface is intended to supply a unity to nature that otherwise is not there: God supplies the “guarantee that the pieces and fragments function as pieces and fragments, as signifiers of a common, but empirically absent, reality. […] Realism becomes a matter not of scientifically Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 401 recording what is there but of religiously believing in what is not” (31). With his tales of apparent Christian virtue, and scattered references to God, Stifter opens himself to such interpretations. Yet the tenets of his worldview by no means entail these conclusions, which tend to be constrained by strict conceptions of creed and theism� In his history of the conceptualization of nature, Pierre Hadot provides a fuller view of the tree upon whose branches we might look to find Stifter. Writing about the study of nature as a study of that which loves to hide, Hadot profiles “Promethean” and “Orphic” approaches to uncovering the secrets of nature. Whereas the former uses experimentation to draw out nature’s secrets and leverage them to utilitarian ends, the latter relies on acts of perception to know nature for the joy that is intrinsic to knowledge. Both dispositions are evident from antiquity onward, sometimes even in the work of the same person. Vital steps in the history of Promethean science include ancient practices of magic and the early modern revolution in mechanics� Promethean practices of science have won hegemony in the Western pursuit of knowledge. The Orphic attitude, on the other hand, is evident from Plato’s Timaeus and Seneca’s Stoicism to Henri Bergson and Jacques Monod, among others - including Goethe. It is not tied to a particular creed, but as Hadot explains, its insistence on the progressive accumulation of knowledge grants research the semblance of revelation. It has a proximity to the sacred (171). One influential version of just such an Orphic stance toward nature emerged from the milieu of German Romanticism� Friedrich Schleiermacher, a friend to and collaborator with the Schlegel brothers, had posited a new form of naturalistic religion on the basis of his enthusiastic reception of Spinoza’s monism� Of the many arguments in Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), the ones that are crucial for Stifter are those where Schleiermacher defines the nature of religion. He pulls the carpet from under the feet of religion’s despisers: religion is not what they think it is. It is neither a system of metaphysics nor is it a system of morals� Instead, religion is a matter of Anschauung � The concept derives from his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics , where the latter had posited three modes of knowing: discursive reason, the experience of the senses, and scientia intuitiva . The last of these, “intuitive knowledge,” Spinoza describes as the highest form of knowing (78). It bears quasi-religious connotations by granting the best pathway to the greatest virtue - the knowledge of God. Intuitive knowledge affords humankind optimal perfection, which according to Spinoza’s definitions, results in optimal joy (104, 239). He terms this joy the intellectual love of God ( amor dei intellectualis ) and equates it to the state of blessedness ( beatitudo )� According to the most famous atheist of early modern Europe, intuitive knowledge guides one to salvation. Schleiermacher was an 402 Daniel DiMassa eager evangelist, enjoining his readers to venerate Spinoza and proclaiming that “Anschauen des Universums” was the “Angel meiner ganzen Rede” (213). The reinterpretation of religion as intuition depends on Spinoza’s monistic ontology� Proposing the reality of just one material substance, Spinoza had circumvented the Western philosophical preoccupation with dualism(s) - the dualism of God and creation, the dualism of mind and body, the dualism of matter and spirit etc. He proposed that there was one substance that, though it exists in variegated forms, was ultimately undivided. One might call it nature, or one might call it God - deus sive natura . For Schleiermacher, who saw the idea of a personal deity as a form of anthropomorphism (245—46), the important thing was to apprehend the unity of all being. Religion has nothing to do with the mythologies of human fantasy, he wrote, and everything to do with intuitive knowledge of the universe. Schleiermacher explains intuition as a mode of knowledge that proceeds from the individual ( das Einzelne ) to the whole ( das Ganze )� Without the mediation of reason or