From the fourth century to the twelfth, the Church carried the substance of Christianity in Latin alone, so the people received ritual without content.
Christianity Kept Secret in Latin in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the long withholding of Christian substance from ordinary Europeans between roughly the fourth and the twelfth centuries, set out in his lecture of 16 May 1921 at Dornach, published in English as European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325). The claim is precise. The doctrinal and scientific content of the faith travelled in the Latin tongue among clergy and schoolmen, while village congregations received only the outer ritual, the sacrifice of the Mass as symbolic rite. Steiner calls the result a stream flowing over the heads of men, and says this concealment ran deeper than the guarding of the ancient Mysteries, since nothing of the substance reached the masses at all. The bearer here is not a body but a language: Latin carried Christianity and the inherited science of antiquity together, out of common reach, until the fifteenth century.
Christianity Kept Secret in Latin names what Rudolf Steiner described on 16 May 1921 at Dornach: the Roman Church holding the substance of the faith in a language its congregations could not read. Grammar and rhetoric formed the clergy; the Mass, watched and not understood, formed everyone else. Two spiritual streams then ran side by side for a thousand years, one in the heads of men, one in their hearts.
In Steiner's Own Words
And from the fourth century A.D. onward Christianity is propagated in the Latin tongue. It is as it were a stream flowing over the heads of men. That goes on right up to the fifteenth century. For what history usually relates is only the outer form of what went on in the souls of men. Christianity was kept secret by those who taught at right up to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in a far deeper sense than the ancient Mysteries were kept secret. For only the outer ritual penetrated the masses. And what was transmitted, which at the same time laid claim to all science coming from the ancient culture and clothed it in the Latin tongue, this was the Church, something which hovered above the essential evolution of humanity.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this lecture in May 1921. Sixteen months later, on 16 September 1922 at Dornach, Friedrich Rittelmeyer and a group of young theologians celebrated the first Act of Consecration of Man and founded Die Christengemeinschaft, the Christian Community. Steiner had helped them shape the renewed ritual, and one decision was structural rather than decorative: the Act would be spoken in the congregation's own language. The sacrament he had just described as a symbol men watched without understanding was to become one they could follow word by word.
Rome arrived at the same question by a much longer road. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the first constitution of the Second Vatican Council, was promulgated on 4 December 1963 and opened the Roman liturgy to the vernacular after some sixteen centuries of Latin. Whatever one makes of the reform, it conceded in law the fact Steiner had named in 1921: the tongue of worship had stopped being the tongue of the worshippers.
Thalira synthesis: the Latin problem was never about Latin. A priesthood of vocabulary re-forms itself wherever the content that matters most is held in a register the listener cannot enter, and the current register is technical, not liturgical. The question Steiner leaves is not which language the Mass is in, but whether the substance of what governs a life reaches the person living it.
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