 Novalis’s political reflections inform the Miscellaneous Observations, get more poignantly voiced in Faith and Love and the “Political Aphorisms” (written in 1798), and find their quasi-religious culmination in Christianity or Europe, the 1799-text that even his Athenaeum friends deemed problematic in its call for a new Catholic unity in Europe. In spite of Schlegel’s willingness to publish the text, the furore it caused amongst Novalis’s peers, including Goethe, Schelling, and Schiller, held him back, and Christianity or Europe remained unpublished till 1826.