03 — War, Family, and the French Orthodox Milieu

Between her marriage in 1933 and her husband’s death in 1969, Behr-Sigel was a wife, the mother of three, a schoolteacher, and — in the interstices — a theologian. The middle third of her life was spent in Nancy, through the Occupation, with a Jewish mother and a Resistance network; and it was in the same years that she helped found the review Contacts and the institutions of a French-speaking Orthodoxy. This section covers the long middle, which is usually skipped.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• Nancy, the War, and the Family — the marriage of 1933, three children, the years of the Occupation, the sheltering of a Jewish girl, the teaching career, and André Behr’s death in 1969.
• Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu — the review founded in 1949, the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale, Syndesmos and the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the teaching posts, and the making of a local Orthodoxy in the West.

Why the Middle Matters

There is a version of Behr-Sigel’s life in which nothing happens between 1933 and 1976 — a long domestic parenthesis, and then the famous old woman. It is false in fact and misleading in theology.

In fact, these were the years in which she did her scholarly work. The maîtrise on Russian sanctity became her first book in 1950. The doctorate on Bukharev was begun in 1951. The review Contacts, which became the principal French-language Orthodox periodical, was founded in 1949 with her among its makers. She published on Bulgakov’s sophiology in 1939 and on the Jesus Prayer in 1947. She did all of this while teaching school and raising three children, in a provincial city, during and after an occupation in which her maternal descent made her a target.

In theology, the point is sharper. Behr-Sigel’s mature argument is that the human person is not exhausted by the roles and natures assigned to her — that a person is her nature and is irreducible to it (see Person and Nature after Lossky). She lived that claim for forty years before she formulated it. A woman who was a mother of three and a scholar of Russian hagiography, a schoolteacher and a founder of a theological review, a wife in Nancy and a correspondent of a monk in London, is not a woman for whom one category will do. Her critics sometimes suggest that she wanted women released from vocation; her life suggests rather that she knew from the inside how many vocations one person carries at once.

She also learned in these years what she later called her real apprenticeship in ecumenism: not conferences, but Christians of three traditions hiding Jews together under an occupation (see Nancy, the War, and the Family).

See Also

• 02 — The Turn to Orthodoxy and Lev Gillet — the milieu she entered
• 04 — Russian Spirituality and Bukharev — the scholarship of these decades
• St. Maria of Paris — the Paris end of the same story, and the same war
• Social Ethics — the Church and the world

References

• Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
• “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky.
• Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.