The Institute and the Canonist

Afanasiev came to the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris on a stipend in March 1930, lectured first on the sources of canon law, and from 1932 held the chair of canon law and Greek, which he kept for the rest of his life. He worked in a faculty that contained Bulgakov, Florovsky, Cyprian Kern, Kartashev, and Zenkovsky; he taught Schmemann, Meyendorff, and a generation of Paris students; and he made the driest subject on the timetable into the place where his ecclesiology was born.

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

The Rue de Crimée

The St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Serge) had opened in 1925 under Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) in a former German Lutheran church compound on the rue de Crimée in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris, bought for the Russian emigration in 1924 with funds raised largely through American Protestant philanthropy (Donald A. Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute, London: SPCK, 1954; 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).

In March 1930 the Institute awarded Afanasiev a stipend and brought him from Skopje (“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org). He lectured in 1930–31 on the sources of canon law; in 1932 he was made docent — associate professor — teaching canon law and Greek, under the general oversight of his old Belgrade teacher A. P. Dobroklonsky, who had a connection to the Institute (centenaire-archeveche.org; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html).

He never left. Apart from the war years he taught canon law at St. Sergius from 1930 until his death in 1966 — thirty-six years in a single chair (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

The Faculty

The concentration of talent in that small compound is one of the striking facts of twentieth-century church history, and Afanasiev worked inside it for his whole career. Alongside him taught Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, professor of dogmatic theology and from 1940 dean; Fr. Georges Florovsky, patrologist and architect of the “neo-patristic synthesis”; Fr. Cyprian (Kern), liturgist and patrologist, whom Afanasiev had known in Belgrade; A. V. Kartashev, church historian and former minister of the Provisional Government; and V. V. Zenkovsky, philosopher (Lowrie, Saint Sergius in Paris, 1954; Arjakovsky, The Way, 2013, ch. 1; Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

Two features of that environment shaped him.

The Institute was theologically divided and survived it. Bulgakov’s sophiology and Florovsky’s neo-patristic program coexisted on one staff through the crisis of 1935–37, when Bulgakov’s teaching was censured by Moscow and condemned by the Russian Church Abroad (see The Condemnations of 1935). Afanasiev belonged to neither camp. He is not a sophiologist, and there is no sophiological content in his ecclesiology; nor is he a neo-patristic systematician in Florovsky’s or Lossky’s sense, since his method is documentary and historical rather than a “return to the Fathers” as a dogmatic program. He was a canon lawyer with a historical question, working in a building where the loudest arguments were about something else.

The Institute was ecumenically porous. St. Sergius had continuous and serious contact with Roman Catholic scholars — with the Dominican ecumenical centre Istina in Paris and with the Benedictine monks of Chevetogne and their journal Irénikon — and with Anglicans through the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius (Radu Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 [2018]: 86–106, at 95). Afanasiev’s later French publications appeared in exactly these venues — Irénikon, Istina, the Chevetogne collections — and this is the mechanism by which a Russian canonist writing in Paris became known to the drafters of Lumen Gentium (see Vatican II and Lumen Gentium).

Canon Law as a Theological Discipline

The chair he held was the least glamorous on the timetable, and he transformed what it was for. Afanasiev’s contention — argued first in the 1930s and never abandoned — is that canon law is not a self-standing juridical system but the historically conditioned expression of an ecclesiology, so that one cannot read the canons rightly without knowing what doctrine of the Church they encode, and one cannot do ecclesiology honestly without reading the canons. The two programmatic essays are “Kanony i kanonicheskoe soznanie” [Canons and Canonical Consciousness], Put’ 39 (1933): 81–92, and “Neizmennoe i vremennoe v tserkovnykh kanonakh” [The Unchangeable and the Temporal in the Church’s Canons], in the Paris collection Zhivoe predanie: Pravoslavie v sovremennosti (1937), 92–109 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; and see Canons and Canonical Consciousness).

It was from inside this discipline that the ecclesiology came. The first full statement of the two-ecclesiologies thesis is an article of 1934 in Put’, “Dve idei vselenskoi tserkvi” [Two Ideas of the Universal Church], Put’ 45 (1934): 16–29 — four years after his arrival, and written by a lecturer in canon law (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; see Two Ideas of the Universal Church).

England, 1936

In 1936 he made a research journey to London and Oxford, supported by Bulgakov and by Metropolitan Evlogy, to work on the origins of the Church’s councils (“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org). The trip belongs to the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius world of Anglican–Orthodox contact in which St. Sergius was heavily invested in the 1930s, and it produced the research that became Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin], written c. 1936–1940 and published only in 2003 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

The Students

His most consequential student was Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983), who studied at St. Sergius from 1940 to 1945 and taught there until 1951 before going to St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York (see St. Sergius and the Paris School). Schmemann took the eucharistic principle and turned it in a different direction — into liturgical theology proper, an account of what the Liturgy is and what happens in it, rather than a settlement of questions about primacy and canonical order (see Liturgy as Theology). That transposition is the main channel by which Afanasiev’s idea reached the English-speaking world, and it reached it altered: readers of For the Life of the World have met Afanasiev without knowing it, and have met a version of him with the canonical edge taken off.

John Meyendorff (1926–1992) also belongs to the St. Sergius generation that formed around this faculty, and it was Meyendorff who edited the English The Primacy of Peter, in which Afanasiev’s most consequential essay appears (Afanasiev, “The Church Which Presides in Love,” in The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, ed. John Meyendorff, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992, 91–143; see John Meyendorff).

Schmemann’s obituary is candid about what Afanasiev was and was not as a writer: his strength lay in “short and scholarly essays” rather than in treatises, and beneath a manner that could be dry and technical there was, Schmemann wrote, “a hidden fire, a truly consuming love for the Church” (Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” 1966). It is a fair description of the corpus. The great book was in a drawer.

References

Lowrie, Donald A. Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute. London: SPCK, 1954.
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.
Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (online edition, 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.
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.
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Kanony i kanonicheskoe soznanie.” Put’ 39 (1933): 81–92.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Dve idei vselenskoi tserkvi.” Put’ 45 (1934): 16–29.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Neizmennoe i vremennoe v tserkovnykh kanonakh.” In Zhivoe predanie: Pravoslavie v sovremennosti. Paris, 1937, 92–109.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “The Church Which Presides in Love.” In The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, edited by John Meyendorff, rev. ed., 91–143. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.