Una Sancta and the Question of Communion

In 1963 Afanasiev published in Irénikon an essay called “Una Sancta.” Its argument is that the eucharist of Rome and the eucharist of Orthodoxy have never been mutually denied; that where a true eucharist is celebrated the Church is; and that the unity of the two was therefore never wholly destroyed but only wounded, so that communion could in principle be re-established by an act of love without either side renouncing its doctrine. This is Afanasiev’s position, and it is his alone. No Orthodox Church has adopted it, no Orthodox Church has acted on it, and the Orthodox Church does not practise eucharistic communion with Rome. This file states his argument, and states the Orthodox objections in their own terms.

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

The Essay

“Una Sancta,” Irénikon 36, no. 4 (1963): 436–475 — the Chevetogne review, published during the Council, in French, for a largely Catholic readership. The English translation is in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time — Readings from the Eastern Church (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 3–30. A short companion piece appeared two years later: “L’Eucharistie, principal lien entre les Catholiques et les Orthodoxes,” Irénikon 38 (1965): 337–339 (English: “The Eucharist, the Principal Link between the Catholics and the Orthodox,” in Tradition Alive, 47–49).

The Argument, Step by Step

Step one: universal ecclesiology makes reunion impossible. If the Church is one worldwide organism, then there can be only one such organism, and each side must identify it with itself. “For the Orthodox, the only true Church is the Orthodox Church. For the Catholics, it is the Catholic Church” (“Una Sancta,” 444; Tradition Alive, 9). Reunion then means the return of a body which had ceased to be the Church at all — which is, Afanasiev says, a very problematic thing to ask of anyone (“Una Sancta,” 445; Tradition Alive, 9; summarized in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 125).

He adds that this is not a Catholic problem only: universal ecclesiology “holds an upper hand in the Roman Catholic as well as the Orthodox Churches,” and Orthodox school theology has accepted it as an axiom (“L’Église qui préside dans l’amour,” 10; “Una Sancta,” 440; and see Two Ideas of the Universal Church).

Step two: the limits of the Church are the limits of the eucharistic assembly. “The actual limits of the Church are determined by the limits of the eucharistic assembly” (“Una Sancta,” 453; Tradition Alive, 14). This is the eucharistic thesis applied to the question of boundaries, and Afanasiev had been working on it since “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church], Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35 — an essay whose title deliberately echoes Georges Florovsky’s “The Limits of the Church,” Church Quarterly Review 117 (1933), which had argued that the charismatic limits of the Church do not simply coincide with her canonical limits.

Step three: neither side has denied the other’s eucharist. This is the empirical premise on which everything turns. Afanasiev observes that through all the centuries of division, and whatever else was said, the validity of the other side’s eucharist was not denied. Radu Bordeianu states the inference: “as long as there is a valid eucharist in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, the unity was never completely broken — the link is found in the eucharist” (Radu Bordeianu, “Orthodox–Catholic Dialogue: Retrieving Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 44, no. 2 [2009]: 239–265, at 245).

Step four: the separation is real but shallower than it looks. Afanasiev holds that the differences are in large measure canonical in character, that they “lie on the surface and not [extend] to the depths,” and that the tragedy of the separation, while genuine, must not be exaggerated (“L’Eucharistie, principal lien,” 338–339; Tradition Alive, 48–49; summarized in Saldanha, “Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” 130).

Step five: the conclusion. And here is what he actually wrote:

“By an effort of Love, the orthodox church could reestablish communion with the catholic church, the dogmatic divergences notwithstanding and without demanding that the catholic church renounce the doctrines that distinguish her from the orthodox church. (…) Certainly, to attain this the effort in Love is necessary, a great sacrifice, an element of self-renunciation. To restrict the doctrine of the power of the pope within the limits of the catholic church would be, for the church of Rome, the result of a great sacrificial spirit toward the goal of reestablishing the union-of-the-churches-joined-in-Love.” (Afanasiev, “Una Sancta,” in Tradition Alive, 25–26; quoted in Ambrose Mong Ih-Ren, OP, “Purification of Memory in the Spirit of Love,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 3, no. 3 [2012]: 129–150, at 140–141)

