The Church and the Holy Spirit in 20th Century Russia

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Boris Bobrinskoy

While the theme of kenosis in trinitarian theology is special to Fr Bulgakov's thinking and, incidentally, inseparably linked with his sophiological ideas, the difficulty he finds himself in when it comes to situating the boundary between the gifts of the Spirit and the Person of the Spirit is common to all biblical and patristic theology.

Vladimir Lossky deals with this theme in a masterly way:

   The Holy Spirit "mysteriously identifies himself with human persons whilst
   remaining incommunicable. He substitutes himself, so to speak, for
   ourselves; ... We should say, rather, that the Holy Spirit effaces himself,
   as Person, before the created persons to whom He appropriates grace. In him
   the will of God is no longer external to ourselves: it confers grace
   inwardly, manifesting itself within our very person in so far as our human
   will remains in accord with the divine will and cooperates with it in
   acquiring grace, in making it ours ... It is then that this divine Person,
   now unknown, not having his image in another hypostasis, will manifest
   himself in deified persons: for the multitude of the saints will be his
   image.(25)

Church and eucharist

In this last section I should like to group together a number of themes around the mystery of the eucharist, as the communion of saints in heaven and on earth in the kingdom which has already begun.

Eucharistic ecclesiology

Modern Orthodox theology is agreed in considering the church's celebration of the eucharist and the liturgy in general as being the place par excellence where the church is made manifest, its epiphany, its identity, the most intense and privileged moment of its existence.

We must obviously pay homage to the important ecclesiological work done by the professors of the St Sergius Institute and St Vladimir's Theological Seminary since the end of the second world war in developing and redefining the principles of Orthodox ecclesiology around the central mystery of the eucharist. Father Bulgakov had situated the beginning of the historical and institutional church in the apostolic community and the breaking of the bread. Father Sergius's reference to the teaching of the apostles and the breaking of the bread assures both the dimension of Orthodoxy and the place of the eucharist at the heart of the church's life.(26) "One may say that in the present age, the church as the body of Christ is strictly this eucharistic body in which the eucharistic gifts are transformed through the action of the Holy Spirit."(27)

It is above all the work of Fr Nicolas Afanassiev which marks the rise of eucharistic ecclesiology, and that indeed beyond the confines of Orthodoxy. He sees the fullness of the church as being realized around the bishop in the eucharist, in the very catholicity of the local church. He contrasts this sense of the fullness of the local catholic church with the Western and legal conception of a universal ecclesiology centred around the monarchical power of the Roman primate.(28)