NOTES for Act 4:32-37
When reading the description of the early Christian community, today we notice first of all the common ownership of property that characterized it. Yet this was probably only one possible form of Christian communal life at that time. Some episodes in the Book of Acts make it clear that giving all one’s property to the Church was not compulsory; it was the personal, voluntary choice of someone joining the community. What was indispensable, however, was what the author of the book calls “one heart and one soul.” A community can exist without common property, but not without one heart and one soul, even if common property becomes a compulsory norm within it.
Indeed, what does it mean to be of one heart? In the Bible, the heart is the spiritual center of the human person, the spiritual “I,” the genuine center where the person begins, where the breath of life given by God touches human nature. It is here, in the heart, in the depths of the spiritual “I,” that the intentions are born which determine what a person will be before God and other people. The strength and, above all, the degree of awareness of each intention determine how pure and intense a person’s spiritual life will be. If every member of the community does not care for their heart in this sense, they destroy the community. If they do care for it, the community becomes a kind of school of spiritual life, not a theoretical school but a practical one.
Then the community acquires something like a single heart, because the intentions arising from every heart are directed toward one thing. Then “one soul,” or more precisely one shared life, also becomes possible. The Greek word used by the sacred author, like its Hebrew equivalent, denotes the soul as the stream of life in which we dwell and which at the same time flows through us. In this stream, the spiritual joins the natural, while its strength is given by God, who grants us life. As for the quality of the stream of life, whether the spiritual or the natural predominates within it, everything depends on us, on the intentions arising from our heart, from our spiritual “I.”
It depends on us what our life will be, both in spiritual purity and in spiritual intensity. It also depends on us who will be given access to our life. A true community is possible only when the stream of its life is one.
Every current, every individual life entering the common stream, must of course have the corresponding spiritual quality. Otherwise the common stream will become cloudy and dirty or disappear altogether. Yet such a common stream of life, a “common soul,” is an indispensable condition for the community’s existence. Property may or may not be held in common; that depends on the particular conditions and circumstances.
But the soul must necessarily be shared; otherwise the community disappears, even if all outward forms of communal life are preserved. The Christian community in Jerusalem possessed precisely such a common soul, behind which stood one heart. As long as this state of affairs endured, God’s breath moved freely within it and met no obstacle.