09 — Legacy and Assessment

Behr-Sigel died on 26 November 2005, aged ninety-eight, having been Orthodox for seventy-six years. She left a corpus of perhaps six books and some two hundred articles, most of it in French and most of it untranslated; an authorized biography written with her cooperation in her last year; a monograph-length scholarly study of her theology; and a reputation determined almost entirely by one part of her work. This section takes stock, provisionally — twenty years after her death, in a dispute still in motion.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu)

Files in This Section

• The Corpus and Its Translations — what she wrote, what exists in English, and what a reader who wants her rather than her reputation should read.
• Assessment — a provisional weighing: what is durable, what is contested, what is unresolved, and what it means that she is the first woman theologian to have a collection in this repository.

The Provisional Character of This Section

The repository’s practice for recently deceased figures — the model is St. Joseph the Hesychast §09, and it is followed for the modern theologians of this slate — is to offer assessment provisionally, as the judgment of a moment still close to the events. Behr-Sigel died in 2005. The questions she pressed are open; the deaconess question has moved twice since her death and may move again; her own final formulation on the priesthood question is contested; and no substantial body of Orthodox scholarly engagement with her mature argument has yet appeared in the languages this collection could survey.

Any assessment written now is therefore an interim one. It is offered as such.

What Is Not Provisional

Two things can be said without qualification.

She is not a canonized saint, and this collection does not present her as one. She is titled plainly “Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.” No Orthodox Church has glorified her; none, so far as the record shows, has considered doing so; and nothing here should be read as anticipating such an act. She was a laywoman and a theologian, and that is how she is treated.

She was a member of the Orthodox Church in good standing from 1929 until her death. Received by chrismation in 1929, married in the Church in 1933, a parishioner and later churchwarden of a French-speaking Orthodox parish, a teacher at Orthodox institutions, buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. No Orthodox Church took any formal action concerning her writings. This is a fact about the record, offered neither as a vindication of her positions nor as an argument against her critics.

See Also

• 08 — The Reception and the Critique — the criticism that any assessment must weigh
• 01 — Alsace and the Protestant Formation — where the collection begins
• Women in Orthodoxy — the doctrinal frame
• Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae — the repository’s model for a revered but non-glorified modern theologian

References

• Lossky, Olga. Vers le jour sans déclin: Une vie d’Élisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005). Paris: Cerf, 2007. English: Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, trans. Jerry Ryan, ed. Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010 (xvii + 345 pp.; ISBN 978-0-268-03385-9).
• Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013.
• 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.