The Local Church and Its Fullness

If the eucharistic assembly is the Church of God in her fullness, then the local church is not a province, a diocese of a larger organism, or a branch: it is the Church, entire. Afanasiev drew from this the theses that made him famous and made him suspect — that each local church is “autonomous and independent,” that all local churches are absolutely equal, and that in ecclesiology “one plus one is still one.” This file sets out what he meant by those words, and what he took to bind the many churches together in place of jurisdiction.

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

Fullness

The word doing the work is fullness — πλήρωμα. Afanasiev’s claim is that the fullness of the local church is not conferred on it from outside, by incorporation into a whole, but arises from within, from what it receives:

“As the Body of Christ, the Church manifests herself in all her fullness in the eucharistic assembly of the local church, because Christ is present in the Eucharist in the fullness of his body. This is why the local church possesses all the fullness of the Church.” (Afanasiev, “Una Sancta,” Irénikon 36, no. 4 [1963]: 452–453; English, Tradition Alive, ed. Michael Plekon, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 14)

Against this he sets what he takes to be the alternative account, on which “local churches do not possess fullness and unity; being parts of the Church, they together form the universal Church that possesses fullness and unity” (Afanasiev, “L’Église qui préside dans l’amour,” 13; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 61; summarized in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 123). To say that the local church is a part is, on Afanasiev’s reading, to say that the Body of Christ it receives is a part — and that he holds to be impossible.

The consequence he draws is arithmetical, and he states it as a joke that is not a joke: Euclid does not apply to ecclesiology. “‘One plus one is still one’ in ecclesiology. Every local church manifests the fullness of the Church of God because it is the Church of God and not just one part of it” (“L’Église qui préside,” 28; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 75).

Autonomy and Independence

The two words that have caused the most trouble are Afanasiev’s rendering of what he takes to be Ignatius’s presupposition: “every local church was autonomous and independent; autonomous for it contained in itself everything necessary to life; and independent by not depending on any other local church or bishop whatever outside itself” (“L’Église qui préside,” 26; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 73).

Read with modern ears, “independent” sounds like Congregationalism, and that is exactly the charge his critics have laid (see The Critique). Benjamin Safranski, who is otherwise critical of Afanasiev’s handling of Cyprian, insists that the word cannot bear the modern sense: for Afanasiev, independence “did not mean modern connotations of ‘separation,’” but that “each local church (each local Eucharistic assembly gathered around bishop) was literally ‘not dependent’ on the other; its status as the Church could not be withdrawn by any power or authority of itself and it did not derive that status by the allowance or sanction of Rome or any other Church” (Benjamin B. Safranski, “Nicholas Afanasiev and Episcopal Collegiality in Cyprian,” in St. Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018, 155–208, at 158).

This is a claim about the source of ecclesial status, not about isolation. A local church is the Church because Christ gives himself to it in the eucharist, not because a larger body has certified it. Whether that claim can carry the weight of conciliar and canonical order is the substance of the argument against him.

Equality, and the Absence of a Higher Church

From fullness follows equality. If every local church is the Church of God in her entirety, then no local church can be more the Church than another, and no local church can stand over another as a superior body. Afanasiev applies this with complete consistency, and it is the hinge of his treatment of primacy: a primacy of jurisdiction is impossible in eucharistic ecclesiology, not because jurisdiction is unpleasant, but because there is no larger ecclesial body for a jurisdiction to be exercised over. He distinguished terminologically between primauté — primacy in the juridical sense — and priorité, a non-juridical priority of witness which he was willing to grant, and he was candid that the distinction was a convention of his own devising (Afanasiev, “The Church Which Presides in Love,” rev. ed., 115–116; discussed in Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 256).

It is worth registering that he applied the same razor in the other direction. Afanasiev was a critic of autocephalism — the reorganization of Orthodoxy into a set of national churches each functioning as a self-contained universal Church in miniature — precisely because it reproduces at national scale the “universal” structure he objected to (Afanasiev, Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., Moscow: Palomnik, 1993, 17; Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 256–257 and n. 89). Readers who assume his ecclesiology is a charter for jurisdictional fragmentation have him backwards; so, Alexandrov argues, does the suggestion that his thought fed Orthodox ethno-nationalism.

Unity Without Subordination: What Binds the Churches

The obvious objection is that this leaves the churches with nothing to hold them together. Afanasiev’s answer is that they are held together by the same thing that constitutes each of them — the one eucharist — and that the mechanism by which the union is worked out is not jurisdiction but reception in love.

