Page "learned" Paragraph 988

To derive Utopian communism from the Jerusalem Christian community of the apostolic age or from its medieval successors-in-spirit, the monastic communities, is with an appropriate shift of adjectives, misleading in the same way as to derive it from Plato's Republic: in the Republic we have to do with an elite of physical and intellectual athletes, in the apostolic and monastic communities with an elite of spiritual and religious athletes.

The apostolic community was literally an elite: chosen by Christ himself.

And the monastic communities were supposed to be made up of volunteers selected only after a novitiate which would test their religious aptitude for monastic rigors, their spiritual athleticism.