Canons and Canonical Consciousness

Afanasiev’s ecclesiology came out of the canon law chair, and the two programmatic essays in which he set out how the canons should be read — one in 1933, one in 1937 — precede the ecclesiological essay of 1934 and explain it. His thesis is that the canons are not a code but the deposit of an ecclesiology; that they contain something unchangeable and something temporal, and that the work of a canonist is to distinguish them; and that a “canonical consciousness” which reads the canons as statutes has lost the ability to say what the Church is.

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

The Chair

Afanasiev came to the St. Sergius Institute in March 1930, lectured in 1930–31 on the sources of canon law, and from 1932 held the chair of canon law and Greek, which he kept until his death in 1966 (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html; “Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org; see The Institute and the Canonist). He was still lecturing on canon law in 1968 — that is, his course notes were still being drawn on after his death (a fragment of his canon law course of 1968 is discussed in Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278).

He also practised. He chaired the canonical commission and the ecclesiastical tribunal of the Russian exarchate in Western Europe (centenaire-archeveche.org). Whatever he wrote about the limits of law in the Church, he wrote as a man who spent years hearing cases.

The Two Essays

“Kanony i kanonicheskoe soznanie” [Canons and Canonical Consciousness], Put’ 39 (1933): 81–92. The earlier and more programmatic of the two. Its target is a habit of mind rather than a doctrine: the “canonical consciousness” that treats the canons as a body of positive law, to be applied, appealed to, and dispensed from, without asking what conception of the Church they presuppose.

“Neizmennoe i vremennoe v tserkovnykh kanonakh” [The Unchangeable and the Temporal in the Church’s Canons], in Zhivoe predanie: Pravoslavie v sovremennosti (Paris, 1937), 92–109. The constructive counterpart, published in the Paris collection Living Tradition alongside contributions from the St. Sergius faculty. Its argument is in its title.

Both are cited from the bibliography in the Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев.” Neither has been translated into English.

Canon Law as Encoded Ecclesiology

The thesis Afanasiev argued from 1933 and never abandoned is that canon law is not a self-standing juridical system but the historically conditioned expression of an ecclesiology. Two consequences follow, and they run in opposite directions.

One cannot read the canons rightly without knowing what doctrine of the Church they encode. A canon regulating the relation of a bishop to his metropolitan, or the reception of a schismatic, or the convocation of a council, is not a neutral administrative rule. It presupposes an answer to the question of what the Church is, where she exists, and how she is one. Read as bare statute, it becomes unintelligible or — worse — intelligible in terms of an ecclesiology it never held.

One cannot do ecclesiology honestly without reading the canons. This is the half that distinguishes Afanasiev from the dogmatic theologians around him. He held that the Church’s actual self-understanding is deposited in what she did — in her canons, her rites, her ordination prayers, her disciplinary practice — more reliably than in what her theologians said about herself. It is a canonist’s conviction, and it is the methodological root of the whole eucharistic thesis: he arrived at eucharistic ecclesiology because the canonical and liturgical material did not fit the ecclesiology with which it was being read (see Where the Eucharist Is).

The chronology bears this out. The two-ecclesiologies essay of 1934 falls between the two canon-law essays of 1933 and 1937, and is written by a lecturer in canon law with four years in the post (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”; see Two Ideas of the Universal Church). The ecclesiology is a by-product of the canonical work, not the reverse.

The Unchangeable and the Temporal

The 1937 essay addresses the question every Orthodox canonist eventually faces: the canons of the ecumenical councils and the Fathers were framed for a world that no longer exists — a Christian empire, a settled territorial episcopate, a society in which excommunication had civil consequences — and yet they are received by the Church as her canons. What is binding in them, and what belonged to the age?

Afanasiev’s answer follows from the previous thesis. What is unchangeable in a canon is the ecclesiology it expresses; what is temporal is the form in which that ecclesiology was applied to a particular set of historical circumstances. A canon is therefore not to be abolished when its circumstances lapse, nor mechanically enforced against circumstances it never contemplated, but read for its ecclesiological content and applied accordingly.

This is a demanding position, and it cuts both ways. It licenses a critical attitude to particular canonical arrangements — Afanasiev used it against the modern rearrangement of Orthodoxy into national autocephalies, which he regarded as reproducing at national scale exactly the universal-ecclesiological structure he objected to (Afanasiev, Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1993, 17; Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 256–257 and n. 89). It equally forbids treating any canon as merely obsolete, since the ecclesiology inside it is not obsolete at all.

