Two Ideas of the Universal Church

In 1934, four years into his career as a lecturer in canon law, Afanasiev published in the Paris journal Put’ an essay called “Two Ideas of the Universal Church.” It contained, in outline, everything he would spend the next thirty years arguing: that Christian history has known two irreducible conceptions of what the Church is, that the one now taken for granted in East and West alike is the later of the two, and that its first clear expression is in the writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage. This is Afanasiev’s historical reconstruction, and it is contested; it is set out here as his.

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

The Essay of 1934, and What Preceded It

“Dve idei vselenskoi tserkvi” [Two Ideas of the Universal Church] appeared in Put’ 45 (1934): 16–29 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). A French translation appeared much later as “Deux conceptions de l’Église universelle,” Le Messager Orthodoxe 164–165 (2018): 175–191. Afanasiev himself dated the proposal slightly earlier, to the winter of 1932–33 — that is, to a moment when no one was thinking about Catholic-Orthodox rapprochement and the essay had no ecumenical occasion at all (noted in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 126).

He was not alone or first in the thought. The previous year, in the same journal, his friend Nicolas Zernov had published “Svyatoy Kiprian Karfagenskiy i edinstvo Vselenskoy Tserkvi” [Saint Cyprian of Carthage and the Unity of the Ecumenical Church], Put’ 39 (1933): 18–40, arguing that Cyprian had reversed an older conception of ecclesial unity. Irénikon‘s review of Zernov summarized the claim: Cyprian would be responsible for the overthrow of an older ecclesiastical conception which placed the community of Christians, and not the hierarchy, at the base of the Church, with the consequence that submission to the legitimate bishop becomes the condition of belonging to the Church (review of “S. Cyprien de Carthage et l’unité de l’Église œcuménique,” Irénikon 11 [1934]: 602–603; the Zernov–Afanasiev relation is set out in Saldanha, 133–134).

Afanasiev held a similar view, with one significant difference of temper: where Zernov reproached Cyprian for inconsistency, Afanasiev refused to, remarking that “logic by itself is not proof of truth” (“L’Église qui préside dans l’amour,” 16; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 64; noted in Saldanha, 134 n. 52). It is a small thing that tells against the caricature of Afanasiev as an anti-Cyprianic polemicist.

The Two Types

The mature statement of the thesis is in the 1960 Chevetogne essay. Afanasiev reduces the ecclesiological conceptions found in Christian history to two, with the caution — stated repeatedly and usually ignored — that he is speaking of different conceptions of the Church, not different churches, and that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, merely “different enough to provide a different interpretation of historical facts” (Afanasiev, “La doctrine de la primauté à la lumière de l’ecclésiologie,” Istina 4 [1957]: 401–420, at 407; “L’apôtre Pierre et l’évêque de Rome,” Theologia 26 [1955]: 465–475, at 466; cited in Saldanha, 122 nn. 10, 11).

Universal ecclesiology. The Church is one organism spread over the whole world and divided into parts — the local churches. A local church has no ecclesial value in itself; it derives its ecclesial nature from its rootedness in the universal Church. Fullness and unity belong to the whole; the parts have them only by participation (“L’Église qui préside,” 11, 13; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 58–59, 61).

Eucharistic ecclesiology. Each local church, gathered for the eucharist under its presiding minister, is the Church of God in her fullness, because Christ is present in the eucharist in the fullness of his body. The local churches are not parts of a whole; they are, each of them, the whole (see Where the Eucharist Is).

Afanasiev’s historical claim is that the second is the earlier: “universal ecclesiology . . . is not the primitive ecclesiology, but quite the reverse: it has taken the place of a different ecclesiology which I call eucharistic” (“L’Église qui préside,” 26; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 73).

His diagnostic claim is that the first now prevails on both sides of the schism: “the universal sort is now predominant, especially in Catholic doctrine. The Orthodox Church has not clearly defined her attitudes, but our ‘school’ teaching follows Catholic doctrine and accepts universal ecclesiology as an axiom” (“L’Église qui préside,” 10; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 58). He offers Orthodox evidence for the charge — the definition of the diocese adopted by the Moscow Council of 1917–1918 as “one part of the Russian Orthodox Church when governed by a bishop according to canon law” (“L’Église qui préside,” 11; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 59).

