The Book and Its History

The Church of the Holy Spirit had one of the strangest publication histories of any major work of modern Orthodox theology. Drafted in wartime North Africa without access to a library, submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1950, revised for sixteen more years, and printed in Russian only in 1971 — five years after its author’s death — it reached French readers in 1975 and English readers in 2007. For four decades Afanasiev’s reputation rested on a book almost nobody had read.

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

Written in Exile

The Institute on the rue de Crimée dispersed in 1940. Afanasiev was evacuated to Saint-Raphaël, and in November 1941 left Marseille for Tunisia, where he served Russian parishes in Bizerte, Tunis, and Sfax until 1947 (“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html; and see Priesthood, Tunisia, and the Later Years).

The Archdiocese’s biography records that he composed his major work during these years with very limited resources (centenaire-archeveche.org). This is not a picturesque detail. The Church of the Holy Spirit is a book of close patristic and canonical scholarship — Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Hermas, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian, the Didache, the Apostolic Tradition, the early conciliar canons — written by a man who could not check most of his references and who was simultaneously running parishes in three port towns. Some of the unevenness his critics later noted has this as its background, and the manuscript was under revision for the rest of his life.

There is a second, less obvious effect. For six years the author of the claim that the Church exists wherever the faithful gather for the eucharist under a presiding minister was himself the presbyter of exactly such assemblies — small, poor, scattered, with no apparatus of any other kind available. Whatever one concludes about the history, the theology was not written in a seminar room.

The Thesis of 1950

He returned to Paris and the Institute in 1947 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”). The manuscript was submitted as a doctoral thesis under the title Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo.

[Disputed: the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya dates the defense to 2 July 1950; the Archdiocese’s centenary biography gives 2 June 1950. Schmemann’s 1966 obituary dates the composition of the work itself to 1948 and notes that it won him the doctorate but remained unpublished (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966). The year is not in doubt; the month is. Some later scholarship, following the internal evidence, dates the writing to the 1940s generally rather than to a single year.]

He was made full professor after the defense. He was fifty-six. The book would not be printed for another twenty-one years.

The unfinished second half. The thesis as Afanasiev conceived it was to have a sequel — a second volume under the title The Limits of the Church, whose schema included two chapters on St. Cyprian of Carthage. He never completed it (Anastacia Wooden, The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev, PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019, 378). This is an important qualification on the whole Cyprian question: the sustained treatment of Cyprian that his critics have wanted from him is the one part of the project he did not live to write, and the essays and asides that survive were never meant to carry the argument alone (see The Cyprian Thesis Contested).

The Companion: The Lord’s Supper, 1952

Two years after the defense Afanasiev published the short book that is in practice the reader’s way into the large one: Trapeza Gospodnia [The Lord’s Supper] (Paris: Religious-Pedagogical Cabinet of the Orthodox Theological Institute, 1952; reprinted Riga, 1992). Where The Church of the Holy Spirit argues eucharistic ecclesiology through the history of the ministries, The Lord’s Supper argues it directly, from the assembly and the meal.

Michael Plekon takes its keynote from Afanasiev’s own insistence that the eucharistic act 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). It is also the book in which Afanasiev poses, and declines to settle, the question of what counts as a local church under modern conditions — parish or diocese (Afanasiev, Trapeza Gospodnia, 63–64; Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 241).

The Lord’s Supper has still not been translated into English in full. A French version appeared as “Le Repas du Seigneur,” Contacts 68 (2016): 445–571. The absence of an English text is one reason the English-language debate about Afanasiev has been conducted so largely on the terms of his critics.

The same period produced the other short Paris books — Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church] (1952), on Christian initiation, and Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church] (1955) — which overlap substantially with chapters of the unpublished thesis (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

The Russian Editio Princeps, 1971

Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo was published at last in Paris by YMCA-Press in 1971, five years after Afanasiev’s death on 4 December 1966. This is the editio princeps: the first appearance of the book in any language, in its author’s own Russian, prepared posthumously.

[Corrected: several English-language descriptions of the book — including publishers’ catalogue copy still in circulation — state that it was “published posthumously in French in 1971.” This is wrong on the language. The 1971 Paris edition is Russian (YMCA-Press); the French translation came four years later.]

The French Translation, 1975

L’Église du Saint-Esprit, translated by Marianne Drobot, with a preface by Dom Olivier Rousseau of Chevetogne, appeared from Éditions du Cerf in Paris in 1975. It is the edition through which the book entered Western European theology, and the one that most Catholic scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s cites.

