The So-Called Dangers of Initiation

I was still very young when I once sat with someone who had recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday in another country and who at that time shared my interest in my studies of Goethe. The man said at the time that he was worried about joining the ranks of writers. Although still relatively young at the time, he was already older than many who are still writing today. He came up with the idea: I will not write reviews. I want to write something else, because only those who have a great deal of life experience should write reviews; actually, only the elderly should criticize." In any case, that was a very good idea on the part of the man. Today, in the widest circles, there is no longer any judgment that maturity is necessary to be effective in the intellectual sphere. The further we grow into the times, the younger the people who write below the so-called line become, and since the reader generally does not think about it and has no means of investigating how young the person writing below the line is, he has no idea what he is getting himself into. Anyone who is familiar with such things knows that it is not difficult to write wittily today. Some people are still surprised that this or that person writes wittily. A person who has perhaps done nothing else since the age of fifteen or sixteen but read such material, who has thus learned the craft properly, need only publish something, and he can make a terrible impression with the radical or vague nature of his judgment. It is possible that a person has what can seriously be called mental deficiency. As strange as it sounds, someone today can be mentally deficient and yet write wittily for the world, so that they can be admired as a witty writer. This case is entirely possible. Decades ago, it was already a correct judgment when someone said: It is not difficult to write a good poem in our time; culture and language do the writing. Today this is even more true, so that some schoolgirls can write newspaper articles. It is quite different powers that judge, that use people for their own purposes. Humanity must increasingly come to demand maturity from those who are to have true judgments. True maturity is especially important in the field of Spiritual Science. Therefore, it is also necessary that those who are leaders of so-called secret schools first work within their circles and do not appear before the world before the age of about thirty-five to proclaim spiritual scientific truths. Before that, they can bring judgments from the field of philosophy into the world. But one only becomes mature enough to draw from the spirit at the moment when one no longer has to use one's spiritual power to build up the body. As long as the body is growing, the powers from which logical judgment is built up must go into the body. Therefore, it is possible that a poet may have written real poems before middle age. But people so easily fail to recognize that in order to really penetrate into the depths, so that one not only understands something for one's own satisfaction and development, but also comes to stand before humanity with full responsibility and represent spiritual science work, the highest maturity of life is required, which can only be achieved at an advanced age. But to spout theosophical phrases requires no maturity at all.