Richard Gaillardetz observes that this is what gives Afanasiev’s ecclesiology its “bite”: earlier Orthodox writers had used the notion of universal ecclesiology chiefly as a stick with which to beat the West, and Afanasiev turned it on his own tradition (Richard R. Gaillardetz, “The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanassieff: Prospects and Challenges for Contemporary Ecumenical Dialogue,” Diakonia 27 [1994]: 18–44, at 22).

Afanasiev’s own student agreed with the taxonomy. Alexander Schmemann wrote that Afanasiev “has shown that there existed (and still exist) two ecclesiological elaborations or interpretations of this organic unity: the Universal and the Eucharistic. This distinction is of capital importance for the understanding of the Orthodox idea of primacy” (Alexander Schmemann, “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in The Primacy of Peter, ed. John Meyendorff, London: Faith Press, 1963, 30–56, at 35; and see Alexander Schmemann).

Why Cyprian

Afanasiev’s account of how the shift happened turns on two things he says shaped Cyprian’s conception of the Church.

The Roman Empire. Cyprian, Afanasiev holds, felt that the empirical unity of the Church in his time was not strong enough, and reached for the one model of worldwide unity his world made available: an empire in which one head guarantees the unity of many provinces. “Cyprian brought into the Church the Roman concept of empire” (Afanasiev, “La doctrine de la primauté,” 403–404; “L’Église qui préside,” 12–14; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 59–61). Afanasiev grants that Cyprian was not Roman by birth, and says he was Roman in spirit.

The Pauline image of the body. The other source is 1 Corinthians 12 — the body and its members, which do not exist or function apart from the whole. Read one way this yields a local church whose members are the Church; read another, it yields a worldwide body whose members are the local churches. Afanasiev holds that Cyprian read it the second way (Saldanha, “Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” 122–123).

From these he takes Cyprian to have constructed the definition that ruled afterwards: the Church is a unique organism spread over the world and divided into parts; the local church is a part; its ecclesial nature comes from its rooting in the whole.

Episcopatus unus est

On Afanasiev’s reading, the visible bearer of that unity in Cyprian is the episcopate, and the crucial move is a shift in what makes a bishop a sign of unity. In universal ecclesiology, a bishop signifies unity by his membership in the college of bishops, not by his headship of a eucharistic assembly. Local churches are united through their bishops, and the principle of the Church’s unity is therefore located in the multiplicity of bishops at peace with one another: “Episcopatus unus est because the ‘throne of Peter is one,’ in which God has established and shown the source of all unity” (“L’Église qui préside,” 14; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 62; “Una Sancta,” 449; Tradition Alive, 12). And the boundary of the Church follows the bishop: Afanasiev cites Cyprian’s “the bishop is in the Church and the Church in the bishop, and if anyone is not with the bishop, he is not in the Church” (Epistula 66.8, cited at “Una Sancta,” 451; Tradition Alive, 12–13).

Christopher Ruddy states the contrast Afanasiev is drawing as sharply as it can be put: universal ecclesiology identifies the bishop with the episcopal college and places him above the Church, whereas eucharistic ecclesiology makes him head of the eucharistic assembly and situates him within it, from which position he becomes a member of the college (Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology, New York: Crossroad, 2006, 18).

The Consequence: Primacy

Afanasiev’s most consequential inference is that universal ecclesiology entails a doctrine of primacy, whether or not the man who formulated it drew the conclusion. His formula is blunt: “If a universal theory of the Church is adhered to, the doctrine of the primacy will somehow be a necessary concomitant” (“L’Église qui préside,” 18; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 65). The argument is structural. If every local church has one bishop at its head, and the universal Church is an organism of the same kind on a larger scale, then the universal Church too must have one bishop at its head.

