The Church of the Holy Spirit

Introduction: The Church of the Holy Spirit— Nicholas Afanasiev’s Vision of the Eucharist and the Church

In some ways Fr. Nicholas was a man of one idea, or, it may be better to say, one vision. It is this vision that he described and communicated in what appeared sometimes as “dry” and technical discussions. A careful reader, however, never failed to detect behind this appearance a hidden fire, a truly consuming love for the Church. For it was the Church that stood at the center of that vision, and Fr. Afanasiev, when his message is understood and deciphered, will remain for future generations a genuine renovator of ecclesiology.1 Memories and memoirs can be most revealing as well as obscuring. The recently published selections from Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s journals attest to this.2 The quotation above, however, comes from one of the typically succinct obituaries Fr. Schmemann was accustomed to writing and in many ways summarizes not only who Fr. Nicholas Nicholaievitch Afanasiev (1893–1966) was, but the larger significance of his work.3 It is telling that another vignette of Fr. Afanasiev, in the often acerbic but usually accurate memoirs of Fr. Basil Zenkovsky, both con- firms the Schmemann view while adding something which perhaps obscures or even misunderstands the man. Zenkovsky several times notes Afanasiev’s reticent personality, his characteristic diffidence, while at the same time observing the force with which Fr. Afanasiev expressed his convictions. Zenkovsky, as later John Meyendorff, curiously faults ix Introduction The Church of the Holy Spirit—Nicholas Afanasiev’s Vision of the Eucharist and the Church Michael Plekon x — Introduction Afanasiev for being an historical relativist. I think the methodological precision and rigor of historiography that Afanasiev explicitly discusses both at the beginning and close of The Church of the Holy Spirit witnesses otherwise, and strikingly so. If there is something of an enigma here it is not so much about Afanasiev as a person but about the history of his work in ecclesiology. Born in Odessa in 1893, his father was an attorney who died when Afanasiev was very young. He was the only remaining male in a household comprised of his mother, grandmother, and younger sister. Fr. Afanasiev’s wife observed that his personality was deeply tied to the south of the Ukraine, its sunshine, seashore, and countryside, the almost Mediterranean feel of life there. A gifted student, Afanasiev early on wanted to be a bishop, so attracted was he by the ornate vestments. (He would later point to these as sad relics of a disappeared Byzantium, preserved for no theological reasons in Orthodox liturgical tradition.) Of other possible vocations—teaching, medicine, the priesthood—the first seemed to fit best with his skills and sensibilities. Mathematics became his specialization and it eventually influenced his inscription in the artillery school and then service in this branch of the military in WWI. Afanasiev, like Paul Evdokimov, saw much suffering, death, and destruction in these war years, first in the internal conflict and then in the civil strife following the Russian revolution. Marianne Afanasiev notes that it was Fr. Nicholas’s beloved books—Rozanov, Merezhovsky, Soloviev, and especially Alexander Blok’s poetry—which sustained him. With thousands of other immigrants he fled in 1920, arriving finally in Belgrade , where he enrolled at the University’s theology faculty, returning to the vocational intentions of years before. But it was a hard life as a political exile: new surroundings, a different language, loneliness, a tiny stipend which meant that he shared the extreme poverty of fellow refugees. It was through membership and then service as treasurer in a Russian association that Afanasiev was integrated into a circle of friendships in which he would remain the rest of his life. There was Kostia Kern and Sergei Sergeivich Bezobrazoff , later Father Kyprian and Bishop Cassian, who would be fellow students and then faculty colleagues at the Paris St. Sergius Theological Institute. Bishop Benjamin (Fedtchenko) and Father Alexis Nelioubov became spiritual fathers to him. Perhaps the most important figure was his “teacher and friend” Basil Zenkovsky, also later to be his colleague in Paris. Probably no one was more influential than Zenkovsky in eventually bringing Fr. Nicholas to his career as a theologian and faculty member at St. Sergius. In Belgrade Afanasiev also participated in the Fraternity of St. Seraphim and most especially in the Students’ Movement, later the Russian Christian Students Movement. Through these he was drawn into the Introduction — xi eucharistic revival, the “churching of...