03 — Eucharistic Ecclesiology

The thesis in his own terms: the Church of God exists wherever the faithful are gathered epi to auto — “in the same place” — for the breaking of bread under one who presides, and that assembly is not a fragment or a branch of the Church but the Church of God in her fullness. Afanasiev takes the phrase, the program, and most of the evidence from the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch and the Pauline epistles, and he reads them as the surviving deposit of an ecclesiology the Church later ceased to state, though it never ceased to enact.

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

Files in This Section

File Description
Where the Eucharist Is The formula and its sources: the eucharistic assembly as the empirical sign of the Church, epi to auto, the Ignatian texts, and The Lord’s Supper of 1952
The Local Church and Its Fullness Fullness, autonomy and independence; “one plus one is still one”; the plurality of local churches and the communion of love that binds them

The Discipline of This Section

This is Afanasiev’s ecclesiology, not the Church’s dogma. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, what follows is a modern theologian’s constructive proposal about how the Church understood herself in the first three centuries, and about how she ought to understand herself now. It is expounded here as fully and as sympathetically as the sources allow, and it is nowhere presented as the confession of the Orthodox Church. The Church’s own ecclesiological confession is set out in Ecclesiology, which also contains the repository’s summary of eucharistic ecclesiology and its critics.

The thesis and the history are separable. Afanasiev supported the eucharistic thesis with a historical reconstruction — that a rival “universal ecclesiology” displaced it, and that the displacement is traceable to St. Cyprian of Carthage. That reconstruction is contested, and it is treated separately in Section 05. A reader may find the eucharistic thesis persuasive and the Cyprian history unpersuasive, or the reverse; several of his critics do exactly that. This collection keeps them apart on purpose.

The formula is his, but it is one sentence among many. “Where the eucharist is, there is the Church” appears in his corpus, by Viktor Alexandrov’s count, exactly once — in the 1963 essay “Una Sancta” — and Alexandrov argues that reducing Afanasiev’s ecclesiology to that aphorism is precisely the misreading that has dogged him (Viktor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 238–240). This section therefore gives the formula, and then gives the argument the formula abbreviates.

See Also