Where the Eucharist Is

Afanasiev’s central claim is that the Church has an empirical sign, and that the sign is the eucharistic assembly: the faithful gathered epi to auto, in one place, for the breaking of one bread, under one who presides. Everything else in his ecclesiology — the royal priesthood, the ministries, the bishop, the councils, the critique of canonical juridicism — is derived from that assembly rather than added to it. This file sets out the formula, the texts he built it on, and the compact 1952 statement of it in The Lord’s Supper.

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

The Question He Was Asking

Afanasiev did not begin as a dogmatic theologian, and he was insistent that he was not one. He described himself as “a historian, almost exclusively a historian” (in conversation with the Jesuit Bernhard Schultze; Schultze, “Ekklesiologischer Dialog mit Erzpriester Nikolaj Afanas’ev,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 33 [1967]: 388, cited in Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 57). He never taught dogmatics or ecclesiology; he taught canon law (see The Institute and the Canonist).

The question that produced the ecclesiology was accordingly a historian’s question, and it arose from a mismatch. Working on the councils, the ministries, and the canonical sources of the first three centuries, Afanasiev found that the material did not fit the ecclesiological scheme with which it was ordinarily read — a scheme in which the Church is one worldwide body and each local community a province of it. His response was methodologically unusual and made his name: rather than force the data into the scheme, he proposed that the scheme itself was a later acquisition, and that the early Church had operated with a different self-understanding. He put the point cautiously — “in the history of Christianity there were a number of ecclesiologies, which without being necessarily mutually exclusive, were still different enough to provide a different interpretation of historical facts” (Afanasiev, “Apostol Petr i rimskii episkop,” in Tserkov’ Bozhiya vo Khriste, ed. V. Alexandrov, Moscow: PSTGU, 2015, 424; quoted in Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 57).

He then stated the program of the whole enterprise in the foreword to his major book:

“My study is an attempt to revise the history of primitive Christianity from the perspective of eucharistic ecclesiology. . . . Familiar facts then acquire new meaning and importance. . . . Ecclesial history will look different because we will be viewing the Church’s history in a manner radically different from that to which we were accustomed.” (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. Vitaly Permiakov, ed. Michael Plekon, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, 7)

The Formula

The sentence for which he is quoted is:

“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 . . . the Church is where the eucharistic assembly is.” (Afanasiev, “Una Sancta,” Irénikon 36, no. 4 [1963]: 452–453; English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 14; quoted and translated in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology: The Rise of Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 126–127)

Two observations belong here at once, because almost every misunderstanding of Afanasiev turns on them.

First, the logic runs from Christology, not from sentiment. The premise is that Christ is not divided and is not partially present in the eucharistic gifts. If the assembly receives the whole Body of Christ, then the assembly is the whole Body of Christ; it cannot be a fraction of the Church, because there is no fraction of Christ for it to receive. The argument is a syllogism about the eucharist, not an enthusiasm about congregations.

Second, the formula is a summary, not a slogan. Alexandrov, who has read the corpus in Russian more completely than anyone, notes that the crisp phrase “where the eucharist is, there is the Church” occurs in Afanasiev’s works, so far as he can find, only in “Una Sancta,” and that in the very passage from which it is taken Afanasiev is visibly trying out several formulations at once — “the Church abides where a eucharistic assembly is,” “a distinctive empirical feature of the Church is a eucharistic assembly,” and, crucially, “by claiming that a eucharistic assembly is the principle of the unity of the Church, we do not exclude the thesis . . . that a distinctive empirical feature of the local church is a bishop because he is included in the concept of Eucharist” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” 238–239, quoting “Una Sancta”). The bishop is not an afterthought smuggled in later. He is inside the definition from the start.

Epi to auto

The phrase Afanasiev treats as technical is the New Testament’s ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό — “in the same place,” “together,” “as one” — used of the first community in Jerusalem and of the Corinthian assembly (Acts 2:1, 2:44, 2:47; 1 Cor. 11:20; 14:23). For Afanasiev this is not a description of seating but the earliest name for the eucharistic gathering itself, and therefore the earliest name for the Church in her concrete, visible existence. Anastacia Wooden argues that Afanasiev’s whole enterprise is best characterized not as a theory about the relation of local to universal but as “an ecclesiology of the eucharistic assembly” aimed at “the restoration of the meaning of ‘gathering together as a Church’” — beginning with the liturgical life of local assemblies and only then extending outward to the relations among them (Wooden, “Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanasiev and Its Ecumenical Significance: A New Perspective,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45, no. 4 [2010]: 543–560).

