Father Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church”

Fr. Lev Gillet (1893–1980) — a Frenchman, a former Benedictine, received into Orthodoxy in Paris in 1928, first rector of the first French-language Orthodox parish, chaplain to Mother Maria Skobtsova’s work of hospitality, and from 1938 the resident Orthodox presence of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius in London — published everything he wrote under the signature “a monk of the Eastern Church.” He received Elisabeth Behr-Sigel into the Church in 1929 and married her in 1933; she was his friend and disciple for fifty years and, thirteen years after his death, his biographer.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Who He Was

Louis Gillet was born in 1893 at Saint-Marcellin in the Dauphiné. He studied philosophy in Paris, was mobilized in 1914, taken prisoner almost at once, and spent three years in German captivity, where he came to know Russian Orthodox prisoners — the first of the Russian encounters that determined his life. After the war he studied mathematics and psychology at Geneva, and in 1919 entered the Benedictines at Clairvaux. He was drawn into the orbit of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and made his final vows at the Studite monastery of Univ in Galicia — that is, he became an Eastern-rite Catholic monk before he became Orthodox (orthodoxwiki.org, “Lev Gillet”; en.wikipedia.org, “Lev Gillet”).

He was received into the Orthodox Church in Paris in May 1928, and in November 1928 became rector of the parish of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris — the first French-speaking Orthodox parish in France (orthodoxwiki.org, “Lev Gillet”). In 1938 he moved to London to serve the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox body founded in 1928, and remained in England until his death in 1980, travelling constantly to France, Switzerland and Lebanon (orthodoxwiki.org).

He published under the pseudonym un moine de l’Église d’Orient — “a monk of the Eastern Church” — and the anonymity was not a pose. His best-known books, The Jesus Prayer, Orthodox Spirituality, and The Year of Grace of the Lord, all appeared under it (orthodoxwiki.org, “Lev Gillet”). On the practice at the center of the first of these, see The Jesus Prayer.

The Paris Milieu and Mother Maria

Fr. Lev’s Paris years put him at the exact center of the milieu this collection keeps returning to. He was chaplain to the work of hospitality that Mother Maria Skobtsova built on the rue de Lourmel, and belonged to the circle of Orthodox Action around her, Berdyaev, and Fedotov (see St. Maria of Paris). Behr-Sigel, then living in Nancy, visited the rue de Lourmel foyer (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007).

The two women — the nun who died at Ravensbrück in 1945 and the theologian who lived to 2005 — are therefore not merely contemporaries but participants in one small world, formed by one priest. They differ in almost every other respect: Mother Maria was a poet, a former revolutionary, and a monastic; Behr-Sigel was an academic, a wife and mother, and a layperson to the end. What they share is Fr. Lev, the rue de Lourmel, and a conviction that Orthodoxy in the West had to become a Church of and for the place it was in.

[Disputed: the extent of Behr-Sigel's involvement with Orthodox Action and the rue de Lourmel. The record establishes visits to the foyer and shared formation under Fr. Lev Gillet; it does not establish that she was a member of Orthodox Action or a regular co-worker. She lived in Nancy, more than three hundred kilometres from Paris, from the mid-1930s. Claims that she "worked with" Mother Maria should be read as describing a shared milieu and, during the war, a shared network of rescue, not a daily collaboration.]

What He Gave Her

Three things, on the evidence of her own writing about him.

A Christianity of the love of God without conditions. Fr. Lev’s characteristic note — the one that runs through Amour sans limites and the meditations — is the priority and gratuity of God’s love; the OCA reproduces his reflections under the title “Love Without Limits” (oca.org, “Love Without Limits,” reflections of Archimandrite Lev Gillet). Behr-Sigel’s own theology is, at its root, an anthropology of the person addressed and loved by God, and she took that root from him.

A Western Orthodoxy. He founded the first francophone parish and served an Anglican–Orthodox fellowship for forty years. He is the single largest reason that Behr-Sigel’s Orthodoxy was never an exoticism.

