Benedict Anderson says “...yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
What is an image of communion?
Communion can mean multiple things and has several associations with Christian traditions.
Derived from Latin communio it means to share in common, and is often translated as fellowship.
In Greek, it applies to a business partnership, comradely fellowship between friends, to community or society.
In the Bible, it applies to sharing or fellowship with God, fellow Christians, their sufferings, source of spiritual favors, evil deeds of others, bodily human nature.
A sharing of the same essential doctrines between a community and an individual.
Other words to describe communion are: unity, empathy, relationship, and association.
So to say that there is an image of communion in each person’s mind, is to say that each person mentally shares an idea or image of a relationship. In the case of America, each person has a communion with the country, so he or she has an emotional or theological relation to the idea of country.
So to ask what is a nation, one must ask to what the nation is relating to. One must know what brings the people together to know that the people are together in a partnership of theology.
Nicole, Nice job researching the different meanings of the word, "communion"... and I like your lucid explanation of what it might mean to have "an image of communion" in one's mind. You end with a great question: if a nation is defined by imaginary relationships, then what are those relationships and what brings people together?
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