Toward the Possible Development of Fr. Nikolay Afanasiev’s Antithesis between “Primate” and “Priority”

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Fr. Nikolay Afanasiev’s significant study entitled “The Church Which Presides in Love”, in which in addition to treating the long-discussed relationship between local and universal ecclesiology, Afanasiev proposes an innovative interpretation of the church primate (hierarch), which presupposes the practical refusal of any manifestation of primacy in favour of the conceptual imagery of priority, previously unexplored in academic discourse. According to Afanasiev, priority is an exclusively spiritual quality of the church community which exceeds others in the charisma of Christian witness because of its foundation in the love of Christ. This article examines the possibility of extending this understanding of primacy based on a priority of love, as proposed by Fr. Nikolay Afanasiev in the context of interrelations between local church communities, to the internal life of any given local Christian community. The author supposes that it is possible to extrapolate from the priority of love as the foundation of authority of a particular local fellowship in relationship to others, in order to conclude that within each community it is this charisma of love that becomes the foundational, if not unique criterion of the community’s spiritual maturity and the extent to which it is living its calling. Turning the priority of love into a fundamental and pervasive life principle for the local church community makes it necessary, in the author’s opinion, to integrate imagery depicting the “flashing” or “shimmering” manner in which the Church of God appears within history into our conceptual understanding of orthodox ecclesiology. This “shimmering” indicates the lack of self-sufficiency of any given empirical form of church, without respect to its scale in numbers and degree of institutional effectiveness.