The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
1916–1923
With the year 1916 begins the third seven-year epoch of the Movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. In the first seven-year epoch, he had laid the foundation in knowledge; in the second, he had lifted art, the manifestation of secret laws of nature, to the position of noblest helper in the spiritual schooling of mankind; in the third epoch, the knowledge and art born out of the spirit were now called upon for a solution of the social tasks of humanity. The cosmic hour demanded that what had been achieved through knowledge and had become visible through art should now become deed in the sphere of the social unity. In cognition the ego-being of the one who searches for knowledge stands at the point of departure, in accordance with the laws of the spiritually creative; in representations of art, the actors, as individuals or as a community, make known to their fellow men what has been beheld by the creative personaHty; in the social life the many receive the knowledge and impulses from the great creative individualities and through this give form in the practice of life to history, the organism of the totality in space and time. The degree of truth, beauty, and goodness which can be demanded of every fruitful form of knowledge must give evidence of itself through the fact that these call forth ideas and actions which heal the illnesses of the social organisms, which are capable of curing both within and without. Thus did Rudolf Steiner travel over the path from the one who knows to the artist and to the healer. In three periods of seven years each, science, art, and the social formation were led to a new point of departure and a new synthesis. Even the inner rhythm and upbuilding of this lifework are in themselves a work of art bearing the signature of the great Creative Prototypes.
In surveying this third epoch of seven years we shall find the realization in every realm of a practice of life growing out of spiritual science: The activating of a new pedagogy in the founding of schools; science in the College of the Goetheanum, in the laboratories and the research institutes; medicine in the founding of clinics and the development of physicians; agriculture in the inauguration of the biologic-dynamic methods in this field. In the realm of art this is brought about through the great instructive courses for the various arts and the achievements of the artists presented to the world; in architecture through the erection of the Goetheanum building; in questions of religion through the development of a Christology and the fostering of the Movement for Religious Renewal, the development of "The Christian Community”; in the social sphere through the idea of the Threefold Social Organism and its practical working out; most especially, through the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society at the end of the third seven-year epoch in 1923—that is, through the integration of his own personality as leader into the community created out of the Spirit; through the setting forth of the history of humanity as the prototype of an organism in process of development. Indeed, in all areas of knowledge and action, through such a multitude of results of research, impulses, directives, inner deepening and the creation of institutions in the external world, that generations to come will be able to work upon what has been begun, and to carry to realization impulses not yet realized. A biographer feels overwhelmed as he faces the task of analyzing and presenting only a small part of the multitude of facts and events within the story of this life.
Just this final epoch in the life of Rudolf Steiner will present to those who seek such a wealth of treasures that we can only endeavor to indicate the directions in which these are to be found. Their discovery, development, bringing to realization will be one of the most fruitful and beautiful future tasks of humanity. For just as nature has given to the human being, even in his earthly corporeal organization, such an immeasurably manifold miracle, in which it is possible to read the nature and the action of the Creator, so is the spirit of a great human being, like the light of the sun, to be comprehended only in the innumerable colored reflections of its radiation from that which it creates on the earth. We must rest content here with indicating merely individual products of this creative achievement which attract our special attention, dwelling for a short time reflectively upon single sentences out of the story of a lifework.