05 — The Theology of the Person

The heart of Behr-Sigel’s mature thought is a claim about the human person taken from Vladimir Lossky: that a person is her nature and yet is not reducible to it. She used that claim in two directions — constructively, to argue that the Church must address women as persons and not as instances of a feminine essence; and critically, to dismantle the theology of “the eternal feminine” that her friend Paul Evdokimov had built, and which she herself had used before she rejected it. This section sets out the argument as she made it, and marks its limits.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• Person and Nature after Lossky — the Losskian anthropology, what she took from it, how she deployed it, and the objections it invites.
• The Critique of the Eternal Feminine — the turn against Evdokimov’s Son/Spirit correlation and against feminine “charisms,” including her own earlier use of them.

The Order of the Argument

It is essential to get the order right, because both her admirers and her critics reverse it.

She did not begin from a conviction about women’s ministries and then look for a theology to support it. On the record, she published nothing on women in the Church before 1976, when she was sixty-nine (Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013). When she did begin, at Agapia, she argued from Evdokimov’s categories — the feminine charisms, the ontological difference of the sexes — and reached a conservative conclusion about ministry. It was only over the following decade that she abandoned those categories and rebuilt her case on the theology of the person; and the mature position on ministry follows the change of anthropology rather than causing it (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, T&T Clark, 2013; see also Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine).

That sequence — anthropology first, ministry second — is what she meant when she insisted that her case was not a secular-feminist one. The Orthodox doctrine of the person, she held, and not modern egalitarianism, is what requires taking women’s personhood with full seriousness. Whether the Losskian anthropology bears the weight she put on it is the substantive theological question about her, and it is a real question, not a rhetorical one. It is taken up in both files of this section and again in 08 — The Reception and the Critique.

What This Section Does Not Do

It does not present her anthropology as the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Lossky’s person/nature distinction is a theological account, powerfully influential in twentieth-century Orthodox thought and by no means uncontested; Behr-Sigel’s development of it is her own work, and it is expounded here as hers. The Church’s own anthropology — the image of God in man and woman, the Theotokos as the summit of created personhood, and the male presbyterate — is set out in the repository’s doctrinal files, to which the reader is directed: Theological Anthropology, The Theotokos, and Women in Orthodoxy.

See Also

• 06 — The Ministry of Women — what she built on this ground
• 07 — The Ordination Question — where it becomes contested
• Vladimir Lossky — the source
• Paul Evdokimov — the position she abandoned and then criticized

References

• Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église. Paris: Cerf, 1987. English: The Ministry of Women in the Church, trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1991.
• Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.
• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957; and In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.