The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] I have spoken to you about the historical origins of what we today call imperialism, and you have already noted from what I said yesterday that, in these reflections on imperialism, the essential point is to see how present-day phenomena—which were once entirely real factors in social life—are now, in terms of their reality, merely remnants of bygone times. In the past, the institutions and customs in question had real significance. They were, so to speak, realities. That reality has ceased to exist. It has evolved through the stage of symbolism and has ultimately become a mere phrase.

[ 2 ] We are, in fact, living in the age of clichés. The point, however, is to recognize that even a cliché must have a certain foundation on which to grow, and that, on the other hand, a cliché serves as a precursor to something that is bound to come in the course of human development. If old reality were not to transform into a cliché—that is, into something that is like an existing illusion—then something entirely new could not assert itself as reality. Nothing new could emerge if, for example, the visible, sensually perceptible God in human form—as He still existed as a final remnant in the ancient Roman Empire—were to persist into our time; for the Roman emperors, even if this was no longer felt as fully as it had been felt in the East, were nonetheless, according to their own claims, gods. Nero, at least according to the assumption or hypothesis, was a real god in human form. Over time, these things have lost their real significance. They have passed through the stage of the sign, the symbol, and have then become mere phrases.

[ 3 ] The point is that the more things become mere phrases, the more the ground is being prepared for a new reality—that is, for a spiritual life that is drawn not from the sensory world but from the supersensory world, for a spiritual life that does not seek to find the divine spiritual beings not in human form, but as real, actual beings among the visible people on Earth. First, the empty rhetoric must be present, but it must then also be recognized. Only then will it be possible for a new spiritual life to truly develop. So, if one wants to understand the present from such—let us say—unpleasant premises, one must be able to focus one’s attention on the birth of a new spiritual life, in which everything that was reality in the development of humanity becomes completely illusory.

[ 4 ] It is only natural that people want to cling to old realities, even if they have already become mere clichés; for realizing that things have become mere clichés creates a certain sense of insecurity in people’s minds. People believe that if they have to admit that the old things have become mere clichés, they no longer have solid ground beneath their feet. They like to delude themselves, because the moment they accept the delusion as such, they feel as if they are floating in the air. One will cease to believe one is floating in the air only when one can truly feel the solidity of the new spiritual life. And we are living precisely in the age in which we must become participants in the fading clichés and participants in the rising spiritual life. This will become possible, in particular, as it becomes increasingly clear to all English-speaking people that what they have traditionally preserved from earlier times—and what they still speak of—is nothing but a cliché, and that economic life is the reality underlying this cliché, as I described to you yesterday as the sole, true reality beneath the cliché.

[ 5 ] But a moment will come—a moment of very special importance. At the very moment when one realizes that one is dealing with that economic life which, as I described yesterday, becomes “decent” by the third or fourth generation—and is otherwise mere rhetoric—at that very moment one will perceive the insignificance of the human being who merely exists within the reality of physical life. This realization must dawn in particular on the Western peoples. The moment must come when the admission takes root in the soul: We can no longer hold on to all that we talk about. The reality among us is what we acquire and prepare for people’s stomachs and digestion. As long as one has not yet seen through empty rhetoric for what it is, as long as one does not yet know that the economy is the only reality, one will not arrive at the necessary admission. But once one arrives at this necessary admission, human nature can do nothing but say to itself: To be human, we need a spiritual reality in addition to the physical reality of mere economic activity.

[ 6 ] This moment of insight must dawn. Without this moment of insight, humanity’s development cannot move forward. Precisely for the same reason that we are moving toward a new spiritual life, we must immerse ourselves in the realm of rhetoric in the present.

[ 7 ] Now, however, the greatest aptitude, the greatest talent for this insight is found among Western peoples. Among Western peoples, all the prerequisites are in place for such an insight to truly dawn, whereas, for example, other peoples of Europe have little predisposition for such an insight to dawn among them with the necessary intensity. For there, in many cases, different circumstances prevail that prevent the illusions from being seen through as thoroughly and as radically as they can be, particularly among the English-speaking population. One need only consider historical circumstances once again.

[ 8 ] Just imagine that the various tribes of Germanic origin living in Central Europe had been united since the time of Charlemagne’s successors—since the Saxon and Staufer rulers—as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as I have already said. This Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was, in essence, an entire network of symbols. Everything was of a symbolic nature. In everything one encountered, it was necessary to move from the sign, from the symbol, back to some kind of reality. Yet this penetration through the sign, through the symbol, did not lead to a full spiritual reality. The churches prevented that. One arrived, so to speak, at a mere hovering and drifting within a spiritual reality. That is why everything the Middle Ages had to say about a spiritual reality—and everything the successors of the European confessions have to say about such a spiritual reality—has the character of the half-understood, the not-quite-comprehensible. It has the character of the glimmer of light that fell through stained-glass windows into medieval churches. People recoiled when they moved from the symbols to the spiritual; they recoiled from a clear, sharp grasp of it. On the contrary, they preferred to characterize the matter in such a way that it stood as something half-unknown, which cannot be penetrated by knowledge.

