05 — Eucharistic Ecclesiology
Zizioulas is the second great name in twentieth-century eucharistic ecclesiology and the one who gave it systematic form: the local community gathered for the eucharist under its bishop is the catholic Church, whole and not partial, and the communion of such churches is a communion of identicals rather than of parts. This section states that ecclesiology in its mature form, and then does the thing most summaries omit — it sets out precisely how Zizioulas differs from Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, from whom the programme came and whose version he judged unsafe.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church | Catholicity as a qualitative predicate; the bishop as head of the assembly rather than administrator of a territory; the unity of identity; ordination as relation; the awkwardness of the parish and of the titular see |
| Zizioulas and Afanasiev | What he took, what he corrected, and why: the local/universal problem, the grounding of conciliarity, the bishop against the presbyteral parish, and the ecumenical conclusion he refused to draw |
The Shape of the Argument
Zizioulas’ ecclesiology has one premise and three consequences.
The premise is historical and was established, to his satisfaction, in the 1965 Athens dissertation: in the first three centuries the Church of a place was the assembly of that place gathered for the eucharist under one bishop, and this assembly was called “the catholic Church” because the whole Christ, not a portion of Him, was present in it (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001; see Section 02).
The three consequences:
- Catholicity is qualitative. A local church is not a province of a worldwide organization but the one Church, present in a place, lacking nothing.
- The bishop is constitutive, not administrative. He is the head of the assembly because he presides at its eucharist; his office is not a jurisdiction laid over the community but the community’s own structure.
- Communion is a relation of identity, and it is necessary. Because each local church is wholly the Church, they cannot relate as parts of a whole; but neither can any of them be the Church in isolation, since the very act that constitutes a local church — the ordination of its bishop by bishops of other churches — is an act of communion. Catholicity therefore requires the council.
The third consequence is where Zizioulas parts from Afanasiev, and where his ecclesiology becomes an argument about primacy and conciliarity that runs directly into Section 06.
The Relation to Afanasiev, Stated Once Here
Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) of the St. Sergius Institute in Paris is the author of the phrase and the programme of eucharistic ecclesiology; Zizioulas is its systematizer and its most consequential critic. The two are constantly conflated, and the conflation obscures a real and stated disagreement. Afanasiev’s own thought — his life, his major work The Church of the Holy Spirit, his thesis about St. Cyprian and “universal ecclesiology,” his conclusions about communion with Rome, and the criticism directed at him — belongs to the sibling collection and is treated there at length: see Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev. What this section does is state Zizioulas’ side of the argument in his terms, and it defers Afanasiev’s own case to Afanasiev’s own guide.
The Caveat That Governs This Section
The Orthodox Church confesses one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; she confesses the eucharist and the episcopate; the hub file Ecclesiology states that confession as hers. Eucharistic ecclesiology in the form given it by Afanasiev and Zizioulas is a twentieth-century theological programme, widely influential and nowhere dogmatized, and its reconstruction of the ante-Nicene evidence is contested by competent historians. Where this section expounds Zizioulas’ account, it expounds it as his.
See Also
- The Argument of the First Three Centuries — the historical foundation
- The Argument of the Book — chapters 4–6 of Being as Communion
- Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev — the sibling collection
- Ecclesiology — the Church’s teaching, stated as hers
- The Divine Liturgy — the assembly this ecclesiology describes
- St. Ignatius of Antioch — the patristic anchor
References
- Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. Trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
- Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985.
- Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Vitaly Permiakov, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
- McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.