Belgrade and Skopje

Afanasiev enrolled in the newly founded theological faculty of the University of Belgrade in the spring of 1921, studied church history under the Russian émigré scholar A. P. Dobroklonsky, helped found the Brotherhood of St. Seraphim of Sarov, and completed his degree in 1925. He married in Prague the same year and spent the next five years teaching religion in a girls’ gymnasium in Skopje in Serbian Macedonia, working on the origin of the Church’s councils in his own time. The Belgrade years supplied his teachers, his method, and his subject.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Belgrade Faculty

The theological faculty of the University of Belgrade had been founded only in 1920, and in its first years it was staffed and populated to a remarkable degree by the Russian emigration, which the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had received with unusual generosity. Afanasiev enrolled in the spring of 1921, within months of the evacuation (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html; “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org).

His principal teacher was A. P. Dobroklonsky (1856–1937), the Russian church historian, professor at Novorossiysk University before the revolution and at Belgrade after it, and the author of the standard pre-revolutionary Russian handbook of church history. Afanasiev worked under his direction and remained his student in method: Dobroklonsky’s discipline was documentary and historical, and Afanasiev’s later ecclesiology is built on historical claims about the second and third centuries, argued from texts (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

The Belgrade years also brought him into contact with the men who would define the Russian religious emigration. The Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya names Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), V. V. Zenkovsky, and Fr. Cyprian (Kern) among those in whose circles he moved in these years — a range that runs from the most creative to the most conservative pole of the emigration (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org). He was among the founders of the Brotherhood of St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Belgrade student religious society out of which a good part of the émigré theological generation came (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

He completed his degree in 1925 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966, which states that he graduated from the Belgrade faculty in 1925).

[Disputed: the standing of his Belgrade research is reported inconsistently. English-language notices, following OrthodoxWiki and the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Theologians, describe him as taking a doctorate at Belgrade — one gives 1927 and a dissertation on state power and the ecumenical councils; the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya and the Archdiocese’s biography describe him as completing his degree in 1925 and continuing doctoral research on the councils privately during the Skopje years, with the doctorate itself finally taken at St. Sergius in 1950 on a different work. The 1950 St. Sergius defense is firmly documented (see Priesthood, Tunisia, and the Later Years); the Belgrade degree’s exact grade is not. This guide treats 1925 as the completion of his Belgrade studies and 1950 as the date of his doctorate.]

The Councils

The subject he chose then he kept for fifteen years. His first published article, in the Paris journal Put’, was on the ecumenical councils (“Vselenskie sobory,” Put’ 25, 1930: 1–16), and the large study he worked on through the 1930s was Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin], written c. 1936–1940 and published only in 2003 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев,” which lists both).

The question that occupied him was not what the councils decided but how the institution of the council arose at all — what it presupposed about the relation of local churches to one another, and how far the imperial power shaped its form. That is a historical and canonical question, and it is the question out of which eucharistic ecclesiology came: if the local church is complete in itself, what kind of act is a council of many local churches, and where does its authority come from? He never abandoned the problem; his 1953 essay on “the unsuccessful church district” (Neudavshiisia tserkovnyi okrug, Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 9, 1953: 7–30) is still working on it (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; see Canons and Canonical Consciousness).

Marriage

In 1925 he married, in Prague, Mariamna Nikolaevna Andrusova, daughter of the geologist and Academician Nikolai Andrusov and — through her mother — granddaughter of the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). Marianne Afanasieff was later his collaborator; the posthumous publication of his works in Russian and French, including the 1971 Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo, was carried through by his family and colleagues after his death (centenaire-archeveche.org). Like most married Orthodox priests of his generation in the emigration he was ordained after, not before, his marriage — fifteen years after, in his case.

Skopje, 1925–1930

From 1925 to 1930 he taught religion in a girls’ gymnasium in Skopje, in what was then Serbian Macedonia (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”). Some accounts describe the post as teaching at the Serbian Orthodox seminary in Skopje; the Russian reference literature specifies the gymnasium, and the two descriptions are not necessarily exclusive (Alexander Golitzin, “Afanasiev, Nicholas,” Biographical Dictionary of Christian Theologians, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

These were five years of provincial schoolmastering with scholarship done in whatever hours were left. They ended in March 1930, when the St. Sergius Institute in Paris awarded him a stipend and brought him to France (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). He was thirty-six. Everything he is known for was written in the thirty-six years that followed, and almost all of it in a single building on the rue de Crimée (see The Institute and the Canonist).

What Belgrade Gave Him

Three inheritances are worth naming.

A historian’s method. From Dobroklonsky he took the conviction that ecclesiological questions are settled, or at least constrained, by evidence about what the early Church actually did. He read Scripture, the Apostolic Fathers, the early canons and the early liturgical texts as a historian reads sources, and the eucharistic ecclesiology is presented as a finding about the second century, not a preference about the twentieth (Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, 1989; Alexandrov, Nicholas Afanasiev and His Eucharistic Ecclesiology, 2018).

A canonist’s problem. The councils question set him permanently on the ground where dogmatics, history, and canon law meet — which is exactly where his chair at St. Sergius would be.

The émigré network. Bulgakov, Zenkovsky, and Cyprian Kern, all met or first heard in Belgrade, were his Paris colleagues within a decade (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; and see The Founding of St. Sergius).

See Also

• Odessa, the Artillery, and the Evacuation — how he arrived in Belgrade
• The Institute and the Canonist — Paris from 1930
• Canons and Canonical Consciousness — the canonical work that grew from the councils project
• Sergius Bulgakov — the senior figure of the emigration he first met in Belgrade

References

• Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (online edition, pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). Belgrade enrolment in spring 1921, Dobroklonsky, the Brotherhood of St. Seraphim, the 1925 degree, Skopje 1925–1930, and the full bibliography.
• “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, centenaire-archeveche.org. The 1925 marriage to Mariamna Andrusova; the March 1930 St. Sergius stipend.
• Nichols, Aidan. Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Alexandrov, Viktor. Nicholas Afanasiev and His Eucharistic Ecclesiology. Moscow: St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute, 2018 (in Russian).
• Schmemann, Alexander. “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev.” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966. Text at schmemann.org.
• Golitzin, Alexander. “Afanasiev, Nicholas.” In Biographical Dictionary of Christian Theologians. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.
• Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Vselenskie sobory” [The Ecumenical Councils]. Put’ 25 (1930): 1–16.
• Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin]. Moscow, 2003. Written c. 1936–1940; published posthumously.