Abstract
If it is true that one can tell a lot about a person by looking at her friends, then the subject of this biography is exceptional. The list is deeply impressive: Nicholas Berdiaev, Vladimir Lossky and his extended family, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, (St) Mother Maria Skobtsova, Fr Lev Gillet (the anonymous ‘Monk of the Eastern Church’), and many others. Most of the great names of the modern Orthodox diaspora are there, as well as various renowned members of other Christian churches such as Fr. Louis Bouyer. But it is hardly surprising, for neither the subject of the biography—the celebrated Orthodox theologian Elizabeth Behr-Sigel— nor the biography itself are in any way ordinary.
To take the biography first: it is the work of Olga Lossky, great-granddaughter of Valdimir Lossky who had been lay patriarch in Paris of the neo-patristic strand in modern Orthodox theology. First published in French in 2007, this translation comes to us from Jerry Ryan and was edited by Fr. Michael Plekon, a contemporary Orthodox writer well known for his ecumenical openness and sensitivity to the workings of the Holy Spirit beyond his own communion. It has a Foreword by the late Olivier Clement, one of the most distinguished of Vladimir Lossky’s disciples and a recognized authority in the field of Orthodox spirituality. With such credentials, the volume is unlikely to disappoint, nor does it. It is a beautifully written, inspiring, yet never merely hagiographical account of one of the most fascinating, controversial and convincing converts to Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. The University of Notre Dame Press is to be commended both for the content of the work and for its form as well.
Behr-Sigel herself was a fascinating mixture of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. A bi-lingual native of Alsace-Lorraine, the daughter of a Protestant father and a Jewish mother, she originally trained for the ministry, having studied at the Protestant theology faculty at Strasbourg. At the age of 24 she embraced Orthodoxy as a result of various personal contacts which she read as evidence that God was steering her in that direction. As with so many other converts to that tradition, the power of the paschal liturgy and the beauty of Byzantine worship played their part in attracting her to the Christian East. One of the most fascinating sections of the book is the account of her time in Nancy during the war, coping not only with the dangers of the conflict and the German occupation, but also with an increasingly problematic husband afflicted both by alcoholism and a debilitating nervous condition.
Like her friends and co-religionists in twentieth-century Orthodoxy, Behr-Sigel repeatedly drew attention to Christ’s kenosis as the core of the Gospel, yet it was anything but an academic theme for her. She learnt it from bitter experience and from her intense life of prayer, a life that bore fruit especially in her still valuable studies of Russian sanctity and on the theory and practice of the ‘Jesus Prayer.’ In her research on that ancient Eastern Christian spiritual discipline she contributed greatly to the expansion of Hesychasm beyond the confines of Orthodox monasticism, assisting its growth as a spiritual method among the laity of her chosen Church and far beyond.
One of the most absorbing themes in the book is her intense friendship with and indeed love for Fr. Lev Gillet. He was the famously anonymous ‘Monk of the Eastern Church,’ a character as weird and wonderful as herself—successively, French Catholic, Benedictine monk, Greek-Catholic priest, Orthodox hieromonk, saint, scholar, and hesychast in the city. She wrote his biography after he had returned to God, partly one suspects to keep alive the memory of this remarkable spiritual guide, partly to disseminate his doctrine, and partly to try to make sense of the colossal amount of emotional turmoil it had brought them both.
Their friendship was purified in the suffering provided by the hard facts of daily life. He was a monk faithful to his vows, she a married woman equally faithful to her dysfunctional (but beloved) husband. It was a truly remarkable spiritual relationship, a physically unconsummated mystical marriage of minds. Olga Lossky does not gloss over the flaws and human failings in their characters, but for that very reason they both emerge as utterly convincing and enormously appealing. In their case, grace certainly didn’t make plaster saints or even paper icons. It formed real human beings into living icons of divine-human, suffering, kenotic love, persons profoundly transformed by their paschal experience.
Behr-Sigel attained a degree of notoriety within her own communion by daring to raise the great unmentionable (at least in Roman Catholic and Orthodox circles), the ordination of women to the ministry. Anyone tempted naively to idealize the Orthodox Church (as opposed to genuinely loving and venerating it) should reflect on her assiduous but fruitless efforts to roll that particular theological boulder up the mountain of her chosen ecclesiastical edifice, notwithstanding the fact that in Orthodoxy at least, discussing it at all still remains a possibility.
Another issue guaranteed to burst the bubble of excessive enthusiasm for all things eastern is the disedifying spectacle, in describing which Olga Lossky pulls no punches, of the endless jurisdictional disputes which periodically rent the body of the Orthodox Church in the diaspora. That too caused Behr-Sigel great suffering, as one who loved the Russian roots of her tradition yet yearned for its inculturation in her native western European culture. Although things have improved in recent years, Orthodoxy propensity to schism is a timely reminder to Latin Catholics not to complain too uncritically about Vatican centralization. If we often seem to suffer from an excess of primatial authority it is surely also possible to suffer from its absence, even if one doesn’t want to swallow Pastor Aeternus in a wholly undiluted form.
This book deserves to be read not only on account of its stimulating personal subject but as a window on to twentieth-century Orthodoxy in its diaspora experience and as a vibrant, carefully crafted account, sympathetic yet critical, analytical yet loving, of one of the most gifted converts—spiritually and intellectually—ever to have been received into the communion of that great Church.