Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

man to the present state is described only to show that it cannot go on in the same way, that a jump must be made now into a wholly new and different life, one that has never before been imagined in the whole of human experience.

The contrast is further heightened by Steiner’s attention to knowledge as opposed to Gutkind’s insistence on deed. It is not that Steiner disregarded the need for action any more than Gutkind underrated knowledge. It is a matter of emphasis. Steiner called his Anthroposophy ‘Spiritual Science’ and to get to understand what he is saying, and to follow the path he describes requires patient study and application over many years. Gutkind’s first prophetic book has the title Sidereal Birth and the sub-title ‘Seraphic journey from the death of World to the baptism of Deed’. And in the essay which is called World Conquest he declares that he is commanded by unheard-of necessity and love violent in onslaught ‘to utter words that are not words but deeds’. There is an imperative urgency about Gutkind which says ‘Now!’. This very moment is the challenge which you and I and all of us have to meet. We have to make a leap into an unimaginable and unheard-of novelty. There was never before a moment like this, and there never again will be.

Finally, although Steiner had a clear conception of the changes in social life which he thought necessary to the present age, and wrote and spoke a great deal about them, nevertheless the effect of his work was to put the emphasis on the inner development of individual consciousness. Gutkind is speaking about a change which the individual cannot make alone. ‘It is in vain,’ he says, ‘that we torment ourselves and ask what we should do. At this point all knowledge breaks down—for of what use are the deeds of single individuals? Even in the greatest men it is only the spirit of the whole of humanity which is effective, not the narrow self.’ It is only in a profoundly committed alliance with his fellow men, which Gutkind calls ‘socialistic interwovenness’ that the individual can do anything atall.

Gutkind starts urgently with an affirmation of the uniqueness of the present human crisis and the need to makea leap into new realms of life. We have now to take a step, he says, ‘which is greater than the step from animal to man’. “World’, as we know it, is outworn. It has reached the limit of its possible development. Nothing is to

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