Person and Nature after Lossky

Behr-Sigel’s mature theology rests on a single borrowed proposition: that to be a person is to possess one’s nature fully and yet not to be reducible to it. The proposition is Vladimir Lossky’s, drawn from the Cappadocian and Chalcedonian distinction between hypostasis and ousia; Behr-Sigel applied it to the human being as man and woman, and concluded that sex belongs to nature while the person who bears it is not exhausted by it. This file expounds that argument as hers, and states the objections it invites.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Losskian Proposition

The distinction between person (hypostasis, prosopon) and nature (ousia, physis) is dogmatic in its origin. It was forged in the trinitarian controversies of the fourth century — one nature in three hypostases — and refined at Chalcedon in 451 for the doctrine of Christ: one hypostasis in two natures, divine and human, unconfused and undivided (see The Holy Trinity and Christology).

Vladimir Lossky made this distinction the pivot of his theological anthropology. Since man is in the image of God, and since in God person is irreducible to nature, so in the human being the person is irreducible to the nature it possesses. The human person, on Lossky’s account, is not a part of the human being nor a set of individuating properties; it is the one who has the nature, and is free with respect to it in a way that the nature itself is not (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957; In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974). On Lossky’s theology as a whole, see Vladimir Lossky.

Behr-Sigel’s rendering of the principle, in Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s summary, is compact: “To be a person is to be fully one’s nature and yet not reducible to one’s nature” (Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013). Both halves matter, and Behr-Sigel’s readers have a tendency to drop one of them.

“Fully one’s nature.” She is not proposing that the body, or sex, is accidental, external, or to be transcended. That would be a gnosticizing move and she rejected it. A woman is a woman in her nature, bodily, really, and not by convention.

“Not reducible to one’s nature.” But the person who is a woman is not therefore an instance of Woman. She is this person, unrepeatable, addressed by God by name, and her vocation is not deducible from her sex any more than a man’s is deducible from his.

What She Did With It

Behr-Sigel drew four consequences, in ascending order of contestedness.

1. Against essentialism about the sexes. If the person is irreducible to nature, then no account of “the feminine” as such can determine what any particular woman is for. She warned repeatedly against the danger of theological reasoning that trades in cultural stereotypes dressed as ontology, and this is the ground on which she came to reject the “eternal feminine” — including her own earlier use of it (see The Critique of the Eternal Feminine).

2. For a distribution of charisms by the Spirit, not by sex. Her mature position, as the scholarship summarizes it, is that persons rather than sexes are called to service, and that spiritual gifts are distributed by the Holy Spirit without regard to sex. The New Testament’s own catalogue of charisms (1 Corinthians 12) is nowhere sorted along male/female lines, and she took this seriously as an exegetical datum rather than as a slogan (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, London: T&T Clark, 2013; cf. Pneumatology).

3. On the iconic argument. The most-cited Orthodox argument against a female presbyterate is iconic: in the Liturgy the priest images Christ, and the maleness of the priest belongs to that image (see Women in Orthodoxy for the argument as its proponents state it, and [Fr. Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood] in the references below). Behr-Sigel’s reply proceeds from the person/nature distinction and from a christological maxim: both men and women must be able to be icons of Christ, because the humanity of both has been assumed by Christ — and what is not assumed is not healed (St. Gregory the Theologian, Epistle 101 to Cledonius, the classic anti-Apollinarian formula; see St. Gregory the Theologian). If Christ assumed human nature and not male nature specifically, then the priest represents Christ as a person bearing the assumed humanity, and the representation is, on her argument, independent of the sex of the one who bears it (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013). She adds an argument from the polyvalence of symbols: the refusal to ordain women, in a culture that no longer reads the symbolism as the tradition read it, now communicates the opposite of what it intends — that women are not adequate icons of Christ (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013).

4. On the priest “lending his tongue and hands.” She took up St. John Chrysostom’s description of the priest as one who lends his tongue and hands to God, and asked why a woman could not lend hers (as summarized in the secondary literature on her argument). The move is characteristic: she reaches for a patristic formulation of the priesthood that is stated in terms of instrumentality and self-effacement rather than of representation-by-likeness, and presses the question of what in it requires a male instrument.

