Growing Old E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'And that is one thing we need to relearn, that all of life brings its gifts – not only the first two or three decades.' – Rudolf SteinerWhen are we actually old? What happens as we age? How will we cope with old age? Growing old is an art, and to grow old in the right way we need spiritual understanding. In this enlightening anthology – compiled by a director of care homes for the elderly – wide-ranging cosmological perspectives alternate with detailed observations of the phenomena of ageing. Rudolf Steiner sees ageing within the context of the earthly and spiritual evolution that encompasses all forms of existence. The book thus begins with the primary meaning that ageing has in developmental terms and ends with a consideration of the human being as co-creator in cosmic processes – and with our capacity to become increasingly conscious of the tasks this implies.These key texts by Rudolf Steiner show how spiritual knowledge can broaden the current debate on the study of old age, the process of ageing, and the particular problems faced by older people. Concerns about our 'ageing population' can be seen in a broader context that recognizes the fruits of old age. The productive relationship between childhood and old age – a running theme throughout this volume – is one example. If we grow old consciously, viewing ageing not only as a period of physical decline but as a time when we can actively participate in shaping life, then we can begin to find greater meaning in it.Chapters include: 'The Core Messages of Ageing'; 'Fundamental Principles of Gerontology'; 'Ageing as a Developmental Process'; 'Ageing: the Risks and Opportunities'; The Art of Growing Old'; 'Old Age and Death'; 'Growing Old – A Challenge for Education'; 'The Cosmological Dimensions of Ageing'.

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

GROWING OLD

The Spiritual Dimensions of Ageing

RUDOLF STEINER

Selected texts with commentaries by Franz Ackermann

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translated by Matthew Barton

Rudolf Steiner Press, Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2019

© Futurum Verlag 2018 This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2019

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Print book ISBN: 978 1 85584 562 6 Ebook ISBN: 978 1 85584 505 3

Cover by Morgan Creative Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

Contents

Introduction

The Core Messages of Ageing

Ageing as the foundation of all evolution

The meaning of ageing

Fundamental Principles of Gerontology

What the different life phases signify for old age

Interdependency of youth and age

Ageing as a Developmental Process

Ageing throughout history

Transformation processes in the human soul

Ageing: the Risks and Opportunities

The art of growing old

Biographical laws

Typical age-related infirmities: dementia and sclerosis

Pathological age-related symptoms

Changes in the interplay of the different levels of human nature

Old Age and Death

Why we die

A long life or an early death

Karmic laws

Lucifer and Ahriman

The corpse as ferment

Living with the dead

Growing Old—a Challenge for Education

Unbornhood: the pre-birth journey

Suggestions for upbringing and education

The Cosmological Dimensions of Ageing

The ageing of the earth and the mission of human beings

Becoming ever more human, and knowledge of Christ

Modern Gerontology, a Survey

Notes

Sources

Introduction

We all grow old. And this begs questions: What happens as we age? When are we old? What can we expect of old age? How will we cope with it? The present volume seeks to address these questions. It is intended for all who see our human existence as an adventure, right up to the last moment, and old age itself as harbouring treasures we can discover as long as we don’t dismiss it as the mere failing of capacities. Concerns about our ‘ageing population’ can then be set against a true sense of the fruits of old age. If we grow old consciously, and learn to make something of our ageing, seeing it not only as physical decline but as a period when we still participate in—and indeed, still help shape—life, then we can find existential meaning in it.

Ageing takes courage. And trust. Can we think of our life in its complexity and development other than in ways defined by the narrow corset of our modern scientific and medical paradigms? In his carefully developed science of the soul and spirit, Rudolf Steiner offered us stimulus for broadening and enlarging these habits of thought which seem to hold us in their thrall. His path of schooling can help us toward a different outlook. And the idea of recurring lives on earth allows us to develop a different attitude toward old age and death. The book starts here, and opens up other perspectives on our ageing, with a far-reaching view of the transformative processes in which human beings and the earth itself are involved.

To compile this volume, I sifted through a wealth of written and verbal comments in the works of Rudolf Steiner. Some readers may react with scepticism to the spiritual depths of what is presented. But if you can keep an open mind, allowing yourself to enter into the broad scope of earthly and cosmic development as here conveyed, insights into the meaning and importance of old age can dawn, and open up new dimensions.