His account of unity in plurality is deliberately paradoxical:

“The plurality of local churches does not destroy the unity of the Church of God, just as the plurality of eucharistic assemblies does not destroy the unity of the Eucharist in time and space. In the Church, unity and plurality are not overcome: the one also contains the other. The unity of the Church in its empirical life is manifested by a plurality of local churches, and the plurality of local churches safeguards the unity of the Church of God in Christ.” (“L’Église qui préside,” 29; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 76)

The working machinery is reception. In the communion of churches, each recognizes the catholicity of the others, and the acts of one church are received by the rest. When a church tolerates an irregularity, the others may decline to receive its act — and Afanasiev insists that non-reception is not a punishment inflicted by a superior but “a fraternal admonition,” a desire to help a weaker church. If the admonished church corrects itself, peace is restored; if it will not, communion may rupture. But — and this is the sharp edge — the admonished church, in or out of communion, remains a church, because all local churches strive for the full manifestation of the Church of God without any of them achieving it perfectly (Afanasiev, “Una Sancta,” 457; Tradition Alive, 16–17; summarized in Saldanha, “Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” 129).

Two things follow, and both are consequential.

Councils are not a higher authority but a meeting of churches. Afanasiev worked this out in Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin], researched around his 1936 journey to England and published only in 2003 (see The Institute and the Canonist). He is willing to allow the regional council very considerable weight — “the [regional] council unites the assemblies of the church into an ecclesial region and represents the highest authority for all the assemblies within the region” — while denying that this subordinates any assembly to another: “within the region, however, each assembly remains independent — it is not subordinate to any other assembly. The catholic design of the supreme ecclesiastical body excludes the possibility of a singular supreme authority” (Afanasiev, Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie, Moscow: Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003, 168; quoted in Saldanha, “Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” 138 n. 70). He notes, drily, that Cyprian defended this thesis strongly — which is one of several places where his supposed adversary turns out to be on his side.

The boundaries of the Church become a eucharistic question. “The actual limits of the Church are determined by the limits of the eucharistic assembly” (“Una Sancta,” 453; Tradition Alive, 14). Afanasiev had been working this ground since his essay “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church], Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35 — an essay whose title deliberately echoes Georges Florovsky’s “The Limits of the Church,” Church Quarterly Review 117 (1933), which had argued that the charismatic limits of the Church do not simply coincide with her canonical limits. The intended second volume of Afanasiev’s doctoral project was itself to be called The Limits of the Church, and was never finished; its schema included two chapters on Cyprian (Anastacia Wooden, The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev, PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019, 378). Where this line of thought ended up is the subject of Section 08, and it is the most contested thing he wrote.

The Parish Question, Left Open

Afanasiev’s norm is drawn from a period before the local church had subdivided into parishes, and the obvious modern question — is the parish a local church in his sense, or the diocese? — is one he raised and did not answer. In The Lord’s Supper he proposed it as an open theological problem, noting that the modern parish differs significantly from the ancient local church (Afanasiev, Trapeza Gospodnia, Paris, 1952, 63–64; Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 241, 243).

Alexandrov, having gone through the corpus, reports that there are “two or three places” in Afanasiev that could be read as leaning toward calling the parish a catholic church, but that the position is nowhere clearly stated, and that neither Afanasiev nor Schmemann held it in the form later attributed to them (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 241–242; and see his fuller treatment in “Local Church in Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 63 [2019]: 384–394). This is a small point of bibliography with a large polemical footprint, and it is taken up in The Critique.

Where This Leaves the Reader

Stated at its strongest, Afanasiev’s local church is a community that is fully the Church, receives its status from Christ and not from any authority above it, is equal to every other such community, and is bound to the rest by eucharistic communion and the reception of one another’s acts in love rather than by jurisdiction. Stated at its most vulnerable, it is a Church with no visible principle of unity beyond mutual goodwill, and no way of saying what a council does.

Both statements are fair, and the argument between them is a live one. It is set out, with the names attached, in Section 09.

References

Afanassieff, Nicolas. “L’Église qui préside dans l’amour.” In La primauté de Pierre dans l’Église orthodoxe, 7–64. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1960. English: “The Church Which Presides in Love.” In The Primacy of Peter, edited by John Meyendorff, 57–110. London: Faith Press, 1963; rev. ed., 91–143. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Afanassieff, Nicolas. “Una Sancta.” Irénikon 36, no. 4 (1963): 436–475. English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive, 3–30. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper]. Paris, 1952.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church]. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow: Palomnik, 1993.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin]. Moscow: Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church]. Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Local Church in Eucharistic Ecclesiology.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 63 (2019): 384–394.
Florovsky, Georges. “The Limits of the Church.” Church Quarterly Review 117 (1933).
Safranski, Benjamin B. “Nicholas Afanasiev and Episcopal Collegiality in Cyprian.” In St. Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops, 155–208. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018.
Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology: The Rise of Eucharistic Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Wooden, Anastacia. The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev. PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019.