This matters for reading him. The centre of gravity of Afanasiev’s work is not the polemic against Rome or the argument about primacy; those are consequences. The centre is the assembly, and what the assembly does.

The Ignatian Grounding

Afanasiev’s principal patristic witness is St. Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 107), and he says so: eucharistic ecclesiology is “derived from the Pauline writings as well as the writings of the apostolic age, especially from the letters of Ignatius of Antioch” (Afanasiev, “L’Église qui préside dans l’amour,” in La primauté de Pierre dans l’Église orthodoxe, Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1960, 27; English, “The Church Which Presides in Love,” in The Primacy of Peter, ed. John Meyendorff, London: Faith Press, 1963, 75; rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992, 91–143).

The texts he leans on are the familiar ones. Ignatius knows one eucharist, one altar, one bishop: “Take care, then, to use one eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup for union with his blood, one altar, as there is one bishop” (Philadelphians 4). He knows the assembly as the place where the Church is: “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church” (Smyrnaeans 8.2). And he addresses churches as wholes, not as branches. From these Afanasiev draws the principle he states as Ignatius’s own: “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).

The repository’s own Ignatius collection states the necessary caution, and this collection endorses it: this is a modern theological reading of Ignatius, not a paraphrase of him. Ignatius supplies the texts; Afanasiev — and after him Zizioulas — builds from them an ecclesiology answering questions about local and universal that Ignatius never posed (see Unity Around the Eucharist and Monepiscopacy). Aidan Nichols, the first English monographer, devoted two long articles to auditing precisely this appeal to the Fathers and concluded that Afanasiev’s use of them is selective in ways he was not always candid about (Aidan Nichols, “The Appeal to the Fathers in the Ecclesiology of Nikolai Afanas’ev: I. From the Didache to Origen,” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 2 [1992]: 125–145; “II. From Cyprian to Denys,” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 3 [1992]: 247–266).

The Lord’s Supper, 1952

The compact statement of all this is Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper], published in Paris in 1952 by the Religious-Pedagogical Cabinet of the Orthodox Theological Institute — a short book, and the one place where the eucharistic argument is made directly rather than through the history of ministries (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). A French translation appeared much later as “Le Repas du Seigneur,” Contacts 68 (2016): 445–571; there is still no complete English edition.

Michael Plekon, who has done more than anyone to bring the book to English readers, takes its governing note to be the togetherness of the eucharistic act — his essay on it is titled from Afanasiev’s own insistence that in the assembly it is “always everyone and always together” (Michael Plekon, “‘Always Everyone and Always Together’: The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicholas Afanasiev’s The Lord’s Supper Revisited,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 [1997]: 141–174). Alexandrov singles out the same feature — the table fellowship of the eucharist, the meal character of the assembly — as the element most distinctive of Afanasiev and most absent from later eucharistic ecclesiologies, Zizioulas’s included (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” 274).

The Lord’s Supper also contains the honest admission that his historical norm does not map cleanly onto modern arrangements. Afanasiev there raises as an open theological problem what, under present conditions, should count as a local church — the parish, or the bishop’s diocese — and does not settle it (Afanasiev, Trapeza Gospodnia, Paris, 1952, 63–64, discussed in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” 241). The point is worth flagging early: the charge most often laid against him, that he made the parish a catholic church, is a charge about a question he explicitly left open.

What the Formula Is Not

Afanasiev is not saying that the Church appears on Sunday morning and disappears when the people go home. Alexandrov identifies this as a vulgarization that later polemic made almost standard, and rejects it: Afanasiev’s account of the identity of Church and eucharist is “definitely more subtle,” and includes the bishop, the presbyterium, the ministries and the reception of one church’s acts by another as internal to the concept (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” 239–240).

Nor is it a claim that the local church may do as it likes. That is the subject of the next file.

References

Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Translated by Vitaly Permiakov. Edited by Michael Plekon. Foreword by Rowan Williams. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper]. Paris: Religious-Pedagogical Cabinet of the Orthodox Theological Institute, 1952. French: “Le Repas du Seigneur,” Contacts 68 (2016): 445–571.
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: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time, 3–30. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Nichols, Aidan. “The Appeal to the Fathers in the Ecclesiology of Nikolai Afanas’ev: I. From the Didache to Origen.” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 2 (1992): 125–145; “II. From Cyprian to Denys.” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 3 (1992): 247–266.
Plekon, Michael. “‘Always Everyone and Always Together’: The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicholas Afanasiev’s The Lord’s Supper Revisited.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 (1997): 141–174.
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. “Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanasiev and Its Ecumenical Significance: A New Perspective.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45, no. 4 (2010): 543–560.
Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya [Orthodox Encyclopedia], s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (pravenc.ru/text/77064.html).