The book approaches the many-layered issue of ageing from different angles. Wide-ranging cosmological perspectives alternate with detailed and differentiated observations of the specific phenomena of ageing, and their connection with the rest of our life. The anthroposophic outlook characteristically regards ageing as part of a larger context, connected with an evolutionary process encompassing all forms of existence, both earthly and cosmic. Chapter 1 examines this. The following chapter then goes on to deal with characteristic phenomena of human ageing as Steiner regards them. Following these basic aspects of an anthroposophic gerontology, Chapter 3 offers a more extensive survey of overall development, firstly in relation to historical and cultural evolution and then in terms of individual human biography. The various stages of life, and the changes we either succeed or fail in achieving, are important milestones toward a wholesome ageing process. Independence at the end of life is a principle much vaunted in modern gerontology. Freedom is the highest human possession, and involves both opportunities and dangers, and hence we can speak positively of an ‘art of ageing’. As far as the dangers are concerned, Chapter 4 details not only typical infirmities but also some potentially pathological phenomena of old age. Steiner’s account of dementia offers a surprising angle on this widespread concern. Transformations in the fabric of body, soul and spirit are, ultimately, very diverse, and culminate in the process of dying as a release from bodily conditions. In the chapter on ‘Ageing and Death’ we find a description of the human corpse as offered by anthroposophy’s broader view, and also an account of what happens after we cross the threshold of death.

The fruitful relationship between childhood and old age is a theme running through the book. Dialogue between the generations and the potential of these relationships is receiving more attention nowadays. How space can be made for such interactions in daily life and how, in particular, family and school life can have a decisive effect on our health and vitality in old age, is considered in the chapter on ageing as an educational challenge. The book begins with the primary meaning that ageing has in evolutionary terms, and it ends with a consideration of the human being as co-creator in cosmic processes, and with our capacity to become increasingly conscious of the tasks this implies.

Many years as a director of state-funded care and nursing homes for the elderly have given the compiler of this volume first-hand knowledge both of current practices and of research in conventional and anthroposophic gerontology. His experiences with the elderly and the dying, involving many rich and diverse human encounters but also knowledge of prevailing concepts, have fed into this volume and govern the selection and compilation of texts. The suggestions and insights which Rudolf Steiner offered on this theme around a century ago, based on his spiritual-scientific investigations, are thus geared to questions that still preoccupy us today. The last chapter contains pointers toward further, hopefully fruitful dialogue.

Finally, I’d like to make a general remark about this kind of thematic anthology: the passages collected here are drawn from many different contexts, usually either from public lectures or ones given in more intimate circles, and are always excerpts from a ‘whole’ that was addressed to a very specific audience at the time. They have been placed into a new context in this volume, to highlight the diversity and relevance of ideas this book seeks to illumine. That each excerpt originally belonged in its particular setting should always be remembered, and this volume is therefore also conceived as a stimulus for further reading.

The Core Messages of Ageing

It seems fitting to start with essential and general principles before going on to speak of specific details of ageing. An overall holistic view of the ageing process will enable us to discern and understand its significance. At the same time this highlights an important principle in this book: that a deeper meaning, a message, is intrinsic to ageing. Forearmed with this insight, it will be easier for us to accept ageing in each individual instance, as part of an all-embracing process. Ageing as such manifests throughout the cosmos, and human ageing is only a special instance of this.

All existence is subject to ageing processes. Nothing arises without going under again, and as it does so something new emerges. Ageing therefore also signifies transformation, evolution. And evolution means that something higher develops through this transformation. From this perspective, death is an expression of something overcome on whose foundation a higher life germinates.

The cosmos also ages and evolves. Here too, evolution means transformation into a higher condition. This holds true for planetary embodiments and for the hierarchies of angels. In the divine world of spirit, beings aspire toward ever richer forms of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner perceived these dimensions and described them in various ways. Of particular note here is the detailed way in which, drawing on Dionysius the Areopagite’s Christian doctrine of angelic hierarchies, Steiner described the characteristics of the hosts of spirit beings—from angeloi and archangeloi through to cherubim and seraphim—highlighting their specific tasks for Creation and for the further evolution of cosmos and human being.1

Life is accompanied by maturation processes which end and are acknowledged in diverse ways: school readiness, puberty and coming of age are the best-known thresholds in human life through which we pass to become adults. Unfortunately, we often overlook other but no less important developmental stages. Those privileged to encounter the elderly at first hand know however that processes of maturation accompany life up to our very last breath.

