Assessment

A closing weighing, offered as a judgment and not as a verdict. Afanasiev gave twentieth-century theology a vocabulary it has not been able to do without, and an account of the Church that neither of the two great communions has been willing to adopt. His historical reconstruction is the most vulnerable thing he wrote and the thing he is most often judged by; his theology of the royal priesthood is the most durable and the least read. He is, sixty years after his death, a theologian whose reception is only now beginning on the basis of his actual texts.

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

What He Was

A canon lawyer who became an ecclesiologist by accident of evidence. Afanasiev held one chair for thirty-six years, published no large book in his lifetime, and made his central proposal — the reduction of ecclesiological types to two — in a journal article at the age of forty-one. He described himself as “a historian, almost exclusively a historian,” never taught dogmatics or ecclesiology, and worked on the narrow ground of the pre-Constantinian ministries and conciliar institutions (Bernhard Schultze, “Ekklesiologischer Dialog mit Erzpriester Nikolaj Afanas’ev,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 33 [1967]: 388; quoted in Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 57).

Alexander Schmemann’s obituary is still the best short characterization: his gift was for “short and scholarly essays” rather than treatises, and beneath a dry and technical manner there was “a hidden fire, a truly consuming love for the Church” (Alexander Schmemann, “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966).

Paul Valliere’s judgment, in the Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, is that he was “the most original ecclesiologist of the Russian emigration” (Paul Valliere, “The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 660–676, at 664). In a generation that contained Bulgakov, Florovsky, Lossky and Evdokimov, that is a considerable claim, and it is not obviously wrong.

What Is Durable

The vocabulary. “Eucharistic ecclesiology” is his phrase, and the distinction between eucharistic and universal conceptions of the Church has become standard usage in Orthodox and Catholic theology alike — including among people who reject his account of how the second arose, and among people who have never read a page of him. A theologian who supplies the terms in which a century argues has done something durable, whatever the fate of his particular theses.

The eucharistic derivation of ecclesiology. The claim that one should begin an account of the Church from what happens when the faithful assemble to break bread, rather than from a definition of the Church as institution, has won. It won in Orthodoxy through Schmemann and Zizioulas; it is legible in the Roman Catholic conciliar record at Lumen Gentium § 26; it structures the Munich statement of 1982. Kallistos Ware’s judgment, written in 2011, was that “the eucharistic ecclesiology of Zizioulas continues to prevail almost everywhere” and “will prevail in Orthodox thought during the future” (Kallistos Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, nos. 2–3 [2011]: 231, 233; quoted in Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 56). The version that prevailed is not Afanasiev’s. The starting point is.

The theology of the royal priesthood. This is the part of him that has been least discussed and, on the evidence, is most likely to matter next. The claim that every baptized Christian is consecrated, that the Church’s whole structure exists to make the exercise of the royal priesthood possible, and that the difference between clergy and laity is a difference of ministry within one priestly people rather than between two classes of Christian, is a serious and under-examined proposal. Wooden argues that this is the area where his ecclesiology “needs to be most urgently lived out and experienced” (“On the Legacies,” 59). It is also the part of him that Zizioulas dropped and that therefore fell out of the tradition that carried his name forward (Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 274–275).

The method. The proposition that a period’s operative ecclesiology can be read out of its canons, rites and ordination prayers — and that this is more reliable evidence than what its theologians said about the Church — is a genuine methodological contribution, and it is the reason a canon law course produced an ecclesiology at all (see Canons and Canonical Consciousness).

What Is Vulnerable

The Cyprian thesis. This is the weakest link, and it is the one on which he is most often tried. The objections of Camelot, Nichols, Zizioulas, Safranski, Miltos and others are serious, they come from several confessional directions at once, and the defence — that Afanasiev claimed less than he is charged with, that Cyprian was never his subject, and that the argument does not stand on the exegesis — is a mitigation rather than a refutation (see The Cyprian Thesis Contested). The fairest thing to be said is that the intended volume on Cyprian was never written, and that we are judging a case that was never fully made.

