Steiner's 1923 verdict on the Roman Mass: a genuine confluence of the ancient mysteries whose meaning died out, leaving a corpse that still holds enormous power.
The Mass as a Corpse in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's historical verdict on the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the Mass, given in Lecture II of the Course for Priests of the Christian Community (GA 345) at Stuttgart on 12 July 1923. Steiner did not call the rite false. He called it a synthetic confluence of all the corresponding cults of antiquity, deepened in the Christian sense, the one place where the ancient mysteries had genuinely flowed together. His charge was that comprehension of it died out from the third and fourth centuries onward, after which the rite propagated by tradition alone, was altered by men who came with the courage of non-understanding, and was finally sealed shut by the dying out of Latin as a living tongue. What remains is a Leichnam, a corpse: the body of something tremendously great, still carrying tremendous community-building power, yet no longer understood by those who celebrate it.
The Mass as a Corpse is the image Steiner set before the founding priests of the Christian Community to explain why he had given them a new rite rather than a repaired old one. The Roman Mass was not to be attacked. It was to be recognised as an inheritance whose language, and with it whose meaning, had already stopped speaking.
In Steiner's Own Words
Then, seemingly soon, people came with the courage of non-understanding and started to improve all kinds of things. Today, as a result, we have in the Catholic Mass sacrifice, something which gradually, simply through the dying out of language, has become fundamentally incomprehensible. It is celebrated in the old language, without it possibly bringing about understanding. One can regard this sacrifice of the Catholic Mass as a corpse, which is something unthinkably huge and powerful, yet still as a corpse possessing unbelievable power.
What it Means Today
Steiner made this diagnosis in July 1923. Nine years later a Benedictine monk of Maria Laach Abbey published the same thesis from inside the Church. Odo Casel's Das christliche Kultmysterium (1932), translated as The Mystery of Christian Worship, argued that Christian liturgy is not a memorial pageant but a real continuation of the ancient mystery cults, in which the saving act of Christ is made present rather than recalled. Casel's Mysterientheologie was received as dangerous by many Roman theologians for precisely the reason Steiner names: it required admitting that the rite once carried a knowledge, and that the knowledge had gone. Maria Laach became the engine room of the Liturgical Movement, and that movement eventually turned the second half of Steiner's diagnosis into official policy. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the sacred liturgy promulgated on 4 December 1963, opened the Mass to the vernacular, conceding that a rite nobody can follow has stopped teaching. Rome answered the language problem. It did not answer the comprehension problem, which was Steiner's actual charge.
Thalira synthesis: a corpse is not a lie, and that is what makes this verdict harder than either the Protestant charge of superstition or the traditionalist defence of unbroken continuity, because Steiner grants the Mass both its ancestry and its power while locating the loss in the celebrant's cognition rather than in the rite itself. The practical consequence for anyone standing at an altar is not to renovate the ceremony but to re-earn the understanding the ceremony once presupposed.
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