The Critique

A §4.2 file. The criticism of Afanasiev is dominated by one man. John Zizioulas took the eucharistic principle from him, said so, and then argued through a long career that Afanasiev’s version of it “raises serious problems” and “is in need of fundamental correction” — that it makes the parish a catholic church, gives priority to the local over the universal, dissolves canonical unity, and cannot ground conciliarity or primacy. That verdict became the consensus. It has been contested since 2009, chiefly by Viktor Alexandrov and Anastacia Wooden, on the ground that Zizioulas was criticizing a version of Afanasiev he had constructed rather than read. This file gives both, plus the other lines of objection, and settles nothing.

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

The Consensus, and How It Formed

By the mid-1980s the standard way of mentioning Afanasiev had settled into a pattern that Anastacia Wooden describes with some asperity: “first, thanking him for bringing up the eucharistic nature of the Church and for coining the clever phrase ‘eucharistic ecclesiology.’ Then — often without pausing to say more — proceeding by presenting this ecclesiology in the allegedly corrected and advanced version of John Zizioulas. Virtually every textbook on Orthodox ecclesiology follows this pattern” (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 56).

The endorsements came from the top of the Orthodox academy. John Meyendorff, in his foreword to Being as Communion (1985), called Zizioulas’s criticism “justified” and framed the objection as a rhetorical question: “Was not Afanasiev somewhat overlooking the Trinitarian and anthropological dimension of ecclesiology, focusing his thought on the ‘local’ nature of the eucharistic community and, somewhat, excluding the problems of truth and of the universal presuppositions of unity?” (Meyendorff, foreword to John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985, 12; quoted in Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 223–224). Meyendorff had form: in the mid-1950s, as a young theologian in Paris, he had argued against positions in Afanasiev’s book on the ministry of the laity (Alexandrov, 224).

Kallistos Ware recommended Being as Communion as the work containing “important correctives” to Afanasiev. John Erickson wrote that eucharistic ecclesiology, “once identified chiefly with the late Fr Afanasiev and émigré Russian theologians,” had been “given both balance and scholarly precision quite independently by John Zizioulas” (both quoted in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 224).

Andrew Louth‘s Modern Orthodox Thinkers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015) gives Afanasiev’s ecclesiology two paragraphs, inside a chapter on Zizioulas’s contributions (221–222; noted by Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 56 n. 2). That is the settled position in a sentence.

Zizioulas’s Case

1. The formula, pressed to its limit, destroys canonical unity

The earliest form of the objection is in Zizioulas’s 1965 Athens dissertation:

“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.” (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 continues that “such an absolute view of the eucharistic character of the Church to the exclusion of canonical preconditions” leads Schmemann also to ecclesiological fullness in the parish — “which conflicts with the conclusions of this study in which the eucharistic element is interwoven with the canonical, which is to say, the Eucharist with the Bishop” (Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 259).

By 1981, in the introduction to Being as Communion, the diagnosis has hardened: “Eucharistic ecclesiology such as has been developed by Fr Afanasiev and his followers raises serious problems, and because of this it is in need of fundamental correction. The principle ‘where the Eucharist is, there is the Church’ on which this ecclesiology is built, tends to lead to two basic errors that Fr Afanasiev did not avoid” (Being as Communion, 24).

2. First error: the parish as catholic church

“The first of these errors consists in considering even the parish where the Eucharist takes place as a complete and ‘catholic’ Church. Several Orthodox, following Afanasiev, have come to this conclusion without recognizing that they are raising in a very acute manner the entire problem of the structure of the Church” (Being as Communion, 24).

3. Second error: localism

“The principle ‘where the Eucharist is, there is the Church’ risks suggesting the idea that each Church could, independently of other local Churches, be the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.’ Here there is a need for special attention and creative theological work to keep an adequate balance between the ‘local Church’ and the ‘universal one’” (Being as Communion, 25). And later in the same book: “it is often too easily assumed that eucharistic ecclesiology leads to the priority of the local Church over the universal, to a kind of ‘congregationalism.’ . . . Afanasiev was wrong in drawing such conclusions, because the nature of the Eucharist points not in the direction of the priority of the local Church but in that of the simultaneity of both local and universal” (Being as Communion, 132–133).

