The Christianity the Goths carried west without passing through Rome, still steeped in dreamlike ancestral clairvoyance rather than in settled ritual.
Arian Christianity in Anthroposophy is the Christian stream that travelled west with the Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Herules along a road that did not pass through Rome, and that was taken up into the ancestral cults and the cults of place those tribes already carried. Rudolf Steiner describes it in the second lecture of European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325, Dornach, 16 May 1921), where he sets Wulfila, the Gothic translator of the Bible, against Augustine as the two representative figures of the fourth century. Steiner's point is not the doctrinal quarrel over whether the Son is of one substance with the Father, which he calls the less important thing. What marks Arian Christianity is that Christ entered a spiritual life still lived as dream and picture, interpreted by priests for each person, and not yet hardened into symbol and rite. It names the road Christianity took when it stayed close to inner experience.
Arian Christianity is the name Steiner gives to the Christianity of the migrating Germanic tribes, absorbed into ancestor worship and local cult rather than into the Roman Mass. Its distinguishing mark, in his reading, is temperature rather than doctrine: a Christ met inwardly, in dreamlike clairvoyant experience that the tribal priests interpreted, before the fourth-century turn from a religion of time to a religion of place set ritual in its stead.
In Steiner's Own Words
I have described how the ancient ancestor-worship lived on, rolling over from the east upon the declining Roman Empire. In the “Our Father” of Wulfila we see that in these nomadic peoples Christianity was absorbed into the ancestral cults and the cults connected with locality. And that constitutes the essence of Arian Christianity. The dogmatic conflict in the background is not so important. The important thing for this Arian Christianity, which traveled with the Goths and the other German tribes from the East towards the West by a path which did not lead through Rome, is that in it Christianity becomes steeped in a living spiritual life which has not yet reached the stage of ritual, that is closely related to the dream experience, to the clairvoyant experience, if you will not misunderstand the expression.
What it Means Today
Herwig Wolfram, the Vienna medievalist whose History of the Goths reached English readers in Thomas J. Dunlap's translation for the University of California Press in 1988, arrived at a conclusion that sits oddly close to Steiner's. Wolfram's Goths do not adopt Arianism because they have weighed Arius against Athanasius. They receive it as the form Christianity happened to wear when it reached them, then keep it because it marks them off as a people, a Traditionskern carried by a leading kindred and held distinct from the Catholic provincials they had come to govern. Sixty-seven years before that translation, Steiner told a Dornach audience the same thing in a single line: the dogmatic conflict in the background is not so important.
Thalira synthesis: where Wolfram reads the Gothic creed as a mark of peoplehood, Steiner reads it as a mark of consciousness, and the two readings need each other, because a creed can hold a tribe together only while that tribe still meets religion inwardly, in pictures, through priests who interpret a man's dreams rather than administer a rite for him.
The use of the term is diagnostic: when a movement is remembered by the doctrine it lost on, the record may be preserving the winner's filing system rather than what was actually lost.
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