Prière et sainteté and the New Hagiography

Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe — “Prayer and Holiness in the Russian Church” — grew out of a master’s thesis begun in Germany in 1930 with the help of the historian Georges Fedotov, appeared in installments in the review Irénikon, and was published as a book by Cerf in 1950. It was a pioneering French introduction to Russian sanctity, organized around the conviction that runs through the whole of Behr-Sigel’s work: that holiness takes more forms than the categories allow, and that the Church’s recognition of a saint often lags a long way behind the fact.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Book

The origin is a student’s thesis. In 1930, working in Germany on her maîtrise for the Strasbourg Protestant faculty, Élisabeth Sigel took Russian sanctity as her subject, assisted by Georges Fedotov — the émigré historian who was then producing the fundamental modern studies of Russian holiness and would publish The Russian Religious Mind in English in 1946 (fr.wikipedia.org, “Élisabeth Behr-Sigel,” following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007).

The material appeared first as chapters in Irénikon, the review of the Benedictines of Amay/Chevetogne — the principal French-language organ of Catholic–Orthodox rapprochement — before being published as a book by Éditions du Cerf in 1950, in the series Russie et Chrétienté (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky; contemporary notice in Revue des études byzantines 9, 1951, reviewing Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe, “Russie et Chrétienté, 5”). It was later reissued by the Abbaye de Bellefontaine (ISBN 2-85589-033-0).

The book proceeds by typical figures rather than by system, illustrating “the idea, in its multiple richness, of Christian holiness as the believing people of ancient Russia carried it within themselves” (publisher’s description, Bellefontaine edition). Among the figures treated are St. Nil Sorsky, the non-possessor and hesychast of the Volga forests; St. Juliana Lazarevskaya, the seventeenth-century laywoman and mother; and St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, the eighteenth-century bishop who resigned his see for the monastery (publisher’s descriptions; Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and the New Hagiography,” sarahhinlickywilson.com, 21 August 2017). Princes, monks, holy fools and laypeople all appear. On several of these figures the repository has its own treatments: see St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, and for the wider ascetic tradition The Ascetic Fathers and Orthodox Monasticism.

[Disputed: the full table of contents of the 1950 edition and the pagination of any figure treated. This file names only those figures corroborated in publishers' and reviewers' descriptions of the book; no chapter list from the printed volume was available for this collection, and no page references are given for that reason.]

What Was New About It

Two things, one of them obvious in 1950 and one that only became visible later.

The obvious one: it was among the first serious French-language presentations of Russian holiness as a subject. The Catholic and Protestant reading publics of France in 1950 knew a certain amount about Russian religious philosophy — Berdyaev was famous — and almost nothing about Russian saints. The book put figures like Nil Sorsky and Seraphim of Sarov into French theological circulation, and it did so from inside the Orthodox Church rather than as comparative religious history. Its home in Irénikon is exactly right: it belongs to the moment when the West began to be given Orthodoxy in its own voice.

The one that mattered later: its method. Hinlicky Wilson has given this method a name — “the new hagiography” — and states its premise in one sentence: “Sainthood is not as monolithic as one might think” (Hinlicky Wilson, “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and the New Hagiography,” 2017). Behr-Sigel’s interest was in the variety of holiness: the monk and the prince, the fool and the housewife, the bishop who resigned and the ascetic who never left the forest. Her recurring move is to look at forms of sanctity that the standard categories do not accommodate well and to ask what they reveal about the whole.

Hinlicky Wilson picks out one case as characteristic: Juliana Lazarevskaya, whose holiness was “so renowned that she was spontaneously acclaimed a saint on her death by those who knew her, although it took almost three hundred years for the official church to catch up” (Hinlicky Wilson, 2017). Juliana was a married laywoman with children, whose asceticism was exercised in a household and whose charity was exercised in a famine — an entirely non-monastic sanctity, recognized first by the people among whom she lived and only much later by the institution.