In 1997 he restated it: “Orthodox theologians such as late Afanassieff and Meyendorff put forth the view that the local Church comes first, both historically and theologically, and it is only in a secondary way, if at all (Afanassieff would not allow even for that until the time of Cyprian), that we can speak of the Church universal. My personal view has always been different . . . because I have always believed that the nature of the Eucharist points to the simultaneity of locality and universality in ecclesiology” (quoted in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 247–248).

This is the objection that matters most for the questions of conciliarity and primacy. On Zizioulas’s account the council and the primate are not additions to eucharistic ecclesiology but consequences of it, because the eucharist is offered in the name of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and therefore requires the communion of all such assemblies; on Afanasiev’s, they can only be arrangements among churches that were already complete without them.

4. Law

Zizioulas holds that Afanasiev’s refusal to see the ties between local churches as juridical produces isolationism, and that his distinction between primauté and priorité is not a natural one. He notes with approval Nicolas Lossky’s suggestion that the position might, on one reading, strengthen autocephalism and admit nationalism into Orthodoxy (Zizioulas, The One and the Many, Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010, 281; discussed in Alexandrov, 256). In 2009 he put it flatly: “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, 257).

5. The bishop

The most personal statement came in 2008, at St. Sergius: “That eucharistic ecclesiology which is not episcopocentric — this is one of the shortcomings of the ecclesiology of Afanasiev — makes a bishop a mere administrator and not a eucharistic proestos. This undermines the sacramental basis of the authority of the bishop in the Church and leads to a dichotomy between doctrine and canon law. If the Eucharist, bishop and local Church are not interdependent, in the future such eucharistic ecclesiology may be a real danger for the Orthodox Church” (Zizioulas, “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale,” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 [March 2008]: 28; quoted in Alexandrov, 275–276).

In the same address he spoke of Afanasiev with great warmth: “Afanasiev drew our attention to the central role of the divine Eucharist in ecclesiology. . . . Almost everything my generation achieved in theology was built on the foundation laid by those great men. They are the pillars of the modern Orthodox theology to whom I turn my mind with a profound gratitude, and I pray for our Lord to accept them among His saints” (quoted in Alexandrov, 273). Both halves are his.

Christophe D’Aloisio has catalogued the full inventory of Zizioulas’s disagreements as ten: the sacramentalization of ecclesiology; the rejection of canon law; the catholic character of the parish; the lack of pneumatology; the absence of an articulated link between local and universal; the empirical modalities of the communion of churches, especially at an episcopal ordination; the erroneous exegesis of Cyprian; the absence of an eschatological understanding of collective apostolic succession; the dialectic of ontological versus functional ordination; and the recognition of ecclesial character in communities isolated from communion (D’Aloisio, Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff, 318; listed in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 132 n. 46).

The Reply

1. Zizioulas did not read enough of him to correct him

This is Alexandrov’s and Wooden’s central contention, and it rests on Zizioulas’s own footnote: “We do not have access to the works of these two theologians [Afanasiev and Schmemann] written in Russian, and have, therefore, drawn our information about their theory mainly from the following articles (as far as we know, only articles exist)” — then listing five: “L’Apôtre Pierre et l’évêque de Rome,” “La doctrine de la primauté à la lumière de l’ecclésiologie,” “The Church which Presides in Love,” “Le Concile dans la théologie orthodoxe russe,” and “Una Sancta” (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 36 n. 47).

Wooden’s inference: “This explains why his often-sweeping assertions about Afanasiev are never illustrated by Afanasiev’s own words.” And Alexandrov’s, quoted by her: throughout his career Zizioulas engaged critically not with Afanasiev but with “a ‘folkloric image of Afanasiev’s ecclesiology that Zizioulas created for himself in the 1960s’” (Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 57).

2. The formula is not his axiom

Alexandrov’s finding is bibliographic: “to the best of my knowledge, this phrase emerges in his works only once, namely, in the article Una sancta.” It is one of several formulations Afanasiev tries in a single passage, and the same passage explicitly includes the bishop in the concept of the eucharist. “By limiting this idea of Afanasiev to a template-like principle ‘where the Eucharist is, there is the Church,’ Metropolitan John makes the thought of his opponent more schematic — even primitive — than it is” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 238–240).