Extinction is already implicit in blossoming. Yet this development is by no means either linear or final in nature. Subtler observation shows, rather, that fertilization occurs; that in blossoming something emerges that will not go to the grave but will ripen again toward a higher existence.

For this kind of transformation to occur, we need human community. We only become fully human through other people, as we know from the field of education. That this principle of reciprocity must not fade in the evening of life comes to expression wherever people are trying to create a new ‘culture of care’. ‘Beyond ensuring we ourselves receive care, such a culture is founded on caring about and for others’, said the well-known Heidelberg gerontologist Andreas Kruse,2 chair of the Berlin commission on ageing which published its extensive report in the 1990s.

On 5 December 1912, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture, at the Architect’s House in Berlin, entitled ‘Life Questions and the Enigma of Death Illumined through Spiritual Research’. Concluding the lecture, he summed up his comments in a kind of mantra or verse which, it seems to me, can well serve as a guiding thought and introduction to this anthology.

Everything alive in the cosmos lives only by creating within itself the germ of new life. And the soul gives itself up to ageing and to death only in order to ripen immortally to ever new life.3

Ageing as the foundation of all evolution

In his fundamental work Occult Science, an Outline, published in 1909, Rudolf Steiner devoted a whole chapter to the evolution of the human being and the world. In doing so he formulated the following underlying law of development:

All evolution is in fact founded on this: that independent being first separates itself out from the life of its surroundings, these surroundings then imprinting themselves on this separate being like a reflection, after which this separate being evolves further independently.4

This law can likewise be applied to human life and ageing: at birth we are separated from a cosmic totality, and the ageing process begins with our development as independent beings on the earth. In the process, through thinking, we gradually inform or imprint our thinking with something resembling substance: the cosmic wisdom we make our own. It is precisely in this that the maturation process consists. At death, what we acquired during life on earth is carried back into the cosmos, and made available to it for its own independent further evolution.

It does not come easily to us to imagine that our existence has been of a quite different nature in every era, and will be different again in future. But this is what distinguishes us from animals: we are continually developing, and learning new things from one life to the next.

Nowadays people have no sense at all that they are living beings who evolve through time. Instead they feel they are something timeless. People speak today of ‘the human being’ without paying heed to our developing nature, to the fact that we draw something new into our whole evolution at every stage of life.5

Only when we adopt this outlook can we gain a new relationship to time and thus to human evolution and development. To do so we have to include the idea that humankind originates in the macrocosm. The eternal core of our being enters the body which becomes available to it as ‘outward form’. Rudolf Steiner speaks of this in his lecture of 11 December 1920. Only around the middle of our life do we gradually start to transform physical corporeality into spirit and soul. This is accompanied at the same time by degenerative processes that will ultimately lead to death. We increasingly become estranged from our body, as part of the natural course of development. And yet human freedom implies the possibility of a turnaround, of initiating a maturation process. Steiner’s exacting observations below culminate in the insight that human existence only comes into its own in the presence of freedom and love.

People think that the human embryo grows simply within the mother’s body, nourished by the forces of her body itself, only because their outward sight cannot perceive how the whole macrocosm is involved in this; only because they do not see the influences playing in from without so that the human being is here truly connected with the whole macrocosm. In fact this human embryo clearly comes from the world of spirit, merely making use of this habitation in which it finds the gateway, if you like, for entering the physical world. In all that surrounds us in spatial conditions no gateway can be found—except within the human body itself—for the human being who has passed through the period between death and a new birth to enter the physical world. And the forces active there are not those of father and mother, but cosmic forces seeking their approach to the physical world through the mother’s body after fertilization, once the being of spirit and soul has developed the desire for this.

