The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. What I Have to Say to the Older Members on This Matter

Newsletter of the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] The announcement by the “Section for the Spiritual Aspirations of Youth” at the Goetheanum has elicited encouraging responses from youth circles. Representatives of the “Free Anthroposophical Society” and the younger members living at the Goetheanum have expressed to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society that they are wholeheartedly ready to participate in what it intends to do.

[ 2 ] I see these two rallies as valuable starting points for a significant part of our society’s work. If our society can build a bridge between older and younger people of our time, it will accomplish something important.

[ 3 ] What can be read between the lines of these two letters can be summed up as follows: our youth speaks in a tone whose timbre is new in the development of humanity. One senses that the eye of the soul is not focused on continuing what has been inherited from the past and can be built upon in the present. It is turned toward the dawning of a new life from realms where it is not time that unfolds, but the eternal that is revealed.

[ 4 ] If older people today want to be understood by the younger generation, they must allow the eternal to serve as the driving force behind their attitude toward the temporal. — And they must do so in a way that the younger generation can understand.

[ 5 ] It is said that young people do not want to engage with older generations, do not want to accept any of the insights they have gained or the wisdom of their mature experience. — Older people today express this out of their displeasure with the behavior of young people. It is true: young people set themselves apart from older people; they want to be among themselves. They do not want to listen to what comes from older people. .

[ 6 ] This fact is cause for concern. After all, these young people will grow old one day. They will not be able to continue behaving this way into old age. They want to be “truly young.” They ask how one can be “truly young.” They will no longer be able to do so once they themselves have reached old age.

[ 7 ] That is why, the older person believes, the young must cast aside their arrogance and look up to the older generation once more, in order to see the goal toward which their mind’s eye must be directed.

[ 8 ] When people say this, they assume it is the young people’s fault that they are not attracted to older people.

[ 9 ] But young people could not help but look up to older people and take them as role models if they were truly “old.” For the human soul—and especially the young soul—is such that it turns toward what is foreign to it in order to unite with it.

[ 10 ] Today’s youth, however, do not see in older people something that strikes them as both foreign and worth emulating. For today’s older people are not truly “old.” They have absorbed a wealth of knowledge and can speak about many things. But they have not brought all that knowledge to a state of human maturity. They have grown older in years, but their souls have not kept pace with their age. They still speak from their aged brains just as they did when they were young. Young people sense this. When they are with older people, they do not perceive “maturity,” but rather their own youthful state of mind within bodies that have grown old. And so they turn away, because this does not strike them as the truth.

[ 11 ] Over the course of decades, older people have come to believe, in the realm of knowledge, that one “cannot know anything” about the spiritual aspect of the world’s things and events. When young people hear this, they are bound to feel that older people have nothing to say to them, for they can, after all, acquire this “not knowing” on their own; they will only listen to the elderly if “knowledge” comes from them. Talking about “not knowing” is tolerable when it is done with freshness—with the freshness of youth. But hearing about “not knowing” when the words come from an aging mind—that desolates the soul, especially the young soul.

[ 12 ] Young people today are turning away from older people not because the latter have become “old,” but because they have remained “young”—because they have failed to understand how to grow “old” in the right way. Older people today need to come to this realization.

[ 13 ] However, one can only “grow old” in the right way if one allows the spirit within the soul to unfold. When this happens, one possesses, within an aged body, that which is in harmony with it. Then one will be able to offer youth not only what time has developed in the body, but also what the eternal reveals from within the spirit.

[ 14 ] Wherever there is a sincere search for spiritual experience, there can be a space where young people and older people come together again. It is an empty phrase to say that one must be “young” with young people. No; as an older person among young people, one must understand the right way to be “old.”

[ 15 ] Young people like to criticize what comes from older people. That is their right. For one day they will have to carry on what the older generation has not yet achieved in the progress of humanity. But one is not a true older person if one merely joins in the criticism. Young people may put up with this for a while, because they don’t need to be annoyed by the opposition; but eventually they will grow weary of the “old boys,” because their voices are too harsh, and criticism has more life in youthful voices.

[ 16 ] Anthroposophy seeks, in its search for the spirit, to find a common ground where young and older people can come together willingly. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can be pleased that its announcement has been received by the youth in the manner that it has. But the active members of the Anthroposophical Society must not abandon the Executive Council either. For at the same time as I receive approval from one side, I receive a letter from the other containing words that anyone who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society with their heart must heed. “The day may come when we ‘young people’ must break away from the Anthroposophical Society, just as you once had to break away inwardly from the Theosophical Society.”

[ 17 ] That day would come if we in the Anthroposophical Society were unable, in the near future, to bring to fruition what is meant by the announcement of a “Youth Section.” Hopefully, the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will follow the lead of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, so that the day may come when it can be said of the “young people”: we must unite ever more closely with anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] This time, I spoke to the older members of the Anthroposophical Society about “youth”; in the next issue, I would like to tell the young people what is on my mind.