3. Neither Afanasiev nor Schmemann held the parish to be a catholic church

“I have several times drawn the attention of the readership that neither Afanasiev, nor Schmemann considered the parish as a catholic Church. Zizioulas attributes them the position they never held” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 241). Alexandrov concedes that “two or three places” in Afanasiev might be read that way but that the position is nowhere clearly expressed; and he notes that in The Lord’s Supper Afanasiev raised the parish/diocese question as an open problem rather than answering it (Afanasiev, Trapeza Gospodnia, Paris, 1952, 63–64).

4. Priority over versus refusal of priority under

Alexandrov identifies a slide in Being as Communion itself: at the start of the passage Zizioulas reports Afanasiev, “quite sympathetically,” as holding only that the universal Church has no priority over the local; by the end of the same passage he has Afanasiev asserting the priority of the local over the universal. “Evidently, this is not the same!” (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 247).

5. On law

Alexandrov concedes the ambiguity and denies the charge: Afanasiev “issued a good number of invectives against law in the Church” and “never clarified his concept of canon law enough” for an ordinary reader — but he also wrote that “the very concept of the Church implies order” and that the canons belong to the Church’s nature. What he rejected was law of the imperial kind; his own conception is a law in which enforcement by violence has no place and decisions take effect on reception (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 257; and see The Power of Love). On the autocephaly charge, Alexandrov notes that Afanasiev criticized autocephalism (Afanasiev, Vstuplenie v Tserkov’, 2nd ed., 1993, 17).

6. They are not on one line of development

Alexandrov’s conclusion is the most consequential reframing on offer: “although the real Afanasiev influenced, to some extent, Zizioulas while the imagined one is a permanent point of reference and criticism for him, Metropolitan John does not really build his theology on Afanasiev. The two versions of ecclesiology . . . are not on the same line of development. They have parallel, although not completely different, trajectories. Zizioulas builds not a ‘corrected’ version of Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology but a significantly different and rather alternative” one (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 275).

He lists the differences: Zizioulas’s root intuition is “corporate personality” and the dialectic of the one and the many, not Afanasiev’s identity of eucharistic and ecclesial body; Zizioulas’s bishop is an icon of Christ who sometimes “incarnates” his church, which Afanasiev’s is not; the table-fellowship aspect of the eucharist, central to Afanasiev, is almost absent in Zizioulas; and the teaching on the people of God as royal priesthood, from which Afanasiev’s theology of ministries begins, is not present in Zizioulas at all (Alexandrov, 273–275).

A dissenting voice on the same evidence. Christophe D’Aloisio, reading the same material, concludes the opposite — that Zizioulas has no fundamental disagreement with Afanasiev except where he misreads him, and appears rather as “a faithful continuator of Afanasiev’s thought” (D’Aloisio, Institutions ecclésiales et ministères, 332; quoted in Alexandrov, 275 n. 137, who disagrees). The defenders do not agree among themselves.

7. The historical method

To Aidan Nichols’s judgment that Afanasiev’s historical method is 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), Alexandrov replies that “back to sources” was the mainstream of twentieth-century theology and its chief factor of renewal, that “we do not really have anything better to replace it,” and that Zizioulas himself paid tribute to the historical method in his first book (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 277).

Wooden adds the tu quoque, using Andrew Louth against Zizioulas’s own history: Zizioulas’s picture of a monepiscopal eucharistic ecclesiology going back to the apostles “reflects a possible state of affairs throughout that period. But it cannot be maintained that it is the only form of the church to be found in the early centuries,” and “the poverty of the historical material relating to the early Christian centuries demands a much more tentative approach” (Andrew Louth, review of Eucharist, Bishop, Church, The Ecumenical Review 56 [2004]: 147–148; quoted in Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 58). Wooden’s point is that Louth’s criticism “did not extend to the need to reconsider Zizioulas’s critique of Afanasiev.”

The Other Lines of Objection

The historiographical objection — that Afanasiev’s Cyprian is a construct — is made by Camelot, Nichols, Zizioulas, Safranski, Miltos, Stavrou, and Aryankalayil, and is set out in full in The Cyprian Thesis Contested.

The ecumenical objection — that his conclusions about communion with Rome cannot be squared with Orthodox faith or discipline — is set out in Una Sancta and the Question of Communion. It is worth registering that this line of objection is the one most likely to be encountered by a reader outside academic theology, and that it is frequently combined with objections to ecumenical engagement in general — a much larger argument which is not Afanasiev’s and which is treated in The Ecumenism Debate.

