Communion of saints

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS
concept of the person and the basic social relations that neither
should be somehow abstracted from empirical social structures.
But both must be conceived of quite generally, in order to be
applied to the special case of empirical relations with basic
social relations. Empirical relations extend across a social
realm, a group of social acts, which are not our immediate
concern. We are asking, rather, whether a person must necessarily
be thought of in relation to another person, or whether a
person is conceivable in an atomist fashion ; and this leads to the
question of what are the basic relations between persons. That is
why in our historical introduction we discussed the philosophical
background of each social theory, and not the history of the
social theories themselves.
In brief, we are dealing not with the
empirical fact of communities of will, and the specific sociological
problem of the interaction of wills, but with basic ontic relations
of social existence. Our problem, therefore, is the metaphysic
of sociality.
This part of our investigation is therefore not sociological, but
theological and philosophical. In this way we hope to find a
norm in these basic matters for empirical sociology. It is the
basic ontic relations which provide the norm for all empirical
social life.
church.
This is of the greatest significance for a concept of the
In thus presenting basic social relations from the standpoint of
Christian dogmatics we do not mean that they are religious ;
they
are purely ontic, but seen as such from the Christian perspective.
This provides us with the conditions for a positive presentation of
the philosophical basis of the Christian doctrine of persons and
basic relations. We must look for the scheme by which basic
Christian relations are to be understood.
We first ask whether the philosophical schemes are satisfactory.
The metaphysical scheme involves a basic overcoming of the
person by absorbing it into the universal. The epistemological
subject-object relation does not advance beyond this, since the
opposition is overcome in the unity of mind, in intellectual
intuition, but there is no distinction between the subject-object
and the I-Thou relation; but the latter is absorbed in the
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