Behr-Sigel and the Critique of the Eternal Feminine

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907–2005) was Evdokimov’s friend, his junior by six years, and the theologian who carried his question forward after his death. In 1976, at the first international consultation of Orthodox women at Agapia, she gave the opening address drawing explicitly on his theology of a feminine charism. Within about a decade she had abandoned the category of “feminine charisms” altogether, and with it the ontological difference and the Son–Spirit correlation on which Evdokimov had built. This file sets out that reversal, its reasons, and what it does and does not amount to.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Friendship

The critique reported here is not hostile. Behr-Sigel belonged to the same Paris Orthodox world — a convert from Protestantism, a student at St. Sergius in the 1930s, a friend of Fr. Lev Gillet, a colleague in the Contacts circle — and she regarded Evdokimov with affection and gratitude. Her own recorded judgement is that Evdokimov was for a long time the only Orthodox theologian to consider the women’s movement with interest and sympathy, and it was her friendship with him that lay behind her being asked to give the opening address at the first international consultation of Orthodox women at Agapia, Romania, in 1976; in Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s account, Evdokimov — six years dead — “was present in spirit” at that meeting (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, T&T Clark, 2013).

They also shared a wider theological programme. Both were convinced that the lay priesthood ought to be exalted in Orthodoxy, building on an Orthodox ecclesiology understood as horizontal in the sense of sobornost — communion, conciliarity — rather than as a hierarchy of grades (this common ground is drawn out in the literature on the two; cf. the study “Tradition’s Freedom and Beauty: The Enduring Vision of Paul Evdokimov and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel,” Lutheran Forum 37:2 [2003]: 28–32). The critique that follows is therefore internal to a shared project, which is what gives it its force.

What She Used, and What She Dropped

In her 1976 Agapia lecture, Behr-Sigel drew on Evdokimov’s theology of a feminine charism (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). The framework served the purpose she then had: to insist that women had something distinctive and irreplaceable to contribute to the Church, and that the Church was impoverished by not receiving it.

But the same lecture contained a claim that would eventually dissolve the framework. She had also stated that Scripture contains no “theoretical exposition on the nature of women and their specific charisms” — that is, that the Bible simply does not supply the doctrine of gendered charisms she was elsewhere using. Hinlicky Wilson identifies this as the seed of the reversal: Behr-Sigel became troubled by the contradiction, and the insight that “Scripture’s language of spiritual gifts and graces doesn’t map cleanly onto the male–female binary” came in time to dominate her thinking (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013).

The turn is dated with some precision in the scholarship: less than ten years after her first reflections on women, she came to reject the concept of “feminine charisms” altogether (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). The mature statement is Le ministère de la femme dans l’Église (Cerf, 1987; English The Ministry of Women in the Church, trans. Steven Bigham, Oakwood, 1991).

The Substance of the Objections

Behr-Sigel’s critique, as reconstructed by Hinlicky Wilson and as visible in her own later writing, has four strands. They should be read as distinct arguments, since a reader may accept some and not others.

1. The exegetical objection. The New Testament’s actual language about charisms (1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12; Ephesians 4) enumerates gifts — prophecy, teaching, healing, tongues, administration, mercy — and distributes them by the sovereign will of the Spirit, “dividing to every man severally as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11). It nowhere sorts them by sex. A doctrine of specifically feminine charisms therefore has no scriptural warrant, and one who claims otherwise is reading a modern schema into the text.

2. The trinitarian objection. This is the sharpest. Hinlicky Wilson states it directly: 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 — no longer seemed to her a valid explication of the relationship between trinitarian being and human being” (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). The divine hypostases are not sexed; to align the Son with the male and the Spirit with the female is to project creaturely difference into God, and then to derive from that projection conclusions about creatures — a circle.

3. The shift to personhood. Behr-Sigel did not simply subtract. She rebuilt her anthropology on the theology of the person which she took from Vladimir Lossky — the account of the human hypostasis as irreducible to its nature, not exhausted by any set of natural properties, and therefore not definable by sex (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). On this account the fundamental fact about a woman is not that she is a woman but that she is this person, unrepeatable, called by name. Gendered charisms are precisely a way of subsuming persons under a nature, which is the error Lossky’s personalism exists to prevent. This is an elegant and specifically Orthodox line of attack: it convicts Evdokimov not by importing a secular feminism but by applying the personalism of his own contemporary and colleague.

