The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
1902–1909 Survey
The last chapter of The Course of My Life begins with the words: “In what is to follow, it will be difficult to separate the account of the course of my life from a history of the Anthroposophical Movement.” A decisive year for this new departure in the shaping of Rudolf Steiner’s life was 1902. The writing of his autobiography was interrupted by his death in 1925, when it had arrived at a period only a little beyond the beginning of the new century. The attempt must be made, therefore, as we have said in the Foreword, to supplement his own narration of the events of his life by means of collected material.
The story of the Anthroposophical Movement, which is the work of Rudolf Steiner, unmistakably shows in its development three seven-year periods. These periods can be identified by quite definite events, which are here given in detail:
1902-1909: First period in the development of Anthroposophy (in the beginning associated with the Theosophical Society).
1902: Entrance into Theosophical Society.
1909: Decisive inner separation from this at the Budapest Congress.
1902-1909: Appearance of the following works:
1902: Christianity as Mystical Fact. Goethe’s Faust as Picture of His Esoteric World Conception.
1903: Reincarnation and Karma from the Standpoint of Conceptions Essential to Modern Natural Science.
1904: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Theosophy. Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and of Human Destiny. 1906: The Stages of Higher Knowledge, and other works.
1907: Beginning of cycles of lectures on the Gospels.1909-1916: The inner development of the Anthroposophical Movement and Society. The realization of the unity of science, art, and religion.
1909: Appearance of the fundamental work on spiritual-scientific cosmogony: Occult Science—An Outline.
In the years following:
The artistic development of the Movement.
The Mystery Dramas.
The birth of Eurythmy.
First presentations from Goethe’s Faust.
The Goetheanum building.1916-1923: Development of tasks with special reference to the outside world.
The “Goetheanum” as Free School of Spiritual Science.
Technical college courses: natural science, art, medicine, pedagogy, etc.
Founding of schools.
Opening of laboratories.
The social question.
The threefold nature of man and of the social organism.
1923: Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. Inner and outer reconstituting of the Anthroposophical Movement on an esoteric basis and the realization of this.
Thus we see that, in the first seven-year period, the basic substance is born and livingly organized and developed; how, in the second seven-year period, artistic education becomes the dominant factor in the schooling of consciousness; how, in the third seven-year period, the tasks which arise for every living being out of social connections now pose their problems and demand solutions; how finally, after the twenty-first year, the being, made dependent upon itself, consummates its ego-birth and from then onward has to win the mastery over a new way of life through its own forces. We shall see how Rudolf Steiner’s relation to the evolving organism in its first twenty-one years was at the beginning rather that of the teacher, and how in the year 1923, twenty-one years after the birth in 1902—that is, at the time of the ego-birth—he himself now united as the creator with what had come about, bound his destiny with the substance of this earth-being, thereby endowing it with the power to devote itself in the course of further existence entirely to their common tasks.
Reverting to the hour of birth of this spiritual creation, we see clearly in what manner Rudolf Steiner, through his scientific publications and his works on the mystics and on Christianity, had planted the seed of a new synthesis of the two worlds in consciousness as in the mother soil of a new evolutionary epoch for mankind.