Thus the human being is transformed into a physical being, but this physical being is only the outward form for something spiritual in nature. We see that the child initially possesses, let us say, undifferentiated features, and that the human form increasingly develops from this. But we would be wrong to say that there is something emerging and developing from within the child as such. Rather, we should turn our gaze from the child back to what was active before birth, before conception, and continues to work on: to what expresses its activity in the child. Our observations of the child from day to day, from week to week and from year to year will show us the influx of a past condition through which the human soul and spirit passed before birth or conception. We only observe the child rightly if we see their particular qualities developing not from within the child’s organization itself but in antecedents whose light still shines into the child. The failure to do so is the great misfortune of our modern outlook. The important thing is to draw help from the past, conceiving it as still active in our present. And as we follow the further development of life through time, we can keep returning from physical corporeality, transforming it back, into spirit and soul. As we became physical human beings, the spirit and soul did actually transform itself into physical corporeality, and now we transform this physical corporeality back into spirit and soul again. You will point out a difficulty here. We could understand how physical corporeality transforms back into spirit and soul if this occurred gradually, so that, let us say, we saw that a person had become entirely physical around the age of 35 and then began to grow spiritual again, and by the end of their life had been spiritualized to such a degree that death would be merely a slow transition back into spirit and soul. This does indeed happen inwardly, but not outwardly, and here we are deceived by appearances. In our declining years—and the somewhat older people in the audience will I hope not take this amiss—we bear our body with us as something of a burden, as something that no longer entirely belongs to us. We slowly become a corpse, and death consists only in the fact that this corpse of ours grows too heavy, that gravity becomes too strong when, on awakening each morning, our soul comes back into this body. But if we direct our senses only to outward appearance, we cannot discern these changes already occurring in us, do not notice that this second half of life is already a gradual dying.

Rather than merely assuming the existence of spirit and soul on the one hand, and physical corporeality on the other, we should learn to see how, when we gain help from the concept of time, spirit and soul transform into physical corporeality, and physical corporeality in turn transforms itself back into spirit and soul. Although this gives only outward expression to the course of human evolution, it is connected with two significant human attributes. What enables us to metamorphose slowly from a spirit-soul condition into a physical and corporeal one so that we become physical and bodily in nature, so that we become one with physical corporeality? We can grasp this when we come to understand the moral quality of love. The following is an important and fundamental truth: we enter the physical world through love, by pouring ourselves into physical corporeality. And how do we depart again? We withdraw ourselves again from this physical, corporeal metamorphosis, we transform ourselves back, and the power that enables us to undertake this retransformation is none other than freedom. In other words, our further development, made possible by passing through death, occurs precisely through freedom. We are born through cosmic love, and we pass through the gateway of death into the world of spirit and soul through the power of freedom that we have within us. If we develop love in the world, this love is basically the echo, the continuing resonance of our being of spirit and soul as we possessed it before birth, or let us say before conception. And if we develop freedom in our existence between birth and death, soul-spiritually we are prefiguring development of the power that will be most important to us once we have departed from the body at death.

In cosmic terms, what does it actually mean to be a free being? To be a free being, to be able to transform ourselves back from physical corporeality into spirit and soul, actually means to be able to die. Love, on the other hand, means being able to transform ourselves from the realm of spirit and soul into that of physical corporeality. In cosmic terms, being able to love means being able to live.

As you see, occurrences that doubtless also can be seen in entirely naturalistic terms, being born and departing from the body, birth and death, which external scientists see only as natural processes, can be understood as manifestations of love and freedom. And by developing love out of our will in a soul-spiritual sense, what are we actually doing? We are creating a soul-spiritual after-image within us, within our skin, of what constituted our whole being before we were conceived. Before our conception we live in the cosmos through the power of love. And the development of love as a moral virtue during life between birth and death is in a sense a memory of this cosmic life in our feeling and will. The virtue of love appears like a refinement within the microcosm of what is spread out macrocosmically before birth; and awareness of our freedom arises in us because, during our life between birth and death, we bear within us soul-spiritually something that will act fully in the cosmos, like the workings of a natural power, after we have passed through the portal of death. We experience love and freedom between birth and death. They are nothing other than the human echoes of cosmic powers, cosmic love being associated with all birth, and cosmic freedom with all death. Since the natural sciences became predominant, we have been speaking of all kinds of natural forces—light, heat, electricity and so on. But we do not speak of the natural forces—or it would be better to say the cosmic forces—that lead us into physical, sense existence as human beings, and out of it again. Consider for a moment the fields of physics, chemistry and biology, and think of all the forces constituting the world described in these terms. Such forces can explain everything in the world that is not human, but they can never explain the nature of human beings on earth. You see, for the human being to exist here, freedom and love are needed as well as the actions of electricity, light, heat and so on in the world. If we engage in this way of thinking, and really learn to understand human nature, we can form concepts of natural creatures which are simultaneously moral and natural concepts. And then we no longer have two distinct and unconnected realms: of morality, on the one hand, and the natural world on the other, with no bridge between them.6

