Assessment

A provisional weighing, twenty years after her death, of a theologian whose reputation rests on one part of her work and whose most contested position remains contested even as to its exact content. What is durable in her: the historical scholarship, the critique of gender essentialism, the deaconess case, and the making of a French-speaking Orthodoxy. What is contested: the extension to the priesthood, and the anthropology it runs on. What is unresolved: nearly everything she pressed.

Tradition: Orthodox (France — Russian emigration milieu); provisional assessment, offered as the judgment of a moment still close to the events

The Ground Rules of This Assessment

Three, stated first.

It is provisional. She died in 2005; the questions are open; the Church’s reception of her is neither condemnation nor acceptance but something more like non-adoption with continued hospitality. Following the repository’s practice for recent figures, this is the judgment of a moment still close to the events, not a settled verdict.

It does not adjudicate the §4.2 dispute. Section 08 states the criticism at full strength and this file does not overturn it. Where the assessment records that something of hers is durable, that is a statement about reception, not a ruling that she was right.

It does not present her as glorified, and does not anticipate any such act. She is titled plainly Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.

What Is Durable

1. The historical scholarship. Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe (1950) was among the first serious French presentations of Russian sanctity from within the Orthodox Church, and the Bukharev thesis (1977) remains, so far as this collection could establish, the principal Western monograph on its subject. The Gillet biography (1993) is the fullest account we have of the francophone Orthodoxy of the twentieth century, written by someone who was there for seventy-five years of it. None of this is contested by anyone. It is also the part of her work that almost nobody reads.

2. The critique of gender essentialism. Her dismantling of the “eternal feminine” — the Son/Spirit correlation, the ontological difference of the sexes, the derivation of vocation from an eternal feminine — has been very widely accepted among Orthodox theologians, including many who reject everything else she argued. Paul Evdokimov’s scheme is far less defended today than it was in 1958, and Behr-Sigel is a principal reason. The critique’s durability is independent of what one thinks follows from it: it is entirely possible to hold, and many do, that she was right about the essentialism and wrong about the priesthood. See The Critique of the Eternal Feminine and Paul Evdokimov.

3. The deaconess case. Adopted in substance by an inter-Orthodox consultation of twelve autocephalous Churches at Rhodes in 1988, at which she was among the theological architects; still the position of the most organized advocacy in the Orthodox world; still unimplemented in most of it. See The Recovery of the Deaconess.

4. The local-Orthodoxy project. The review Contacts, the Fraternité orthodoxe en Europe occidentale, the teaching, the parish work: a French-speaking Orthodoxy that is not a diaspora chaplaincy. This is the least remarked and perhaps the largest of her achievements, and it is shared with Fr. Lev Gillet, Olivier Clément, Boris Bobrinskoy, Nicolas Lossky and others. See Contacts and the French Orthodox Milieu.

5. The conduct of a life. She hid a Jewish girl in her apartment under the Occupation while her own maternal descent made her a target; she was for years vice-president of a Christian body against torture; she raised three children, taught school, and did her scholarly work in the margins of that; she was a churchwarden into her nineties. Nothing in the theological dispute touches any of this, and an assessment that omitted it would be a poor one.

What Is Contested

The extension to the priesthood. She held the standard Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women to be theologically defective, and held the question to be one for conciliar discernment rather than one already closed. Whether her final position went further than that is genuinely disputed, with at least three incompatible readings in circulation (see The Question She Raised). The Orthodox Church does not ordain women to the priesthood, and this collection neither revises that teaching nor advocates any change to it. What can be assessed is the reception: the Orthodox world has not adopted her conclusions, has not formally rejected her, and has largely responded by treating the position as a personal opinion of no ecclesial weight.

The anthropology. Her case rests on the Losskian person/nature distinction extended to sex. That extension is contested within Orthodox theology, and so is the wider personalist turn of which it is part. The most serious objection is not that her anthropology is wrong but that irreducibility does not entail interchangeability: one may grant her account of the person entirely and still hold that the sacramental order deals in embodied signs in which the natural is not incidental. See Person and Nature after Lossky.

The method. Whether an Orthodox theologian is entitled to hold open a question the Church’s unlegislated but universal practice has closed is, itself, a question about theological method — and it is the deepest layer of the dispute about her. Her critics hold that the Church’s continuous practice is a locus of theology and not a proposition awaiting justification. Her defenders hold that a practice not conciliarly defined is not thereby beyond inquiry. Neither side is being frivolous.