Reception, Not Enforcement

The most distinctive feature of Afanasiev’s account of church order — and the one that most divides his readers — is the place he gives to reception.

On his account, an act of a local church, or of a council, does not take effect because a competent authority has issued it. It takes effect when it is received — by the church in which it was done, and by the other churches. Alexandrov’s summary is that by “order and canons” Afanasiev means law of a special sort: a law to which enforcement by violence does not apply, and in which “a legal decision becomes effective only after reception of it by all parties involved” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257; the fullest treatment of Afanasiev’s concept of law is in Anastacia Wooden, The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev, PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019, 441–462).

He works out the mechanism in the ecclesiological essays. When a church tolerates an irregularity, the other churches may decline to receive its act — and this refusal is not a penalty imposed from above but “a fraternal admonition,” a desire to help. If the church corrects itself, communion continues; if it will not, communion may be broken. But the church remains a church throughout, since no local church perfectly manifests the Church of God (“Una Sancta,” Irénikon 36, no. 4 [1963]: 457; English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 16–17; and see The Local Church and Its Fullness).

Whether this is a recovery of the way the ancient Church actually worked or a description that leaves the Church without any effective discipline is precisely the contested question.

Councils

Afanasiev’s account of the council follows directly. He researched the origins of the councils on his 1936 journey to London and Oxford, supported by Bulgakov and Metropolitan Evlogy, and the resulting book — Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin], written c. 1936–1940 — appeared only in 2003 (centenaire-archeveche.org; Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев”).

The position it reaches is finely balanced, and it should be quoted because it is regularly misreported. Afanasiev grants the regional council very considerable weight: “the [regional] council unites the assemblies of the church into an ecclesial region and represents the highest authority for all the assemblies within the region.” He then denies that this creates subordination: “within the region, however, each assembly remains independent — it is not subordinate to any other assembly. The catholic design of the supreme ecclesiastical body excludes the possibility of a singular supreme authority” (Afanasiev, Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie, Moscow: Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003, 168; quoted in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 138 n. 70). He adds that this thesis was strongly defended by St. Cyprian — one of several places where the man he is supposed to have made his adversary turns up as his witness.

He also wrote on the specifically Russian discussion of the council in “Le Concile dans la théologie orthodoxe russe,” one of the five essays through which Zizioulas knew him (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001, 36 n. 47).

Nichols on Afanasiev the Canonist

The one sustained English study of this side of him is by Aidan Nichols, who devoted a separate article to it: “Nikolai Afanas’ev and the Byzantine Canonical Tradition,” Heythrop Journal 33 (1992). Nichols’s assessment of Afanasiev’s use of the Fathers is critical (see The Cyprian Thesis Contested), and he considers the historical method limited (“The Appeal to the Fathers in the Ecclesiology of Nikolai Afanas’ev: II,” Heythrop Journal 33, no. 3 [1992]: 247–266, at 263–264). But he took the canonical work seriously enough to treat it on its own, which is more than most of Afanasiev’s Orthodox critics have done.

Anastacia Wooden’s complaint is exactly this: of everything in the corpus, “his thoughts on sacramental theology, theology of ministry (especially the ministry of the laity), the theological foundations of canon law, and so forth remain largely unknown,” because the debate about him has been conducted almost entirely on the terrain of local-versus-universal (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 58).

See Also

References

  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Kanony i kanonicheskoe soznanie” [Canons and Canonical Consciousness]. Put’ 39 (1933): 81–92.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Neizmennoe i vremennoe v tserkovnykh kanonakh” [The Unchangeable and the Temporal in the Church’s Canons]. In Zhivoe predanie: Pravoslavie v sovremennosti, 92–109. Paris, 1937.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Tserkovnye sobory i ikh proiskhozhdenie [Church Councils and Their Origin]. Moscow: Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1993.
  • 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.
  • Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
  • Nichols, Aidan. “Nikolai Afanas’ev and the Byzantine Canonical Tradition.” Heythrop Journal 33 (1992).
  • 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.
  • Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. The Limits of the Church: Ecclesiological Project of Nicolas Afanasiev. PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2019.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
  • Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
  • 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.