Two things about that passage deserve marking. It is reciprocal — the asked-for sacrifice on the Roman side is the restriction of papal power to the Catholic Church. And it is not indifferentist: Mong, who is sympathetic to Afanasiev, is careful to say that he is “not minimizing the importance of dogmatic formulations nor advocating doctrinal relativism or indifferentism,” but arguing that the differences can be resolved through the power of charity, on the ground that “our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect” (1 Cor. 13:9) and that when love is set higher than knowledge, knowledge itself is perfected (Mong, “Purification of Memory,” 141, quoting Tradition Alive, 28).

Afanasiev’s “love” here is not sentiment. It is the same “power of love” that closes his major book: “if the power founded upon love is insufficient in actual life, which has lost the principle of love, it is on the contrary completely sufficient in the Church, where love is the first and the last principle. Juridical power is a substitute for love in actual social life . . . In the Church, perfect love dwells, there is no need for such a substitute” (“Una Sancta,” in Tradition Alive; quoted in Mong, 141; and see The Power of Love).

The Non-Reception Mechanism

Afanasiev’s account of how churches deal with one another when something goes wrong is what makes the argument coherent to him. A church that acts irregularly is admonished by the others’ refusal to receive its act — a “fraternal admonition” rather than a penalty. If it persists, communion may be broken. But it remains a church, since no local church perfectly manifests the Church of God (“Una Sancta,” 457; Tradition Alive, 16–17; and see The Local Church and Its Fullness).

Applied to 1054 and after, this yields: a rupture of communion between churches, not the ceasing of one of them to be the Church. From which follows both the “wounded but not destroyed” reading of the schism and the possibility that the wound could be closed without a surrender.

The “Sister Churches” Question

Afanasiev’s ecclesiology supplies the logic on which two ecclesial bodies can regard one another as churches rather than as the Church and its defection — the logic that later underwrote the “sister churches” idiom of Orthodox–Catholic dialogue and of the Munich statement of 1982 (Bordeianu, “Orthodox–Catholic Dialogue,” 241).

That idiom has itself been contested from the Roman side, and it is worth recording since it bears directly on how far Afanasiev’s premises are shared. Joseph Ratzinger objected that it is not appropriate to speak of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church as two “sister Churches,” because the term properly applies to particular churches; to use it of the two wholes would be to set up “a plural above and beyond which no singular is apparent,” leaving a dualism at the ultimate level of the concept of Church, so that “the one Church would thus become a phantom, a utopia” (Joseph Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005, 232–233; reported and discussed in Mong, “Purification of Memory,” 152). Ratzinger’s objection is precisely a universal-ecclesiological objection, which is what Afanasiev would have predicted.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has likewise rejected any eucharistic ecclesiology that would allow “self-sufficiency on the part of the particular Churches,” a position Richard DeClue identifies as Afanasiev’s most controversial (Richard G. DeClue, Jr., “Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology, ect.org).

What the Orthodox Church Holds and Practises

This must be said separately, and it is not Afanasiev’s to say.

The Orthodox Church does not practise eucharistic communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Communion in the Mysteries is the sign and seal of a unity in faith already possessed, not a means of arriving at it; the Orthodox discipline admits to the chalice those who are members of the Orthodox Church. No Orthodox Church has adopted eucharistic ecclesiology as her ecclesiology, and no Orthodox Church has acted on the conclusion Afanasiev drew from it. The differences that stand between Orthodoxy and Rome — the filioque, the papal claims of 1870, and much else — are set out in Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and The Filioque, and the intra-Orthodox argument about ecumenical engagement in The Ecumenism Debate.

It should equally be said that no Orthodox Church condemned Afanasiev, censured his books, or acted against his person. He died a protopresbyter in good standing in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Western European exarchate and rector of the St. Sergius Institute church (see Priesthood, Tunisia, and the Later Years). What stands between those two facts is a proposal that was made, argued, published, read — and not received.

