“As for what my present position means, let me say only this: For me, at present, a genuinely and loyally united community which lives a coherent life, is, in a perfectly literal sense, a person. Such a person, for Paul, the Church of Christ was. On the other hand, any human individual person, in a perfectly literal sense, is a community. The coherent life which includes past, present, and future, and holds them reasonably together, is the life of what I have called a Community of Interpretation, in which the present, with an endless fecundity of invention, interprets the past to the future, precisely as, in the Pauline–Johannine type of theology, Christ, or the Spirit, interprets the united individuals who constitute the human aspect of the Church to the divine being in whom these members seek, at once their fulfilment, their unity, their diversity, and the goal of their loyalty. All this is a scrap of theology, which serves as a hint of what I have been trying to formulate in this recent phase, not merely of my thinking, but of my experience. I do not know any reason why this phase of my thinking should attract any other interest than what may be due to its actual relations to a process which has been going on in human thought ever since Heraclitus remarked that the Logos is fluent, and ever since Israel began to idealize the life of a little hill town in Judea.
“I stand for the importance of this process, which has led Christianity to regard a community not merely as an aggregate but as a Person, and at the same time to enrich its ideal memory of a person until he became transformed into a Community.
“The process in question is not merely theological, and is not merely mystical, still less merely mythical. Nor is it a process invented merely by abstract metaphysicians. It is the process which Victor Hugo expressed in Les Miserables when he put into the mouth of Enjolras the words, ‘Ma mére, c’est la république.’ As I write you these words, Frenchmen are writing the meaning of these words in their blood, about Verdun. The mother which is a republic is a community which is also a person, and not merely an aggregate, and not merely by metaphor a person. Precisely so, the individual patriot who leaves his home behind and steadfastly serving presses on in ardent quest of the moment
