02 — The Turn to Orthodoxy and Lev Gillet

On 12 December 1929, in Strasbourg, Élisabeth Sigel was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation at the hands of Fr. Lev Gillet — a former Benedictine, newly Orthodox himself, who would become the most important person in her spiritual life and the subject, sixty-four years later, of her longest book. This section covers the reception and the relationship.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• The Chrismation of 1929 — the date, the place, the circumstances, and the disputed alternatives; what a reception by chrismation is and what it meant here.
• Father Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church” — who he was, what he gave her, the anonymity he insisted on, and her 640-page biography of 1993.

The Shape of the Turn

Behr-Sigel’s reception into Orthodoxy is unusual in three respects, and all three are visible in what she became.

It was not a flight from Protestantism. She was not disillusioned, not in crisis, and not looking for authority. She had been a serious and active Protestant since her confirmation at fourteen, was studying in a Protestant faculty, and would take a Protestant pastoral charge two years after her chrismation (see Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé). What drew her was positive: the Paschal liturgy at Saint-Serge, Khomiakov’s sobornost, and a community of Russian exiles whose faith was the one thing they had not lost.

It was mediated by a Western convert, not by a Russian. The priest who received her was a Frenchman and a former Benedictine of Farnborough, received into Orthodoxy himself only a few years earlier. What she entered was therefore, from the first day, an Orthodoxy in the French language and in the West — not a Russian colony to be joined but a Church to be inhabited where she lived. Her whole later career in French Orthodoxy, from the review Contacts to the Fraternité orthodoxe, follows from that starting point (see Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu).

It gave her a spiritual father for fifty years. Fr. Lev received her in 1929, married her in 1933, was her correspondent through the war and after, led a pilgrimage with her in 1965, and died in 1980. She then spent more than a decade writing his life. Whatever else is said about her theology, it grew inside a long obedience to a particular priest, and that fact belongs in any honest account of her.

See Also

• 01 — Alsace and the Protestant Formation — what preceded
• 03 — War, Family, and the French Orthodox Milieu — the world the chrismation put her into
• St. Maria of Paris — who was also formed, at the same time and in the same city, by Fr. Lev Gillet
• The Jesus Prayer — the practice at the heart of what Fr. Lev taught

References

• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Un moine de l’Église d’Orient: le père Lev Gillet. Paris: Cerf, 1993; reissued 2005. English: Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church,” trans. Helen Wright. Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999.
• Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin. Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day, Notre Dame, 2010.
• “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky.