The Critique of the Eternal Feminine

Paul Evdokimov’s La Femme et le salut du monde (1958) grounded the difference of the sexes in an ontological correlation — the masculine with the Logos, the feminine with the Holy Spirit and the “hypostasis of maternity” realized in the Theotokos — and derived from it a set of feminine charisms and the conclusion that the ministerial priesthood does not belong to woman’s vocation. Behr-Sigel used those categories herself at Agapia in 1976, and within about a decade had abandoned them entirely. Her critique of the “eternal feminine” is the most substantive Orthodox engagement with Evdokimov’s theology of woman, and it was made by his friend.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

The Position She Was Criticizing

Evdokimov’s argument is expounded on its own terms elsewhere in this repository and should be read there before it is criticized here (see Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine and The Book and Its Argument). In summary, and in his strongest form:

The difference of the sexes is ontological, not merely biological or cultural, and is grounded in the way each images the divine life: the male related to the hypostasis of the Logos, the female to the Holy Spirit and to the hypostasis of maternity whose human realization is the Theotokos.
From this follow distinct charisms — the feminine gathered around interiority, the guarding of life, the priority of the person over the institution, and above all a maternity that is spiritual before it is physical.
The ministerial priesthood does not belong to woman’s charism; the Virgin stands rather at the head of the royal priesthood of all the baptized, which is the higher and more universal priesthood.
The archetypes of C. G. Jung are read as evidence of a real structure in the human being which revelation names and fulfils.

Evdokimov’s motive was emphatically not the subordination of women. Behr-Sigel herself recorded that he was for a long time the only Orthodox theologian to consider the women’s movement with interest and sympathy, and that judgment stands at the head of every fair account of him (Behr-Sigel’s judgment, reported in Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, London: T&T Clark, 2013). His half of the argument that male dominance is a disorder that has damaged the Church and the world is the half his critics, including Behr-Sigel, kept.

That She Held It First

The point that governs everything else in this file: Behr-Sigel argued from Evdokimov’s categories before she argued against them.

At the first international consultation of Orthodox women, at Agapia in Romania in 1976, she gave the opening address, and she drew explicitly on Evdokimov’s theology of a feminine charism. Hinlicky Wilson’s account has Evdokimov — six years dead — “present in spirit” at Agapia (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013; see Agapia 1976 and the Ministry of Women). Within about a decade she had abandoned the category of “feminine charisms” altogether and rebuilt her case on the theology of the person she took from Vladimir Lossky (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013).

This matters for three reasons.

It means the critique is internal: made from inside the position, by someone who had used it and found it failing under use, not by an outsider importing foreign standards.

It means the critique is retractive: she was correcting herself in public, in her seventies, which is not a common thing.

And it means the usual causal story about her is wrong in its direction. She did not adopt a new anthropology in order to reach a new conclusion about ministry; the anthropology changed first, and the conclusions followed (see Person and Nature after Lossky).

The Critique Itself

Her objections, as the scholarship reports them, fall under four heads.

1. The divine hypostases have no gender. To align the Son with maleness and the Spirit with femaleness is to project creaturely sexual difference into the Trinity. Orthodox trinitarian theology knows nothing of sex in God; the names Father and Son are revealed relational names and not statements about a divine masculinity, and the Spirit is not feminine in the Church’s doctrine (see The Holy Trinity and Pneumatology). This is the objection that later critics such as Bryce Rich have taken up and generalized, placing Evdokimov and Sergei Verkhovskoy in a line of Orthodox thinkers holding “an association between women and the Holy Spirit on the one hand and men and the Son on the other” (Rich, “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality,” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019).

2. Scripture does not distribute charisms by sex. The apostolic catalogues of the gifts (1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12; Ephesians 4) are sorted by the Spirit’s sovereign distribution — “to each one individually as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11) — and nowhere along male/female lines. A theology that assigns charisms by sex is therefore adding a principle of division the New Testament does not use.

3. The content of “the feminine” is cultural, not revealed. This is her sharpest point and the one on which she is most often quoted: the danger of thinking in terms of cultural stereotypes while believing oneself to be doing ontology (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013). Interiority, receptivity, nurture, the priority of the personal over the institutional — these are real human excellences, but the claim that they are feminine is a claim about nineteenth- and twentieth-century European culture, given a theological gloss. Hinlicky Wilson states the core of the disagreement precisely: what Behr-Sigel came to differ with Evdokimov on was “his essentializing of feminine being and attributing it to the being of God the Spirit” (Hinlicky Wilson, interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013).

4. The scheme licenses the hierarchy it claims to transcend. Evdokimov intended his correlation to elevate the feminine, and it does elevate it rhetorically. But an account which assigns woman to interiority, hiddenness, and receptivity — and which pointedly does not assign her to word, initiative, and public act — will in practice ratify the existing distribution of authority while praising those excluded from it. Behr-Sigel’s charge is that an ontological compliment functions as a closed door.

The Charge of Gnosticism, Reported Precisely

Behr-Sigel’s most severe formulation, as Hinlicky Wilson reports it, is that she came to conclude that all the Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women were, in fact, heretical at root (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013).

That sentence needs careful handling, and this collection handles it as follows.

What it asserts. A judgment about arguments, not about the Church’s practice. Her contention is that the reasons commonly offered — the Son/Spirit correlation, the ontological difference of the sexes, the derivation of vocation from an eternal feminine — introduce, when pressed, propositions the Church has condemned: sexual differentiation projected into God, or a devaluation of the assumed humanity of women, or a natural determinism the doctrine of the person excludes.

What it does not assert. That the Orthodox Church is heretical; that its practice is invalid; or that the practice must change. The distinction between rejecting an argument and rejecting a practice is essential here and is frequently collapsed by both her admirers and her opponents (the point is made in the same terms in Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine).

[Disputed: the exact wording, occasion and scope of the "heretical at root" judgment. It is reported by Hinlicky Wilson as a conclusion Behr-Sigel came to, and this collection could not locate the primary text, its date, or the French original. Readers should treat it as her interpreter's summary of a position rather than as a quotation, and should consult Hinlicky Wilson's monograph for the underlying citations. It is a strong claim, and the fact that it circulates chiefly at second hand is itself worth noting.]

The Counter-Case

§4.2 requires that the other side be stated at strength, and there is a real other side.

Evdokimov’s defenders hold that the correlation is analogical and illuminating, not a literal assignment of sex to the divine hypostases; that it is grounded in the biblical and liturgical portrayal of the Spirit and of the Theotokos; and that it belongs to a long strand of Russian religious thought including Bulgakov and Verkhovskoy (the position is set out in Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine). They add that Evdokimov explicitly denied that every man exhibits only masculine and every woman only feminine charisms: his categories are modes in which every human being participates, differently centred.

Defenders of the tradition more broadly answer that Behr-Sigel’s anti-essentialism proves too much. If sexual difference carries no theological weight at all, then a great deal besides the priesthood becomes unintelligible — the nuptial imagery of Scripture, the maleness of the Incarnation, the specific honor of the Theotokos as woman. The Church has never taught that the difference of the sexes is theologically inert. The question is what weight it bears, and Behr-Sigel’s critics hold that in clearing away Evdokimov’s over-claim she cleared away too much.

A third response, and the most common among Orthodox theologians, concedes the critique of Evdokimov and denies that anything follows for ministry. The Son/Spirit correlation was always one theologian’s speculation, not the ground of the Church’s practice; the practice rests on the apostolic tradition and the Church’s unbroken discipline, which stand whether or not Evdokimov’s archetypes do. On this reading Behr-Sigel demolished a rationale and left the thing itself untouched — and mistook the one for the other.

This collection does not adjudicate among these. It records that the critique of the eternal feminine has been very widely accepted among Orthodox theologians, including many who reject Behr-Sigel’s conclusions about ministry entirely; that Evdokimov’s scheme is much less defended today than it was in 1958; and that the disagreement about what follows remains open (cf. Women in Orthodoxy).

A Note on Friendship

Evdokimov died in 1970. The critique came after his death, from a woman who had known him since about 1930, who had used his categories in public as recently as 1976, and who never ceased to credit him with having asked the question when no other Orthodox theologian was asking it. There is no polemic in it and no repudiation of the man. That is a rarer thing in theological controversy than it should be, and it is part of what the two collections in this repository are trying to preserve by treating the dispute from both ends (see Paul Evdokimov).

References

Evdokimov, Paul. La Femme et le salut du monde: Étude d’anthropologie chrétienne sur les charismes de la femme. Tournai/Paris: Casterman, 1958. English: Woman and the Salvation of the World, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994.
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. (The principal published form of the critique.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013; interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (Behr-Sigel’s use of Evdokimov’s feminine charisms at Agapia and her abandonment of the category within a decade; the shift to Lossky’s theology of the person; “his essentializing of feminine being and attributing it to the being of God the Spirit”; the “heretical at root” judgment; the warning against cultural stereotypes; her tribute to Evdokimov as long the only Orthodox theologian sympathetic to the women’s movement.)
Rich, Bryce E. “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality.” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019. (Evdokimov and Verkhovskoy in the genealogy of the women–Spirit / men–Son association.)
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:4–11; Romans 12:6–8; Ephesians 4:11–13; Luke 1:35, 38.