[ 9 ] And that is, in fact, how things actually were with regard to external social conditions. Anyone who truly studies with inner insight the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—and Swiss history is, after all, intimately connected with the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—will find that ambiguities upon ambiguities perpetuate themselves from age to age. Ambiguities through which one attempts to grasp one’s own social organization, to live within it, and to understand it—until, in 1806, it became clear—even the Habsburgs realized it at the time—that the entire Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation no longer made any sense. And the particularly gifted—that is, negatively gifted—Emperor Franz L. abdicated the German imperial crown at that time, after having created for himself, two years earlier, a personal or, as it is called in this case, a “house” substitute in the form of the Austrian imperial crown. These institutions lost their ability to exist because, in the end, no meaning could be found behind this symbol. And for these people in Central Europe, nothing remained but a striving, a desire that reached for everything possible but held little concrete meaning within it.

[ 10 ] Hence the founding of the German Empire in 1870–71, with its inherent contradiction. A German empire was created, but not based on any real circumstances. This title was invented. In France, if something similar had succeeded, the “Empereur” might have been understood—or at least half-understood—because there was still some substance left in the people; but within the German character, there was a name that would have required a talent for mere names that mean nothing—a talent, on the one hand, for cultivating the phrase, and on the other, for an underlying reality of economic life or something of the sort that initially had nothing to do with it. But this talent did not exist in Central Europe. And to understand what developed in this Central Europe, one must be clear that history should not actually be studied in abstract terms, but in realities! One can pose a question with a focus on reality: What, in fact, developed under the German Empire from 1871 to 1914? — What was there, what people saw on the outside, was, after all, merely an illusion. What was the reality? Well, you see, with historical phenomena, it is the case that one thing appears (red); beneath its surface, it contains another thing (blue). When the first thing disappears as an illusion, the second then appears in its reality as a continuation.

[ 11 ] One should not analyze, but must point to reality, to the concrete. What developed under the German Empire from 1871 to 1914 did not become apparent at the time it was coming to an end, for that was the illusion; reality comes later—it is what has been developing since November 1918; that is, the current rulers. The fundamental character of the Wilhelmine era is Noske. The fundamental character of what had been developing there for decades only came to light when the current rulers emerged. The former German emperor is defined by the so-called revolutionary rulers of the present. The conditions that lay beneath the surface in the decades prior, when people indulged in illusions—those are the conditions that now exist in reality.

[ 12 ] And so you can actually study history by seeking out involution within evolution, by seeking out that which develops beneath the surface. What, in reality, is the name of what was Russian tsarism in the 19th century? What Russian tsarism was—that is, today, now that it has appeared in its truth—is Lenin and Trotsky, Bolshevism. That is the concrete truth of what was merely an illusion back then. Tsarism is merely the lie floating on the surface; but what this tsarism truly nurtured appeared, as soon as it itself was swept away, in its true reality. Lenin is nothing other than the Tsar himself; after his skin was stripped away, what remained was his true reality, and that is what we call Lenin or Trotsky today. And if you continue this analogy by stripping away the skins of people like Caprivi, Hohenlohe, or Bethmann Hollweg, what remains are Noske, Scheidemann, and so on. These are the real figures; the others were merely illusions superimposed upon them.

[ 13 ] The point is that, in history, one does not illustrate a phenomenon through abstract concepts and ideas, but through what actually comes to be in history. In history, the definition of a thing will always be another fact, not an abstract concept. Thus, the point is to study realities. And so, in particular, the point is to focus one’s attention on what these realities are; for today we live in an age in which realities must be seen through, in which realities must be completely laid bare.

[ 14 ] This phenomenon is particularly evident when you study the structure and nature of those secret societies that wield great power within the English-speaking population—a power of which the general public is largely unaware. These are societies that come together under exceptionally appealing outward rules—societies that have gained ever-greater power, particularly in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

[ 15 ] If you look back to the year 1720, you’ll find a few followers of such societies in England. Followers are generally merely tools; the people who are actually pulling the strings are behind the scenes; but even back then, there were only a few followers. If we look at the statistics today, we find that there are 488 Masonic lodges in London—that is, lodges that serve as effective instruments in the hands of secret societies—1,354 lodges throughout Great Britain, and 486 English lodges in the colonies and abroad; and affiliated with this is the so-called Royal Arch Chapter—that is, the organization that keeps even the outward practices of Freemasonry somewhat secret—with 836 chapters worldwide.