concepts, intuition recognizes objects as pieces of a whole. Indeed, Schleiermacher defines religion in these very terms: “alles Einzelne als einen Theil des Ganzen, alles Beschränkte als eine Darstellung des Unendlichen hinnehmen, das ist Religion” (214). In Schleiermacher’s attention to the relation of the individual and the whole we begin to witness how he anticipates the poetic project of Stifter. Both men advocate the preservation of the individual for the sake of knowledge of the universal� Stifter holds it necessary to collect and observe fragmentary objects in order to glean insight into the greater laws at work in the whole of nature. Schleiermacher advocates for the preservation of the individual on the basis that the realm for intuition must be protected� To maximize the opportunities for intuitive knowledge, the religious person has the responsibility to guard the individual� But in the search to contemplate the individual, Schleiermacher warns, one should not confuse it with the sublime events of nature that inspire fear and awe. The similarity to Stifter in that admonition becomes all the more compelling in the example of awe-inspiring nature that Schleiermacher cites: Was ist jenes zarte Spiel der Farben, das Euer Auge in allen Erscheinungen des Firmaments ergözt, und einen Blik mit so vielem Wohlgefallen festhält, auf den lieblichsten Produkten der vegetabilischen Natur? Was ist es, nicht in Eurem Auge sondern in und fürs Universum? (224) The citation of colors in the sky is glaring in the light of Bergkristall � What further highlights the potential intertext is the challenge Schleiermacher poses to his readers: to divorce their response to the phenomenon from the import of the phenomenon to the universe� Sanna’s false perception of the Northern Lights - her reinterpretation of them as the Christkind - is a failure to do exactly Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 403 this� Thus it is that Schleiermacher proceeds, in a statement that again anticipates Stifter, to caution against assigning undue weight to the ostensibly great phenomena of nature: “nicht im Donner des Himmels noch in den furchtbaren Wogen des Meeres sollt Ihr das allmächtige Wesen erkennen” (224). Size and quantity are not the stuff of religion. The night sky was no less marvelous for the ancients to behold than it is for the modern viewer who knows the massive dimensions of the planets. Unlike experiences of the sublime, intuition does not depend upon the effects of a natural occurrence on an observer; it consists in the observer’s asking how natural phenomena cohere with the whole of nature. In the case of Stifter and Schleiermacher, an observer’s attunement to the individual phenomena of nature leads to enlightenment. The knowledge most central to this state of enlightenment is the knowledge of the laws of the universe. Stifter’s preface is famously preoccupied with such laws. His apologia amounts to an argument for a practice of spiritual vision that uses “small” things to intuit grand laws. But the same is no less true of the Romantic theologian, who formulates the argument in much the same way: “Was in der That den religiösen Sinn anspricht in der äußeren Welt, das sind nicht ihre Massen sondern ihre Geseze. Erhebt Euch zu dem Blik wie diese alles umfassen […] und dann sagt, ob Ihr nicht anschaut die göttliche Einheit und die ewige Unwandelbarkeit der Welt” (225). More apparently than Stifter’s preface, Schleiermacher’s enjoinder evinces the religious dynamic inherent in what Hadot calls the Orphic approach to nature’s secrets� But the religiosity of Schleiermacher’s position is not to be mistaken for one more take on run-of-the-mill German Protestantism. Indeed, it is barely legible as any form of Abrahamic theism. Enamored with Spinoza, Schleiermacher spurns the notion of a personal god; he rids himself of Christian dualisms; and he argues that knowledge of the laws of the universe disabuses one of the falsity of miracles, leaving one only to wonder at the marvel of the universe’s existence. The latter of these notions again anticipates Stifter, who writes in the preface that as knowledge of the law ( Gesetz ) comes to the fore, “die Wunderbarkeiten” cease and “das Wunder” increases (9). Miraculous events yield to the miracle of nature itself� The more comprehensive our observation of nature, as the development of chemistry suggested to Schleiermacher, the greater is our wonderment at its unitary character. Stifter and Schleiermacher envision that unity as inclusive