Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu

Behr-Sigel’s institutional life’s work was not a book but a Church: the making of a French-speaking, local, non-diasporic Orthodoxy in Western Europe. She was among the founders of the review Contacts in 1949 and of the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale in the 1960s; she taught at the St. Sergius Institute, the Institut Catholique’s ecumenical institute, and by correspondence; she worked in Syndesmos, in the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and in the World Council of Churches; and she served as churchwarden of a francophone parish in the crypt of the Russian cathedral on the rue Daru.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Problem She Worked On

The Orthodoxy that arrived in France after 1917 was an Orthodoxy in exile: Russian in language, Russian in personnel, organized around the assumption — universal among the first generation and abandoned only slowly — that the exile was temporary. Alongside it stood Greek, Romanian, Serbian and later Antiochian jurisdictions, each with its own bishop in the same cities, an arrangement the canonical tradition does not contemplate and which the Orthodox world has still not resolved (for the parallel American case and its literature, see Twentieth-Century Fragmentation).

Behr-Sigel belonged to the small party — Fr. Lev Gillet, Evgraf Kovalevsky, later Olivier Clément, Boris Bobrinskoy, Nicolas Lossky — who held that Orthodoxy in the West must become local: French-speaking, rooted in the place, evangelizing the people among whom it lived, and eventually organized under one episcopate per city as the canons require. She was a convert in a Church of exiles, married into the emigration but not of it, and she spent seventy years on this.

Contacts (1949)

In 1949 she was among the founders of the review Contacts — the initiative belonging to Jean Balzon, with Behr-Sigel among the makers; Olivier Clément, Boris Bobrinskoy and Nicolas Lossky were associated with it in the following decades. It became the principal French-language Orthodox periodical, with an intellectual, engaged and ecumenical orientation (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007). She contributed something on the order of two hundred articles and chronicles to Contacts and other publications over her life (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).

That number deserves attention. Behr-Sigel’s five or six books are the visible part of an output that was overwhelmingly periodical: essays, reviews, chronicles, conference papers, obituaries of friends. It is the working form of a theologian who is also a journalist of her own Church, and it explains why her English-language reception has been patchy — the English reader has three or four books, where the French reader has a fifty-year commentary. On the shape of the corpus, see The Corpus and Its Translations; the English collection Discerning the Signs of the Times (SVS Press, 2001) is precisely an attempt to make a small selection of that periodical work available.

The Fraternité orthodoxe

In the 1960s she was among the founders of the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale — the Orthodox Fellowship in Western Europe — which promoted an Orthodoxy transcending jurisdictional and ethnic divisions and gathered Orthodox of all origins in congresses that continue to the present (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). The Fraternité’s premise is the canonical one: that the Church is constituted territorially, and that the multiplication of parallel jurisdictions in one place is an anomaly tolerated by economy and not a permanent order (cf. Ecclesiology).

This is worth registering carefully in a collection much of which concerns her contested positions. The ecclesiological commitment — one Church, locally rooted, conciliar, not defined by ethnicity — is the least contested and arguably the most consequential thing she worked for. It is also the commitment that makes sense of her method on the disputed questions: her repeated demand was that they be settled conciliarly, by the Church deliberating as the Church, and not by administrative reflex in either direction (see The Question She Raised).

Teaching

Her teaching posts, in the order the record gives them:

The St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, Paris — where she had attended Bulgakov’s courses in the 1930s and where she later taught. She is regularly described as an instructor in theology there and as a theological consultant to the Orthodox hierarchs of France (OCA, “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal,” oca.org, December 2005). [Disputed: her exact status and years at St. Sergius. Notices describe her as teaching there without specifying a chair, a rank, or a period. She was, in any case, a laywoman teaching in an institution whose students were largely candidates for the priesthood, and the significance of that is independent of the title.]
The Institut supérieur d’études œcuméniques (ISEO), the ecumenical institute associated with the Institut Catholique de Paris, where she taught after her retirement from schoolteaching (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).
The “Enotikon” correspondence courses, through which she taught Orthodox spirituality at a distance. These lectures became the book Le Lieu du cœur: Initiation à la spiritualité de l’Église orthodoxe (Paris: Cerf, 1989), which received the Prix Montyon of the Académie française in 1990 (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).