Behr-Sigel wrote essays on unexpected forms of holiness throughout her life, Hinlicky Wilson notes — the pattern does not stop with the 1950 book (Hinlicky Wilson, 2017). The 1993 biography of Fr. Lev Gillet is the same method applied to a man she had known for fifty years (see Father Lev Gillet).

The Theological Weight of the Method

It is worth being precise about what the “new hagiography” does and does not claim, because it is the quiet hinge of her later work and is easily overstated in both directions.

What it claims. That sanctity is a fact before it is a recognition; that the Church’s canonizations are acts of recognition and not of manufacture; that recognition has historically come sometimes fast and sometimes very slowly; and that the forms holiness has actually taken in the Church’s life are more varied than a schematized hagiography suggests. Every one of these propositions is standard Orthodox teaching. The Church has always held that glorification declares what God has done rather than confers it, and that the vox populi has a real role in the process (see Holy Tradition).

What it does not claim. It does not claim that the Church’s judgment is dispensable, that popular acclamation is self-authenticating, or that the Church’s slowness is a fault to be corrected by scholars. Behr-Sigel was a historian of canonizations, not a proposer of them. The repository’s own treatment of a contested modern glorification — St. Maria of Paris, where the Church’s act is the datum and the reception is the question — works within the same distinction.

Where it becomes contested. The step from “the Church has recognized unexpected forms of holiness slowly” to “the Church may recognize unexpected forms of ministry slowly” is a step, and it is one her admirers make on her behalf more often than she made it herself. It is not a valid inference in the abstract: the recognition of a saint and the ordination of a minister are different acts with different criteria, and the tradition treats them differently. Whether Behr-Sigel’s hagiographical method licensed her later arguments, or merely accompanied them, is a live question in the interpretation of her work (see The Orthodox Criticism).

The Other Early Work: The Jesus Prayer

Alongside the sanctity project she published, in 1947, an essay in the review Dieu vivant entitled “La Prière à Jésus ou le mystère de la spiritualité monastique orthodoxe” — “The Jesus Prayer, or the Mystery of Orthodox Monastic Spirituality” (fr.wikipedia.org, following Lossky). It appeared a year before the first French edition of Fr. Lev Gillet’s own book on the Jesus Prayer and belongs to the same moment: the introduction of hesychast prayer to a Western readership that would receive the Philokalia in translation only later (see The Jesus Prayer and The Philokalia).

This too is characteristic. The woman remembered for a modern controversy spent her thirties and forties writing about hesychasm and Russian saints, and she went on doing so: Le Lieu du cœur — “The Place of the Heart,” a phrase straight out of the hesychast vocabulary — was published in 1989 and crowned by the Académie française (see Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu). Any account of her that begins in 1976 is missing the larger half of the corpus.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1950 (series Russie et Chrétienté, 5); reissued Abbaye de Bellefontaine (ISBN 2-85589-033-0). (Chapters first published in Irénikon.)
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. “La Prière à Jésus ou le mystère de la spiritualité monastique orthodoxe.” Dieu vivant, 1947.
Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Le Lieu du cœur: Initiation à la spiritualité de l’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Cerf, 1989. (Prix Montyon, Académie française, 1990.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and the New Hagiography.” sarahhinlickywilson.com, 21 August 2017. (“Sainthood is not as monolithic as one might think”; Juliana Lazarevskaya and the three-century delay; the lifelong essays on unexpected forms of holiness.)
Review of Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe, Revue des études byzantines 9 (1951), 279. (Contemporary notice; the series placement.)
Publisher’s descriptions of the Bellefontaine edition (laprocure.com; fnac.fr): the figures treated — Nil Sorsky, Juliana Lazarevskaya, Tikhon of Zadonsk — and the organizing idea of holiness “in its multiple richness.”
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Her adviser’s own work on the same material.)
“Élisabeth Behr-Sigel.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), following Olga Lossky, Vers le jour sans déclin, Cerf, 2007.