The Orthodox Objections, in Their Own Terms

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, these are reported as their proponents make them, and not answered here.

That the argument proves too much. If the limits of the Church are the limits of the eucharistic assembly, and validity of the eucharist is the criterion, then the Church’s boundary is drawn by a sacramental test alone, and the confession of the faith drops out of the definition. What the Church believes, and whether a community holds it, ceases to be constitutive. Critics take this to invert the relation between faith and sacrament that the Orthodox tradition has always maintained.

That it makes doctrinal difference tolerable. Afanasiev asks the Orthodox to restore communion “the dogmatic divergences notwithstanding.” Those who regard the filioque and the Vatican definitions as errors about God and the Church, rather than as canonical irregularities that “lie on the surface,” take this to be an invitation to communion in a division that has not been healed — the classical Orthodox objection to intercommunion as such, which is that it enacts a unity that does not exist.

That it cannot say what a council does. If reception rather than authority makes a decision effective, and if a church remains a church whatever the other churches do, then it is hard to say what happened at Nicaea, or at Chalcedon, or in 1054. This is the same objection Zizioulas presses on the ecclesiology as a whole, and it is set out in The Critique.

That it treats the schism as too shallow. Afanasiev’s claim that the differences are “canonical in nature” and do not “extend to the depths” is a historical and theological judgment that a great many Orthodox — including many with no anti-ecumenical commitments — simply do not share. The repository’s own account of the division does not treat it as shallow (see The Great Schism).

That it stands nearly alone. Even among Orthodox theologians who make eucharistic communion the sign of ecclesial unity — Bulgakov, Florovsky, Afanasiev, Stăniloae, Zizioulas — the understandings of the Church’s boundaries diverge widely, and Afanasiev’s use of eucharistic ecclesiology to justify intercommunion has not been followed. That isolation is itself a datum about the reception of his thought.

A Note on Proportion

Two things should be said in fairness to Afanasiev, and neither is a defence of his conclusion.

The first is that his ecumenical argument is a derivation, not a motive. He proposed eucharistic ecclesiology in the winter of 1932–33, at a moment when neither church had shown any sign of openness to the other and there was no ecumenical occasion for it whatsoever (noted in Saldanha, “Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” 126). The theology came first; the application came thirty years later.

The second is that the reception of him is entangled with a much larger argument about ecumenism that was not of his making, and that his positions are routinely reported in forms he would not have recognized. Anastacia Wooden’s general complaint applies here as elsewhere: most of what people believe they know about Afanasiev is inference rather than reading (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 58).

Whether the conclusion is defensible is a question this collection does not answer. That it was his own, that it has not been received, and that Orthodox discipline is what it is — those are the facts, and they are stated separately on purpose.

References

Afanassieff, Nicolas. “Una Sancta.” Irénikon 36, no. 4 (1963): 436–475. English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time, 3–30. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Afanassieff, Nicolas. “L’Eucharistie, principal lien entre les Catholiques et les Orthodoxes.” Irénikon 38 (1965): 337–339. English: “The Eucharist, the Principal Link between the Catholics and the Orthodox.” In Tradition Alive, 47–49.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. “Granitsy Tserkvi” [The Boundaries of the Church]. Pravoslavnaya mysl’ 7 (1949): 17–35.
Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox–Catholic Dialogue: Retrieving Eucharistic Ecclesiology.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 44, no. 2 (2009): 239–265.
DeClue, Richard G., Jr. “Eucharistic Ecclesiology.” Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology (ect.org).
Florovsky, Georges. “The Limits of the Church.” Church Quarterly Review 117 (1933).
Jesson, Nicholas A. “Orthodox Contributions to Ecumenical Ecclesiology.” University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, October 2001.
Mong Ih-Ren, Ambrose, OP. “Purification of Memory in the Spirit of Love: An Examination of the Ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanasiev and Joseph Ratzinger.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 3, no. 3 (2012): 129–150.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005.
Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.