also of human society. Thus does the relation of the individual and the whole characterize their reckoning with matters of anthropology. Just as Stifter had dismissed the tempests of nature as dull in their egregiousness, he dismisses violent outbursts, acts of vengeance, and similar such expressions as less worthy of representation than the broader and more common forces of human solidarity. When we see the laws of justice and morals at work, overcoming expressions of fitfulness, we 404 Daniel DiMassa feel “menschlich verallgemeinert” (13). Schleiermacher, too, encourages the intuition of universal humanity as an integral step in the intuition of the universe: each human being is “ein notwendiges Ergänzungsstück zur vollkommnen Anschauung der Menschheit” (230). The recognition of the individual’s station in humanity, and of humanity’s finite place in the material universe, he writes, results in “wahre ungekünstelte Demuth” (236). The reference to humility is worth underscoring, for it raises one final parallel of import between the Reden and the Bunte Steine : one of the greatest affective outcomes of knowledge of the universe, in both Stifter and Schleiermacher, is the humility that results from knowing our own smallness in the universe. And yet, in the case of each text, there is a special class of individuals that transcends the ranks of its humble peers. Stifter, who describes himself as little more than a dilettante, regards real poets as “die hohen Priester, […] die Wohltäter des menschlichen Geschlechtes” (9). The notion is virtually synonymous with that of Schleiermacher, who writes of poets, among others, as priests and prophets who help mediate knowledge of the universe� Stifter and Schleiermacher describe their respective aims in modest terms, but in both cases, of course, humility is a posture� Neither man has small ambitions� Stifter aims to do no less than reveal the universe� If there is something good and noble in himself, it will be found in his collection of colorful stones (9). 9 Schleiermacher wishes to unearth a bunten Stein of his own: for far too long, religion has been mired in the muck of morals and metaphysics. “So liegt auch auch der Diamant in einer schlechten Masse gänzlich verschlossen, aber wahrlich nicht um verborgen zu bleiben, sondern um desto sicherer gefunden zu werden” (28). The affinities of Stifter and Schleiermacher we have been tracing merit recapitulation� In an apologia of things despised, each defends the small and particular as a sign of the great and universal - above all as signs of the laws that govern the universe� 10 Their rhetorical strategies overlap in striking ways, with each abjuring in similar terms the grand phenomena of nature� Inasmuch as they interpret particular phenomena as signs to be perceived, they are at pains to teach readers to “see” objects in relation to greater networks of being. It is a “geistiges Auge” of which Stifter writes, exercised in the maneuvers of natural scientific inquiry, that finds its activity elaborated in Schleiermacher’s discussion of the individual. His notion of “Anschauung des Universums” is promoted, after all, by the attunement of vision in the natural sciences to ever smaller phenomena� The microscopic worlds discovered by the chemistry of organic compounds and by the mathematics of the infinitesimal reveal the incomprehensibly vast stretches between nature and her parts, just as had the data points gathered by Stifter’s researcher of electromagnetic fields. For neither writer is the pursuit of Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 405 science an end-in-itself� It is an activity that promotes the preconditions of our highest form of knowledge: the knowledge of the unity of being. Our frequent ascription to Stifter of physico-theology is a form of shorthand that paints him as an epigone (viz. fides quaerens intellectum )� It implies a personal deity whose existence one seeks to confirm in scientific research, as if Stifter were a “Detektiv auf den Spuren Gottes” (Schiffermüller 18). Admittedly, there is some truth to this: Stifter does regard religion and research as intertwined. But there is a difference between research as a confirmation of the premises of faith and research as a definition of the articles of faith. In the Bunte Steine , observation of nature serves the latter, not the former. After all, we might ask: why would Stifter be at pains to seek out the apparently malevolent deity who reigns over the world of Granit and Die Pechbrenner ? Those