The Prix Montyon is an odd and rather moving detail: a French national academy honoring an introduction to Orthodox spirituality written by an eighty-two-year-old Alsatian laywoman. It is a fair measure of how far the “local Orthodoxy” project had come by 1990.

Syndesmos, the Fellowship, and the Wider World

Syndesmos, the world fellowship of Orthodox youth, occupied her from the 1960s: in 1965 she led a Syndesmos pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Lebanon with Fr. Lev Gillet (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). In 1963 she lectured in Greece at the invitation of the Zoë brotherhood, the Greek lay renewal movement (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky) — a detail worth noting against the impression that her audience was exclusively Western.

The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox body founded in 1928 and served by Fr. Lev from 1938 until his death, was a lifelong connection; it was the Fellowship that published the English translation of her Gillet biography in 1999 (bibliographic record, Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church,” trans. Helen Wright, Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999). Through the Fellowship and its journal Sobornost she belonged to the same Anglo-Orthodox world in which Metropolitan Kallistos Ware worked, and the collaboration of their old age has its roots there (see Fr. Kallistos Ware).

She was, finally, a fixture of World Council of Churches work on Orthodox women and on ecclesiology, including the consultation at Agapia in 1976 (see Agapia 1976 and the Ministry of Women) and the inter-Orthodox consultation at Rhodes in 1988 (see The Recovery of the Deaconess). Her WCC involvement is both the source of her international reach and, for her critics, the principal count against her: it is the arena in which her positions were most amplified and, on at least one documented occasion, overstated by others (see The Over-Claiming and the Record).

The Churchwarden

On retiring she became marguillière — churchwarden — of the francophone parish of the Très-Sainte-Trinité, which meets in the crypt of the cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky on the rue Daru in Paris (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky).

The image is exact and should not be lost among the controversies. The most prominent Orthodox woman theologian of the twentieth century spent her last decades as the warden of a small French-speaking parish in the basement of the Russian cathedral: counting the candle money, opening the doors, keeping the accounts. It is also a precise illustration of the roles the women-in-orthodoxy file lists as the actual and consequential offices women hold in Orthodox life — parish administration, catechesis, theological writing, the ordinary labor without which a parish does not exist.

She died on 26 November 2005 at Épinay-sur-Seine, aged ninety-eight, and was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky) — among the graves of the emigration whose Church she had joined seventy-six years earlier in a student’s room in Strasbourg.

References

“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Olga Lossky’s biography. (Contacts founded 1949 with Jean Balzon, and Olivier Clément, Boris Bobrinskoy and Nicolas Lossky; the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale in the 1960s; c. 200 articles and chronicles; ISEO; the Enotikon correspondence courses and Le Lieu du cœur, Cerf, 1989, Prix Montyon 1990; the 1963 lectures for Zoë in Greece; the 1965 Syndesmos pilgrimage with Fr. Lev Gillet; marguillière of the Très-Sainte-Trinité parish, rue Daru; death at Épinay-sur-Seine, 26 November 2005; burial at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.)
Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin. Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (Teaching at the St. Sergius Institute; theological consultant to the Orthodox hierarchs of France; the 1976 Agapia keynote; the 2003 Florovsky Lecture.)
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Le Lieu du cœur: Initiation à la spiritualité de l’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Cerf, 1989.
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Discerning the Signs of the Times: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. Ed. Michael Plekon and Sarah E. Hinlicky; trans. Lyn Breck, Michael Plekon, Deno Takles, Rachel Mortimer. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Lev Gillet, “A Monk of the Eastern Church.” Trans. Helen Wright. Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1999. (The Fellowship as her publisher.)