[ 16 ] Now, the first task is to consider the substantive content of what exists within these lodges as an instrument for the forces that are actually driving events. And then it is a matter of seeking out the reasons why these forces have, in fact, continued to hold extraordinary significance to this day. The truly substantive content dates back to the most distant past. And those who emphasize time and again that the content of Freemasonry dates back to the distant past are not entirely wrong, even if the way things are presented is often nebulous, perhaps even deceptive. But this connection to the distant past is nevertheless based on a certain true foundation. It even goes back to such distant times that we can say: These times are those of the ancient, earliest stage of imperialism, when God walked among humans in human form. Back then, what is spoken of in these lodges today—and especially what is demonstrated—had meaning. Then it became a symbol. The meaning is long gone. One could say that within the lodges that exist today, there is hardly any knowledge left of the content of what is done or said. But the symbolism has remained. This symbolism has now also degenerated into mere rhetoric, so that—particularly in English-speaking regions and those regions dependent on them—we have two layers of cultural forces coexisting side by side: the outer, entirely exoteric, empty phrase that dominates public life, and, within the secret societies, the symbol, which is preserved solely by tradition—with no attempt whatsoever to trace it back to its true origin—but which is preserved as a symbol. As a result, the symbol becomes a phrase in symbolic form, or a symbol that also becomes a phrase, but one that appears in other forms. So you have the outer, exoteric phrase of public life, which is expressed in ordinary human language—the kind that runs its course in parliaments, for example—and then, in secret societies, you have the goings-on involving symbolism, which, as a rule, even those to whom this symbolism is handed down do not understand. It is, therefore, something phrase-like in symbolic form. It is important to recognize that alongside the outer, purely literal phrase, we have the cultural phrase—the ceremonial phrase. For this ceremonial phrase does, after all, contain a spiritual element within it. And in secret societies that have genuine ceremonial forms—that is, those rooted in actual customs—it can happen that, through their karma, particularly gifted individuals eventually uncover the true meaning of these symbols. After all, even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain of corn. So it is entirely possible that particularly gifted individuals will uncover the meaning of the ceremonies; in which case they are expelled from the secret societies in question. But measures are taken to ensure that they can no longer pose a threat to these secret societies. For what is particularly important to these secret societies is power, not insight. The aim is, after all, to preserve the secrets in their traditional form. And in this traditional form, they possess a certain power. Why?

[ 17 ] I have now, so to speak, described the substantive content to you. But this substantive content is, of course, tied to the people who are gathered together in these secret societies. Just think how many people belong to these various lodges around the world. When these people join the lodges, they are confronted with the ceremonial practices that are of the nature I have just described to you. But they have been won over to the lodges from certain perspectives. And one of the most important aspects under which they were originally won over to the lodges—even though these aspects are being violated in the most diverse ways from various quarters, especially today, though this is irrelevant to the effectiveness of these lodges—one of the most important aspects under which people are gathered together in these lodges is the absolute indisputability of religious creeds. Certainly, this principle is violated. There are Masonic lodges in the world today that, let us say, do not admit Jews. Of course, this happens; but they simply do not understand the fundamental principle. The fundamental principle is to embrace people of all faiths. This is one of the main principles, then: to attach no importance to the content of what a person believes. The other principle is to pay no attention within the lodges to external class distinctions or other differences. The people who are members of true lodges are all brothers to one another, regardless of whether one is a lord and another a laborer—though, again, this principle is often violated. In most lodges, no workers are admitted—only lords and those who are subservient to them. But that has nothing to do with the principle itself. Those who are inside are indeed united under the motto: All are brothers. — There are, of course, only the degrees; but these have nothing to do with external stratification, with the social stratification of people. As a result, people are brought together on the basis of criteria that have nothing to do with the external social order, for in our external social order we have indeed stratified people, first according to their religious affiliations—which still play a role there, whereas in the real lodges, religious affiliations play no role—and second, one cannot claim that people in the external social order are brothers. They are not brothers. In the lodges—at least those who are members—they are brothers.