novellas - like Kleist’s Erdbeben - are better read as critical accounts of Christian theodicy. Arguably, the Bunte Steine posit no personal deity at all ( Bergkristall )� This is not to discount Stifter’s own discussions of a deity so much as it is to underscore a rift between such discussions and the actuality of his narratives. Instead of aligning him with enlightened theism, this reading of the novellas aligns him with the reorganization of knowledge that took place around the development of science in the mid-nineteenth century� At the outset of his Logische Untersuchungen (1840), Adolf Trendelenburg noted that empirical observation of the individual ( das Einzelne ), as opposed to a preoccupation with the whole ( das Ganze ), had enabled the sciences to flourish (1). That flourishing, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have demonstrated, depended on how empirical observation occurred� By the middle of the nineteenth century, the idealizing vision of collectors and taxonomists like Linnaeus was no longer tenable (73). It became imperative for the researcher to erase his subjectivity and allow nature to speak for herself: “Was ist es,” as Schleiermacher asks, “nicht in Eurem Auge sondern in und fürs Universum? ” (224). This mode of science and its procedures of vision - which Daston and Galison call “mechanical objectivity” - are endorsed by Bunte Steine � 11 In the figure of Sanna and in her interpretation of the Northern Lights, Bergkristall illustrates a powerful (negative) example of how subjectivity clouds the act of observation� The girl’s reinterpretation of a natural phenomenon as a divine being is a case in point for the failure to observe the universe as it is. This hardly makes Stifter a writer whose realism depends on religious belief. On the contrary, it points up the affinities he shares with contemporaneous critics of religion like Ludwig Feuerbach, for whom religion represented a hypostasized anthropology� If there is a religious dimension to Stifter’s program of Realism, it is one that militates against the mythologies of religion and opts to venerate nature� 406 Daniel DiMassa That returns us to the philosophical-religious world of Goethe and his contemporaries� If Stifter’s poetics of the small is a rearticulation of Schleiermacher’s theology of the individual, then the Gott to whom Stifter appeals is not the God of a dualist Christian theology� It is the impersonal God of Spinoza’s deus sive natura � It is the natura naturans of Spinoza’s Ethics � Stifter is decidedly not the provincial Christian whose observation of nature validates his faith; nature is his faith. Where Downing thinks the appeal to God in Stifter’s preface supplies the missing unity to an infinite universe, and thus generates a realism that is underpinned by religious faith, I read the reference to God in the preface differently: the deity to whom Stifter refers is the infinite nature of Schleiermacher, 12 whose Spinozism authorizes the choice between deus and natura � Stifter’s Gott is shorthand for a monistic reality� Consider, on that note, what Stifter writes of our endless quest to know nature: its infinity affords us “die Freude und die Glükseligkeit des Forschens” (11; my emphasis). These are the very terms, translated from Latin, that Spinoza uses to describe the affective results of intuitive knowledge - laetitia and beatitudo � Stifter’s program of realism is not a naturalism that is hellbent on finding Heaven. It is a poetics of the material, dynamic universe, aimed at training readers to orient themselves in a unitary reality� The connection of Stifter and Schleiermacher confuses traditional taxonomies. In a phrase that could have defined Stifter’s poetic endeavor, Schleiermacher described his religion as “einen höheren Realismus” (213). It seems clear now, though, that the tenets of Stifter’s religion were rooted in the nature philosophy that had come to vogue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries� There thus emerges an ironic chiasm between Stifter and the Age of Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries� Whereas the Spinozism of the Schlegel brothers had given way to Catholicism, the Catholicism of Stifter gave way to Spinozism. The chiasm is ironic not just because both parties moved in opposite directions, but because Stifter despised the bluster of the Romantics and the braggadocio of the Schlegel brothers, the title of whose journal ( Athenäum ) suggested it could show readers the holy of holies. As Hadot reminds