None but the brave deserves the fair: Anthroposophy as Sleeping Beauty

 

"What is truth?"

Rudolf Steiner:

These thoughts concerning departed friends, linked as they are with sorrowful experiences, also belong to our studies—using the word here free from all pedantry. We know that for the human soul there is survival and new beginning, but does the same apply to the many hopes and expectations we witness that come to nothing especially in our times? Why is it, we may ask, that even those who have a measure of insight into mankind's evolution nurture unjustified hopes and expectations? The answer is that we must nurture them, for they are forces, effective forces. Any doubt we may have as to whether they will be fulfilled should not prevent us from cherishing them because while we do they act as forces and produce effects whether they are fulfilled or not. We must accept it if, for the time being, they come to nothing. How gladly we set our hopes on many a person when he shows the first signs of warm understanding for the spiritual world! One has such hopes despite the fact that in our materialistic age they are often shattered. In recent lectures I have described deeper reasons as to why such hopes are shattered.

In this connection we must be clear that what we call human courage, which we see today in such abundance in many spheres of external life, is very seldom found in relation to spiritual life. This is why the personalities I spoke of today are really models even in regard to more external aspects of our society and movement. It is dawning on many people today that materialism will not do. But what I have often referred to as man's love of ease prevents them from committing themselves to spiritual science. Yet nothing else can save human civilization from plunging into disaster. There are people who are often quite near the point of crossing the threshold into spiritual science; that they do not is basically due to indolence. It is love of ease that prevents them from making their soul receptive and pliable enough to grasp ideas that quite concretely explain the spiritual world. There are many today who enthuse in general about the mystical unity of worlds, vaguely declaring that science alone does not explain everything; faith must come to its aid. But the courage to penetrate earnestly into the descriptions and explanations of the spiritual world that lies at the foundation of the sense world, that courage is greatly lacking.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive August 21, 1917