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In a first step, the lecture deals with central theoretical and empirical work on spirituality in old age and, on the basis of this work, looks at the importance of spiritual care for interacting and working with older people. It shows that transcendence is an important topic for many old people, which must not be simply overlooked in medical, psychological, social and nursing work. Transcendence means not only transcendence in a religious sense, but also in the sense of ‘survival’ in subsequent generations (symbolic immortality). However, it also becomes clear how intensely the questioning of a spiritual and an immaterial world can also become for those old people who have dealt with such a topic only to a lesser extent in earlier phases of life. This question can become increasingly important and urgent, especially in the immediate vicinity of death. The theoretical, and above all the empirical, literature on spiritual care in old age has skyrocketed in the past decade, which shows how important it is to examine this topic from a theoretical and empirical perspective. In a second step, we go into our own studies, which were carried out at the Institute for Gerontology at Heidelberg University on the central issues of life in old age. Among these central issues of life, concern for people of subsequent generations, autonomy, one’s own vulnerability, one’s own finiteness, and finally transcendence (in the spiritual sense as well as in the sense of symbolic immortality) played an important role. Studies on the internal processing of chronic physical and cognitive illness as well as oncoming death are also presented, in which questions of transcendence also emerged clearly. These results are interpreted against the background of theories of concern, generativity, and integrity. A more metaphorical closing of the lecture is a reflection on pictures of the age by Rembrandt van Rijn, especially his last self-portraits, in which the aspect of transcendence comes very clearly into the center.
