What I Have To Say To The Older Members (Concerning the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science)

The announcement of the “Section for the Spiritual Striving of Youth” at the Goetheanum has met with an encouraging response from young people. Representatives of the “Free Anthroposophical Society” and younger members living at the Goetheanum have expressed to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society their wholehearted willingness to take part in the Council's intentions.

I see in both expressions valuable starting points for a good 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 an important task.

What can be read between the lines of the two letters can be put into words: our youth speaks in a tone whose timbre is new in the development of humanity. One feels that the soul's eye is not directed towards the continuation of what has been inherited from the past and can be increased in the present. It is turned towards the irruption of a new life from the regions where not time is developed but the eternal is revealed.

If the older person wants to be understood by the youth today, he must let the eternal prevail as the driving force in his relationship to the temporal. And he must do this in a way that the youth understands.

It is said that young people do not want to engage with old age, do not want to accept anything from the insight gained from it, from the experience matured by it. - The older person today expresses his 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.

One can become concerned about this fact. Because these young people will one day grow old. They will not be able to continue their behavior into old age. They want to be really young. They ask how you can be “really young”. They will no longer be able to do that when they themselves have entered old age.

Therefore, the older person says, youth should abandon its arrogance and look up to old age again, to see the goal towards which its mind's eye must be directed.

By saying this, one thinks that it is up to youth not to be attracted to the older person.

But young people could do nothing other than look up to the older person and take them as a role model if they were really “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 it with itself.

Now, however, young people today do not see something in the older person that seems both alien to them as a human being and worth appropriating. This is because the older person of today is not really “old”. He has absorbed the content of much, he can talk about much. But he has not brought this much to human maturity. He has grown older in years; but in his soul he has not grown with his years. He still speaks from the old brain as he spoke from the young. Youth senses this. It does not feel “maturity” when it is with older people, but rather its own young state of mind in the aged bodies. And so it turns away, because this does not appear to it to be truth.

Through decades of knowledge in the field of knowledge, older people have developed the opinion that one cannot know anything about the spiritual in the things and processes of the world. When young people hear this, they must get the feeling that the older person has nothing to say to them, because they can get the “not knowing” themselves; they will only listen to the old person if the “knowledge” comes from him. Talking about “not knowing” is tolerable when it is done with freshness, with youthful freshness. But to hear about the “not knowing” when it comes to the brain that has grown old, that deserts the soul, especially the young soul.

Today, young people turn away from older people not because they have grown 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-knowledge.

But one can only grow old in the right way if one allows the spirit in the soul to unfold. If this is the case, then one has in an aged body that which is in harmony with it. Then one will be able to offer young people not only what time has developed in the body, but what the eternal reveals out of the spirit.

Wherever there is a sincere search for spiritual experience, there can be found the field in which young people can come together with older people. It is an empty phrase to say: you have to be young with young people. No, as an older person among young people, you have to understand the right way to be old.

Young people like to criticize what comes from older people. That is their right. Because one day they will have to carry that to which the old have not yet brought in the progress of humanity. But one is not a real older person if one merely criticizes as well. Young people will put up with this for a while because they do not need to be annoyed by the contradiction; but in the end they will get tired of the “old young” because their voice is too rough and criticism has more life in youthful voices.

In its search for the spirit, anthroposophy seeks to find a field in which young and old 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 that it has been. But the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will not leave the Executive Council in the lurch either. Because at the same time as I am receiving approval from one side, I am also receiving a letter from the other side that contains words to which anyone who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society with their heart must listen. “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 from the Theosophical Society.”

This day would come if we in the Anthroposophical Society are 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 go in the direction of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, so that the day may come when it can be said of the “young”: We must unite more and more closely with Anthroposophy.

This time I have spoken to the older members of the Anthroposophical Society about the “youth”; in the next issue I would like to tell the youth what is on my mind.