05 — Cyprian and Universal Ecclesiology

This section sets out a contested historical thesis, and labels it as Afanasiev’s throughout. His claim is that the models of the Church found in Christian history reduce to two — a “eucharistic ecclesiology” in which each local assembly is the Church in her fullness, and a “universal ecclesiology” in which the Church is one worldwide organism of which local churches are parts — and that the second is not the original, but supplanted the first, its first clear expression being the writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage. That reconstruction has been criticized by Catholic and Orthodox scholars alike, and defended by others. It is his thesis; it is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church.

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

Files in This Section

File Description
Two Ideas of the Universal Church The 1934 Put’ essay and its mature form: the two types, Cyprian’s episcopatus unus est, the Roman-imperial derivation, and why Afanasiev thought universal ecclesiology entails primacy
The Cyprian Thesis Contested §4.2 — Camelot, Nichols, Zizioulas, Miltos, Safranski and the objections; Wooden, D’Aloisio and Alexandrov in reply; and what Afanasiev did and did not actually claim

The Discipline of This Section

§4.2 governs this section entirely. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the “two ecclesiologies” reading of Cyprian is a live scholarly dispute. Both files name proponents and critics, give their arguments in their own terms, and adjudicate nothing. Nowhere in this collection is Afanasiev’s reconstruction stated as fact about St. Cyprian.

Consistency with the Cyprian collection is deliberate. The repository’s own treatment of St. Cyprian — The Contested Ecclesiology, De Unitate, and The Primacy Text — presents Cyprian as a saint claimed simultaneously by Roman primatial theology and by Orthodox conciliar ecclesiology, and notes that Afanasiev and Meyendorff are among those who read his episcopatus unus est as the classic patristic statement of collegial rather than papal unity. That is not a contradiction of this section: it is the other half of Afanasiev’s relation to Cyprian, and this section says so. Afanasiev used Cyprian against Rome on primacy while blaming Cyprian for the conception that made Roman primacy thinkable.

St. Cyprian is a canonized saint and hieromartyr of the Church. Afanasiev’s criticism is directed at a conception he ascribes to Cyprian’s writings, not at Cyprian’s holiness, and Afanasiev himself calls him an ideal image of a bishop. This collection follows him in that, and would follow the Church in it regardless.

See Also