Zizioulas and Afanasiev

Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev gave twentieth-century theology the phrase and the programme of eucharistic ecclesiology; Zizioulas gave it its systematic form and, in the same movement, its most consequential internal critique. This file states what Zizioulas took from Afanasiev, the four points on which he corrected him — the local and the universal, the grounding of conciliarity, the bishop against the presbyteral parish, and the ecumenical conclusion — and defers Afanasiev’s own case to the collection devoted to him.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

A Note on Scope

This file gives Zizioulas’ side. Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) — his life, his major work The Church of the Holy Spirit, his thesis about St. Cyprian and the birth of “universal ecclesiology,” his account of the royal priesthood, his conclusions about communion with Rome, and the criticism directed at him from several quarters — is treated at length in the sibling collection Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, which should be read for Afanasiev’s positions in Afanasiev’s terms. Nothing here is offered as a substitute for that, and where the two collections describe the same disagreement they are meant to agree.

What Zizioulas Took

The debt is large and Zizioulas acknowledged it. From Afanasiev and the Paris school he received:

The principle that the eucharist constitutes the Church, rather than the Church constituting the eucharist. The Church is not an institution that happens to celebrate; she is what she is in the celebrating.
The recovery of the local church. The community of a place, assembled, is the Church of God in that place — not a branch, a diocese-as-district, or an administrative subdivision.
The historical thesis that a rupture occurred, and that the Church’s later self-understanding is not simply identical with her earliest one. Afanasiev located the decisive turn in St. Cyprian of Carthage and the emergence of what he called universal ecclesiology; Zizioulas restated the observation in his 2005 interview with Gianni Valente, noting that Afanasiev “insists that universal ecclesiology is unknown in the ancient Church until Saint Cyprian” (Zizioulas, interview with Gianni Valente, “Where the Eucharist is, there is the Catholic Church,” 30Days, 8 July 2005).

Zizioulas’ 1965 Athens dissertation is, in one aspect, the historical labour Afanasiev’s thesis required and had not received in that form: a full examination of the ante-Nicene evidence for the unity of the Church in the eucharist and the bishop (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).

What Zizioulas Corrected

Zizioulas distanced himself from Afanasiev explicitly, most compactly in the Introduction to Being as Communion, where he sets out why the slogan “where the eucharist is, there is the Church” is, in his judgment, dangerous if left in Afanasiev’s form: it distorts the relation of local and universal (Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, Introduction and ch. 4; the divergence is analysed in the specialist literature, e.g. Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” and the same author’s survey “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Ecclesiology and Some of Its Orthodox Critics,” golubinski.ru).

The correction has four heads.

1. The universal Church must not be dissolved

Afanasiev’s insistence that the local eucharistic community is the Church in her fullness could be read — and by some of his readers was read — as leaving nothing for the universal Church to be except the sum of the local ones. Zizioulas accepts the premise and refuses the consequence. His device is the unity of identity: because each local church is wholly the Church, the churches are not parts, but neither are they separate wholes merely added together; they are the same Church, and their communion is the coincidence of identicals. On this account the universal Church is neither prior to the local churches (the error he ascribes to Roman ecclesiology) nor posterior to them as their aggregate (the error he feared in Afanasiev’s) (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 4, “Eucharist and Catholicity”).

He put the same point negatively: a eucharistic ecclesiology that ends in the self-sufficiency of the local community has arrived, by an Orthodox route, at a congregationalism — the very ecclesiology Orthodoxy has always rejected.

2. Conciliarity must be grounded, not merely permitted

This is the sharpest of the four, and the one Zizioulas’ defenders regard as decisive.

If the local church lacks nothing, why must there be councils? Afanasiev’s framework, his critics say, can explain why councils are possible and even useful, but not why they are necessary — and an ecclesiology that cannot ground synodality has failed at the point where Orthodoxy is most distinctive.

