Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

be hoped for by progress along the same paths as we have followed up to now. We do not really expect that religion or philosophy or any social or economic reform will bring us the renewed life, the sense of fullness and attainment which we long for. And we are past the days in which we expected any salvation from science or technology. ‘Ours,’ says Gutkind, ‘is the most terrible suffering that has ever been or ever will be. It is the suffering of the Creator in the face of limitation, the pain of not being able to grow any further. Extreme exhaustion is the secret of our time... But now whenall is exhausted and nothing new can arise, we shall perform the one deed that is new and that will renew everything. We shall surmount all worldliness and materiality which excludes and rejects and shall enter into our own divinity, which includes everything . . . For we have received the most joyful message of all time—that we can burst open the confines of our world and form them anew in holy creation.”

To see what is before us we must look back to how we got here. Mankind has arisen out of the depths of nature. How we look upon nature depends on the state of our human development. Nowadays we regard nature as chiefly mechanism. We try to comprehend it by mathematical formulae and thus control it. We are now above nature. But there was a time when men were very mucha part of it. These were the days of mythology, when animals, trees, rivers, mountains, thunder and rain, and also sun, moon and stars were beings like ourselves and seemed to dominate our lives. Our relation to them was what Martin Buber called I-Thou rather than the present I-It. We made gods of them and were never sure what they would do next. We lived in awe of them. Equally our own impulses and feelings, our imagination and even our very actions seemed to come from some source outside ourselves, as we can still observe fo be the case with little children. In those days everything was alive, everything was in continuous movement and there was no real security anywhere.

Man was deeply embedded in the realm of Nature when he lived through his animal stage. He could not control either the rest of nature outside him or his own impulses and appetites within. Gradually, however, by the superior power of his mind man came to be above nature. And this does not merely mean the ability man has to use nature for his own ends, which has culminated in modern