NOTES for Act 4:32
According to the testimony of the Book of Acts, the early Christian Church had to be a community, where the norm was, in particular, the commonness of properties. Several Christians (and not only them) subsequently tried to follow the ideal of the early Christians. For someone it succeeded better, and for another worse. But what motivated all these people? Indeed, the commonness of properties were practiced by the representatives of certain philosophic religious doctrines in pre-Christian times, not speaking about Jewish religious brotherhoods like the Essenes. What thus incited these so different people to give up their properties for the benefit of the community?
Very often main motive turns out to be the longing to the ascetic life, which impelled not only the Christian monks of the Middle Ages and the modern times, but also for example, the followers of Pythagoras, in the communities where the commonness of properties was also something if not compulsory, then apparently rather widely spread. Here the man was above all impelled by the desire to simplify at most his life, including as regards the economic and social links. By giving up the properties, man thus refused also the society, as well as what connected him to the society. Another case - the refusal of property in the context of the impending eschatological and apocalyptic perspective, as it was, for example, to the Essenes-Qumran.
Here played its role the assurance of the fact that the world is condemned to perdition because of its impurity, and can be saved only those belonging to the community of "pure" (under which the people of Qumran, of course meant themselves). Here the donation of the properties to the community was equivalent to the contribution in the construction of the only ark of salvation on earth, for which one regrets of nothing. But could the early Christian Church be guided by the ascetic or apocalyptic motives? Probably, no. For, it was not about the abstinence and not about the coming end, but about the life of the Kingdom. But here there was another, not less powerful stimulus: the very experience of life in the Kingdom.
Indeed, the Kingdom is possible only as a giving, the rejection of one’s partiality, the will to share everything that we have, in order to receive "everything" in the place of the little we give. Here to give means not refusing and not to lose, but to get and to receive. It is exactly the case when to divide means multiplying. And the commonness of properties is here not the realization of an ascetic or eschatological idea, but a natural continuation in the non transformed world of this life of the Kingdom, which one day, after the transformation, will become for it natural and organic.