In his lecture of 25 August 1911, Steiner now describes the beginnings of cosmic-earthly evolution from a quite different perspective. He begins with the evolution of Saturn in the long-distant past, a remote, primordial time in which physical conditions were as yet present only in the form of warmth or energy. In Greek myths, this primordial wisdom reappears in a vivid, pictorial language.

As Saturn evolution was beginning, or, more accurately, before it began, the ether stream of all humanity and all earthly evolution of which we spoke was as yet a single one. At the moment when Saturn evolution starts, dichotomy, duality arises within the powers of the macrocosm. We will consider later why this happened, but for now we will simply identify it as a fact. Duality is initiated in all macrocosmic activity only at the moment when Saturn evolution begins. Greek mythology interprets duality in terms of the opposition or enmity between ancient Saturn, or Chronos as the Greeks called him, and his father, Uranus. This legend shows an awareness of the original unity of all macrocosmic powers. But as old Saturn or Chronos began to crystallize, something that intimately pertains to this Chronos opposed universal evolution. Duality arose; and if we stay for now with what simply occurred, we can say that the totality of divine-spiritual beings who held sway when Saturn evolution commenced, divided inwardly in a sense, giving us an evolutionary stream directly involved in everything that has unfolded from Saturn through Sun and Moon evolution to our present Earth stage, on the one hand, and another stream alongside this primary one.7

Human ageing will now be considered from a further, and again different, perspective, that of the ageing of the earth and cosmos. This cosmological dimension of ageing will be taken up again at the end of the book and examined in detail.

Our earth, with everything upon it, has already entered upon its period of decline, its decadence. I have often mentioned that even knowledgeable geologists recognize this fact. We can demonstrate purely outwardly, physically, with very rigorous and precise geology, that the earth is already breaking down, that the rising trajectory of its evolution has ended and we are in fact walking around on a rupturing earth-slab. And it is not just the mineral earth that is breaking down, but all organic life too is declining—the structures of plants, the bodies of animals and humans are no longer in rising evolution but are degenerating.8

The meaning of ageing

As we mature, our human existence acquires meaning and fulfilment. Evolution toward ever higher stages of consciousness is associated with this. On earth we develop self-awareness that kindles in resistance to the sense world, as we can observe when we wake up each day: our I experiences bodily reality as an external world, and it awakens to its surroundings through the sense organs. Rudolf Steiner distinguishes three levels or ‘sheaths’ into which the I enters on its path toward birth, each being of a different ‘substance’. We develop alert awareness through the soul nature of the astral body, we acquire life through the etheric body, and receive physical form through the mineral body that decays as corpse at death. Our I consciousness grows through the resistance of these corporeal sheaths, and this wears them out, eventually leading to death. And yet our truly human nature develops through these ageing and death processes. Rudolf Steiner spoke on this theme in 1912/13 in numerous European cities. The lectures are compiled in a volume entitled Esoteric Investigations into the Life Between Death and Rebirth.

