“O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord”: so begins Thomas Cranmer’s collect for All Saints’ Day, in the traditional form as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer (1979). The feast celebrates the saints, encompassing both the New Testament idea that all Christians are called to be saints (1 Cor. 1:2), as well as the insight that the faithful departed of exceptional virtue ought to be commemorated. Cranmer’s collect sounds both notes.
This prayer has much to commend it, not least in its focus on the communion of saints. The collect underscores the emphasis by doubling up on communion and fellowship, English words that both translate the Greek word koinonia. As J.N.D. Kelley writes (Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. 1972), the communion of saints has two main lines of interpretation. In the Christian East, the emphasis lands on God’s gifts, on the sharing of the “holy things for the holy” found in the invitation to Communion in Orthodox liturgies. In the Catholic West, where the phrase finds a place in the Apostles’ Creed, the principal reference is to the fellowship of God’s people.
Communion, whether the emphasis is on sharing the gifts or on the fellowship, naturally suggests communication. In the life of the world to come, God will be seen and known: “for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). St. John adds that in this life, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). St. Augustine takes a step further by positing that in the kingdom of God, the minds and hearts of each of the redeemed will be open and accessible to the rest of the company in a way not possible now. Communication will be perfected.
In so theorizing, Augustine was building on deep-seated convictions about friendship and the nature of human life. “Every human being is part of the human race, and human nature is a social entity, and has naturally the great benefit and power of friendship” (The Excellence of Marriage 1.1, trans. Kearney). In friendship, we trust those whose hearts we cannot see (Faith in the Unseen 3). Nevertheless, Augustine believed that the life of the saints was social, and without that quality the City of God could not reach its goal (The City of God 19.5). It is the very opaqueness of our communication with each other in this life, the fact that hearts and minds are not open, that undercuts peace and renders judgment uncertain (The City of God 19.5-6).
While discussing the vision of God in the world to come, Augustine raises another possibility. Perhaps God will be seen through the possession of “an intellectual quality, a power to discern things of an immaterial nature.” Augustine doubts this could be proven by reference to Scripture. Then he adds:
An alternative suggestion is easier to understand: perhaps God will be known to us and visible to us in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each one of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself; he will be seen in the new heaven and the new earth, in the whole creation as it then will be; he will be seen in every body by means of bodies, wherever the eyes of the spiritual body are directed with their penetrating gaze. (The City of God 22.29, trans. Bettenson)
Then the implications for the communion of saints become clear:
The thoughts of our minds will lie open to mutual observation; and the words of the Apostle will be fulfilled; for he said, “Pass no premature judgements,” adding immediately, “until the Lord comes. For he will light up what is hidden in darkness and will reveal the thoughts of the heart. And then each one will have his praise from God.” (1 Cor. 4:5; The City of God 22.29)
Then a parallel idea from roughly the same period, in Augustine’s Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, again with reference to 1 Corinthians 4:5:
For we mortals do not know the hearts of other mortals. But then “the Lord will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God” (1 Cor. 4:5), because each will praise and love in his neighbor what God has illuminated, so that it may not be hidden from him. (Enchiridion 32.121, Harbert trans.)
In both instances, Augustine contemplates the perfection of communion in a particularly intense way. Not only are all hearts and minds open to God, but they are also open to the citizens of the kingdom, who see God in the mirror of hearts and minds. In the City of God, communication between the elect will be complete. The result will be praise and love.
Yet the kingdom of God is not simply a matter of transparency. Patrick Ness, in his 2008 novel The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first of the Chaos Walking trilogy), gives us a world in which communication is complete and catastrophic. Ness posits a world, distant in space and time from Earth, and settled by human beings who fight a genocidal war with the autochthonous inhabitants. In the meantime, they have contracted from the natives a virus that makes them the involuntary recipients of every thought of the people with whom they come into contact. The surviving settlers call this effect “Noise.”
As you might imagine, “Noise” is a plague, distorting every interaction and virtually destroying sociability. Ness paints a picture of social chaos, a kind of counter-kingdom in which the unfiltered imagination holds sway. The novel, published four years after Facebook launched and two years after the founding of Twitter, can be seen as a prescient commentary on the baleful effects of social media, in which non-curated thoughts and even raw hostility are projected into the world. Our world is becoming “noisy” like Ness’s fiction.
Ness’s book helps underscore the true nature of the City of God. What separates his fictional world from the life of the kingdom is the disciplined and perfected will of the communion of saints. Augustine writes:
… [H]e wants his disciples to be one in him, because they cannot be one in themselves, split as they are from each other by clashing wills and desires, and the uncleanness of their sins; so they are cleansed by the mediator that they may be one in him, not only by virtue of the same nature whereby all of them from the ranks of mortal men are made equal to the angels, but even more by virtue of one and the same wholly harmonious will reaching out in concert to the same ultimate happiness, and fused somehow into one spirit in the furnace of charity. This is what he means when he says “That they may be one as we are one.” (John 17:22; The Trinity 4.12, trans. Hill)
In this world, our wills are in conflict. We are not one in our desires, but it will not always be so. Our hearts and minds are not open to one another, but that will not be the case in the life to come. Love is the binding matrix in which the sinful become the saints, one in heart and mind. There will be one harmonious will; one ultimate happiness; one charitable spirit. In the kingdom, as our prayer says, we are knit together in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of Christ our Lord.
