An Age of Expectation

And are we not, my dear friends, seeking a new form for the old beauty with all that is expressed in our structure? Because beauty means much more than what is usually associated with this idea, with this concept. One has only to realize how diverse human progress is in order to understand what it means that in any age like ours, new forms of beauty, new forms of the whole human soul-attitude, should emerge. It must come about that out of the impulses of spiritual science, as we understand it, something develops that signifies progress compared to what came before, that goes even further than what Goethe himself could want in Faust. We must hope for something like that. When Goethe felt the longing to immerse himself in beauty, he could do nothing but go to Rome to relive Greek beauty in his soul. Basically, the whole of the 19th century could do nothing but go to Rome to relive Greek beauty. But the age has come when one must not only go to Rome, not only immerse oneself in classical Greek forms of beauty, but one must enter into spiritual worlds in order to find new forms of beauty from the spiritual worlds. And it must be emphasized that the past age, so to speak, thirsted for such an approach to an epoch of spiritual experience. More than the present time suspects, it expresses itself in just such a spirit as that of Herman Grimm, this representative of Goetheanism in the second half of the 19th century. Not to say something about Herman Grimm, but to show by his example what is expected of the spiritual life of our present time, I would like to insert this link, Herman Grimm, into the development of humanity as it has taken place from Goethe to us, who may consider ourselves as really living and striving in what, at bottom, was also the will of Goethe in the inmost part of his heart, in the inmost part of his soul. The way in which spiritual life progresses in the evolution of humanity is manifold and accessible only to deeper contemplation.