The Chrismation of 1929

On 12 December 1929, at Strasbourg, Élisabeth Sigel was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation. The priest was Fr. Lev Gillet, a French former Benedictine received into Orthodoxy the year before; the place was the student room of André Behr, the Russian-born chemistry student she would marry four years later. She was twenty-two. The date is contested in the secondary literature, and the contest is worth setting out.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

What Happened

The fullest biographical record places the event precisely: 12 December 1929, at Strasbourg, Fr. Lev Gillet receiving Élisabeth Sigel into the Orthodox Church by chrismation, in the room of André Behr — a chemistry student of Russian origin who four years later became her husband (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Paris: Cerf, 2007).

Three features of that sentence carry weight.

By chrismation, not by baptism. She had been baptized in the Lutheran Church of Alsace-Lorraine as an infant and confirmed in it at fourteen. Her reception followed the practice, general in the Russian emigration and in the francophone parishes forming around it, of receiving baptized Western Christians by chrismation — that is, by anointing with the holy chrism, without rebaptism. The practice reflects a real theological judgment about what is received in the baptism of the heterodox and is not uniform across the Orthodox world; the repository’s treatment of the mysteries sets out the frame (see The Holy Mysteries). Behr-Sigel never treated her Lutheran baptism as nothing, and she never treated her chrismation as a formality.

In a private room, not in a church. There was, in Strasbourg in 1929, effectively no Orthodox parish life to receive her into. The francophone Orthodoxy of the West was at that moment a handful of people and one priest. The domestic setting is not a scandal but a datum: what she joined was not an institution but a nucleus, and she spent the next seventy-five years helping it become a Church in the West (see Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu).

In André Behr’s room. The man in whose room she was chrismated became her husband in 1933, in a marriage celebrated by the same priest. The circle of her Orthodox life was, from the first hour, a circle of persons rather than of institutions — and this is one of the reasons the category of person later did so much work in her theology (see Person and Nature after Lossky).

The Disputed Date

[Disputed: the date of her reception into the Orthodox Church. (a) The fullest and most circumstantial account gives **12 December 1929**, naming the officiant, the city, and the room (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky's authorized biography). (b) Several English-language notices give **1932**, or say that she "became Orthodox at the age of twenty-four," which yields 1931–32 (so the summaries of Sarah Hinlicky Wilson's account; and general encyclopedic notices). (c) Some accounts date her first contact with Orthodoxy to 1926 and her entry to 1932. The 1929 date is the better attested, being tied to named persons and a specific occasion; the later dates may reflect a distinct formal or canonical regularization, or her marriage in 1933, or simple error. This collection uses 12 December 1929 and flags the alternative rather than harmonizing them.]

The disagreement is not trivial, because the sequence of the pastorate at Villé depends on it. If she was received in 1929, then her Protestant auxiliary pastorate of 1931 followed her reception — which is what the fullest record explicitly says, noting that she held the charge “while maintaining Orthodox Church membership.” If she was received in 1932, the pastorate preceded her reception, and the story becomes the tidy one usually told. This collection reports the sequence the best sources give, and marks the alternative (see Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé).

What Drew Her

She has left an account of the attraction, and it is not the account of a woman fleeing something.

The liturgy. The spring of 1928 had taken her to Pascha at Saint-Serge in Paris, celebrated by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov; the record says the Paschal matins made a deep impression (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). Anyone who has attended that service will recognize what a serious twenty-year-old theology student might have found in it: not aesthetic pleasure but an event — the announcement of the Resurrection as something happening in the room. Her later writing keeps returning to the Paschal register; the title of her authorized biography, Vers le jour sans déclin (“Toward the Day Without Decline”), is drawn from the Paschal and eschatological vocabulary of the Orthodox office.

Sobornost. Through her Russian fellow-students, above all Paul Fidler, she had read Khomiakov, and taken from him the category of sobornost — the Church’s unity as a free accord in faith and love, rather than as a juridical structure or an aggregation of individuals (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). For a student of the ecumenical movement, this was the missing word. It is worth noting that Khomiakov’s sobornost is a nineteenth-century theological construction and not a dogmatic definition of the Church, and that Orthodox theologians have differed sharply over how much weight it bears; her own ecclesiology remained marked by it.

The persons. In the Russian émigré circles of Paris she met, in the years around her reception, Paul Evdokimov, Vladimir Lossky, and Eugraphe Kovalevsky (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). Two of those three shaped her permanently: Evdokimov as the friend whose theology of woman she would later take up and then take apart (see The Critique of the Eternal Feminine and Paul Evdokimov), Lossky as the source of the theology of the person on which she built her mature case (see Vladimir Lossky).

The generation she entered was the generation of the Paris emigration at its most creative and most contested: Bulgakov, whose sophiology would be censured by Moscow and by the Russian Church Abroad in 1935; Lossky, who opposed him; Fr. Georges Florovsky, calling for a return to the Fathers; St. Maria of Paris, building houses of hospitality on the rue de Lourmel. Behr-Sigel knew all of them and belonged wholly to none of the parties. She wrote an article on Bulgakov’s sophiology in 1939 and took her doctoral subject on his suggestion, and she took her governing category from his principal critic. This is characteristic and is one reason she is hard to place (see Assessment).

What She Did Not Take From It

It is as important to say what her conversion did not involve.

She did not become Russian. She learned the language, married into the emigration, and worked in its institutions, but the Orthodoxy she wanted was local, French-speaking, and Western — the project of the parish Fr. Lev founded and of the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale she helped to found in the 1960s. She regarded ethnic jurisdictionalism in the West as a disorder to be outgrown, a judgment shared across the whole Paris milieu and still unrealized (cf. Twentieth-Century Fragmentation for the parallel American story).

She did not stop being a scholar of Protestantism or an ecumenist. Her master’s work on Russian sanctity was written for a Protestant faculty; her later teaching included a chair of Orthodox spirituality at Paris’s Institut supérieur d’études œcuméniques; she was for many years vice-president of ACAT (Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture), an interconfessional human-rights body (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). Continuity, not renunciation, is the shape of her life.

And she did not, so far as the record shows, arrive with a program. The woman who was received in a student’s room in 1929 published nothing on the question of women in the Church until 1976. What she brought was a question about holiness — how sanctity actually looks in real lives — and that question produced her first book (see Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography).

References

Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky. (Chrismation by Fr. Lev Gillet at Strasbourg, 12 December 1929, in André Behr’s room; Pascha at Saint-Serge, spring 1928, celebrated by Bulgakov; Khomiakov and sobornost through Paul Fidler; meetings with Evdokimov, Lossky and Kovalevsky; ACAT.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013; interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (Reception into Orthodoxy by chrismation; the dating at age twenty-four.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (Her attraction to the Church as “a community of men and women… joined in joy and peace.”)