LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
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ever, one important difference: a nation, unlike an individual, does not
usually anticipate its own demise.
The fourth aspect of collective national "personality" is body: the
nation's territory, the natural particularities of its landscape, and the
physical artifacts that have reshaped it. A counter-example which imme–
diately springs to mind is the case of the Jews, who survived for so long
without a land of their own. But they had their substitute for body: their
religious identity. This was what ensured their distinctness throughout all
the centuries of life in the diaspora. In the past, Jewish religious and eth–
nic identities were virtually indistinguishable, and the Jews would surely
not have survived as a distinct ethnic community without their religious
identity, their laws and their rituals, to support and distinguish them.
The fifth element essential to national identity is a nation's awareness
of its origins-of an identifiable beginning at some point in time. Every
nation has myths that testify to this, legends about founding events or
ancestral figures to which the origins of the nation can be traced. Some–
times these events and figures cannot be precisely located in time, but
this does not matter. It is enough that they represent an
exordium tem–
poris-a
beginning of the nation's historical time.
These five elements through which the collective "person" can iden–
tify itself are also clearly visible in the way in which religious bodies
define themselves. In no religious body is continuous identity so firmly
established as in the Catholic Church. The same five elements which
make up personal and collective identity are also present in its constitu–
tion. This is partly because of its high degree of institutionalization,
unequalled by any other religious community.
In the case of the Catholic Church, the idea which most closely cor–
responds to that of substance is the idea of the Church as a
corpus mys–
ticum-as
the bride of Christ. Just as the idea of substance is not an
empirical one, so this, too, is unverifiable: it is a question of faith. But
it is essential to the preservation of the idea of the Church, the
Ecclesia,
as a charismatic body established by God and deriving its legitimacy
directly from divine intervention in human history-an intervention
more momentous than any except the act of Creation itself. And the
church as a mystical body owes its unblemished purity and sanctity not
to the impeccable moral conduct of its members, but to its divine origin
and mission. This is why, for example, St. Augustine's battle against the
Donatist heresy was so important; if the validity of the sacraments
depended on the moral qualities of priests, or the perfection of the
Church on the perfection of the faithful (as the Pelagians thought), the
identity of the Church body would soon have been destroyed. The