The fourth point is where the argument becomes fully contested, and this collection does not adjudicate it. Section 07 treats the ordination question directly; the present file is about the anthropology.

The Objections

Four are worth stating at their real strength, because the value of expounding her argument is lost if the replies are not also given.

The distinction may be doing more work than it can bear. The person/nature distinction was forged for trinitarian and christological use. Applied to human beings, it is a theological extension — powerful, widely used in the twentieth century by Lossky, Zizioulas, Yannaras and others, and by no means unanimously accepted in the form Lossky gave it. Critics of the “personalist turn” in modern Orthodox theology (a live intra-Orthodox debate; see John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras for the wider argument) hold that it imports a modern philosophical notion of person under patristic vocabulary. If that charge sticks against Lossky’s anthropology generally, it sticks against Behr-Sigel’s use of it.

Irreducibility does not entail interchangeability. From “a person is not exhausted by her nature” it does not follow that nature is irrelevant to vocation. The Church’s practice has never rested on the claim that women are less than persons; the position stated by its defenders is equality of dignity without interchangeability of role (see Women in Orthodoxy). A defender of the tradition can grant Behr-Sigel’s entire anthropology and deny her conclusion, on the ground that the sacramental order deals precisely with embodied signs, in which the natural is not incidental — as it is not incidental that the bread is bread and the water is water.

The christological maxim cuts both ways. “What is not assumed is not healed” establishes that Christ assumed the whole of human nature and therefore saves women as fully as men. It does not by itself establish anything about who may stand at the altar, since the tradition has never held that the unordained are unhealed. The defenders of the practice hold that the priest’s maleness is a matter of the sign, not of the salvation, and that Gregory’s maxim is about the latter.

The argument from symbolic polyvalence is double-edged. If the meaning of a symbol shifts with the culture that reads it, then the argument that the male priesthood now communicates women’s inadequacy is an argument about contemporary perception — and a tradition that adjusted its sacramental signs to contemporary perception would have abandoned the principle that the signs are given rather than devised. Behr-Sigel was aware of this and did not draw the conclusion that the Church should follow the culture; her claim was narrower, that an argument resting on symbolism must reckon with what the symbol actually conveys.

What the Anthropology Is Not

Three clarifications the sources support and that are constantly lost in summary.

It is not feminism in the secular sense, and she said so. She explicitly rejected a secular-egalitarian framing of the question and grounded her case in the Orthodox doctrine of the person. Her critics answer that the rejection is sincere but ineffective — that the conclusion is the same one modernity had already reached, whatever the route (see The Orthodox Criticism). The disagreement about whether her framing succeeds is genuine; the fact that this was her framing is not in doubt.

It is not a denial of sexual difference. She held that sex is real, bodily, and given; what she denied is that it determines vocation and that it can be mapped onto the divine hypostases.

It is not a claim that the Church has erred. Her mature judgment, as reported by Hinlicky Wilson, was about the arguments: that the reasons commonly given by Orthodox against the ordination of women were, at root, theologically defective. This is a claim about theological reasoning, not a verdict on the Church’s practice, and the distinction is the single most frequently collapsed point in the literature about her (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013; the same distinction is drawn in Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine). Section 07 takes it up in full.

See Also

References

  • Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987. English: The Ministry of Women in the Church, trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1991.
  • Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Discerning the Signs of the Times: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. Ed. Michael Plekon and Sarah E. Hinlicky. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
  • Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013; and interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (The Losskian formula “to be a person is to be fully one’s nature and yet not reducible to one’s nature”; the christological argument from Gregory the Theologian; the polyvalence of symbols; charisms distributed without regard to sex; her judgment that the Orthodox arguments against ordination were defective at root; her warning against “cultural stereotypes.”)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957; In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The person/nature distinction in anthropology.)
  • Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian). Epistle 101 (to Cledonius): “that which is not assumed is not healed.”
  • Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999. (The standard Orthodox statement of the case against, including the iconic argument.)
  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12; Galatians 3:28.