A vocation of freedom, and its cost. Fr. Lev’s own trajectory — Benedictine, Eastern-rite Catholic under Sheptytsky, Orthodox — and his lifelong refusal of position, title, and even his own name in print, made him a figure of unusual liberty and unusual irregularity. This collection notes without embellishment that his life and his relationships have been the subject of discussion among his biographers and readers; Behr-Sigel’s biography of him is by common report a candid book rather than a hagiography, and readers should go to it (see below) rather than to summary.

The Biography of 1993

In 1993, at eighty-six, she published Un moine de l’Église d’Orient: le père Lev Gillet (Paris: Cerf), a book of some 640 pages, reissued by Cerf in 2005, the year of her death (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). The English translation, by Helen Wright, appeared as Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church” (Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999) — published, appropriately, by the body he had served since 1938 (bibliographic records; ISBN 0-903190-07-9).

It is her longest book and, in the judgment of many readers, the one on which her craft is most fully displayed. It is also a strange kind of achievement: the most substantial work of the woman who is remembered for a controversy is a biography of her spiritual father, written across more than a decade, out of fifty years of letters and conversation. The English reviewers noted that it opens a window not only on Fr. Lev but on the growth of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe after the Russian Revolution — which is the milieu of this whole collection.

Two things about the book bear on the rest of her work.

It is a work of hagiography in her own revised sense. Her first book had been about how sanctity actually appears in Russian lives, in forms the official categories were slow to recognize (see Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography). The Gillet biography applies that method to a man she had known intimately: it is a study of a modern holiness that does not fit the standard shapes. Whether Fr. Lev was a saint is not a question this collection or that book decides — he is not canonized, and the repository titles him “Fr.” (cf. the discipline of Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae and Fr. Seraphim Rose).

It was not written as an act of piety at the expense of truth. The pattern of her scholarship — on Bukharev, on Russian sanctity, on Evdokimov — is that admiration and criticism go together, and there is no reason to think the Gillet book is an exception.

The Fifty-Year Relationship

The documented points of contact are worth listing, because they show a continuity rare in modern religious biography:

1929 — he receives her by chrismation at Strasbourg.
February 1933 — he celebrates her marriage to André Behr.
1938 — he moves to London; the correspondence between them begins in earnest and continues for decades.
1965 — she leads a Syndesmos pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Lebanon with Fr. Lev (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).
1980 — his death.
1993 — the biography.

Behr-Sigel is often described as a pioneer, and the description is fair. It should be set beside this: her theological life was lived inside a fifty-year relationship of spiritual fatherhood, and she did not treat that relationship as an obstacle to freedom. When she is charged with importing an alien individualism into Orthodoxy (see The Orthodox Criticism), this is part of what the charge has to account for.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Un moine de l’Église d’Orient: le père Lev Gillet. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993; new edition, Cerf, 2005. English: Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church,” trans. Helen Wright. Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999 (ISBN 0-903190-07-9).
Gillet, Lev [as “A Monk of the Eastern Church”]. The Jesus Prayer; Orthodox Spirituality; The Year of Grace of the Lord. (Published under the pseudonym; English editions from SVS Press and elsewhere.)
“Lev Gillet.” OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (Born 1893 at Saint-Marcellin; prisoner of war 1914–17; Benedictine at Clairvaux 1919; final vows at Univ under Metropolitan Sheptytsky; received into Orthodoxy at Paris, May 1928; rector of Sainte-Geneviève, the first French-speaking Orthodox parish, November 1928; to London 1938 for the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius; died 1980; the pseudonym and the books.)
“Lev Gillet.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org).
Orthodox Church in America. “Love Without Limits: Reflections of Archimandrite Lev Gillet.” oca.org.
Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin. Paris: Cerf, 2007; English Toward the Endless Day, Notre Dame, 2010. (Behr-Sigel’s visits to the rue de Lourmel; the 1965 Syndesmos pilgrimage with Fr. Lev; the correspondence.)
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky.