The Argument of the Book

The Church of the Holy Spirit argues eucharistic ecclesiology backwards from the way ecclesiology was ordinarily written. It begins not with Christ’s institution of a hierarchy but with the royal priesthood of every baptized Christian; it treats entry into the Church as an ordination; it derives every ministry, including the bishop’s, from the eucharistic assembly rather than over it; and it ends by asking whether the Church, as distinct from the empire, has any use for law at all. Eight chapters, and the order of them is the argument.

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

The Premise: Nothing in the Church Without the Spirit

The title is programmatic. Afanasiev’s governing claim is that the Church is constituted by the Spirit’s gifts and not by a juridical structure into which gifts are afterwards poured. Peter Phan summarizes the book’s premise in Afanasiev’s own terms: “Without the Spirit there is no life in the Church, no activity, no ministry; in short, there is no Church” (Peter C. Phan, review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Catholic Books Review, 2013, catholicbooksreview.org).

From this follows the book’s most consequential negative thesis: there is no such thing in the Church as a non-charismatic member and no such thing as a non-charismatic ministry. The ordained ministries are not an institutional order set against the charismatic order; they are themselves charisms. And the laity are not the unendowed remainder; they hold the charism of the royal priesthood. Everything else in the book is worked out from that double denial.

Afanasiev states the method in the foreword: the study is “an attempt to revise the history of primitive Christianity from the perspective of eucharistic ecclesiology,” with the result that “familiar facts then acquire new meaning and importance” and “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).

He is candid that this is a reconstruction offered as a norm, not a proposal to reverse history:

“As with all of history, that of the Church is irreversible. We cannot return to the time of early Christianity, not only because of radically changed historical conditions but also because the experience of the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the church, accumulated through the passage of time, cannot be laid aside. Nevertheless, the time of early Christianity remains an ideal for us, according to which we must check our ecclesial life.” (The Church of the Holy Spirit, 256–257)

That paragraph deserves to be read by anyone tempted to treat Afanasiev as a primitivist. He is not asking the Church to become the second century. He is asking her to use the second century as a measure.

The Eight Chapters

The Notre Dame edition, following the Russian, runs: a foreword by Rowan Williams; Michael Plekon’s editorial introduction; Afanasiev’s own foreword; then —

The Royal Priesthood
The Ordination of Laics
The Ministry of Laics
The Work of Ministry
“Those Who Preside in the Lord”
“The One Who Offers Thanksgiving”
The Bishop
The Power of Love

Phan’s judgment is that the first and last chapters “form the backbone” of the whole (Phan, review, 2013). That is right, and the shape is deliberate: the book opens on the priesthood of the whole people and closes on love as the Church’s ordering principle, with the entire history of the ministries suspended between them.

Chapters 1–3: The Royal Priesthood and Its Ordination

The opening move is to take 1 Peter 2:9 — “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” — and Revelation 1:6 as ecclesiological data rather than as devotional rhetoric. Every baptized and chrismated Christian is consecrated; there is no unconsecrated Christian.

Afanasiev then does something more startling. He reads the rites of Christian initiation as an ordination — the ordination of laics — arguing from the baptismal liturgy, the rites of ordination, and the eucharistic prayers themselves that all Christians are consecrated to a priestly ministry, and that the later habit of calling clerics “the consecrated” and laics “the non-consecrated” is a reduction of what the baptismal rites actually say. Chrismation is, in this reading, the rite by which a Christian receives the gift of the Spirit for service in the Church.

The consequence is a critique, not of the hierarchy, but of the separation of hierarchy from people. Afanasiev’s contention is that a liturgical distinction between laics and clerics — real, ancient, and proper — hardened into a separation between two classes of Christian, and that this separation is the root of what would later be called clericalism (The Church of the Holy Spirit, chs. 1–3; on the “liturgical distinction . . . turned into their separation,” see the passage discussed at Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame, “Actualizing Baptism: The Font of Lay Authority,” churchlifejournal.nd.edu).

The full treatment of these chapters, and of the separate 1955 book Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church], is in Section 06.

Chapters 4–6: Ministries, Presidency, and Thanksgiving

The middle chapters are the historical core, and the most technical. Afanasiev works through the New Testament and sub-apostolic vocabulary of ministry — apostles, prophets, teachers, “those who labour among you and are over you in the Lord” (1 Thess. 5:12), προϊστάμενοι, ἐπίσκοποι and πρεσβύτεροι — asking in each case what the term names in the concrete life of a eucharistic assembly.

