Priesthood, Tunisia, and the Later Years

Afanasiev was ordained deacon and priest by Metropolitan Evlogy in January 1940, ten years after joining the St. Sergius faculty. Evacuated from Paris that summer, he left Marseille for North Africa in November 1941 and served Russian parishes in Bizerte, Tunis, and Sfax until 1947 — the years in which The Church of the Holy Spirit was drafted, largely without a library. He returned to Paris, defended the book as a doctoral thesis in 1950, was made professor and later protopresbyter, chaired his archdiocese’s canonical commission and ecclesiastical tribunal, became rector of the Institute church in 1963, attended the last session of the Second Vatican Council, and died in Paris on 4 December 1966.

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

Ordination, January 1940

He was ordained deacon on 7 January 1940 and priest on 8 January 1940 by Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) (“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org; the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html, gives the priestly ordination as 8 January 1940). He was forty-six, had taught canon law for a decade, and had already published the essay that contains his whole later program. The order — the theologian first, the priest afterward — is worth noting in a man whose central argument is that the eucharistic assembly, not the professor’s chair, is where the Church exists.

He was ordained into Metropolitan Evlogy’s Western European archdiocese, which since 1931 had been under the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a temporary exarchate after Evlogy found himself unable to function under Moscow’s demands and unwilling to join the Karlovci Synod (Antoine Arjakovsky, The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940, trans. Jerry Ryan, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, ch. 1; and see The Founding of St. Sergius for the jurisdictional background, and Twentieth-Century Fragmentation for the wider pattern).

The War and Tunisia, 1941–1947

The Institute effectively dispersed in 1940. Afanasiev was evacuated with his family to the south of France and settled at Saint-Raphaël; in November 1941 he managed to leave on what the Archdiocese’s biography calls the last ship from Marseille to Tunisia (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”).

He spent the next six years in pastoral ministry among the Russian communities of French North Africa — the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya records service in Bizerte, Tunis, and Sfax from 1941 to 1947, and the Archdiocese’s biography records five years as rector at Bizerte, ministering in several languages (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org). Bizerte had a substantial Russian colony descended directly from the 1920 evacuation: the remnants of the Black Sea fleet had been interned there, and Afanasiev — himself an artillery officer of that evacuation — was pastor to the survivors of his own exodus.

Two things about this episode matter for the theology.

The book was written there, without a library. The Archdiocese’s biography records that he composed his major work during the exile with very limited resources (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). The Church of the Holy Spirit is a work of patristic and canonical scholarship written by a man who could not check most of his references; some of the unevenness later noted by critics has this as its background, and the manuscript was revised for the rest of his life (see The Book and Its History).

He became a parish priest for the first time. For six years he was not a professor of canon law but the presbyter of small eucharistic assemblies in North African port towns. The doctrine that the Church exists wherever the faithful are gathered for the eucharist under their presiding minister was written by a man doing precisely that, in circumstances where no other kind of ecclesial apparatus was available at all.

Return, and the Doctorate

He returned to Paris and to the Institute in 1947 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org).

The manuscript was submitted as a doctoral thesis under the title Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo [The Church of the Holy Spirit]. [Disputed: the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya gives the defense as 2 July 1950; the Archdiocese’s centenary biography gives 2 June 1950. Schmemann’s 1966 obituary dates the work itself to 1948 and notes that it earned him the doctorate but remained unpublished (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966). The year 1950 is not in doubt; the month is.] He was promoted to full professor after the defense (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

He was fifty-six, and the book would not be printed for another twenty-one years.

The Working Years, 1950–1966

The published work of the last sixteen years is the corpus we have. In quick succession came the two Paris books of 1952 — Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church], on Christian initiation, and Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper], the compact statement of the eucharistic assembly as the Church’s constitutive act — and in 1955 Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church] (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; see Where the Eucharist Is and The Royal Priesthood and the Ordination of Laics). The journal Pravoslavnaya mysl’, the Institute’s own review, carried the essays that fill out the system: “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church] (1949), “Tainstva i tainodeistviya” [Sacraments and Sacred Actions] (1951), “Apostol Petr i rimskii episkop” [The Apostle Peter and the Bishop of Rome] (1955), and “Kafolicheskaya Tserkov’” [The Catholic Church] (1957).

From the early 1950s he also wrote increasingly in French, for Catholic readers — in Irénikon (the Chevetogne review) and Istina (the Dominican ecumenical review) — and this is the body of work that made his name in the West: “L’Église qui préside dans l’Amour” in the 1960 Chevetogne collection La primauté de Pierre dans l’Église orthodoxe, the 1962 essay “Statio orbis” in Irénikon, and the 1963 “Una Sancta,” also in Irénikon (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; see Vatican II and Lumen Gentium).

Administratively he did what canonists do. He chaired the canonical commission and the ecclesiastical tribunal of the Russian exarchate in Western Europe, and from 1963 he was rector of the Institute church of St. Sergius (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”). He was raised to the rank of protopresbyter, the highest dignity for a married priest, by which title he is generally known in Russian and in the reference literature (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; and see Ecclesiology, which uses the title).

Vatican II and the End

In 1965 he was present at the fourth and final session of the Second Vatican Council — the details of his status there, which are more complicated than the popular account allows, are set out in Vatican II and Lumen Gentium. [Disputed: the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya records simply that he took part in the closing session; the Archdiocese’s centenary biography dates his attendance at the fourth session to 1966, which cannot be right, since the Council closed on 8 December 1965. Radu Bordeianu’s archival study places him and Paul Evdokimov at the fourth session in 1965 as guests of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, replacing Bishop Cassien (Bezobrazov) — Radu Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106, at 95.]

He died in Paris on 4 December 1966, aged seventy-three (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; centenaire-archeveche.org). The Archdiocese’s biography notes that the day was the feast of the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple — 21 November on the Julian calendar, 4 December on the civil one — and that he died without having seen his major works in print (centenaire-archeveche.org, “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff”).

Almost everything for which he is now known was published after this date: the posthumous Ekkleziologiya vstupleniya v klir (Paris, 1968), the Russian Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971), the French L’Église du Saint-Esprit (Paris: Cerf, 1975), the Meyendorff volume that put “The Church Which Presides in Love” into English (rev. ed. 1992), Church Councils and Their Origin (Moscow, 2003), and the English The Church of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame, 2007). The reception history is therefore, in an exact sense, posthumous — and the man most responsible for the reception was his own former student (see Alexander Schmemann).

See Also

References

  • Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (online edition, pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). Ordination, Tunisia 1941–1947, the 2 July 1950 defense, the professorship, the full bibliography, and the death.
  • “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, centenaire-archeveche.org. The 7–8 January 1940 ordinations, Saint-Raphaël, the November 1941 passage to Tunisia, Bizerte, the 2 June 1950 defense, the canonical commission, the 1963 rectorship, and the death of 4 December 1966.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev.” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966. Text at schmemann.org.
  • Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106.
  • Arjakovsky, Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940. Translated by Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper]. Paris: Religious-Pedagogical Cabinet of the Orthodox Theological Institute, 1952.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church]. Paris, 1952.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church]. Paris, 1955.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo [The Church of the Holy Spirit]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971.