The Cyprian Thesis Contested

A §4.2 file. Afanasiev’s reading of St. Cyprian has been contested for seventy years, by Catholic patrologists, by Orthodox theologians, and by scholars of Cyprian himself. This file names the critics, states their objections in their own terms, gives the replies of Afanasiev’s defenders, and adjudicates nothing. It also states what Afanasiev did and did not claim — because a good part of the dispute turns out to be about that.

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

The Shape of the Dispute

Afanasiev’s thesis has three separable parts, and the criticism attaches to them unevenly:

That there are two distinguishable conceptions of the Church, one that locates fullness in the local eucharistic assembly and one that locates it in a worldwide whole.
That the second displaced the first, and is not the primitive conception.
That the second’s first clear expression is Cyprian, and that Cyprian derived it from the Roman imperial model.

Almost nobody rejects (1) outright. The argument is over (2) and, above all, over (3).

The Critics

Pierre-Thomas Camelot, OP (1957) is the earliest published objection. Camelot argues that Cyprian remained faithful throughout to Scripture, and that his Roman education and Roman cast of mind neither influenced nor altered his theology of the Church — that is, he denies Afanasiev’s causal claim about the empire (P.-Th. Camelot, “Saint Cyprien et la primauté,” Istina 4 [1957]: 421–434, at 424 n. 4).

Aidan Nichols, OP conducted the most sustained audit of Afanasiev’s use of the Fathers, in two long articles and then in the first English monograph. On Cyprian he makes several distinct objections.

On the imperial derivation, he sides with Camelot and adds two arguments of his own: that Cyprian, like his fellow North Africans, is more likely to have shared an instinctive dislike of Roman imperial power than to have taken it as a model, and that he had lived through two persecutions — under Decius and under Valerian — which would have left him with a bitter memory of the Roman state (Aidan Nichols, “The Appeal to the Fathers in the Ecclesiology of Nikolai Afanas’ev: II. From Cyprian to Denys,” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 3 [1992]: 247–266, at 248).
On catholicity, he argues that Cyprian did not deny the catholicity of the local church, provided it was articulated within the universal Church, around the chair of Peter occupied by all the bishops in concord; that Cyprian’s conception of the episcopal ministry tends rather to reconcile the local and universalist aspects of the Church; and that at the end of his life Cyprian stated clearly that each local church is the whole Church, in the sense that the one and whole Church of Christ is entirely present in each of them, since each is united to the rest (Nichols, “Appeal to the Fathers II,” 247, 249–251).
On the juridicization charge, he notes that Cyprian’s images of the Church are not only the body but the mother, the root, the bride, the house of God — images foreign to a juridical conception (Nichols, “Appeal to the Fathers II,” 254–255).
More broadly, Nichols regards Afanasiev’s historical method as limited (Nichols, “Appeal to the Fathers II,” 263–264).

John Zizioulas objects that Afanasiev misreads catholica ecclesia in Cyprian: the term in Cyprian refers to the local church of Carthage, not to a worldwide body, so it is hard to accept that Cyprian founded the universal conception or drew his church-organization from the empire (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001, 126; Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985, 156 n. 59). This objection is worth noting carefully: it comes from inside eucharistic ecclesiology, and its effect is to make Cyprian a witness for the eucharistic conception rather than against it (see The Critique, and John Zizioulas).

Benjamin Safranski treats episcopal collegiality in Cyprian at book length and argues against Afanasiev’s construal of it, while being unusually careful to state fairly what Afanasiev meant by the “independence” of local churches (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).

Amphilochios Miltos attacks the framing itself: his article’s title argues that the ecclesiology of St. Cyprian presents “a false dilemma between the universal and eucharistic perspectives” (Amphiloque Miltos, “L’ecclésiologie de saint Cyprien de Carthage: un faux dilemme entre les perspectives universelle et eucharistique,” Contacts 262 [2018]: 201–224).

Michel Stavrou raises the same family of objections in his survey of the reception of Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology (Michel Stavrou, “L’ecclésiologie eucharistique du Père Nicolas Afanassieff et sa réception,” La Pensée orthodoxe 9 [2012]: 7–25, at 15–16).

Joseph Aryankalayil, in a comparative study of Afanasiev and J.-M. R. Tillard, devotes a section to the difficulties in the Cyprian reading (Joseph G. Aryankalayil, Local Church and Church Universal: Towards a Convergence between East and West, PhD diss., Université de Fribourg, 2004, 59–66).

The list is a real one, and it crosses confessional lines: Catholic Dominicans, Greek Orthodox metropolitans, and specialist patrologists have arrived independently at the conclusion that Afanasiev’s Cyprian is too neat.

The Replies

Afanasiev never claimed as much as he is charged with. This is the burden of Anastacia Wooden’s defence. On her reading of the whole corpus — including the Russian works his critics did not use — Afanasiev did not consider Cyprian the “father” or “inventor” of universalistic ecclesiology any more than he considered Ignatius the inventor of the monepiscopate; he nowhere claims that Cyprian’s ecclesiology was “totally,” “solely,” or “absolutely” universal; and he in fact enumerates eucharistic as well as universalistic tendencies in Cyprian. What he intended to show, on Wooden’s account, was that two conceptions of the Church existed within the Church, whose first clear expressions are found in Ignatius and in Cyprian respectively, and that their writings shaped what came after (Anastacia Wooden, “Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanasiev and Its Ecumenical Significance: A New Perspective,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45, no. 4 [2010]: 543–560, at 551–552; The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev, PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019, 379–380).

