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.

Fr. Nikolai Afanasiev points out, however, that in St. Ignatius's writings the bishop is wholly included in the Eucharistic assembly and therefore cannot yet be the only guarantor of its ecclesiastical nature. However, he soon became such, consistently developing the function of the sole representation of his community at enlarged church meetings, where elected persons of neighboring communities were invited to convince his decisions (!), in particular on the election of a new bishop. Initially, these could be, and often were, not bishops or even clerics, but soon the obligatory presence of neighboring bishops as invited on such occasions was established everywhere. In this case, by representing himself, the bishop also represents the community. The latter began to mean the automatic reception of the decisions of one's bishop at meetings of near and distant neighbors. In this way, there is no need for reception in its former form, i.e. as a test of the ecclesiastical nature of certain actions.

Councils of a "transitional type" appeared, in the author's terminology, where the catholic principle inherent in the activity of a given assembly was combined with the legal nature of the presence of neighboring bishops. Then there are precedents for the consecration of bishops outside the communities, consolidating their fundamentally new position: no longer within, but above the church assembly. A logical continuation of such a church structure is such an idea of the conciliar unity of the Church, which will be understood as the assembly of the largest possible number of bishops. In addition, St. Cyprian of Carthage already speaks of the inadmissibility of demanding the ecclesiastical reception of the acts of the council, since this undermines the authority of the bishops. In the extreme, therefore, a council of bishops can replace the assembly of the church. Fr. Nicholas draws attention to the fact that the minutes of the Council of Carthage in 256 are called "Sententiae episcoporum" (decrees of bishops). Thus, with the triumph of universal ecclesiology, the idea of an ecumenical council, which for the time being was only technically impracticable, began to float in the air.

In this way, an order was finally formed, which replaced the spiritual quality of church fullness with the formal legal representation of church communities in the person of their heads, bishops. If we continue this logic further, it is easy to come to the conclusion that it is not obligatory for a bishop to represent anyone other than himself, a person endowed with sacralized legal powers. The order of consecrating bishops not within the community, but in the community, that is, from outside, which contributes to the emergence of such a worldview, has already been mentioned.

Consequently, the legal principle of the structure of the church itself must inexorably lead not simply to the rupture of church integrity, as stated by Fr. Nikolai Afanasiev, but directly to the legitimization of parallelism in the structure of the empirical church. Then one, the main level, is represented by a council of a self-lawful episcopate, and the second is also in a certain sense a self-contained church people. The first appears structurally necessary, but also sufficient, since the council of bishops is the expression of the fullness of the Church. The second, in turn, looks structurally optional, since it is not endowed with any qualities that can testify to its fundamental significance. In other words, ecclesiastical unity and catholic fullness, understood as legal principles, are fully institutionalized by the higher clergy.

However, not everything has been said here either. Authority and legal powers are capable of absorbing the sacramental side of the life of the church. At the very beginning of the book, Fr. Nicholas warns: "If, along with the authority of Christ as the Head of the Church, there were another authority in the person of another community, or of any primate, then this authority would be at the same time an authority over Christ Himself and His Body" (p. 30). The circle closes. The power of love and the power of keys cannot be equalized in rights, and, incredible as it may seem, legal consciousness by its very nature is forced to give primacy to the second, and not to the first.

Who knows, but perhaps the glaring incompatibility of the church order of the author's time with the early Christian church consciousness, which is clearly reconstructed today, including thanks to his own efforts, prompted Fr. Nikolai Afanasiev to this daring work. The accuracy and persuasiveness of the diagnostics and assessments that have become established in the course of history of the institutional and legal priorities of the church structure to the detriment of the original, properly conciliar ones, rooted in the mystical nature of the Church, the Body of Christ, make us think deeply today about the possible ways of actual, and not only theological, rehabilitation of the conciliar principle of the Church.

In this regard, the eyes of the children of the Russian Orthodox Church continue to turn to the Local Council of 1917-1918, since it was there that real encouraging steps were taken towards the restoration of the most obvious forms of conciliarity: the election of the episcopate and the rest of the clergy, the creation of metropolitan districts, the revision of the functions of church courts, and the restoration of some aspects of local conciliarity. On the whole, however, the council did not go beyond the framework of a representative understanding of its own function in church life, which is especially emphasized by Fr. Nicholas. Consequently, by this criterion alone, it has almost entirely remained within the limits of its legal, rather than charismatic, understanding. And yet, the very movement towards overcoming the distortions described above should be recognized as almost a breakthrough in the direction hoped for by the empirical church.