Rousseau’s preface makes two claims that have travelled widely and should be handled with care. He states that Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology shaped the conciliar texts on the local church and the priestly character of the laity, and that bishops at the Council were directed to read his works; and he suggests that Cyprian’s writings clouded the true ecclesiology of the early Church, spreading a juridical and hierarchical conception in East and West alike (Olivier Rousseau, “Préface,” in Afanassieff, L’Église du Saint-Esprit, Paris: Cerf, 1975, 8–10; cited in Radu Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 [2018]: 86–106, at 95 n. 39, and in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 134). The first is the earliest source for the strong version of the Vatican II influence story and is examined in Vatican II and Lumen Gentium; the second is Rousseau endorsing Afanasiev’s own contested reading of Cyprian, not independent corroboration of it.

The English Translation, 2007

The Church of the Holy Spirit, translated by Vitaly Permiakov, edited and introduced by Michael Plekon, with a foreword by Rowan Williams, was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2007 (ISBN 978-0-268-02042-2). It is the first complete English edition, and the one this guide follows for spelling and pagination.

The gap is worth stating plainly: forty-one years passed between Afanasiev’s death and the appearance in English of the book on which his reputation rests. For the whole of that period the English-speaking discussion of “Afanasiev” was conducted on the basis of five French and English essays, a summary in Schmemann, and a critique in Zizioulas. Anastacia Wooden makes this the ground of her plea for reassessment: potential students of Afanasiev arrived with “a preconceived notion of his supposed shortcomings before they even read his works,” and much of what people take themselves to know about him is in fact an inference from Zizioulas (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 56, 58).

Reception of the English Edition

The Notre Dame edition was received as the recovery of a major text. Peter C. Phan, reviewing it, described the book as eight chapters of which “the first and last form the backbone,” and found its pneumatological ecclesiology — “without the Spirit there is no life in the Church, no activity, no ministry; in short, there is no Church” — “fresh and apposite” for contemporary ecclesiology (Peter C. Phan, review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Catholic Books Review, 2013, catholicbooksreview.org).

Paul Valliere’s judgment in the Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is that Afanasiev is “the most original ecclesiologist of the Russian emigration” (Paul Valliere, “The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 660–676, at 664).

The Rest of the Posthumous Corpus

The book was not the end of the posthumous publication. In sequence:

Ekkleziologiya vstupleniya v klir [The Ecclesiology of Entry into the Clergy] (Paris, 1968; 2nd ed. Kyiv, 1997)
Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971)
L’Église du Saint-Esprit (Paris: Cerf, 1975)
The Primacy of Peter, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992) — carrying “The Church Which Presides in Love” into wide English circulation
Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin] (Moscow, 2003) — written c. 1936–1940
The Church of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame, 2007)
Tserkov’ Bozhiya vo Khriste: sbornik statei, ed. V. Alexandrov (Moscow: PSTGU, 2015) — the collected articles

(Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; and the editions themselves.)

The scholarly literature has followed the texts rather than preceded them. Aidan Nichols wrote the first English monograph in 1989, before the English translation existed (Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Viktor Alexandrov’s Russian study appeared in 2018, and Anastacia Wooden’s English introduction — Recovering the Eucharistic Ecclesiology of the Early Church: An Introduction to Nicolas Afanasiev, Studies in Eastern Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 9 May 2025) — only in the last year. On the evidence, the serious reading of Afanasiev has barely begun.

References

Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkov’ Dukha Sviatogo. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971.
Afanassieff, Nicolas. L’Église du Saint-Esprit. Translated by Marianne Drobot. Preface by Olivier Rousseau. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1975.
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, 1952; repr. Riga, 1992. French: “Le Repas du Seigneur,” Contacts 68 (2016): 445–571.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkov’ Bozhiya vo Khriste: sbornik statei. Edited by V. Alexandrov. Moscow: PSTGU, 2015.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106.
Nichols, Aidan. Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Phan, Peter C. Review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Catholic Books Review, 2013.
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.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Schmemann, Alexander. “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev.” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966.
Valliere, Paul. “The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, edited by Caryl Emerson et al., 660–676. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Wooden, Anastacia. The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev. PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019.
Wooden, Anastacia. Recovering the Eucharistic Ecclesiology of the Early Church: An Introduction to Nicolas Afanasiev. Studies in Eastern Christianity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2025.
Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (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.