The Roman Catholic reservation runs parallel: Richard DeClue identifies as Afanasiev’s most controversial position that “he so stresses the self-sufficiency of the local church as to minimize or even deny the necessity of larger connections,” and notes the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s rejection of any “self-sufficiency on the part of the particular Churches” (Richard G. DeClue, Jr., “Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology, ect.org). Two churches with very different ecclesiologies arrived at the same reservation.

On Florovsky — a note of caution. Georges Florovsky was Afanasiev’s colleague at St. Sergius for fourteen years, and his own ecclesiology was Christocentric, apostolic and catholic in emphasis rather than eucharistic in Afanasiev’s sense; Nicholas Jesson observes that the relative priority of the local church “points clearly to the local church in Nicolas Afanasiev’s theology, and to some extent in Georges Florovsky’s” (Nicholas A. Jesson, “Orthodox Contributions to Ecumenical Ecclesiology,” University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, October 2001, 18). But this collection has not been able to document a published critique of Afanasiev by Florovsky, and does not manufacture one. What can be said is narrower and more interesting: Florovsky’s “The Limits of the Church” (1933) — arguing that the charismatic limits of the Church exceed her canonical limits, against Cyprianic rigorism — opened the very question Afanasiev took up in his own “Boundaries of the Church” (1949) and pressed much further in “Una Sancta” (1963). Florovsky supplied a premise; he did not draw Afanasiev’s conclusion.

The Defence, Named

Michael Plekon — the first to notice, on Alexandrov’s account, “a discrepancy between Afanasiev’s words and the claims of his critics”; editor of the English Church of the Holy Spirit; author of the study of The Lord’s Supper (Wooden, “On the Legacies,” 56; Michael Plekon, “‘Always Everyone and Always Together,’” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 [1997]: 141–174).
Viktor Alexandrov — “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Ecclesiology and Some of Its Orthodox Critics,” Sobornost 31, no. 2 (2009): 45–68; Nikolai Afanas’ev i ego evkharisticheskaya ekklesiologiya (Moscow: St. Philaret’s Institute, 2018); “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev” (2020).
Anastacia Wooden — The Limits of the Church (PhD diss., CUA, 2019); “Afanasiev and His Critics: A Call to Reassessment,” Logos 59, nos. 1–4 (2018): 11–30; Recovering the Eucharistic Ecclesiology of the Early Church (CUA Press, 2025).
Aidan Nichols — not a defender but the most serious auditor: critical of the patristic method, and the author of the first English monograph (Theology in the Russian Diaspora, Cambridge University Press, 1989), which took Afanasiev seriously enough to argue with him at book length rather than in a footnote.

Where the Argument Stands

Alexandrov’s own summary of the state of play is as close to a fair statement as the literature offers, and it is a partisan’s: “We have to go further along the path he took, listening to a competent criticism and ignoring that which is incompetent and biased” (“Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 278). His opponents would say the same in reverse.

What is not in dispute: that Afanasiev originated the programme; that Zizioulas’s version has prevailed; that Zizioulas read only a fraction of him; and that the reassessment now under way has not yet displaced the consensus.

References

Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
Alexandrov, Victor. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Ecclesiology and Some of Its Orthodox Critics.” Sobornost 31, no. 2 (2009): 45–68.
Alexandrov, Viktor. Nikolai Afanas’ev i ego evkharisticheskaya ekklesiologiya. Moscow: St. Philaret’s Christian Orthodox Institute, 2018.
D’Aloisio, Christophe. Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff.
DeClue, Richard G., Jr. “Eucharistic Ecclesiology.” Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology (ect.org).
Jesson, Nicholas A. “Orthodox Contributions to Ecumenical Ecclesiology.” University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2001.
Louth, Andrew. Review of John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church. The Ecumenical Review 56 (2004): 147–148.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
Meyendorff, John. Foreword to John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Nichols, Aidan. Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–1966). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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.
Plekon, Michael. “‘Always Everyone and Always Together’: The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Nicholas Afanasiev’s The Lord’s Supper Revisited.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 (1997): 141–174.
Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
Wooden, Anastacia. “Afanasiev and His Critics: A Call to Reassessment.” Logos 59, nos. 1–4 (2018): 11–30.
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. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church. Translated by Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
Zizioulas, John D. The One and the Many. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010.
Zizioulas, John D. “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale.” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 (March 2008): 25–29.