The chapter titles are quotations, and the choice is itself an argument. “Those Who Preside in the Lord” and “The One Who Offers Thanksgiving” name the presiding minister by what he does in the assembly rather than by an office held above it. Afanasiev’s presiding minister — the proestos — is defined by presidency at the eucharist; every other function he exercises is derived from that one. Alexandrov puts the resulting figure precisely: “Afanasiev’s proestos is a more modest figure. His main role, from which all other functions derive, is . . . presiding the Eucharist. He occupies the place of Christ in the Lord’s Supper,” but Alexandrov doubts Afanasiev ever went so far as to call him an icon of Christ, and says he certainly never claimed that he “incarnated” his local church (Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 276).

That last sentence marks the real difference between Afanasiev’s book and the eucharistic ecclesiology that later displaced it. Both make the eucharist constitutive; they differ on how much weight the presiding figure carries.

Chapter 7: The Bishop

The bishop appears seventh — after the laity, after the ministries, after the presidency. This is not a demotion; it is a derivation. Afanasiev’s bishop is the proestos of the local eucharistic assembly, the one who offers thanksgiving in the midst of the royal priesthood and at its head, and whose authority is the authority of that place and not of a rank imported from outside.

Two features of the chapter matter for the later argument.

The bishop is internal to the eucharist, not added to it. Afanasiev is explicit that saying the eucharistic assembly is the principle of the Church’s unity does not exclude the bishop as the distinctive empirical mark of the local church, “because he is included in the concept of Eucharist” (Afanasiev, “Una Sancta,” 453; Tradition Alive, ed. Michael Plekon, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 14; discussed in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 238–239). Critics who charge him with an ecclesiology without a bishop are charging him with something the text denies.

The people are not passive at his making. Afanasiev gives great weight to the assembly’s part in the making of a bishop — the acclamations axios and amen, the ancient testimony of the people, the reception by neighbouring churches — as evidence that ordination is an act of the whole church and not a transaction among clergy. This is the point at which his royal-priesthood theology and his theology of ministry meet.

The developed treatment is in Ministries, Charisms, and the Bishop.

Chapter 8: The Power of Love

The closing chapter began life as a lecture of 1949 under the title “The Power of Love,” and became the last chapter of the book (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257). Phan describes its argument as a distinction between power and love as governing principles, with Afanasiev contending that juridical power is unnecessary in the Church “where perfect love dwells” (Phan, review, 2013).

This is Afanasiev’s most quoted and most attacked material, and also the most easily misread. He is not saying that the Church has no order. He says the reverse: “the very concept of the Church implies order,” and the canons belong to the Church’s nature (The Church of the Holy Spirit, 134; Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1993, 8–9; both cited in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257). What he denies is that the order proper to the Church is law in the sense the Roman and later Byzantine emperors gave that word — coercive, enforceable, effective independently of reception. Alexandrov’s summary is that by “order and canons” Afanasiev means law of a special sort, in which enforcement by violence has no place and a decision becomes effective only when received by all the parties concerned (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257).

That distinction, and the criticism it drew, is the subject of Section 07.

The Shape of the Whole

Read as a unit, the book makes a single claim in three movements. The Church is constituted by the Spirit’s gifts (the premise). Every member holds a gift, and the gift of the whole people is the royal priesthood exercised in the eucharist (chapters 1–3). Every ministry, up to and including the episcopate, is a gift for that assembly and is defined by its place in it (chapters 4–7) — from which it follows that what orders the Church is not a jurisdiction standing over the assembly but the love that constitutes it (chapter 8).

Anastacia Wooden’s formulation is the tightest available: Afanasiev’s ecclesiology “can be seen as an extended excursus into how the whole ecclesial organization was built to assure the exercise of the royal priesthood” (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 59). She adds the point that gives the book its edge for a modern reader: in the absence of visible mechanisms for exercising that priesthood, “our experience is absent, and the gifts given for it remain latent.”

Whether the historical reconstruction holds, and whether an ecclesiology so constructed can ground councils, primacy and canonical order, are separate questions. They are taken up in Section 05 and Section 09.

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. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church]. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1993.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church]. Paris, 1955; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1995.
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.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Phan, Peter C. Review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Catholic Books Review, 2013.
Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
“Actualizing Baptism: The Font of Lay Authority.” Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame (churchlifejournal.nd.edu).