What Should Be Said About the Shape of Her Reputation

Two observations, both of which cut against tidy narratives.

Her reputation rests on a fraction of her work. Five of her seven or eight books are on other subjects; the woman question occupied the last third of a very long life and perhaps a fifth of the corpus. This is not a complaint on her behalf — controversies attract attention, and that is how it works — but a reference collection should record the proportion.

The usual causal story about her is not supported by the record. The story runs: woman Protestant pastor converts, and spends her life pressing Orthodoxy to ordain women. The record runs: chrismation 1929; auxiliary pastorate 1931, about eight months; forty-five years of silence on the question while writing on hesychasm, Russian sanctity and a nineteenth-century archimandrite; a first public intervention at sixty-nine, on invitation, arguing from a conservative theologian’s categories; the mature position only in her eighties. It is possible that the early experience shaped everything; it is also possible that it did not; and the shape of the record does not settle it. See Strasbourg Theology and the Pastorate at Villé.

The First Woman Theologian in This Repository

Behr-Sigel is the first woman theologian to receive a collection in this repository. That fact deserves to be stated soberly and then examined, because it can be made to mean too much and too little.

Too much: it does not make her position representative, authoritative, or the Orthodox woman’s view of anything. She was one theologian, a convert, French, a layperson, and contested. The Orthodox Church’s women include the Theotokos, the myrrhbearers, the ammas, St. Mary of Egypt, the great martyrs, St. Olympias the deaconess, the abbesses, St. Maria of Paris, St. Olga of Kwethluk — a cloud of witnesses beside whom a modern academic is a small figure, and among whom the repository’s collections are far more numerous than this one. Behr-Sigel would have said so herself; her lifelong subject was sanctity, and she never confused theology with it.

Too little: it is nonetheless a real fact about the history of Orthodox theology that until the twentieth century there is no woman whose written theological corpus the tradition transmits in the way it transmits the Fathers’. Women have taught, ruled, founded, prophesied, been martyred, and been venerated as the highest of created persons; the Apophthegmata preserve the sayings of the ammas beside those of the fathers. But the genre of the theological treatise, in the Christian East as in the West, was until very recently a genre women did not write in — not because they lacked the capacity but because they were not given the training, the platform, or the leisure. Behr-Sigel was among the first women in France to be given the training, at Strasbourg in 1927, and she used it for seventy-five years.

The sober statement is therefore: the first woman with a collection here is the first because she is among the first Orthodox women with a substantial published theological corpus, and that is a fact about the twentieth century rather than about her merits. Whether the corpus is good is a separate question, answered differently for its different parts, as this file has tried to do.

It should also be said that the honest reason a reference work builds a collection on her is not her sex. It is that the Orthodox conversation about women in the Church since 1976 is unintelligible without her — the repository’s own Women in Orthodoxy names her as the most prominent of the voices urging reexamination — and that a knowledge base which omitted the most cited modern Orthodox figure on a live question would be failing its readers on both sides of it.

A Closing Estimate

The most defensible summary this collection can offer, held provisionally:

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel was a serious historian of Orthodox spirituality who spent fifty years on Russian sanctity, hesychast prayer, and the francophone Orthodoxy of the West, and who in her seventies and eighties made a theological argument about women in the Church that has been widely accepted in its negative half and widely rejected in its positive extension. She was formed by a fifty-year spiritual fatherhood, lived and died in the Church’s communion, never claimed to speak for it, and asked it to deliberate rather than to act. Her critics hold that the asking was itself the injury. Her defenders hold that a Church which cannot be asked has ceased to reason. The Church has not settled it, and neither does this collection.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Prière et sainteté dans l’Église russe. Paris: Cerf, 1950; Alexandre Boukharev. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977; Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église. Paris: Cerf, 1987; Un moine de l’Église d’Orient: le père Lev Gillet. Paris: Cerf, 1993; with Kallistos Ware, L’ordination des femmes dans l’Église orthodoxe. Paris: Cerf, 1998 / The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC, 2000.
Lossky, Olga. 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.
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (Whose opening chapter gives her the description “the grandmother of Western Orthodoxy.”)
Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1999.
Conclusions of the Inter-Orthodox Consultation, Rhodes, 1988 (orthodoxdeaconess.org).
Women in Orthodoxy and The Deaconess — ../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/women-in-orthodoxy.md; ../../orthodoxy/12-church-and-world/deaconess-history.md.
METHODOLOGY.md §4.1 and §4.2, this repository.