The Question She Raised

Behr-Sigel’s position on the ordination of women to the priesthood changed twice over twenty-five years and reached, in her last decade, a formulation that is reported in incompatible ways by her admirers, her critics, and by ecumenical officials who claimed her. This file sets out the stages as the sources give them, states her argument at its full strength and in her own terms, and marks with [Disputed: ...] every point at which the record does not permit a settled statement — including the exact form of her final position. The Orthodox Church does not ordain women to the priesthood. This file reports one theologian’s argument; it does not advance it.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); the position expounded is Behr-Sigel’s own and is not the Church’s teaching

The Three Stages

The scholarship on Behr-Sigel is unanimous that her position moved, and broadly agreed on the stages.

Stage one: acceptance of the consensus (to the mid-1970s). She had published nothing on the subject before 1976, and she began, on the account of her principal interpreter, “supporting the general consensus that priesthood would be impossible for the Orthodox,” rejecting women’s priesthood on iconographic grounds — that is, on the standard argument that the priest images Christ and that the image requires a male (as summarized from Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, London: T&T Clark, 2013).

Stage two: an argument from the Church’s need of feminine gifts (later 1970s to mid-1980s). At Agapia in 1976 she argued from Paul Evdokimov’s categories — the feminine charisms, the ontological difference of the sexes (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013; see Agapia 1976). In this period, the reports have her coming to favor women’s ordination because the Church needs the feminine gifts — an argument she subsequently repudiated as resting on the very essentialism she was in the process of rejecting.

Stage three: the argument from the person (mid-1980s onward). She abandoned the category of feminine charisms and rebuilt her case on the theology of the person taken from Vladimir Lossky: that persons, not sexes, are called to service, and that the Spirit distributes charisms without regard to sex (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013; see Person and Nature after Lossky). This is the mature position, and the one to which everything published after Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église (1987) belongs.

The trajectory is worth noting for its own sake: a theologian who over twenty-five years publicly held three different positions, twice repudiating her own published arguments, is displaying either exemplary intellectual honesty or a settled instability, and readers of good faith have drawn both conclusions.

The Argument at Full Strength

Her mature case, stated as she made it and without the collection’s thumb on the scale, has five parts.

1. It is grounded in the Orthodox doctrine of the person, not in modern egalitarianism, and she said so explicitly. She rejected a secular-feminist framing of the question. Her claim is that the Church’s own anthropology — a person is fully her nature and yet not reducible to it — requires that women be addressed as persons with unrepeatable vocations rather than as instances of a feminine essence. This is the load-bearing move, and any account of her that begins from “feminism” has already missed it.

2. Christ assumed human nature, and women are healed in it. From St. Gregory the Theologian’s anti-Apollinarian maxim — what is not assumed is not healed (Epistle 101) — she argued that both men and women are able to be icons of Christ, since the humanity of both has been assumed (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013). If the priest images Christ as a person bearing assumed humanity, the representation is on her argument not determined by sex.

3. The symbolic argument has become double-edged. Given the polyvalence of symbols, she observed, the refusal to ordain women now communicates to many the opposite of what its defenders intend: not that the priest images the incarnate Lord, but that women are inadequate icons of Christ (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013). Her point is not that the Church should follow the culture’s reading, but that an argument resting on what a sign conveys must reckon with what it in fact conveys.

4. The priest is one who lends tongue and hands. She took up St. John Chrysostom’s description of the priest as lending his tongue and his hands to God, and asked what in that description requires that the tongue and hands be a man’s (as summarized in the secondary literature on her argument). [Disputed: the exact Chrysostom text she used and her exact wording. Secondary summaries of her argument report the Chrysostom image and her question; this collection could not locate her own formulation or verify which homily she cited, and no quotation is offered.]

5. The arguments against are defective, which is not the same as the practice being wrong. Her most severe judgment, as her interpreter reports it, is that all the Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women were, in fact, heretical at root — that is, that the reasons commonly given, when pressed, import propositions the Church has condemned (Hinlicky Wilson, 2013). What she claimed to have shown was that the standard rationales fail; the question of the practice she treated as one for the Church to discern conciliarly. The distinction between rejecting an argument and rejecting a practice is the single most collapsed point in the whole literature about her, and the repository draws it in the same terms in Paul Evdokimov: The Charisms of the Feminine.

The 1998/2000 Volume

The primary text is L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998), co-authored with Bishop Kallistos Ware; three of its chapters appeared in English as The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000), in the Risk Book Series, 96 pages, ISBN 2-8254-1336-4. The contents are:

“Women in the Orthodox Church” — Elisabeth Behr-Sigel
“The Ordination of Women: Also a Question for the Orthodox Churches” — Elisabeth Behr-Sigel
“Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ” — Kallistos Ware

Ware’s chapter had previously appeared in the revised edition of Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood (SVS Press, 1999) — that is, in the standard Orthodox volume against women’s ordination (bibliographic record, archive.org, “The ordination of women in the Orthodox Church”).

The title of Behr-Sigel’s second chapter is her thesis in miniature: also a question for the Orthodox Churches. The claim is not that the Orthodox Church should ordain women. The claim is that the question is one the Orthodox Church has to face rather than one it has already conciliarly settled, and that it should face it by theological deliberation rather than by pointing at Western Christianity and declining.

