Odessa, the Artillery, and the Evacuation

Nikolai Nikolaevich Afanasiev was born in Odessa in September 1893, entered the medical faculty of Novorossiysk University, abandoned medicine for mathematics after a year, and in 1915 was admitted to the Sergievskoe artillery officers’ school. He served as an artillery officer in the First World War and then in the Russian civil war, and left Russia in the evacuation of the Crimea in 1920. He was twenty-seven, had no theological training whatever, and would never see Russia again.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Birth and Family

He was born in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, in September 1893, to Nikolai Grigorievich Afanasiev and Praskovia Yakovlevna (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html; “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenary site of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, centenaire-archeveche.org).

[Disputed: the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya and the Russian-language reference literature give 4 September 1893, and this is the date carried by OrthodoxWiki and the standard English notices; the biographical article on the Archdiocese’s centenary site gives the day as uncertain, printing it as “30 (or 4?) September 1893.” The discrepancy is almost certainly an artifact of Julian/Gregorian conversion in émigré records rather than a substantive dispute; 4 September is the commoner figure and is used in this collection.]

His father, who died while Nicholas was still at the gymnasium, held the view — the centenary biography records it as a family conviction — that a Christian life should be spent in practical service, in medicine, in teaching, or in the priesthood (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). His son would eventually do all three, in that order.

Medicine, Then Mathematics

He finished the gymnasium in 1913 and entered the medical faculty of Novorossiysk University in Odessa (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”). He withdrew from medicine after the first year — the centenary biography attributes the withdrawal to his own poor health — and transferred to the physics-and-mathematics faculty (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org).

The mathematics mattered, and those who knew him said so. The Archdiocese’s biography records that mathematical training “left a strong imprint on his thinking: the subtlety of analysis, the clarity of thought” (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). Alexander Schmemann, writing his obituary, made a related observation from the other end of the life: that Afanasiev was “a man of one idea, or … one vision,” who pursued a single line with unusual singleness of purpose (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966; text at schmemann.org). The habit of reducing a problem to one axiom and following it wherever it goes is the intellectual signature of everything he later wrote — and, his critics would say, the source of his characteristic error (see The Critique).

The Artillery, 1915–1920

Mathematics was not finished either. In 1915 he was admitted to the Sergievskoe artillery officers’ school — the Sergius (Romanov) artillery school, which had been evacuated to Odessa — and was commissioned second lieutenant (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org). He served in coastal artillery in the First World War and then in the Russian civil war (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”).

That he “fought with the White Russian Army” is the standard English summary of these years, and it is accurate as far as it goes (English-language notices following Alexander Golitzin’s entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Theologians, 2002). What the Russian sources add is the specificity: he was a technical officer, in coastal batteries, of a generation of Russian students whose education was simply interrupted by five years of war. He left no memoir of the fighting and never made it into a public identity; unlike some of his émigré contemporaries he did not write about Russian politics at all.

The Evacuation of 1920

He left Russia in the evacuation from Sevastopol in November 1920, the general withdrawal of General Wrangel’s forces and the civilian population of the Crimea to Constantinople that ended the war in the south (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев,” which dates the emigration to 1920). The route — Crimea, Constantinople, then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — was the common one for the southern Russian emigration, and it was the route by which a very large part of the Russian Church’s intellectual class arrived in the Balkans; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov left by the same port two years later, in a different kind of expulsion (see The Founding of St. Sergius).

By the spring of 1921 he was in Belgrade (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org). The turn from artillery to theology happened there, and it happened fast: the newly founded theological faculty of the University of Belgrade, and the extraordinary community of Russian churchmen who had gathered around it, were what he found when he arrived (see Belgrade and Skopje).

What the Formation Left

Three things from these years are worth carrying into the theology.

He came to theology from outside it, and late. He had no seminary, no clerical family training, no formation in the Russian academies. He arrived at the discipline at twenty-eight with a mathematician’s habits and no professional deference to the received schemes of the Russian dogmatic manuals. His later willingness to say that a whole standing account of the Church’s structure was a historically conditioned development, rather than the given order of things, is not unrelated to that (see Two Ideas of the Universal Church).

He was a historian before he was a systematician. His first scholarly interests were the Church’s councils and the relation between imperial power and conciliar authority — that is, historical-canonical questions, not dogmatic ones (see Belgrade and Skopje and Canons and Canonical Consciousness). Viktor Alexandrov’s study argues that this is the decisive fact about him and the one most often forgotten: Afanasiev framed his own project as historical reconstruction of the earliest Christian ecclesiology, not as a dogmatic proposal, and the criticism directed at him has largely treated it as the latter (Viktor Alexandrov, Nicholas Afanasiev and His Eucharistic Ecclesiology, Moscow: St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute, 2018, in Russian; reviewed by Anastacia Wooden for the International Orthodox Theological Association, 2020).

He was permanently an émigré. Everything he wrote was written in exile, for a Church that had lost its state, its structures, and in the Soviet Union very nearly its visible existence. That an ecclesiology built on the local eucharistic assembly rather than on institutional apparatus should have come out of that experience is a point his interpreters have often made; it is a context, not an explanation, and Afanasiev himself argued the case on historical grounds and not autobiographical ones.

See Also

References

  • Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (online edition, pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). The authoritative Russian reference article: dates, education, military service, career, and full bibliography.
  • “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff.” Biographical article on the centenary site of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, centenaire-archeveche.org. Detailed biography from the archives of his own jurisdiction.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev.” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966. Text at schmemann.org.
  • Alexandrov, Viktor. Nicholas Afanasiev and His Eucharistic Ecclesiology. Moscow: St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute, 2018 (in Russian). ISBN 978-5-89100-194-7.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. Review of Viktor Alexandrov, Nicholas Afanasiev and His Eucharistic Ecclesiology. International Orthodox Theological Association, 1 June 2020.
  • Golitzin, Alexander. “Afanasiev, Nicholas.” In Biographical Dictionary of Christian Theologians. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.