He is explicit that Cyprian himself drew no such conclusion about the bishop of Rome. The charge is that the conception, once accepted, made the conclusion available to others. Catholic scholarship broadly concurs on the first half: Bernard Prusak notes that neither recension of De unitate advocates the Roman centralization of the medieval period or the universal jurisdiction defined at Vatican I, and that Cyprian’s emphasis on Peter always served the apostolic authority of all bishops as a college (Bernard Prusak, The Church Unfinished: Ecclesiology Through the Centuries, New York: Paulist Press, 2004, 135–136). Roger Haight observes that the North African church of Cyprian’s day recognized no jurisdictional authority over itself and accorded the bishop of Rome no universal authority (Roger Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 1, Historical Ecclesiology, New York: Continuum, 2004, 185). J. Patout Burns concurs (Cyprian the Bishop, London: Routledge, 2002, 165).

The repository’s own Cyprian collection treats the primacy texts at length and sets the Roman and Orthodox readings side by side without adjudicating them; see The Primacy Text and De Unitate.

The Ecumenical Payload

Afanasiev did not develop this taxonomy as antiquarianism. He held that universal ecclesiology makes reunion structurally impossible, because it forces each side to say that the true Church is itself and that reunion means the return of a body which had ceased to be the Church: “For the Orthodox, the only true Church is the Orthodox Church. For the Catholics, it is the Catholic Church” (“Una Sancta,” 444–445; Tradition Alive, 9). Eucharistic ecclesiology, he thought, dissolves that impasse by relocating the question. Where that argument led is the subject of Una Sancta and the Question of Communion, and it is the most contested thing he wrote.

Afanasiev on Cyprian the Bishop

One qualification belongs here, because it is routinely lost. Afanasiev’s view of Cyprian is not simply negative. He calls him an ideal image of a bishop, brilliant in his activity in the Church, and an excellent pastoral model — precisely because, as bishop, he refused to take any initiative without the confirmation of the presbyterate and the people (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, 62–63; “La doctrine de la primauté,” 406; “L’Église qui préside,” 16; “The Church Which Presides in Love,” 64; noted in Saldanha, 131). He also cites Cyprian approvingly on the conciliar question — the regional council as the highest authority within its region, with no assembly subordinated to another, a thesis “strongly defended by Cyprian” (Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie, Moscow, 2003, 168).

The relationship, in short, is not that of a critic to an opponent. It is that of a historian to a figure he thinks got the Church’s shape half right and half wrong, and whose half-wrong half prevailed.

Whether he was right about any of it is the subject of the next file.

References

Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Dve idei vselenskoi tserkvi” [Two Ideas of the Universal Church]. Put’ 45 (1934): 16–29. French: “Deux conceptions de l’Église universelle,” Le Messager Orthodoxe 164–165 (2018): 175–191.
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. “La doctrine de la primauté à la lumière de l’ecclésiologie.” Istina 4 (1957): 401–420.
Afanassieff, Nicolas. “L’apôtre Pierre et l’évêque de Rome.” Theologia 26 (1955): 465–475.
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.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie. Moscow: Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Burns, J. Patout, Jr. Cyprian the Bishop. London: Routledge, 2002.
Gaillardetz, Richard R. “The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanassieff: Prospects and Challenges for Contemporary Ecumenical Dialogue.” Diakonia 27 (1994): 18–44.
Haight, Roger. Christian Community in History. Vol. 1, Historical Ecclesiology. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Prusak, Bernard. The Church Unfinished: Ecclesiology Through the Centuries. New York: Paulist Press, 2004.
Ruddy, Christopher. The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology. New York: Crossroad, 2006.
Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Schmemann, Alexander. “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology.” In The Primacy of Peter, edited by John Meyendorff, 30–56. London: Faith Press, 1963.
Zernov, Nicolas. “Svyatoy Kiprian Karfagenskiy i edinstvo Vselenskoy Tserkvi.” Put’ 39 (1933): 18–40.
Review of “S. Cyprien de Carthage et l’unité de l’Église œcuménique.” Irénikon 11 (1934): 602–603.
Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (pravenc.ru/text/77064.html).