Communion of saints

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS
person, and the intimate act towards his closedness. But it is
wrong to distinguish in the person an inaccessible, completely
isolated core and a completely open layer surrounding it. The
unity and the closedness of the whole person are presupposed
together with sociality. No Thou can be experienced except by
an I, which means that the Thou can never be experienced in a
purely epistemological context. Thus the only question asked in
idealist philosophy concerning the I and the Thou—the question
of Fichte concerning the synthesis of the world of spirits—is
wrongly put. For it proceeds from the assumption that I and
Thou can be thought of as entirely unrelated, and then questioned
about the point of unity, which somehow must exist.
The question
about the other soul, about being with the other, is not
sufficiently filled with the knowledge of the unity of all spiritual
happenings. The question starts with the individual, thought of
as isolated and somehow seeking connection with others. 13 So we
hold to our conclusion about the equilibrium between personal
and social being.
Does the social unity, then, extend beyond the personal interactions
In what way is this conceivable Or is it completely
contained in them In theological language, does God mean by
community something that absorbs individual man, or is God
solely concerned with the individual Or are the community and
the individual both willed by God as having their own significance
Is objective spirit nearer to God than subjective spirit, or
is it the other way round Or do both stand side by side beneath
God's will
If the equilibrium between social and personal being is to be
maintained, what meaning does the community acquire as a
metaphysical unity in relation to the individual We maintain
that the community can be understood as a collective person,
with the same structure as the individual person. To think of
the community as man on a larger scale,
modern organology, 14 that is,
rather in the style of
with the aim of subordinating the
individual to the whole, is an idea known since the time of Plato.
This subordination must be rejected, as contrary to the equilibrium
we have spoken of;
but the question remains whether,
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