On the imperial derivation, Wooden concedes ground and holds ground. It cannot be proved that the Roman empire did not influence Cyprian’s thinking at all; but it is also not right to ascribe the universal vision of the Church to the empire as its only cause. Afanasiev himself, she notes, traced the beginnings of a universal understanding back further — to a Jewish-Christian consciousness before the destruction of Jerusalem, in which certain communities were regarded as extra-territorial extensions of the church of Jerusalem, an awareness which he thought disappeared with the city and was not taken up by the Pauline churches (Wooden, The Limits of the Church, 380; Afanasiev, “La doctrine de la primauté,” 407).

Cyprian was never the subject of the investigation. Wooden’s most disarming point is bibliographical. The schema of The Limits of the Church — the intended second part of Afanasiev’s doctoral project — contained two chapters on Cyprian, and he never completed them. Although Cyprian is cited many times across the corpus, he was never the topic Afanasiev was actually studying; the treatment his critics demand is precisely the treatment he did not live to write (Wooden, The Limits of the Church, 378; and see The Book and Its History).

The argument does not stand on the exegesis. Christophe D’Aloisio’s reply is methodological: whatever the value of Afanasiev’s interpretation of Ignatius, Cyprian, and the other Fathers, his thesis proceeds by a logical argument that “does not absolutely require an infallible patristic knowledge”; and the significant thing in his theology is not the identification of a culprit for the ecclesiological shift, but the deconstruction of the universalist conception of the Church and of the predominance of law over the spiritual life, in the light of the New Testament and the ancient liturgical tradition (Christophe D’Aloisio, Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff, 67–70, summarized in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 138–139).

Ressourcement was not a private eccentricity. Viktor Alexandrov’s answer to the charge that Afanasiev’s historical method is limited is that “back to the sources” was the mainstream of twentieth-century theology and the chief factor in its renewal, that “we do not really have anything better to replace it,” and that Zizioulas himself paid tribute to the historical method in his earliest book before moving to a more dogmatic approach (Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 277).

Where This Collection Stands

It does not stand anywhere, and that is the point. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, a live scholarly dispute is reported and not settled.

What can be said without adjudicating:

The taxonomy has outlived the historiography. The distinction between eucharistic and universal conceptions of the Church has become standard vocabulary in Orthodox and Catholic ecclesiology alike, including among people who reject Afanasiev’s account of how the second arose.
The Cyprian question is separable from the eucharistic thesis. Zizioulas’s case is the demonstration: he rejects Afanasiev’s Cyprian while building his own career on the eucharistic principle. A reader may do the same.
The repository’s Cyprian collection reads Cyprian differently, and deliberately so. The Contested Ecclesiology sets out the Orthodox case that Cyprian’s episcopatus unus est, his refusal to let Rome impose custom on Africa, and his declaration that “none of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops” together constitute the classic patristic statement of collegial rather than monarchical episcopate — and it names Afanasiev himself among the developers of that reading, from “The Church Which Presides in Love.” Both things are true of Afanasiev at once. He used Cyprian against Roman jurisdictional primacy, and he blamed Cyprian for the conception of the Church that made such a primacy conceivable. That is not incoherence; it is the natural position of a man who thinks a great bishop acted better than his own theory.

A Note on What the Dispute Is Really About

Underneath the patristic argument lies a larger disagreement about what ecclesiology is for. Afanasiev thought the Church’s self-understanding could be recovered historically and used as a norm — that one could go to the pre-Constantinian evidence, find the operative ecclesiology there, and measure later development against it. His critics, in different ways, doubt that: some because they read the evidence differently, some because they think no single “operative ecclesiology” can be extracted from evidence this thin, and some — Zizioulas above all — because they think the norm should be sought theologically rather than archaeologically.

Andrew Louth’s warning, made against Zizioulas but applicable to the whole enterprise, is the fairest statement of the underlying problem: a monepiscopal eucharistic ecclesiology going back to the apostles “reflects a possible state of affairs throughout that period. But it cannot be maintained that it is the only form of the church to be found in the early centuries,” and “the poverty of the historical material relating to the early Christian centuries demands a much more tentative approach” (Andrew Louth, review of John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, The Ecumenical Review 56 [2004]: 147–148).

That caution applies to Afanasiev’s reconstruction with at least equal force, and this collection applies it.

References

Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Aryankalayil, Joseph G. Local Church and Church Universal: Towards a Convergence between East and West. PhD diss., Université de Fribourg, 2004.
Camelot, P.-Th. “Saint Cyprien et la primauté.” Istina 4 (1957): 421–434.
D’Aloisio, Christophe. Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff.
Louth, Andrew. Review of John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church. The Ecumenical Review 56 (2004): 147–148.
Miltos, Amphiloque. “L’ecclésiologie de saint Cyprien de Carthage: un faux dilemme entre les perspectives universelle et eucharistique.” Contacts 262 (2018): 201–224.
Nichols, Aidan. “The Appeal to the Fathers in the Ecclesiology of Nikolai Afanas’ev: II. From Cyprian to Denys.” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 3 (1992): 247–266.
Nichols, Aidan. Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Stavrou, Michel. “L’ecclésiologie eucharistique du Père Nicolas Afanassieff et sa réception.” La Pensée orthodoxe 9 (2012): 7–25.
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. The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev. PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019.
Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. Translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.