Communion of saints

SANCTORUM COMMUNIO
spirits, as community of spirit and as spiritual unity. These
three forms are thus analogous also to the basic sociological data
which we saw formed the essential structure of every community.
Both analogies are of the greatest importance.
a. Multiplicity of spirits
The Holy Spirit of the church is directed as personal will towards
personal wills. It approaches each person in that person's singularity,
and leads him into 'loneliness'. The Holy Spirit makes the
members of his community lonely not only by what he claims,
but also by what he gives. Each one believes and experiences his
justification and sanctification in loneliness, each one prays in
loneliness, and each struggles through in loneliness to the certainty
of his eternal election; each one 'possesses' the Holy
Spirit, and in him also Christ, completely by himself. This
loneliness, however, is none of faith's doing, 38 but is willed by
God. 39 It is the individual's loneliness, which remains everywhere
preserved, inherent in man's structure as a creature.
The recognition of the person's structural singularity as a
creature and his ethical singularity finds expression in that idea
of the church which takes as its point of departure the deepest
individual Christian perception; namely, the predestinarian
idea.
From outside, the consequences of this idea seem to be the
dissolving of the church into a plurality of single predestined
persons. Scheler 40 is quite right in saying that from this viewpoint
the primal 'way to God' is that of the inmost person's intercourse
with him. This idea seems to contain a permanent
dissolvent of the idea of the church, for clearly
the individual
person perceives himself as something ultimate in God's sight;
all community seems to be shattered into its individual component
parts, and it is solely to these that God's will seems to bear
any relation.
Viewed logically, the concept of the numerus praedestinatorum
can define the range of this individualistic dissolution of the
concept of the church. But it has no content (it is the counter-
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