The Charisms of the Feminine

The constructive core of La Femme et le salut du monde is a doctrine of ontological difference: the masculine, Evdokimov argues, is correlated with the Logos, the Son, and the feminine with the Holy Spirit and with the “hypostasis of maternity” whose realization is the Theotokos. From this he derives distinct charisms, a theological reading of Jung’s archetypes, and the conclusion that the ministerial priesthood does not belong to woman’s charism. This file expounds that argument as his own — it is not the Church’s doctrine — and records where it has been contested.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Trinitarian Correlation

Evdokimov’s boldest claim is that the difference between the sexes is not merely biological, psychological or cultural but ontological, and that it is grounded in the way each images the divine life. In his scheme, the male is related to the hypostasis of the Logos, the Son; the female to the Holy Spirit and to what he calls the hypostasis of maternity, whose human realization is the Theotokos (the correlation is reported consistently in the critical literature; see Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, T&T Clark, 2013, which describes “the notion of an ontological difference between men and women — perhaps indicating their alignment with the Son and the Spirit respectively — as her friend and fellow theologian Paul Evdokimov had proposed”; and Bryce E. Rich, “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality,” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019, which places Evdokimov and Sergei Verkhovskoy in the 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”).

The reasoning is analogical rather than deductive, and it should be stated in its strongest form. The Son is the one who is spoken, sent, and who acts in the world; the Spirit is the one who hovers, overshadows, indwells, brings to birth, and who is characteristically hidden — the Spirit does not speak of Himself (John 16:13) and is known by what He causes to appear. Evdokimov reads the masculine mode as corresponding to the first (the word, the initiative, the going-out, the work) and the feminine mode as corresponding to the second (the interiority, the reception that is not passivity, the bringing to birth, the hiddenness that is the condition of fruitfulness). Neither is a lesser participation. His whole point is that the second has been systematically undervalued, and that a Christianity which has forgotten the Spirit has, in the same movement, forgotten the woman.

The Theotokos is the linchpin. Her fiat — “be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38) — is for Evdokimov not a passive submission but the highest human act, the free reception without which the Incarnation does not occur; and the Spirit’s overshadowing of her (Luke 1:35) is the archetype of every fruitful relation between God and a human being. Because the whole human race, male and female, stands before God in exactly this posture of receptive freedom, Evdokimov can argue that the feminine mode is in one respect the universal Christian mode: every soul before God is bride, every soul is asked for a fiat. This is why he can title the book as he does. It is also the point at which his admirers find him most illuminating.

[Disputed: whether the Son–male / Spirit–female correlation is theologically admissible. (a) Evdokimov's position, shared in varying forms by Bulgakov, by Verkhovskoy, and by a strand of Russian religious philosophy, is that the correlation is analogical and illuminating and grounded in the biblical and liturgical portrayal of the Spirit and the Theotokos. (b) The objection — pressed by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, who abandoned the idea, and by later critics such as Bryce Rich — is that the divine hypostases have no gender, that assigning sexes to them projects creaturely difference into the Trinity, that Scripture's language of charisms (1 Corinthians 12) is nowhere distributed along male/female lines, and that the schema in practice licenses the very hierarchy it claims to transcend. See [Behr-Sigel and the Critique of the Eternal Feminine](../08-the-critique/behr-sigel-and-the-critique-of-the-eternal-feminine.md). The collection adjudicates nothing. On the Church's own doctrine of the Spirit, which knows nothing of gender in God, see [Pneumatology](../../orthodoxy/01-foundations/pneumatology.md) and [The Holy Trinity](../../orthodoxy/01-foundations/holy-trinity.md).]

The Charisms

From the correlation Evdokimov derives what he calls the charisms — the specific gifts of each mode of being human. The feminine charisms as he describes them include: the guarding and nourishing of life; interiority and the capacity for prayer as a state rather than an activity; the priority of the person and the relation over the abstract and the institutional; a certain unfalsifiable realism about human beings; and, above all, the maternal — which he insists is not reducible to physical motherhood but is a spiritual capacity that virgins and childless women exercise as fully as mothers.

The corresponding masculine charisms are the initiating, ordering, constructing and defending gifts; and his charge against the modern world is not that these are bad but that, unbalanced by the others, they become destructive.

An important qualification, often overlooked in summaries: Evdokimov does not hold that every individual man exhibits only masculine charisms and every woman only feminine ones. His categories are the masculine and the feminine as modes, and he assumes that every human being participates in both in some measure — one of the places where his debt to Jung is clearest. What he does hold is that the two modes are differently centred in men and in women, and that this is given rather than constructed.

