Subsequent Remarks

At the end of the “trial of the soul,” Johannes Thomasius is at a point where the spiritual world is real to him, but where he also wants to assert himself freely as a personality within the spirit. The healthy part of his being wants to feel itself within itself and cast off all the sentimental dross that so easily arises in devotion to the spiritual world. —In the long time that then passes until the events of “The Guardian of the Threshold,” he devotes himself to work that arises from the healthy foundation of his being and also from his healthy relationship to the spiritual world. The fact that, after completing this work, he then approaches the mystical order of the “Guardian of the Threshold” as described in this soul portrait is because, while working on his book, he has arrived at a point of view that allows him a clear overview of the objective value of such work as he has accomplished. It was precisely during his work that he was able to realize how such a spiritual creation fits into the fabric of the real spiritual world. In the process, his soul is enlightened as to how such creations, which are easily accepted as entirely objective, are nevertheless connected with the personality and its subjective position in the world. Johannes Thomasius is confronted with something that may leave him cold as long as he considers it theoretically, but which takes on a serious aspect as soon as it becomes a soul experience: the connection between what man can believe to be completely detached from his personality and this personality and his destiny. The words Johannes speaks before the Mystic Brotherhood in The Guardian of the Threshold: “That this work had to be done by another human being and not by me” can become a serious inner soul tragedy when they are a soul experience. This tragedy is then connected with the emergence of personal experience. The latter naturally presents itself differently for different people. For Johannes, it seems to me from all his predispositions that it takes the form in which it plays into the third, fourth, and fifth images of The Guardian of the Threshold. In connection with these “aberrations” of his soul, which contrast with his acquired level of knowledge, the possibility develops in the depths of his soul to arrive at his own kind of real self-knowledge, which results for him in the experiences of the seventh and eighth pictures of The Guardian of the Threshold. This self-knowledge is ...