An Age of Expectation

My dear friends! Perhaps you have already gathered from much of what has been said here and in other places in the field of spiritual science – including the introductory words about our dear friend Christian Morgenstern – that it is important to me to take all our endeavors, including those that are linked to our endeavors, as a whole, as something unified, and that it is particularly important to me that this whole, which is to be incorporated into the evolution of humanity as an impulse for a new spiritual culture, really does connect with the longings, hopes and expectations of the spiritual culture of the immediate past. I tried to emphasize this in particular here at the celebration commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of our building. Our spiritual science and its aspirations, and also, among other things, what has just been shown before your eyes as pictures of our building, and finally what is to be introduced into our cultural context as eurythmy, should be seen as a unified whole, but also as something that is not just a whole in itself, but connects to something that has been awaited. And when I tried to draw a line from Goethe to Christian Morgenstern to Herman Grimm, this was only intended to give two examples of how, on the one hand, the development of humanity really gives us to believe in a deeper optimism in the progress of human development, but on the other hand also that spiritual factors and impulses continually intervene in human development. I have tried to lead you to your souls, as Goethe, at the end of his “Faust”, had to depict Faust's ascent into the spiritual worlds with old Christian-Catholic forms, and I have pointed out how in the poet Christian Morgenstern someone has found his way to us who has begun to shape the spiritual life, the supersensible worlds, into new forms, as is necessary for the human being of the present. From some of the poems left behind, from some of these words, you will have heard again how poetry can unite, most intimately unite, with what we mean by spiritual life: that a new relationship be found between the life of the human being on the physical plane and his or her connection to the spiritual worlds, and how spiritual factors intervene in the further development of humanity. I tried to make it clear by daring to express what may be expressed among true anthroposophists: that Herman Grimm, who may be called Goethe's accredited governor in the second half of the 19th century, may now find in the sight of what Christian Morgenstern was already able to carry up into the spiritual worlds what he could not find on earth in his physical body. There we see the interaction of the spiritual with the physical progress of humanity.