The Constitution of the General Anthroposophical Society

GA 260a — 9 March 1924

From the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science I

What I have to say to the older members on this matter

The announcement of the “Section for the Spiritual Aspirations of Youth” at the Goetheanum has elicited encouraging responses from youth circles. Representatives of the “Free Anthroposophical Society” and the younger members who live at the Goetheanum have expressed to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society that they are wholeheartedly prepared to participate in what it intends to do.

I see in both statements valuable starting points for a wonderful part of the work of our Society. If it can build a bridge between older and younger people of our age, then it will accomplish something important.

What can be read between the lines of the two letters can be summed up in the following words: our youth speaks in a tone whose timbre is new in the development of humanity. One senses that the soul's eye is not focused on the continuation of what has been inherited from the past and can be multiplied in the present. It is turned toward the dawn of a new life from the realms where not time develops, but eternity is revealed.

If older people want to be understood by young people today, they must let eternity be the driving force in their attitude toward the temporal. And they must do this in a way that young people understand.

It is said that young people do not want to engage with old age, do not want to accept anything from its acquired insight, from its mature experience. Older people today express their displeasure at the behavior of young people.

It is true: young people separate themselves from old age; they want to be among themselves. They do not want to listen to what comes from old age.

This fact can be cause for concern. Because these young people will grow old one day. They will not be able to continue their behavior into old age. They want to be truly young. They ask how one can be “truly young.” They will no longer be able to do so when they themselves have entered old age.

Therefore, older people believe that young people should abandon their arrogance and look up to old age again in order to see the goal towards which their spiritual eye must be directed.

When saying this, one thinks that it is the fault of young people that they are not attracted to older people.

But young people could not help but look up to older people and take them as role models if they were truly “old.” For the human soul, and especially the young soul, is such that it turns to what is foreign to it in order to unite with it.

However, today's youth do not see anything in older people that seems both foreign to them as human beings and worth acquiring. For the older people of today are not really “old.” They have absorbed a great deal of knowledge and can talk about many things. But they have not brought this wealth of knowledge to human maturity. They have grown older in years, but their souls have not kept pace with their age. They still speak from their aged brains as they did when they were young. Young people sense this. They do not feel “maturity” when they are with older people, but rather their own young state of mind in aged bodies. And so they turn away, because this does not appear to them to be the truth.

Through decades of knowledge, older people have formed the opinion that “nothing can be known” about the spiritual in the things and processes of the world. When young people hear this, they must feel that older people have nothing to say to them, because they can obtain “not knowing” for themselves; they will only listen to the elderly if they have “knowledge” to offer. Talking about “not knowing” is tolerable if it is done with freshness, with youthful freshness. But hearing about “not knowing” when it comes from an aging brain desolates the soul, especially the young soul.

Young people today turn away from older people not because they have become “old,” but because they have remained “young,” because they have not understood how to grow “old” in the right way. Older people today need this self-awareness.

But one can only grow “old” in the right way if one allows the spirit in the soul to unfold. If this happens, then one has in an aged body that which is in harmony with it. Then one will be able to offer youth not only what time has developed in the body, but also what eternity reveals from the spirit. Where the spiritual experience is seriously sought, there can be found the area in which youth can reunite with older people. It is a meaningless phrase to say that one must be “young” with youth. No, as an older person among youth, one must understand how to be “old” in the right way.

Young people like to criticize what comes from older people. That is their right. For they must one day carry on what the old have not yet achieved in the progress of humanity. But you are not a true older person if you merely join in the criticism. Young people may put up with this for a while because they don't need to be annoyed by contradiction, but in the end they will tire of the “old young people” because their voices are too harsh and the criticism in youthful voices has more life.

Anthroposophy would like to find a field in the search for the spirit where young and older people can happily come together. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can be pleased that its announcement has been received by young people in the way it has. But the active members of the Anthroposophical Society must not abandon the Executive Council. For at the same time as receiving approval from one side, I receive a letter from the other side containing words that must be heeded by anyone whose heart belongs to the Anthroposophical Society. “The day may come when we ‘young people’ will have to break away from the Anthroposophical Society, just as you once had to break away inwardly from the Theosophical Society.”

That day would come if we in the Anthroposophical Society were unable to realize in the near future what is meant by the announcement of a “Youth Section.” Hopefully, the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will follow the direction of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, so that the day may come when it can be said of the “young people”: we must unite ever more closely with anthroposophy. This time I have spoken to the older members of the Anthroposophical Society about “youth”; in the next issue I would like to tell young people what is on my mind.