The Power of Love

In 1949 Afanasiev delivered a lecture called “The Power of Love.” It became, seventeen years later and after his death, the last chapter of The Church of the Holy Spirit, and it is the most quoted and most contested thing he wrote. Its claim is that authority in the Church is not power over the Church; that juridical power is unnecessary where perfect love dwells; and that the law which entered ecclesial life with the conversion of the empire is not the Church’s own order but a borrowing that has dominated her ever since. The chapter is where his admirers find him at his most profound and his critics at his most dangerous.

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

The Text

“The Power of Love” was given as a lecture in 1949 and became the closing chapter of The Church of the Holy Spirit — chapter 8, the last of eight (Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 257; the chapter list is that of the Notre Dame edition). Peter Phan, reviewing the English translation, identifies the first and last chapters as the book’s backbone and summarizes the chapter’s argument as a distinction between power and love as governing principles, with Afanasiev contending that juridical power is unnecessary in the Church “where perfect love dwells” (Peter C. Phan, review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Catholic Books Review, 2013, catholicbooksreview.org).

The date is worth noticing. 1949 is a year before the thesis defence, two years after his return from Tunisia, and in the middle of the period in which he was writing “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church], Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35. The reflection on the limits of the Church and the reflection on the limits of law in the Church belong to the same moment.

The Argument

The chapter completes the movement of the book. If every member of the Church holds a charism, and every ministry — up to and including the episcopate — is itself a charism exercised within the eucharistic assembly rather than over it (see Ministries, Charisms, and the Bishop), then authority in the Church cannot be a jurisdiction held by some Christians over others. There is no place in the structure for it to sit.

Afanasiev’s positive proposal is that what orders the Church is love — not as sentiment, but as the mode in which the Body of Christ actually coheres. The presiding minister presides in love; churches receive one another’s acts in love; correction takes the form of fraternal admonition and non-reception rather than of coercion; and a decision becomes effective when it is received rather than when it is imposed (see Canons and Canonical Consciousness).

The negative half is the one that generated the invectives. Afanasiev holds that the kind of law that has dominated ecclesial life since the conversion of the empire is not the Church’s own. It is Roman, and later Byzantine, law: enforceable, coercive, valid whether or not it is received, and backed in the last resort by the state’s capacity to compel. Alexandrov’s careful statement of the distinction is worth quoting in full because almost every misreading of Afanasiev collapses it: “for Afanasiev it is not the canon law which is incompatible with the Church (canon law implying order and rules is inevitable in the Church) but that sort of law which was accepted by the Church with the conversion of the Roman Empire and ha[s] been dominating in ecclesiastical life until the present” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257).

What He Did Not Say

Because the chapter is quoted so freely, the countervailing texts should be set beside it.

“The very concept of the Church implies order.” (The Church of the Holy Spirit, 134; cited Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257 n. 92)
The canons belong to the nature of the Church. (Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1993, 8–9; cited Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257 n. 93)
He held one of the canonical offices of his archdiocese. He chaired its canonical commission and its ecclesiastical tribunal, and taught canon law for thirty-six years (“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff,” centenaire-archeveche.org).

Alexandrov’s conclusion is that Afanasiev means by “order and canons” a law of a special sort — one to which enforcement by violence does not apply and in which a decision becomes effective only after reception by all parties involved (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257). That is a theory of law, not its abolition.

He also concedes the obvious defect, and this collection repeats the concession rather than defending against it: 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” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257). A theologian who issues “a good number of invectives against law in the Church” and never sets out the positive doctrine of law those invectives presuppose has some responsibility for how he is read.

The Sohm Problem

The specific charge levelled against this chapter is that Afanasiev has reproduced the position of Rudolph Sohm (1841–1917), the German Lutheran canonist who argued that law and the Christian Church are incompatible in principle — that the Church’s essence is spiritual and every legal ordering of her is a falling away (Sohm, Kirchenrecht, Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1898, 22–28).

The charge is not baseless as a matter of intellectual history. Afanasiev knew Sohm’s work, and Anastacia Wooden thinks it “highly probable” that Afanasiev’s discovery of the connection between history and ecclesiology was inspired by Sohm, who had likewise come to ecclesiology by way of early church history (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 57).

