Steiner's name for the soul that grows fresher as the body hardens, fed by living concepts planted in childhood.
Growing Young in Old Age in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the second youth of the soul, described in the Oslo lectures of November 1921 published as Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy I (GA 304). Steiner sets it inside his picture of the child as a time organism: around the thirty-fifth year the soul and spirit begin to loosen from the physical body, and what happens next depends on what was planted in childhood. A person given living, growing concepts and feelings does not merely remember school, but relives that content as a continuing source of life forces. The limbs still age, the face wrinkles, the hair greys, gout may set in, yet the soul stays fresh and, in Steiner's phrasing, grows young again without becoming childish. He calls it Wiederjungwerden, and points to Homer and to Vedanta philosophy as works of souls that grew younger in old age.
Growing young in old age describes what Steiner watched happen to adults who had been educated with pictures rather than with finished definitions. When the soul loosens from the body near thirty-five, it either lives on stored memories or it keeps growing. The difference, he told his Oslo audience in 1921, is decided decades earlier, in the classroom between the change of teeth and puberty.
In Steiner's Own Words
But this growing young once more in a body that is physically hardening, of which I spoke in the lecture, also gives old age a certain strength. And, if we look back to ancient times, we find this strength there. I believe that it was not for nothing that the ancient Greeks saw, in Homer above all but also in other poets, people who were creative at the time when their souls were freer from the physical body which was deteriorating. (I am not now speaking about whether there ever was such a person on earth as the one we call Homer.) Much of what we have of oriental wisdom, in the Vedas and, above all, in the philosophy of the Vedanta, has grown out of souls who were becoming younger in old age.
What it Means Today
The closest modern echo of this idea is the Nun Study, which the epidemiologist David Snowdon began in 1986 and expanded to 678 members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. The order's archives held an autobiography each sister had written around the age of twenty-two, on entering the community. Snowdon's team scored those pages for idea density, the count of distinct propositions per ten words. Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996, and at book length in Aging with Grace (2001), they found that low idea density in a woman's early twenties tracked with cognitive impairment some six decades later. The finding that made the study famous ran the other way. Sisters such as Sister Mary, who died at 101, held high scores on cognitive testing to the end while their donated brains showed the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer's disease.
Thalira synthesis: Snowdon measured in language what Steiner described in the time organism, that the quality of what was inwardly formed in youth, rather than the state of the tissue, decides how much life the soul still carries once the body hardens. Steiner was not making a medical prediction and neither are we; a fresh soul is not protection from illness. The practical reading is the one he gave the Oslo teachers. Give children pictures that can keep growing, because a concept fixed and finished at nine has nothing left to unfold at fifty.
Where to Read More