The Book and Its Argument

La Femme et le salut du monde appeared in 1958, when no Orthodox theologian was writing on the question and Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe was nine years old. Its argument is that the domination of society and the Church by a male norm is a genuine disorder with catastrophic consequences, and that the answer is not to make women into men but to recover a Christian anthropology in which the feminine has its own irreducible dignity, vocation and charisms — with the Mother of God, not the male apostle, as the archetype of the human response to God.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Book and Its Occasion

La Femme et le salut du monde: Étude d’anthropologie chrétienne sur les charismes de la femme was published by Casterman (Tournai and Paris) in 1958 (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” bibliography). [Disputed: the first-edition year. 1958 is given by the bibliographies and by the standard notices. Some accounts give 1955 (e.g. *Omnes*, "Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon," which lists "Women and the salvation of the world (1955)"). 1958 is better attested and is used throughout this guide.] The English translation, by Anthony P. Gythiel, appeared as Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), nearly forty years later — a gap which explains why the book’s English-language reception belongs to the 1990s controversy over women’s ordination rather than to the world it was written in. It has also appeared in German (Die Frau und das Heil der Welt, 1989), Romanian (1995) and Russian (Женщина и спасение мира, 2015).

The occasion matters. In 1958 Orthodox theology had produced essentially nothing on the question of women; the postwar French intellectual world had produced a great deal, most influentially Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), which Evdokimov had read and with which he is in constant implicit argument (de Beauvoir is listed among his acknowledged interlocutors in Plekon, “Paul Evdokimov,” in Witte and Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law, Cambridge, 2017, 363–380). When the book appeared in French it was reviewed in The Ecumenical Review by Vasil T. Istavridis, who concluded that the absence of a “theology of woman” which Evdokimov here supplied had been strongly felt in Orthodox theology — a judgement worth recording, since it establishes that the book was received at the time as filling a real gap and not as an eccentricity.

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, who would later become his most important critic, noted that Evdokimov was for a long time the only Orthodox theologian to consider the women’s movement with interest and sympathy (Behr-Sigel’s judgement, as reported in Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, T&T Clark, 2013). That should be held in mind throughout: this is not a book written against the emancipation of women.

The Diagnosis: Androcentrism

The book’s opening move is a diagnosis, and it is sharper than most readers expect. Evdokimov challenges contemporary Christianity to face its androcentrism, and asserts that male dominance in society and in the Church “is at the root of many modern evils” (this is the settled summary of the book’s argument in the secondary literature; Evdokimov, La Femme et le salut du monde, 1958). He means it structurally, not as a complaint about manners. A civilization organized entirely around what he takes to be the masculine mode of being — the drive to construct, to conquer, to abstract, to master — will produce exactly what the twentieth century produced: total war, industrialized killing, ideological systems that consume persons, and a technological reason with no principle of restraint. The world is out of balance because one half of humanity’s charisms has been silenced.

His term for what has been lost is not “the rights of women” but the feminine, understood as a distinct mode of being human with its own gifts: interiority, receptivity, the capacity to shelter and to bring to birth, the priority of the person over the project, the sense of the concrete over the abstract. He argues that these are not lesser attributes assigned to women by convention, but a genuine and irreplaceable dimension of humanity without which the human race cannot be whole.

Hence the title. Woman is not being asked to be saved by the world’s arrangements; the salvation of the world depends, in his account, on the restoration of what woman carries.

The Solution: Not Assimilation but Recovery

The solution Evdokimov proposes is therefore explicitly not the assimilation of women to male roles. He sees “the solution in a rediscovery of an authentic Christian anthropology where males and females are complementary with distinct charisms and vocations” (the standard summary of the book’s thesis). His fear — stated repeatedly — is that an emancipation which simply admits women to the offices and habits men have made will complete the very androcentrism it protests: everyone will now be a man.