Zizioulas’s version of the objection is that Afanasiev’s axiom, pressed hard, has Sohm’s consequence: “emphasized to the extreme, the axiom ‘where the Eucharist is, there is the Church’ destroys in the final analysis any notion of canonical unity in the Church, leading in essence to the antithesis introduced by R. Sohm of Religion and Law” (John 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, 258). He returned to it in 2009 in a sharper form: “Canon law for him [is] incompatible with the essence of the Church as love. For him the Church is L’Église du Saint Esprit — not the Body of Christ” (quoted in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257).

The replies are two. Alexandrov notes, first, a point of accuracy about Sohm himself — Sohm’s claim was that the Christian Church, not religion in general, is incompatible with law (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 236 n. 37) — and second, that Zizioulas’s characterization contradicts what is actually in Afanasiev’s works: the basic intuition of the identity between the eucharistic gifts (“this is my Body”) and the Church (“you are the Body of Christ”) is Christological, and most of Afanasiev’s mature work, including The Church of the Holy Spirit and The Lord’s Supper, is about ministries — which on Zizioulas’s own account belong to the Church’s Christological dimension (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257–258).

The disagreement, at bottom, is about whether Afanasiev’s “order without imperial law” is a coherent third position or a way station on the road to Sohm. That question has not been settled and this collection does not settle it (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

Primacy, Priority, and the Charge of Isolationism

The same argument has a jurisdictional edge. Afanasiev denied that primacy in the Church can be juridical, and coined a terminological distinction to mark it: primauté, primacy in the juridical sense, against priorité, a non-juridical priority of witness. He explained the distinction at length and was candid that it was conventional, even artificial (Afanasiev, “The Church Which Presides in Love,” in The Primacy of Peter, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992, 115–116).

Zizioulas objected in 2004 on two grounds: that the terminological distinction is not a natural one, and — more seriously — that refusing to see the ties between local churches as juridical leads to the isolationism of those churches. He referred with approval to Nicolas Lossky’s suggestion that the position might, in one of its possible interpretations, strengthen autocephalism and let nationalism into Orthodoxy (Zizioulas, The One and the Many, 281; discussed in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 256).

Alexandrov’s reply is on the record and is factual: Afanasiev actually criticized autocephalism, on the ground that a national church conceived as a self-contained whole reproduces the universal-ecclesiological structure he rejected; finding support for autocephalism in him “would not be an easy task” (Afanasiev, Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., 1993, 17; Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 256–257 and n. 89). Alexandrov also notes that the underlying disagreement is that Zizioulas himself believes primacy comes with real rights rather than abstract honour — that is, that primacy is a juridical phenomenon (Zizioulas, The One and the Many, 272; Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 256–257).

That is a clean statement of a real disagreement between two Orthodox theologians about the nature of primacy, and it is not this collection’s business to resolve it. It is, however, worth registering that it is the same disagreement that has occupied Orthodox–Catholic dialogue since.

Why the Chapter Matters

Strip away the polemics and the argument of “The Power of Love” is a question about what kind of thing the Church is. If the Church is a society, she needs law in the ordinary sense, and the theological task is to give an account of ecclesiastical law that does not make her merely a society. If the Church is the Body of Christ constituted in the eucharist, then — Afanasiev thinks — the coercive apparatus of a society is not merely unnecessary but a category error, and what looks like the loss of order is the recovery of a different one.

His critics answer that the second option is unavailable to a Church that exists in history, contains sinners, has to settle disputes, and must sometimes say no. His defenders answer that he never denied any of that, and that “reception” is a real mechanism of discipline and not a euphemism for its absence.

The disagreement is genuinely open, and both sides of it are the same disagreement that produced the criticism catalogued in Section 09.

References

Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Translated by Vitaly Permiakov. Edited by Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1993.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church]. Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35.
Afanassieff, Nicolas. “The Church Which Presides in Love.” In The Primacy of Peter, edited by John Meyendorff, rev. ed., 91–143. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Phan, Peter C. Review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Catholic Books Review, 2013.
Sohm, Rudolph. Kirchenrecht. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1898.
Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
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. The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010.
“Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanassieff.” Centenary site of the Archdiocese of Orthodox Churches of Russian Tradition in Western Europe, centenaire-archeveche.org.