The account of order. Afanasiev issued sustained invectives against law in the Church and never set out the positive theory of canonical order those invectives presuppose. His most thorough defender concedes it: he “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 leaves his central distinction — between imperial law and the Church’s own order — implicit across an entire corpus cannot complain of being read as an antinomian.

The ecumenical conclusion. His argument that communion with Rome could be restored by an act of love, the dogmatic divergences notwithstanding, has not been received by any Orthodox Church, and it is not clear that it could be. It requires that the differences between the two communions be surface and canonical rather than deep and doctrinal — a judgment most Orthodox do not share and which the repository’s own account of the schism does not support (see Una Sancta and the Question of Communion and The Great Schism). It should be added that this is the conclusion, not the theology; a reader may find the eucharistic thesis compelling and this inference from it unsound, and many have.

The problem of the whole. The strongest form of Zizioulas’s objection survives the demonstration that he read Afanasiev thinly. Even granting everything Alexandrov establishes — that Afanasiev included the bishop in the definition, that he did not make the parish a catholic church, that he criticized autocephalism, that reception is a real mechanism — the question remains what, on his account, a council does, and how the churches are one in a way that could ever require anything of any of them. Afanasiev’s answer is love and reception. Whether that is an ecclesiology or the description of a hope is the question, and it has not been settled.

What the Reception Cost

The most striking fact about Afanasiev is chronological. His major book was criticized in print in 1965, published in Russian in 1971, in French in 1975, and in English in 2007. His principal critic acknowledged having read five of his essays and none of his Russian works (John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001, 36 n. 47). The consensus about him was formed, endorsed by Meyendorff, Ware and Erickson, and installed in the textbooks, before the evidence was available in any language most of its participants read.

Wooden states the consequence: “potential students of Afanasiev have a preconceived notion of his supposed shortcomings before they even read his works. There is even an impression that he is interesting only as a historic figure, and that his scholarship is completely superseded by his Orthodox followers” (“On the Legacies,” 56). And: “most of what people think they know about his ecclesiology is an assumption deduced from Zizioulas’s work, while 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” (58).

This is not a complaint about injustice to a man. It is a statement about what the discipline lost: a second, independently developed eucharistic ecclesiology, with a different centre of gravity — the assembly and the royal priesthood rather than the bishop and the one-and-many — which was folded into the first before anyone could compare them.

A Provisional Judgment

Offered as such, and open to correction.

Afanasiev was a historian with one large idea, and the idea was better than the history he wrote in its support. He was right that the eucharistic assembly is the place to begin, right that the ministries are charisms and not offices over the Church, right that the laity are consecrated, and right that a canon cannot be read without the ecclesiology inside it. He was probably wrong, or at least unproven, about Cyprian. He was insufficiently clear about law to be read fairly on the subject. And his ecumenical conclusion asked of the Orthodox Church something she has not been able to give and shows no sign of giving.

He was also, by the testimony of both his student and his critic, a man of considerable and unshowy love for the Church. Zizioulas, who spent a career arguing against him, prayed that God would receive him among the saints (Zizioulas, “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale,” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 [March 2008]: 25–26; quoted in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 273). That is not a canonization and this guide does not present it as one. It is what one Orthodox theologian said of another with whom he disagreed about almost everything, and it belongs at the end of this collection because it is the right note on which to leave a man who is not a saint and was not a heretic, but a scholar who worked for thirty-six years in one chair on one question and got some of it right.

Alexandrov’s closing sentence is the fairest forecast available: “Afanasiev’s ecclesiology deserves attention in its own right. Time will allot his writings the place they deserve” (“Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 277) — a line he takes, fittingly, from Schmemann’s obituary of 1966.

See Also

References

  • Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. “In Memoriam: Father Nicholas Afanasiev.” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 1966.
  • Schultze, Bernhard. “Ekklesiologischer Dialog mit Erzpriester Nikolaj Afanas’ev.” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 33 (1967): 388.
  • Valliere, Paul. “The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, edited by Caryl Emerson et al., 660–676. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • Ware, Kallistos. “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, nos. 2–3 (2011): 216–235.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
  • Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church. Translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
  • Zizioulas, John D. “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale.” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 (March 2008): 25–29.