This is the hinge on which the whole subsequent argument, and the whole subsequent controversy, turns. Two things are being claimed at once, and they can come apart:

A critical thesis: that male dominance is a disorder and has damaged the Church and the world. This is uncontroversially the more radical half of the book for 1958, and it is the half that his later critics, including Behr-Sigel, kept.
A constructive thesis: that the remedy lies in a doctrine of ontological difference between the masculine and the feminine, each with its own charisms. This is the half that has been attacked, and it is set out in The Charisms of the Feminine.

The Shape of the Book

La Femme et le salut du monde is not a treatise on women’s roles. It is a Christian anthropology that happens to be written from the side of the feminine, and it moves through biblical, patristic, liturgical, iconographic and psychological material:

The biblical arc — Eve and the “helper meet for him” of Genesis 2:18, the Fall and its distortion of the relation of the sexes, the women of the Gospels, the Myrrh-bearers as the first witnesses of the Resurrection, and the Woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12.
The Theotokos as the centre — the Virgin’s fiat, “be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), as the archetypal human response to God, and therefore the pattern of what all humanity, male and female, is called to be. This is the theological heart of the book: for Evdokimov the feminine is not marginal to salvation history but is the mode in which humanity receives its Saviour.
The liturgical and iconographic evidence — the place of the Theotokos in the Byzantine rite and in the icon screen, the imagery of the Church as bride and mother.
The psychological material — Jung’s archetypes, given theological content (treated in the next file).
A concluding vision of the feminine charisms exercised in the modern world, including in forms of consecrated service.

Reception: Warm, Then Contested

The book made Evdokimov’s reputation. It was received in the 1960s as a pioneering and generous work; it was influential on Roman Catholic reflection in the years around Vatican II, when the Church was reconsidering the place of the laity and of women; and it lay behind the first international consultation of Orthodox women at Agapia, Romania, in 1976, at which Behr-Sigel gave the opening address and where, in Hinlicky Wilson’s account, Evdokimov — dead six years — “was present in spirit,” and where Behr-Sigel drew explicitly on his theology of a feminine charism (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013; see Women in Orthodoxy).

The reversal came from within that same circle. Within about a decade of Agapia, Behr-Sigel 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, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). The English translation of 1994 therefore arrived into an Orthodox conversation that had already moved past it, which accounts for the sharply divided reviews it received in the mid-1990s. That story is told in Behr-Sigel and the Critique of the Eternal Feminine.

An Honest Summary

Two sentences, held together, describe the book fairly.

La Femme et le salut du monde is the first serious Orthodox attempt to think theologically about women, written by a man who believed that the exclusion of the feminine had helped wreck the twentieth century and who wanted the Church to say so.

It is also a book whose constructive machinery — ontological gender difference, the Son–Spirit correlation, the archetypes — is drawn substantially from Russian religious philosophy and from depth psychology rather than from the Fathers, and it is on precisely that machinery that its Orthodox critics have concentrated.

Both sentences are true, and this collection asserts neither at the expense of the other.

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: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. (The diagnosis of androcentrism; complementarity and distinct charisms; the Theotokos as archetype.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (Behr-Sigel’s judgement that Evdokimov was long the only Orthodox theologian to treat the women’s movement with sympathy; the Agapia consultation of 1976 and her use of his feminine charisms; her later abandonment of the category.)
Istavridis, Vasil T. Review of La Femme et le salut du monde. The Ecumenical Review. (The judgement that Orthodox theology had strongly felt the lack of a theology of woman which Evdokimov supplied.)
Plekon, Michael. “Paul Evdokimov.” In John Witte, Jr. and Gary S. Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 363–380. (Simone de Beauvoir, Freud and Jung among Evdokimov’s interlocutors.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (The variant 1955 dating.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Bibliography: Casterman 1958; the German, Romanian, Russian and English translations.)
Scripture: Genesis 2:18; Luke 1:38; Galatians 3:28; Revelation 12.