On November 16, 2018, as part of the colloquium series of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, Ph.D. candidate Matthew Stoltz (Cornell), presented part of his dissertation project in a paper entitled: “Lessing, Novalis and the Redemption of the Image.” Stoltz, in an illuminating and thoughtful reading, brought to light the multifaceted debate on the status of the image for two central figures of the eighteenth century (Lessing and Novalis) with respect to their philosophies of religious education. Stoltz stressed the importance of relating Lessing’s polemic against the plastic arts in his earlier Laokoon (1766) to his religious writings of the 1780s in which a similar antipathy towards the image can be detected. In his paper, Stoltz delineated some of the major differences between Novalis’ and Lessing’s theories of religious education. Whereas Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts develops an evolutionary scheme of religious education that dispenses with the need for sensible forms of mediation like images, Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa worked to recuperate the role that material mediation plays in sustaining religious experience. Making use of Birgit Meyer’s assessment of modern “mentalistic attitudes” of religion, which privilege the “inside (concept, ideas, beliefs, worldviews) above the ‘outside’ (rituals, objects, pictures, etc.),” Stoltz showed that Novalis, in general, and vis-à-vis Lessing in particular, redeemed the “outside” as an integral part of modern theology and aesthetics. The paper’s focus opened up terms that sparked a lively debate about the differences and similarities between Lessing and Novalis, as well as the status of the image within different faith traditions. The relation between materiality, mentality and medium (the image) was an especially rich constellation that brought Stoltz’s project in dialogue with colloquium participants, faculty and graduate students. (Søren Larsen)
