04 — Russian Spirituality and Bukharev

Before she was a theologian of the person or a voice in the ordination debate, Behr-Sigel was a historian of Russian holiness. Her first book, Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe (1950), grew out of a master’s thesis begun in 1930 under the guidance of Georges Fedotov; her doctoral thesis, begun at the Sorbonne in 1951 and published in 1977, was on Alexander Bukharev, the nineteenth-century archimandrite who left the monastic state to marry and to speak to the modern world as a layman. This section covers the scholarship that occupied the first fifty years of her working life.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography — the book of 1950, the study of Russian sanctity, and her conviction that holiness takes more forms than the categories allow.
• Alexander Bukharev: The Monk Who Returned to the World — the doctoral thesis of 1977, Bukharev’s kenotic Christology, his laicization, and why she called him a prophet.

Why This Section Is Not a Preface

There is a habit of treating a theologian’s early historical work as apprentice labor preceding the real thing. In Behr-Sigel’s case that reading fails twice.

Chronologically, the “early” work is not early: Prière et sainteté appeared when she was forty-three, the Bukharev thesis when she was seventy, and she was still writing hagiography — the life of Fr. Lev Gillet — at eighty-six. The historical work runs the length of the career.

Substantively, the two subjects contain the later argument in germ. Her study of Russian sanctity taught her that holiness appears in forms the official categories are slow to recognize — that a Russian housewife could be acclaimed a saint by those who knew her and wait three centuries for the Church’s formal act (see Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography). Her study of Bukharev gave her the model of a man who obeyed a theological conviction at ruinous personal cost and was condemned for it in his lifetime and vindicated after it, and whose central intuition was the kenotic descent of God into everything human. Put those two together and one has, in outline, both the method and the temperament of everything she wrote after 1976.

That is a genealogy, not a justification. Whether the later positions follow from the earlier scholarship, or whether the scholarship was retrospectively enlisted, is exactly the sort of question this collection leaves open (see 08 — The Reception and the Critique).

See Also

• 05 — The Theology of the Person — the category she later built on
• Fr. Sergius Bulgakov — who suggested the Bukharev subject
• Holy Tradition — how the Church transmits and recognizes
• Russian Orthodox Theologians — the hub

References

• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1950. (Chapters first serialized in Irénikon.)
• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Alexandre Boukharev, un théologien de l’Église orthodoxe russe en dialogue avec le monde moderne. Preface by Olivier Clément. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977.
• Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and the New Hagiography.” sarahhinlickywilson.com, 21 August 2017.
• Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin. Paris: Cerf, 2007; English Toward the Endless Day, Notre Dame, 2010.