02 — St. Sergius and the Paris Years

From March 1930 until his death in December 1966, Afanasiev belonged to the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute on the rue de Crimée: lecturer, then associate professor of canon law and Greek, then — after the doctoral defense of 1950 — full professor, and from 1963 rector of the Institute church. In between came ordination to the priesthood in January 1940, evacuation from Paris, and six years of parish ministry in Tunisia, where the book that made his name was largely written.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration; the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Western European exarchate)

Files in This Section

File Description
The Institute and the Canonist The rue de Crimée, the chair of canon law, the faculty around him, the 1936 research journey to England, and the students
Priesthood, Tunisia, and the Later Years Ordination in January 1940, the war, Bizerte and Sfax, the return of 1947, the doctorate of 1950, the canonical commission, and the death of 4 December 1966

The Discipline of This Section

A short life, mostly quiet. Afanasiev held one post for thirty-six years, published no large books in his lifetime, and left, as Schmemann said in his obituary, “no heavy volumes” (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966). The biography is thin because the life was. What it does contain — the war, the Tunisian years, the late doctorate — is reported from the documented record of his own jurisdiction and the Russian reference literature, with disagreements between them flagged.

Jurisdiction stated once, and it matters. From 1931 the Russian archdiocese of Western Europe under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) was received by the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a temporary exarchate. Afanasiev was therefore, from his ordination onward, a priest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s exarchate — not of the Moscow Patriarchate and not of the Russian Church Abroad. This bears directly on Section 08: when he attended the last session of the Second Vatican Council, he did so from within a jurisdiction whose ranking hierarch had not sent official observers, and his status there was correspondingly ambiguous (see Vatican II and Lumen Gentium).

See Also