4. The consequence for the ordination question. Hinlicky Wilson reports that Behr-Sigel “came to the conclusion that all the Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women were, in fact, heretical at root” (Hinlicky Wilson, Woman, Women, and the Priesthood, 2013). This must be stated with care, and the guide states it twice for safety: the claim reported is about the arguments, not directly about the practice; Behr-Sigel’s own published position was to present the question as open and to co-author with Bishop Kallistos Ware a book that set out the case on both sides (Behr-Sigel and Ware, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church, WCC Publications, 2000; see Fr. Kallistos Ware). Readers who wish to know what the Orthodox Church holds and practises should consult Women in Orthodoxy and not this file, whose subject is a disagreement between two theologians.

Behr-Sigel was also, more generally, “not afraid to criticize some of Evdokimov’s theoretical and romantic ideas about the complementarity and particular charisms of women and men” — the adjective romantic is the one that recurs in the literature, and it points to the genealogical question taken up in How Much Sophiology, and the Counter-Reading.

The Eternal Feminine

The phrase under which this criticism is usually filed is the “eternal feminine” (das Ewig-Weibliche) — Goethe’s line at the close of Faust, taken up by Vladimir Soloviev and by the Russian Symbolists, and from them into the sophiological tradition. The charge is that Evdokimov’s feminine is not the woman of the Gospels or of the Fathers but a metaphysical principle inherited from nineteenth-century Russian and German romanticism, dressed in patristic and liturgical clothing.

[Disputed: whether Evdokimov's theology of woman is patristic or romantic in its foundations. (a) The critical case — that the ontological complementarity, the Son/Spirit correlation, and the archetypal method derive from Soloviev, Bulgakov, Goethe's *Ewig-Weibliche* and Jungian depth psychology rather than from the Fathers, and that the Fathers themselves offer no doctrine of gendered charisms — is made in substance by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (*Le ministère de la femme dans l'Église*, 1987) and by later critics of Orthodox gender essentialism such as Bryce E. Rich ("Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality," *Public Orthodoxy*, 2019), who places Evdokimov and Sergei Verkhovskoy in a genealogy running from Bulgakov. Reviewers have likewise found parts of his argument "rather speculative," particularly the identification of archetypal figures such as John the Baptist. (b) The defending case — that Evdokimov's material is drawn overwhelmingly from Scripture, the liturgy and the icon; that his use of Jung is diagnostic rather than foundational, the archetypes being read as natural evidence which revelation names and corrects; that his central claim (the Theotokos as the anthropological archetype of the human response to God) is thoroughly patristic; and that his critics have too readily let a genealogy stand in for an argument — is made by Michael Plekon (*Living Icons*, 2002) and by the broader current of his sympathetic readers. The collection names both and adjudicates neither.]

Two Cautions Against Misreading

First, Behr-Sigel never repudiated Evdokimov, and it would be a distortion to file her under “opponents.” Her repeated testimony to his pioneering sympathy stands beside her rejection of his framework; she is the model, in this collection’s view, of how theological disagreement between friends is properly conducted — and the Lutheran Forum essay that treats the two of them together does so precisely as “the enduring vision of Paul Evdokimov and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel,” a single conversation with two voices (“Tradition’s Freedom and Beauty,” Lutheran Forum 37:2 [2003]: 28–32).

Second, the critique of the framework does not touch every part of Evdokimov’s work. His theology of marriage, his account of the lay vocation, his theology of beauty, and his diagnosis of androcentrism survive Behr-Sigel’s objections more or less intact — indeed, his charge that male dominance in Church and society is a genuine disorder is a claim she pressed harder than he did. What is at issue is the machinery: whether “the feminine” names a real ontological mode with its own charisms, or whether the truth of the matter is simply that women are persons, made in God’s image, whose gifts the Spirit distributes without consulting anyone’s schema.

References

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, 1991.
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. Casterman, 1958. English: Woman and the Salvation of the World, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. SVS Press, 1994.
Hinlicky Wilson, Sarah. Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. London: T&T Clark, 2013. (Behr-Sigel’s testimony to Evdokimov’s pioneering sympathy; the 1976 Agapia address and its use of his feminine charisms; the claim that Scripture contains no theoretical exposition of women’s specific charisms; the rejection of feminine charisms within a decade; the rejection of the Son/Spirit ontological alignment; the shift to Lossky’s theology of the person; the judgement on the Orthodox arguments against ordination.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Rich, Bryce E. “Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Orthodox Conversations on Homosexuality.” Public Orthodoxy, 18 November 2019.
“Tradition’s Freedom and Beauty: The Enduring Vision of Paul Evdokimov and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.” Lutheran Forum 37, no. 2 (2003): 28–32. (The shared conviction that the lay priesthood should be exalted, on an ecclesiology of sobornost; Behr-Sigel’s willingness to criticize Evdokimov’s “theoretical and romantic” ideas of complementarity.)
Scripture: Romans 12:3–8; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:7–13.