us, Heraclitus had said that “nature loves to hide”; to an Orphic naturalist like Stifter, the Romantic project must have seemed to gloat in its expositions of nature� His manifesto of realism stakes a different approach, without thereby dispensing with a similar set of metaphysical commitments. We thus witness in Stifter the example of an early German Realist who has gleaned his Spinozism from a Romantic theologian. The metaphysical presuppositions, in other words, are those that were common to Goethe and several of his Romantic peers — Friedrich von Hardenberg, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher etc. But whereas several of the latter abandoned those positions and turned to Stifter, Schleiermacher, and the Vision of a Higher Realism 407 Roman Catholicism (Novalis and the Schlegels), to a more orthodox Protestantism (Schleiermacher), or to the world of myth (Schelling), Stifter represents a compelling possibility for conceiving of what the philosophical-religious presuppositions of the Goethezeit looked like when they were translated into the world of post-Goethean aesthetics. If the Jena Romantics met a premature end, having developed a flurry of theory and a dearth of poetry, then in an odd twist, Stifter and his texts of ordinary life suggest what they might otherwise have been� Notes 1 Strowick hesitates to see the prevalence of Gespenster as a return to or continuation of the Romantic; she rejects the view that literary realism is necessarily marked by an interest in the supernatural (8). 2 Important sources for this paper include Begemann (“Metaphysik”), Berendes, and Cooper. Each raises the possibility of forms of skepticism in Bergkristall , while insisting upon an ultimate ambiguity. I try to make the case here for a more thoroughly skeptical Stifter. 3 Sanna’s interpretation of events, Cooper believes, remains fundamentally ambiguous, inasmuch as the text provides no comment on it� Situated in a larger conversation on the relation of Dämmerung to Romantic preoccupations with subjectivity, Cooper sees Bergkristall as essentially post-Romantic� My reading argues in the opposite direction on both counts� In the same paper, Cooper links Caspar David Friedrich’s winter landscape paintings with Schleiermacher’s notions of art as religious mediation, but he does not draw lines of affinity between Schleiermacher and Stifter. 4 Ragg-Kirkby reads the repetition of “Ja, Konrad” as a sign that Stifter has represented a sphere “beyond humanity and beyond divinity.” Sanna’s statement is “an act of misplaced faith; her excessive positivity confirms a negative” (74—75). 5 Compare Stifter’s lexicon to Luther’s translation of John 1: 14, “Und das Wort ward Fleisch und wohnte unter uns, und wir sahen seine Herrlichkeit, eine Herrlichkeit als des eingeborenen Sohnes vom Vater, voller Gnade und Wahrheit.” 6 The Bible is invoked, too, when the boy’s grandfather washes his feet (28). Martin and Erika Swales recognize the biblical reference in that case (Swales and Swales 150), but not in the other facets I have highlighted here. 7 Steiner is less inclined to see Stifter and Kleist as analogous than he is to see them at work on the same religious-philosophical line of inquiry. Inasmuch as I read each of them to be aghast at the narrative of Christian salvation 408 Daniel DiMassa history, I depart from Steiner. That does not diminish, however, the interesting linkages he traces between Bergkristall and Kleist’s Erdbeben ; it only changes how we think of Stifter’s estimation of Kleist. 8 As Paul Fleming writes, “the one thing God does here (if he does anything) is make the task of science infinite and, therefore, guarantee that its joy - the joy of discovering the hidden -will be inexhaustible” (146). 9 It seems significant, keeping in mind how Bergkristall centers the Abglanz , that Stifter indicates in the Vorrede that if “das Niedrige und Unedle” is somewhere in his writing, it is bound to shine through (“durchscheinen”) (9). 10 I have been referring to Stifter’s preface as an apologia� It should not escape notice that the first speech in Schleiermacher’s text is entitled, “Apologie.” 11 It should be noted, too, that precisely this mode of objective vision is at the heart of Thomas Gann and Marianne Schuller’s recent volume on Stifter’s poetics of the surface (8—9). 12 “Ihr wißt daß die Gottheit durch ein unabänderliches Gesez sich selbst genöthiget hat, ihr großes Werk bis ins Unendliche hin zu entzweien (191). 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