From the time when I consciousness is present, the I pushes against our own inner corporeality, and begins to live inwards. It begins to come up against our own body within. If you want to picture this, you need only think of the child waking up each morning. Here the I and the astral body enter the physical and etheric body, the I nudging into the physical and etheric body. If you imagine the resistance you feel when you put your hand in water and push it through, something similar happens when the I submerges itself in the morning and finds itself bathed in its interior life. Throughout life, this I is sunk in the physical and etheric body, and pushes against these bodies on all sides. If you splash your hand about in water, you become aware of its every part; and the same is true when the I immerses itself in the etheric body and physical body, nudging into every part of this corporeality. This happens throughout life. During the whole of life we have to submerge ourselves each morning in our physical body and etheric body, and by doing so the physical body and etheric body on the one hand, and the astral body and I on the other, continually impinge on, or collide with each other. And the consequence of this? The colliding entities wear away, are worn down. What happens under continual impact between two material bodies also happens between the I and the astral body, on the one hand, and the etheric and physical body on the other. They wear each other out—and this is why we gradually age; this is why we increasingly wear out throughout life, and this is also why we physically die. If we had no physical or etheric body, we would not be able to sustain our I consciousness either. We would still be able todevelopI consciousness, but could notsustainit. You see, we always have to push ourselves inward, come up against resistance within if the I is to be sustained in our awareness. From this—an extraordinarily significant fact—it follows that the development of our I arises from the destruction of our being. If the aspects or levels of our being did not come up against each other, did not collide as they do, we could not have I consciousness . And if people ask why they age and perish, then we have to reply that we develop as we wear ourselves out, or more precisely, I consciousness keeps developing, and that is the reason for ageing and dying. To put this in the most radical terms, if we could not die, we could not be truly human either. And if we allow the full importance of this fact to work upon our soul, the following thought can emerge, one which finds an answer in esotericism: to live as human beings we always need the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. As we are constituted today, we need these four ‘members’. And yet in order to acquire I consciousness, we have to destroy them. We have to keep acquiring them in order to destroy them again. This is why recurring lives on earth are necessary—so that we become able to keep repeatedly destroying our human bodies, and thereby keep evolving further as conscious human beings.9

According to Steiner, the process of growth and decay conceals the ‘secret of all life’. In a process of continual self-vanquishing the human soul grows victorious over physical form.

There is something in nature that continually destroys and overcomes one form of life through another. Those who can sense this will also—to choose this most exemplary of instances—be able to feel that the configurations of the natural human form contain something mysterious: that in each moment this form, which realizes itself in outer life, is in fact killed by a higher life. That is the secret of all life: continually and everywhere a lower life is killed by a higher one. This human form of ours, permeated by the human soul, by human life, is continually killed, continually overcome, by the human soul, by human life. And this occurs in a way that can be stated like this: the human form as such bears something that would be entirely different if it were left to its own nature, if it could follow its own intrinsic life. But it cannot do so because it also possesses a higher, different life that continually kills this other intrinsic life.10

Old age is not held in high regard nowadays, nor are the very particular experiences involved in it, which might actually inspire us. And yet the process of maturation could acquire huge importance in social co-existence, especially if we focused on the spiritual development connected with it. In his lecture on 21 May 1918, Rudolf Steiner makes a plea for us to value growing old, pointing to the impulses that could arise from intergenerational encounters.

Who nowadays believes in the productivity, the fruitfulness of growing older? And since people don’t, it has none. They are not attentive to how each new year brings new revelations. But consider how much would change in human life if this belief gained general currency—if everyone recognized they must wait to be older, and would then learn things at first hand that they could not know before. Where do we find expectancy and hope today? Yet if such a thought and feeling entered the life of society, think what a huge significance it would have. What huge significance it would have if, alongside what I will call the ‘egalitarian demolitions’ at work nowadays in all sorts of areas, an awareness grew in community life that simply by virtue of growing to be 40 we can learn things that we cannot know when we’re 27. If this sense of things became natural and customary, imagine what it could mean for the way a 27-year-old relates to a 40-year-old. Of course there is no chance of this happening at present, since 60-year-olds are often no older than 27. Even those in the highest positions are no older, but fail to notice the fact. Today therefore, we can’t urge such a thing as a reality.

And yet that is what life must bring and what the future requires: that people begin to regard the spirit as a reality again. The only way in which, in general, people acknowledge the spirit today is as a sum of abstract concepts. A person nowadays develops a sum of abstract ideas, of the kind one can indeed easily assimilate by the age of 27.11

Fundamental Principles of Gerontology

Ageing is characterized by natural decline. That at least is how it seems at first glance. But if we take a closer look, we can also discern a regenerative current flowing in the middle of life: in fact the etheric body, or body of formative forces, grows ever younger, a dynamic of which Rudolf Steiner gave a precise account. Whereas the physical body ages over time, and becomes frail, during the course of life the etheric body grows ever more vigorous.

This ‘growing younger’ of the body of formative forces as Steiner describes it,12 is of key importance for a full understanding of the processes connected with ageing. Although this idea appears unusual to begin with, the associated outlook on ageing it invokes is a strength of anthroposophic gerontology, which not only considers the physical decline of old age, but also the renewal that comes with it, the inner gains and riches acquired.