[ 18 ] But such things do have a certain real significance. It matters from what perspectives people are grouped into communities. If people are brought together into a community based on a shared creed, then in real life this is a community that, under certain circumstances, relies solely on external power—on dead power. If people are brought together on the basis that their creed is irrelevant, then this results in a community with a particularly strong spiritual power. That is why the Catholic Church has always had to prop up its power with political means, because it seeks to unite people—at least to some extent—under a certain uniform creed. It has always been all the more powerful the less people cared about creed, the less the hierarchy cared about it, and the less Rome cared about it. For in external life, in physical and social orders, to make creed the determining factor is to render it powerless. Only a community that attaches no importance to creed as such can be powerful.

[ 19 ] This is of particular importance in the age of empty rhetoric. For alongside public rhetoric stands, as it were, esoteric rhetoric—that of ceremony and ritual. And it is from these underlying currents that the social turmoil of the present day has, in truth, arisen. One can cite some very curious examples of the era’s tendency toward empty rhetoric. As you know, right up until the mid-19th century, the English Parliament was divided between a liberal party, the Whigs, and a conservative party, the Tories. The Whigs and the Tories stood opposed to one another. What did these labels actually mean? In the first half of the 19th century, these labels were, in essence, taken quite seriously. The liberals were called Whigs, and there was no need to be embarrassed by that; the others were called Tories, and there was no need to be embarrassed by that either. But when these terms first emerged in the dawn of the English Parliament, what did these two names actually mean? The name “Whigs” was a derogatory term. It originated as a slur. When a Scottish alliance formed in opposition to a certain measure of church discipline—which was frowned upon in Scotland—Scots banded together, and in England they were derisively called “Whigs.” So the phrase went so far that an official designation was gained by transforming a derogatory term into an official one. Just imagine how all this plays out in relation to reality. The reality was that the members of this Scottish alliance were called “Whigs” in England. Then it was the very venerable Liberals who were not derided as “Whigs,” but rather defined as such. And the Tories—that was a name that had come from Ireland. That’s what they called the supporters of Papism there in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then this name, which had been a derogatory term for the Irish Papists, became the common name for the English Conservatives. All of this took place in the realm of names, in the realm of designations, in the realm of rhetoric. Reality had nothing to do with it. This is an example, I would say, taken from the surface. But for this phenomenon, you can find the same phenomena everywhere—first in the English-speaking world, but then throughout the rest of the world, insofar as it was and is infected by it.

[ 20 ] But what is it, then, that causes so many people to come together for reasons that are certainly praiseworthy, just like the people who have joined together in the lodges? It doesn’t matter at all that a small number of rather dubious characters are also in the lodges. What matters is the principle. It is of great significance that people come together under the most effective principles, and that they come together in the ritualistic ceremony, in the ritualistic cult, which in turn provides these people with cohesion based on genuine spiritual foundations.

[ 21 ] The fact is that if someone—let’s say, a powerful minister—needs an undersecretary, he naturally prefers to appoint his brother Maurer rather than have to appoint just anyone else. This is even justified, because he knows him better and can work with him more effectively. There is even a justified tendency toward clique formation, which, given the circumstances in which it occurs, is not even unfavorable, but which must cease to operate in this manner.

[ 22 ] But what, exactly, is it that is emerging here? It is indeed strange that, precisely in this age of empty rhetoric that prevails in public life, a spiritual movement—a spiritual community with decidedly effective principles—should emerge! This spiritual community keeps itself quite secret—not so much in terms of its existence, but in terms of its actual inner impulse. Why is that, actually? Because we live in the age of empty rhetoric, and empty rhetoric allows realities to be falsified. For what is actually taking shape here? What is actually already there, when you get right down to it? Economic life, which has been set on its own and with which empty rhetoric no longer aligns; spiritual life, which is driven underground; and legal life, which strides along in a toga as mere empty rhetoric, carrying roughly the same significance for the outer world as jurisprudence does as the English judge sits in his judicial robes. Just as this judge’s robe relates to what is reality, so does jurisprudence relate to the reality that lies behind it. A threefold division in the realm of empty phrases, a threefold division in untruth—but proof of the necessity of the threefold division.

