07 — Canon Law and Church Order

He taught canon law for thirty-six years, chaired his archdiocese’s canonical commission and its ecclesiastical tribunal, and spent his career arguing that the canons cannot be read as a legal code. Afanasiev’s contention is that canon law is not a self-standing juridical system but the historically conditioned expression of an ecclesiology, so that a canon must be read for the doctrine of the Church it encodes; and that what the Church has for order is not law of the imperial kind — coercive, enforceable, effective independently of reception — but a discipline whose decisions become effective only when received, and whose ultimate principle he called the power of love.

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

Files in This Section

File Description
Canons and Canonical Consciousness The programmatic essays of 1933 and 1937, the unchangeable and the temporal in the canons, canon law as encoded ecclesiology, and what he made of the chair
The Power of Love The 1949 lecture that became chapter 8; power, authority and love; the Sohm problem; and the charge that he abolished law in the Church

The Discipline of This Section

He is not an antinomian, and the sources say so plainly. Afanasiev’s invectives against “law in the Church” are the most quoted and most misread part of his corpus. Against them stand his own flat statements that “the very concept of the Church implies order” and that 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 Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 257). What he denies is that the Church’s order is law in the sense the Roman and Byzantine emperors gave that word. These files hold both halves together.

The confusion is partly his own fault. Alexandrov, his most thorough defender on this point, concedes that Afanasiev “never clarified his concept of canon law enough for such an ordinary reader who is not a diligent student of his theology to grasp it” (“Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257). That admission is repeated here rather than smoothed over.

§4.2 applies to the resulting dispute. Whether Afanasiev’s account of ecclesial order can sustain conciliar and canonical life is contested among Orthodox theologians, and the argument is named and reported in Section 09 rather than settled here.

See Also