Nancy, the War, and the Family

In February 1933 Élisabeth Sigel married André Behr, a chemical engineer of Russian origin; Fr. Lev Gillet celebrated the marriage, and she resigned her Protestant pastoral charge. They settled in Nancy and had three children. Through the Occupation she taught school, kept a household under an administration that classified her by her mother’s descent, sheltered a Jewish girl in her apartment, and worked with Christians of three confessions in the Resistance. She afterwards called those years her real apprenticeship in ecumenism.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Marriage

She married André Behr in February 1933; the marriage was celebrated by Fr. Lev Gillet, who had received her into the Church three years earlier, and she gave up the auxiliary pastorate at Villé on marrying (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Paris: Cerf, 2007).

[Disputed: the year of the marriage. The fullest record gives **February 1933**; some accounts give 1932. The 1933 date is better attested and is used here.]

André Behr was a chemical engineer of Russian origin — the man in whose Strasbourg student room she had been chrismated in 1929. Their three children were Nadine (b. 1934), Marianne (b. 1936), and Nicolas (b. 1944) (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). The family settled in Nancy, in Lorraine, where André’s work took him.

This is the point at which the ordinary shape of a woman’s life in the 1930s closes over a promising theological career, and it very nearly did. She would publish her first book at forty-three and her doctoral thesis at seventy. What kept the theology alive through those decades were three things: a correspondence, a parish, and a subject.

The correspondence was with Fr. Lev, who moved to London in 1938 and with whom she wrote for the rest of his life (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). The parish was Notre-Dame Joie-des-Affligés, the francophone Orthodox parish with which she was connected from 1936, and the Paris circles she kept reaching back into — including visits to the foyer on the rue de Lourmel where Mother Maria Skobtsova ran her houses of hospitality (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky; see St. Maria of Paris). The subject was Russian sanctity, on which she had written her maîtrise and would go on writing; she also attended Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s courses at the St. Sergius Institute and published an article on his sophiology in the Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses in 1939 (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky; on the controversy, see Bulgakov and the Sophiology Controversy).

The Occupation

The war put her, precisely, at risk. Her mother was a Jew, which under the statutes applied in France from October 1940 made Élisabeth and her children objects of the racial legislation regardless of her baptism, her confirmation, and her chrismation. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson states the position plainly: Behr-Sigel’s mother’s Jewishness made her “a prime target of suspicion or worse during this period” (Hinlicky Wilson, as summarized in the published accounts of Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, London: T&T Clark, 2013).

What is documented of her conduct in those years is this:

She taught in the public school system in Nancy, supporting the household (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013).

She hid a Jewish girl in her apartment, and was connected with the network around Mother Maria Skobtsova in Paris (Chroniques du Sycomore, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005), pionnière de la théologie orthodoxe au féminin”).

She worked with Christians of several confessions in the Resistance — sharing, in the biographers’ description, the uncertainties of friends from three Christian traditions engaged in resistance activity, hiding Jews and providing escape routes (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013; Chroniques du Sycomore).

She named this her real apprenticeship in ecumenism. The judgment is her own, and it is the most theologically interesting thing she said about the war: that what taught her what Christian unity is was not a conference but a clandestine common work under a persecution (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013).

[Disputed: the extent and formal character of her Resistance activity. The sources consulted for this file establish (a) that she sheltered at least one Jewish girl in her home, (b) that she was part of an interconfessional circle engaged in hiding Jews and arranging escape routes, and (c) that she was herself endangered by her maternal descent. They do not establish membership in a named Resistance organization, a rank, a network designation, or any postwar decoration, and no such claim is made here. Readers wanting the documented detail should consult Olga Lossky's biography, which had access to Behr-Sigel's journal and letters. This collection deliberately reports less than the more enthusiastic summaries do.]

Her third child, Nicolas, was born in 1944 — that is, during the Occupation, in the year of the Normandy landings and the liberation of Nancy. The domestic and the desperate ran together, as they did for everyone.

What the War Left

Three deposits, visible afterwards.

An ecumenism grounded in risk rather than in negotiation. Behr-Sigel’s later ecumenical career — the World Council of Churches, the Institut supérieur d’études œcuméniques, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius — rests on the conviction formed in 1940–44 that Christians divided in doctrine can be one in a common obedience under threat. This is a real theological claim and a contestable one; Orthodox critics of ecumenism argue that shared courage does not constitute ecclesial communion, and the repository sets out that debate on its own terms (see The Ecumenism Debate). Behr-Sigel did not think it did constitute communion; she thought it obliged Christians to pursue it.

A settled hostility to inhumanity as such. She served for many years as vice-president of ACAT — Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture, the interconfessional Christian body against torture (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). That is not a decorative retirement post; it is the same commitment, institutionalized.

A refusal of abstraction about persons. The person she hid in her apartment was a particular girl, and the danger to her own children was particular. When she later wrote that the Church must see the person and not the category, the sentence had a history.

The Long Teaching Years

After the war she taught, moving as her husband’s health declined, and was posted to Nancy in 1960, where she taught philosophy and pedagogy at the École normale d’instituteurs, the teachers’ training college (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). She continued to write — the essay “La Prière à Jésus ou le mystère de la spiritualité monastique orthodoxe” appeared in Dieu vivant in 1947; Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe was published by Cerf in 1950; the Bukharev doctorate was begun under Pierre Pascal at the Sorbonne in 1951 (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky; see 04 — Russian Spirituality and Bukharev).

André Behr died in 1969. In 1970 she obtained a transfer to the Centre de recherche pédagogique at Beaumont-sur-Oise and moved to Épinay-sur-Seine, on the northern edge of Paris — back, after thirty-five years, into the center of the Orthodox world she had joined at twenty-two (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). She was sixty-three. Everything for which she is now known she did after that move.

It is worth pausing on that. The Agapia address was in 1976, when she was sixty-nine. Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église appeared in 1987, when she was eighty. The book with Kallistos Ware appeared in French in 1998 and in English in 2000, when she was ninety-one and ninety-three. The Gillet biography came out when she was eighty-six. She gave the Florovsky Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in 2003, at ninety-six (OCA, “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigel,” oca.org, 2005). She died reading in bed on 26 November 2005, aged ninety-eight.

A career of this shape — everything in the last third — is rare, and it is not incidental to how she should be read. She had had fifty years to think before she began to publish on the question that made her famous, and the thinking shows.

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. (Written with Behr-Sigel’s cooperation, with access to her journal and letters; the authority for the war years.)
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Lossky. (Marriage February 1933 celebrated by Lev Gillet; children Nadine 1934, Marianne 1936, Nicolas 1944; Nancy; Notre-Dame Joie-des-Affligés from 1936; rue de Lourmel; the 1939 article on Bulgakov’s sophiology; “La Prière à Jésus,” Dieu vivant, 1947; Prière et sainteté, Cerf, 1950; the Bukharev thesis begun 1951 under Pierre Pascal; École normale, Nancy, 1960; André Behr’s death 1969; Beaumont-sur-Oise and Épinay-sur-Seine, 1970; ACAT.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (Nancy during the war; teaching in the public schools; the Jewish mother as a source of danger; the war as her “real apprenticeship in ecumenism”; Christians of different traditions hiding Jews and providing escape routes.)
Chroniques du Sycomore. “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005), pionnière de la théologie orthodoxe au féminin.” (The Jewish girl hidden in her apartment; the connection to Mother Maria Skobtsova’s network.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (The 2003 Florovsky Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary; her death.)