[ 23 ] You see, to advocate the threefold social order essentially means to replace lies and empty phrases with the truth—but the truth as reality—whereas in the present day we have entered an era in which reality is not the truth, but rather reality is the empty phrase and everything that depends on it. Of course, one can resort to empty phrases both in the spiritual world and in the legal and political spheres; it is only in the economic world that this does not work well. For there, on a large scale, what has been repeatedly objected to me in various public lectures—since events do, after all, always repeat themselves—comes into play. After I have explained how a person, by following what is said in my book *How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, comes to develop an inner perception of the spiritual world, of spiritual reality, someone always stands up during the discussion after every third lecture and says: “Yes, but how can one know that what one sees inwardly is a reality?” After all, there is autosuggestion. This whole spiritual world could just be autosuggestion! There is even the suggestion that if you merely think of lemonade, you have the taste of lemonade in your mouth; in that case, you are suggesting the taste of lemonade to yourself. You don’t actually have any lemonade there, but you simply think of lemonade, and you experience it as a taste.” — To that I always replied: “It all comes down to standing firmly in full reality. Certainly, you can suggest the taste of lemonade to yourself, but you cannot suggest the quenching of your thirst in this way through thoughts alone. Your thirst remains unquenched. — So if you go far enough, the matter inevitably leads to reality. You can have empty phrases in the realm of the spiritual; you can even have them in the realm of law and government, but you can’t really have them in economic life, because you can’t eat them—or at least they won’t fill you up.

[ 24 ] And so, in this age of empty rhetoric about “realities,” economic reality has actually lagged behind precisely in the most characteristic areas. And at the moment—I must say this once again—when people realize that the illusion is an illusion, that the phrase is just a phrase, a great sense of shame will arise: We humans live in such a way that we possess reason, yet we use this reason for nothing more than securing the economic foundations of physical life—something that animals manage to do even without reason. If we humans, through our reason, accomplish nothing more than securing our economic livelihood—food and everything else connected with physical existence—then we are indeed prostituting reason; then we need our reason to secure something that animals manage quite well without the luxury of reason. The moment this self-awareness sets in—that is, the moment the phrase is seen for what it is—a profound sense of shame will arise, followed by a turning point. Then will come the realization of the necessity to renew the spiritual world.

[ 25 ] But this must truly be prepared for in an appropriate way, by ensuring that a sufficiently large number of people see through the circumstances of the present. For what good does it actually do if people today delude themselves about what is real? What good does it do to believe in Lloyd George if one can see through the fact that everything that comes out of his mouth is necessarily nothing but empty rhetoric? What good does it do that the world idolized Wilson if one can see through the fact that Wilson’s entire policy was a policy of empty rhetoric? What good does it do to reflect on European conditions today based on principles that were inherited from ancient times over the course of centuries and can no longer be a force in today’s circumstances?

[ 26 ] One should also see symbols in historical events. One should be aware that strange things are expressed even in outward appearances. The Habsburgs—they originated in Alsace, moved eastward through Switzerland, farther and farther east. They reached their easternmost point when they became the apostolic kings of Hungary. But in this journey from the West to the East, there is a peculiar aspect: Western realities fade away in the East.

[ 27 ] The Hohenzollerns did not have to travel such a long distance—merely from Nuremberg to Berlin, but also from west to east. These historical signs are, after all, real symbols that one must take into account. And one must take into account what is today referred to as “reality.” That is why it is impossible today for anyone to extract a reality from what prevails in public opinion. Anyone today who has a sense of reality will inevitably come across some very strange things. One tries to examine what appears in public life—what is imitated and emulated all over the world: the Whigs and the Tories. People search for their origin—they were originally terms of derision, and it became necessary to take them seriously because one could not have found suitable, serious names for the realities that existed at the time. This is how it is for us today with so many things; with an immense number of things, this is how it is for us today. In public life today, we try to shroud words in a certain mystical obscurity, and we do not even realize it. We do not realize that we are living in the age of the cliché.

[ 28 ] For example, I know of a very interesting codex consisting entirely of compiled phrases. When you open this codex, you find sentences of a very peculiar nature, such as: What is law? — Law is the will of a people — and so it goes on. Yes, my dear friends: Law is the will of a people...! “People”—for people today, that is merely a sum of individual human beings. But this sum is now supposed to have a will! All the explanations given in this codex of phrases are of this sort. One gets the feeling that someone once indulged in the great luxury of translating everything that currently exists in public life into the language of clichés and publishing it as a code. And do you know what this “Code of Clichés” is called? *The State*, and its author is Woodrow Wilson. And this “Code of Clichés” was published in the 1890s. In the 1890s, Woodrow Wilson did not set out to compile all public clichés—but that is precisely what happened. What people think and say in their clichéd way has very little to do with what actually comes into being. In his view, Woodrow Wilson published the sum total of contemporary political wisdom—in reality, a compendium of nothing but clichés. A few years ago, a German was so fed up with the prevalence of clichés that he translated this thick book into German, so that it is now available in German as well. I assume it will be translated into other world languages as well, though I do not know for certain.

[ 29 ] Without seeing through these things, without facing the realities in them head-on, we won’t get anywhere today. Small thoughts won’t get us anywhere today. We need to spur our minds on to think big. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.