The Use of Jung

Evdokimov’s engagement with C. G. Jung is explicit and is one of the book’s most distinctive and most criticized features. He takes Jung’s doctrine of archetypes and gives it a theological interpretation, turning the archetypes into the subject-matter of a masculine and a feminine spirituality: archetypes such as the mother or the harlot acquire biblical content — the mother becomes the Mother of God, the harlot the eschatological Babylon of the Apocalypse (Revelation 17) — and he identifies John the Baptist as a male archetype (this reading of his use of Jung is set out in the critical literature; Jung is listed among his acknowledged influences in Plekon, “Paul Evdokimov,” in Witte and Hauk, eds., Christianity and Family Law, Cambridge, 2017, 363–380).

Evdokimov’s reason for doing this is not a capitulation to psychology. He held that the archetypes were evidence — that the persistence across cultures of these figures indicates something real in the structure of the human being, which revelation then names and fulfils. The archetype is a shadow; the Theotokos is the substance that casts it. Whether this reasoning holds is exactly what his critics dispute: it can equally be read as a modern psychological system given a Christian vocabulary, and reviewers have found parts of the argument “rather speculative” for just this reason. On this see 08 — The Critique.

The Question of Ordination

Evdokimov drew from all of this a conclusion about the priesthood, and it must be reported exactly.

He held that the ministerial priesthood — the ministry of orders — does not belong to woman’s charism, and he expressed this in a formulation that has been much quoted and much resented: that a woman cannot be a priest without betraying herself. The argument is not one of incapacity or inferiority; it is that ordination would require a woman to exercise her vocation in a mode that is not hers, and would therefore be a loss, not a gain. He reinforces this with an iconographic observation that cuts the other way from what one might expect: the Virgin is depicted as standing at the head of the royal priesthood of all the faithful, which is the higher and more universal priesthood — so the woman is not excluded from priesthood as such but stands at its head (Evdokimov, La Femme et le salut du monde, 1958, on the Virgin, the royal priesthood, and the ministry of orders; the position is summarized in George H. Tavard’s survey of Orthodox models in Woman in Christian Tradition, Notre Dame, 1973, and in the subsequent literature on Orthodox arguments concerning ordination).

Three clarifications are required by this collection’s methodology.

First, the Orthodox Church’s practice of a male presbyterate and episcopate does not rest on Evdokimov’s argument and is not to be identified with it. The Church’s practice is what it is; Evdokimov offered one theological rationale among several, and rationales are not dogmas.

Second, Behr-Sigel — who came to reject Evdokimov’s whole framework — did not thereby simply reverse his conclusion in the way sometimes reported. Hinlicky Wilson records that Behr-Sigel came to conclude that “all the Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women were, in fact, heretical at root” — that is, that the reasons commonly given were theologically defective — while the question of the practice itself she treated as one for the Church to discern, and she co-authored with Bishop Kallistos Ware a book that deliberately presented the question as open (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013; Behr-Sigel and Kallistos Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000). The distinction between rejecting an argument and rejecting a practice is essential here and is frequently collapsed. See Fr. Kallistos Ware.

Third, the deaconess is a separate question with its own history and its own canonical basis, and neither Evdokimov’s position nor its critique settles it. See Deaconess History.

What Survives, and What Is at Issue

The parts of this argument that have proved durable are the ones least dependent on the machinery: the seriousness with which Evdokimov takes the Theotokos as an anthropological and not merely a christological figure; the claim that receptivity is an active and not a passive category; the insistence that the royal priesthood of all the baptized is the primary priesthood; and the charge that a Church which forgets the Spirit will also forget the woman.

The parts at issue are the ontological difference itself, the trinitarian correlation, and the archetypes. Those are the subject of 08 — The Critique, which is where this collection’s obligation under METHODOLOGY §4.2 is discharged.

References

Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth, and Kallistos Ware. The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000.
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. (The ontological difference; the charisms; the Virgin at the head of the royal priesthood; the ministry of orders as outside woman’s charism.)
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (The Son/Spirit alignment attributed to Evdokimov; Behr-Sigel’s rejection of it; her conclusion about the Orthodox arguments against ordination; the shift to a theology of the person taken from Lossky.)
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. (Jung, Freud and de Beauvoir among his influences.)
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.)
Tavard, George H. Woman in Christian Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, chapter on Orthodox models. (Survey of Evdokimov’s position on the Virgin, the royal priesthood, and orders.)
Scripture: Luke 1:35, 1:38; John 16:13; 1 Corinthians 12; Revelation 17.