An Age of Expectation

Thus, after his death, Christian Morgenstern appears to me today as a spiritual leader of many people who, in the recent past, have ascended into the spiritual worlds during the spiritual development of humanity. These people have experienced tremendous advancement in that they were, in a sense, endowed with inner longings for the spiritual worlds in the physical world and yet could not find them. They brought this longing with them. We spoke of these longings on the day the foundation stone was laid, with reference to a particular personality: Herman Grimm. I showed how close he had come to grasping the spiritual world, and yet could not find it. For him and for many others it means an enormous advance that, expressed in human words, they can now be convinced of what they sought and could not find: they can be convinced that they have it in the soul of Christian Morgenstern. Not that they could not otherwise find it in the spiritual world; but it is something else to have it in this way. That is the tremendous blessing of Christian Morgenstern's having connected with the spirit of our movement and thus having had the opportunity to carry it up so that those beings in the spiritual world who longed to know anthroposophy could see it.