Zizioulas’ answer runs through ordination. A church cannot make its own bishop; the ancient canons require that a bishop be consecrated by bishops of other churches. Hence the constitution of any local church already involves the others, and communion is internal to catholicity rather than added to it. The council of bishops is then not a federation of independent churches but the way the one Church exists as many: the many heads assembled are the many churches being one. It follows that synodality is a matter of the Church’s being and not of her convenience — and, in the further step Zizioulas takes, that every synod requires a protos, a first, since a “many” without a “one” is as impossible in the Church as in the Trinity (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, chs. 4–6; and see Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34, where the argument is completed).

3. The bishop, not the presbyter; the episcopal assembly, not the parish

Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology, developed over decades, came to allow that the presbyter-led parish is a eucharistic community and therefore a church in the full sense. Zizioulas held that this cannot be right historically or theologically: the assembly of the ante-Nicene evidence is the assembly under the bishop, and the presbyteral parish is precisely the fourth-century development that obscured the eucharistic meaning of the episcopate. Where Afanasiev’s principle is “where the eucharist is, there is the Church,” Zizioulas’ is nearer to Ignatius’ own: where the bishop is, with his people, at one altar, there is the catholic Church (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, 1985; Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.2).

The difference has practical bite. On Afanasiev’s account the ordinary parish is already the Church entire; on Zizioulas’ it is a derivative form whose relation to the bishop must be maintained visibly, because the bishop is not merely its superior but the head whose eucharist the parish’s eucharist is.

4. The ecumenical conclusion he refused

Afanasiev’s best-known and most contested ecumenical inference — set out in his contribution “Una Sancta” (1963) — was that if the Church is where the eucharist is, then bodies possessing the eucharist are churches, and the Orthodox–Roman division is not a division between the Church and a non-Church. Zizioulas did not follow him there. His position is that the eucharist is not a self-standing token whose mere presence settles ecclesial status: the eucharist of a church is the eucharist of a community in the apostolic faith and in communion with the other churches, and to abstract the sacrament from faith and communion is to make it a thing rather than an event of communion.

Zizioulas was, by any measure, among the most committed Orthodox ecumenists of his century — he spent nearly forty years in the official dialogue with Rome (see Section 06). The point is therefore not that he was less ecumenical than Afanasiev, but that his eucharistic ecclesiology closes the short route to intercommunion that Afanasiev’s appeared to open. Afanasiev’s own argument, and the Orthodox debate about it, belongs to Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev and is not adjudicated here.

How the Two Are Usually Confused

Three confusions recur in the secondary literature and in popular summaries, and it is worth naming them.

“Zizioulas is Afanasiev with footnotes.” He is not. He rejects the local church’s self-sufficiency, grounds conciliarity where Afanasiev leaves it ungrounded, restores the bishop to the center, and refuses the ecumenical conclusion.
“Zizioulas rejected eucharistic ecclesiology.” He did not. He is its most systematic exponent; his criticism is internal, conducted in its own idiom, and aimed at securing it against consequences he judged false.
“The disagreement is about Rome.” It is not primarily. It is about whether communion is constitutive of catholicity — a question that would matter if Rome did not exist.

A Note on the Third Party

Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff stand between the two, and the lines of influence run in several directions: Schmemann’s liturgical theology and Meyendorff’s canonical work both presuppose a eucharistic ecclesiology, and both were engaged with the Afanasiev inheritance in the American context, where the ecclesiology bore directly on the 1970 autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in America. Zizioulas is sometimes grouped with Meyendorff by critics of eucharistic ecclesiology as holding that the Church attains her fullness wherever the eucharist is celebrated — a grouping he would have resisted for the reasons set out above (see John Meyendorff; on the American application, The Tomos of Autocephaly (1970)).

References

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. (Introduction and ch. 4 for the distancing from Afanasiev.)
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. Interview with Gianni Valente, “Where the Eucharist is, there is the Catholic Church.” 30Days, 8 July 2005.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Vitaly Permiakov, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Una Sancta.” (1963.) Trans. in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev”; and “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Ecclesiology and Some of Its Orthodox Critics.” golubinski.ru. (Specialist studies of the divergence.)
McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Smyrnaeans 8.2. Trans. J. B. Lightfoot.