Today's appearance of the church, alas, fully corresponds to the words of Fr. Nicholas, which preceded his most famous work, The Church of the Holy Spirit: "Our church life has come to a dead end, since the principles that penetrated it in the distant past have outlived themselves and cause only shortcomings in church life. The Church is seen as an organization subject to human laws and, as an organization, devotes itself to the service of human tasks. The human will dominates in itself, and the human will outside of it strives to turn the Church of God into a means to achieve its goals. Never, perhaps, have the faithful themselves given the 'bride of Christ' to be mocked in such a way."

"Church Councils...", which to a certain extent prepared Fr. Nicholas's main work, are devoted to the scientific and theological rehabilitation of the conciliar principle of church life, which is inseparable from its essence and purpose.

Fr. Nicholas departs from the Eucharistic nature of the Church, which is thus revealed first and foremost in the Eucharistic assembly. For the same reason, the conciliar principle of the Church is nothing other than a property directly presupposed by the Eucharistic nature of the Church. It is extremely important here that the author does not speak of an assembly that calls itself so or assimilates its visible attributes. It is a question of the very nature of the sacramental event, and therefore of whether a given assembly is really Eucharistic, whether it really lives by having Christ at its head, "in our midst." Fr. Nicholas mentions several times the well-known fact that local gatherings-communities were often designated by the word "love."

The Church obeys Christ, Whom God has "placed above all things," the head of the Church, which is His Body, "the fullness of Him who fills all in all." The very headship of Christ, His authority, is completely devoid of signs of external authority, it only reveals the reality of the gathering in Christ of "two or three" and, therefore, confirms or, more than hopes, refutes it. Even the authority of Christ, therefore, is not an external disposition, but only the authenticity of His presence, and therefore of the presence of the Church, His mystical Body.

The Eucharistic ecclesiology developed by Fr. Nicholas proceeds from the primacy of the local Eucharistic assembly, and, consequently, the presence in it of the fullness of the Church, provided that it is sacramental. In this way, the whole Church, and not any part of it, appears in the life of the local community. In the author's opinion, in the author's opinion, the peculiarity of early Christianity, which has actually disappeared from the life of the earthly Church, is rooted in this consciousness. "The Church is where Christ is, and Christ is where two or three are gathered in His name" (p. 31).

Christ is indivisible, so His presence "in our midst" in this Eucharistic assembly cannot be partial, but it follows with all certainty that the manifestation of the Church is possible only in fullness, and not in part. Only later, as we know, will a different conception of the Church develop as a union of local communities, where none of them has in itself the fullness of the Church, which within the framework of this new, universal ecclesiology belongs only to the whole.

The most ancient image of unity according to Fr. Nikolai Afanasiev looks fundamentally different, it is a loving union of communities, which does not represent an organization of a higher nature, since in the Church there can be nothing higher than the Church (p. 32). In the same way, the authority of a church community is not measured by the number of members, the antiquity of the see, the historical importance or administrative status of the host city. Its authority will be the higher, "the greater the degree of approximation... community to the essence of the Church" (p. 33).

It is important that the life of individual communities appears as an aspiration to one another in love, since "just as Christ cannot rise up against Himself, so one church community accepts with love what is done in another, because what is done in one is done in all, it is done in the Church" (p. 33).

Fr. Nicholas believes that "the only condition for the decisions of one community to another is only their ecclesiastical nature, which is tantamount to recognizing them as catholic." In this case, the Church's reception is something that can belong only to the whole Church, "as the Church's witness to the truth, that is, to Herself" (pp. 33, 34).

Reception itself, therefore, turns out to be a natural form of revealing in the life of a particular ecclesiastical, i.e., Eucharistic community, its catholic nature. In other words, reception establishes whether the gathering of a given church community really has a truly ecclesiastical character, i.e., whether it is Christ's.

Fr. Nicholas's idea of a church council as a special "gathering of the members of the Church with Christ to discuss and resolve issues of a catholic nature" fits very organically into this context. The Council appears as a form of church life, necessary for the solution of an actualized problem, which was previously present in the practice of communities only latently.

Such an understanding of the council assimilates to him the property of a natural and habitual form of life for the church – the assembly of its members, the specificity of which consists only in the special nature of the issues discussed. As Fr. Nicholas writes, "at the moment of its establishment, the Church harbored within itself a potential Council" (p. 42). A council understood in this way can have neither a special status, nor even an authoritative authority. The council, just like any aspect of the life of an individual community, becomes the property of the whole church through reception. The content of conciliarity and the criterion of reception remain the same: "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

It is obvious that the empirical reality in which the author himself lived is too radically different from the order of things he describes. Its nature is fully covered by one definition – legal. Most of the "Church Councils..." is devoted to the formation of this, it should be noted, existing church structure, alien to early Christianity.

The paradoxical feature of this evolution is that, in Fr. Nicholas's opinion, "when the Council was transformed into an ecclesiastical institution, the voice of the Church itself fell silent, and in its place remained the voice of her supreme body" (pp. 43-44). In turn, the powers acquired by the newly emerged legal institution are inevitably made dependent on the representativeness of a particular council. Catholicity as a quality of spiritual life gives way to other priorities that make it possible to formally determine the degree of authority of a particular assembly, as a result of which the integrity of the church council is lost. For a not very long historical period (100-150 years), the once only sign of churchliness turned out to be firmly linked to another, external, unknown in apostolic times. Already St. Ignatius the God-bearer, along with the confession: "Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church" (Smyrn. 8:2), he also speaks a lot about the bishop as an equally important guarantor of the ecclesiastical nature of the local community.