Ware’s own position in the same volume, stated in the layered form he insisted on, was that he was not persuaded by the arguments for women’s ordination; that the arguments against it which he had formerly accepted now “seemed less conclusive”; and that therefore “we Orthodox should regard the matter as an essentially open question” (Ware, as quoted and summarized in Brandon Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022; see Fr. Kallistos Ware: Women, Priesthood and Same-Sex Relationships). The two authors are not saying the same thing, and their volume was not a joint manifesto: it is a book in which two Orthodox theologians set out overlapping but distinct positions, one of them a bishop who explicitly declined to advocate change.

What Her Final Position Was — and Why It Is Disputed

`[Disputed: the exact form of Behr-Sigel’s final position on the ordination of women to the priesthood. The sources support at least three descriptions, which are not equivalent, and this collection does not choose among them.

(a) The “open question” reading. That she held the matter to be theologically open and to require conciliar deliberation, without herself asserting that women can be ordained. This is how she is characterized in the repository’s own Women in Orthodoxy — as having moved “to holding that the arguments against women’s ordination had not been adequately demonstrated and that the question should remain open” — and it is consistent with the title of her 2000 chapter and with the co-authored book’s framing.

(b) The affirmative reading. That she came to hold there is no reason not to ordain women and to permit them eucharistic presidency. This description appears in surveys of the debate and in advocacy literature. It goes further than (a) and is the reading her critics attribute to her.

(c) The “pluralism of discipline” reading. That in an essay on the place of women in the Church she ended by asking whether different local Churches might determine their own approaches, producing a pluralism of practice. This is reported in the secondary literature; this collection could not verify the essay’s title, date, or wording, and it is recorded here as a reported reading and not as established.

The three readings are not reconcilable by fiat. It is possible that she said different things at different times and in different registers — an academic essay, an ecumenical address, and a book co-authored with a bishop are not the same genre — and it is possible that the stronger readings are her interpreters’ extensions. What can be said with confidence is: (i) she held the standard Orthodox arguments against ordination to be defective; (ii) she held the question to be one for the Church’s conciliar discernment; (iii) she did not claim authority to settle it and never suggested that any Orthodox Church should act unilaterally; and (iv) she remained in the Orthodox Church, communing, to her death in 2005. Readers needing her exact final language must go to L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe (Cerf, 1998) and to the WCC English selection.]`

Diaconate and Priesthood: Why She Linked Them

Most Orthodox advocates of restoring the female diaconate insist that it is categorically distinct from the priesthood, and most of them oppose a female presbyterate. Behr-Sigel is the significant exception, and the exception is what her critics point to.

Her position, as the repository’s Women in Orthodoxy file states it, was that the female diaconate and the priesthood should both be part of a free, conciliar theological deliberation rather than the diaconate alone (Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, WCC, 2000). Her reason was methodological rather than substantive: she thought that restoring the diaconate while ruling the priesthood out of discussion in advance would be to settle by procedure what ought to be settled by theology.

Her critics answer that this is exactly the “slippery slope” they had warned of, and that her own linkage is the best evidence for it — the second of the three standard objections to restoration recorded in The Deaconess. Her defenders answer that a distinction between two questions is not violated by considering them in the same deliberation, and that the Church of Greece’s 2004 decision, which restores the one while explicitly excluding the other, shows that the two can be held apart in practice.

Both observations are correct as far as they go, and this collection does not adjudicate between them.

What She Never Did

Four things, all of them documented by absence and all of them relevant to any fair assessment.

She never claimed to speak for the Church. She was a laywoman, held no office, and framed her work as theological inquiry.

She never advocated unilateral action. Her repeated demand was for conciliar deliberation — which is a demand for the Church to decide, not for anyone to act ahead of it.

She never left, and was never disciplined. She was received into the Orthodox Church in 1929 and died in it in 2005, a churchwarden of her parish, taught at the St. Sergius Institute, and was invited in 2003 — at ninety-six, and five years after the most contested of her books — to give the Florovsky Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (Orthodox Church in America, “In Memoriam,” oca.org, December 2005). No Orthodox Church took any formal action concerning her writings. This is a fact about the Church’s response and is reported as such, not as a vindication.

She never disowned the tradition she was arguing with. The whole of her case is made from within Orthodox categories — person and nature, the assumed humanity, the charisms of the Spirit, conciliarity. Whether the case succeeds on those categories is what the next section is about.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Bishop Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000 (Risk Book Series; 96 pp.; ISBN 2-8254-1336-4). Contents: Behr-Sigel, “Women in the Orthodox Church”; Behr-Sigel, “The Ordination of Women: Also a Question for the Orthodox Churches”; Ware, “Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ.” Three chapters from L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998. (Bibliographic record via archive.org, “The ordination of women in the Orthodox Church.”)
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; interview, Eastern Christian Books, November 2013. (The three stages; the initial iconographic rejection; the argument from the Church’s need of feminine gifts and its repudiation; the mature position that persons and not sexes are called to service; the christological argument from Gregory the Theologian; the polyvalence of symbols; the “heretical at root” judgment.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Ware’s three-part formulation and the “essentially open question.”)
Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999. (Ware’s essay in its Orthodox setting.)
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Madame Elizabeth Behr-Sigal.” oca.org, December 2005. (The 2003 Florovsky Lecture at St Vladimir’s Seminary.)
Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian). Epistle 101 (to Cledonius).
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:11; Galatians 3:28.