 The very term romanticism is often traced back to the medieval novel of chivalry in which the hero’s lonely fight against evil, sin, and moral weakness is fuelled by the twin motivation of faith and love, hence reflecting a universe in which the individual is unified with and understands himself through the de facto tradition to which he pledges allegiance. However, the turn to the Middle Ages is not primarily expressive of a sentimental cultivation of the past, but had long been part of the German Enlightenment and its critique of political absolutism. Like the enlightenment philosophers, the Jena romantics were always clear that the organic unity of pre-modern societies was lost once and for all. When Novalis, in Christianity or Europe and other texts, wishes to revive the spirit of the Middle Ages, he is frequently referring to the cosmopolitan thrust of the Hanseatic League rather than a homogenous, tradition-based, and authoritarian medieval culture. As such, Novalis’s philosophy is responsive to the conditions of modernity. In his work, modern philosophy is seen as fundamentally self-reflexive in nature, as belonging to the age of self-critical reason; that is, it is linked up with the quest not only for first-order knowledge of nature and human being, but also for second-order knowledge of what human knowledge involves in the first place.