Sobornost and the National Particularity [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 7-17]

NATIONAL PARTICULARITY
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earlier, una sancta catholica et apostolica, the first and the third expressed
the meaning of sobornost. In his conflicts with the Donatist schism, Augustine had, in effect, subordinated the attribute "sancta" to the attributes
"una" and "catholica," arguing that the only context within which the
church as a body or the individual believer could strive for holiness was the
preservation of catholic unity. The repeated breakdown of this institutional
rationalization during the thousand years between Augustine and Hus
seemed to prove that more drastic measures were called for if the unity
and catholicity of the church were to be preserved and/or recovered: it
could not be "una" in a meaningful sense of the word unless it regained
the imperative of holiness, and its catholicity was not authentic sobornost,
but merely a juridical description, unless it restored the norm of apostolicity,
as defined in the apostolic Scriptures, to its proper and primary place.
Therefore the Czech Reformation was not, according to Hussite teaching,
an assertion of national particularity against sobornost, but an affirmation
of sobornost as this could be achieved through the reform of the church
within the Czech nation and then within the whole of the Western corpus
Christianum.
In a deeper sense, however, it was an error to identify the church
with the Western (or even with the Western plus the Eastern) corpus
Christianum. For the same Augustine who had defended the catholic unity
of the institutional church against the Donatist schismatics had also, both
against the Donatists and especially in his City of God, pointed beyond
any institutional church to the church as it was known to God alone, the
company of the elect or universitas praedestinatorum:
Let this City [of God] bear in mind that among her enemies there
lie hidden those who are destined to be fellow citizens, so that she
may not think it a fruitless labor to bear what they inflict as enemies
until they become confessors of the faith. So long, too, as she is a
stranger in the world, the City of God has in her communion, and
bound to her by the sacraments, some who will not eternally dwell
in the lot of the saints.9
In his most important theological work, De Ecclesia, Jan Hus, reworking material that he had received from John Wycliffe but giving it his own
special emphasis, revived this Augustinian definition of the church.~1 Many
people, therefore, were, according to Hus's teaching, "in ecclesia" who
were not "de ecclesia";1 this applied, moreover, alas to the pope himself.
The true church was the body of the predestinate, and in the fullest sense
of each of the four attributes listed in the Nicene Creed, only that true and
elect church could be said to be authentically una sancta catholica et
apostolica. Conversely, no jurisdictional dispute within the administrative
structure of the institutional church and no schism between a national