Elaine Pagels, “Why Religion? A Personal Story”

Harper Collins, 2018, 216 pp

I first read this book sometime ago and for, well, awhile, had thought to make it the subject of a blog. I knew it would not interest all and might offend some, but it was such a book, both excellent and important, that I felt I had to do it. I have likely made this article too long for many, but there was so much to cover. Don’t worry–I have my eye on a literary autobiography and a study of past and current international politics which I think I should be able to dispense with in a more reasonable length.

I decided to do it as a Christmas read in tandem with Anne Lamott’s “Hallelujah Anyway” and in fact I did read them both last fall and do a fairly long blog that contained reviews of both of them. It did not take me long to decide this was a mistake. As you know, if you’ve read Anne, she is no stranger to sorrow and trouble and not a pusher of a religion of easy answers. She takes on trouble without flinching and confronts it with reason, good sense, faith and, of course, her own, personal brand of humor. Maybe you read what I said about her, I hope so.

But Elaine Pagels is another author and “Why, Religion-A Personal Story” another book and the two just didn’t mesh with each other(they are not diametrically opposed but they are different), Furthermore “Why?” did not mesh with the ‘Christmas Spirit” or maybe we should call it something else, a point I won’t speculate on further now. But the overall feeling of merriment that surrounds Christmas, though possibly a bit wide of the point of the original holiday, is overwhelming and to have tossed Pagels’s short, poetic, gut wrenching, , searching and brutally honest memoir in with it would have been a disservice to her and to you and maybe to the season. Whatever the origins of the “Christmas Spirit,” it obviously has come to epitomise merriment and joy although there’s always enough pain around to make you question it. But most people who don’t have a recent or impending tragedy in their lives manage to get on with the merriment. And the world being as it is, I guess that’s about right.

It is now Lent, well plus a bit now, the season of regret, and it got here quickly. This year its quick arrival had a lot to do with the calendar and the fact of Easter being a “moveable feast.” But it always comes quickly after the holidays or seems to. As W H Auden memorably put it in “After Christmas,” “Ash Wednesday and Lent cannot now be too far behind.” Or words to that effect.

Elaine Pagels, whose thoughts and writing can be “searing” as one critic put it , came from an upper ,middle class family from Palo Alto. She had an intelligent but cold father who had apparently kept the emotional repressions of his early conservative Protestantism, but jettisoned the religion and the loving part for a scarily logical following of everything “scientific.” Her mother seems to have been stunningly “proper” in the 1950’s US Middle Class Woman fashion but suppressed. She occasionally took Elaine to Sunday School at a Methodist Church but never pushed it very hard. They sound a grim pair.

Not surprisingly Elaine had emotional pain. As a teenager she was taken by a friend to a Billy Graham service and was enraptured by the enthusiastic emotionalism. She became an Evangelical Christian for a few years. In college she naturally tended toward the more interestingly intellectual students on campus and was a friend of, among others, Jerry Garcia. She left the Evangelical approach behind but did not find anything new with which to replace it.- Except maybe study. Her study was , broadly speaking, the history of religion, so she was in the position of having abandoned most belief but retained the interest in where it all came from and what it meant.,

Eventually she worked her way into the doctoral program in religion at Harvard, One respected scholar, asked why she wanted to be there. She said “Because I want to find the essence of Christianity.” He said, “How do you know it has one?” She knew she was in the right place. That was exactly the kind of question she wished to pursue.

Harvard was not entirely accepting. Women in such doctoral programs were still at least unusual, and there was a fair amount of sexism, the worst of which came in several years of sexual harrassment by one professor who was an admired liberal to most people. She held up and endured. Today he would have been disciplined, likely fired.

But she found excitement and joy there too in studying the origins of Christianity and other religions and trying to make sense of man’s way of creating different religions, many of which ask similar questions,. She was still in her thirties when she published “The Gnostic Gospels,” which became a best seller and a disturber to some. A few years later she met and married Heinz Pagel, a young theoretical physicist. And at this point we need, temporarily, to discuss the two aspects of her life, personal and professional..

After getting her Ph.D at Harvard she moved on, eventually, to teaching at Princeton where she has, at least on and off, remained since. She also has published over the years many books, more than twenty, on religious history, mostly early Christianity and its divisions and disagreements. She is certainly one of the leading biblical-religious scholars of Christianity in the country, perhaps in the world.

But while her professional life blossomed, her personal life brought sorrow. She and Heinz had a baby, Mark, who was born with a heart defect. It proved impossible to cure and they were told Mark would have what appeared to be a fairly normal childhood for a few years, but never come close to growing up. This turned out to be tragically true. The young couple spent a year trying to put themselves back together again and to recover from losing Mark, when Heinz, an experienced hiker, was killed by falling off a mountain in the Rockies. Elaine, understandably, went into despair at the viciousness of these two great blows and tried to fight her way out. With the help of friends and therapists and at least one session of LSD she began to recover but it was a slow and painful progress and likely still is not and won’t be completed.

Mark’s death was fairly sudden. Expected, but not like that. One day he was in school, the next he was having heart surgery. Elaine held him, but “at a certain moment I sensed that his life had left his body, and the intimate connection we’d been sharing suddenly seemed to break …when his cardiologist arrived, I turned toward her and fell down, losing consciousness. Then I seemed to be in a brilliant place, vividly green, with golden light.”

Later, after coming back to ordinary consciousness she and Heinz sat together, held each other and waited. Eventually they were told Mark’s heart was beating again and they went to him, but it stopped beating soon. Elaine felt he had heard their voices and gone back into his body but found it couldn’t sustain life. “Strangely, I also sensed that he felt a burst of joy and relief to leave his exhausted body.” And Heinz and Elaine waited by their son’s body for hours until it became clear that he was gone, “his body deserted.”

The next months were months of trying to go on with ordinary life and trying to recover. Elaine’s work, studying religion, drove her further than some to ask the big questions, including “Why do we suffer and why do we die?” And she noted that Christianity and Judaism both seem to say, or at least hypothesize that pain comes as the result of sin. Similar thoughts are there in ancient Greek thought. And so the problem–why guilt and what is to be done? And there were not good answers, just stumbling cliches people thought of, such as that they would learn a “spiritual lesson” from this.

The Pagels were just beginning to recover about a year later when they returned to their beloved Rockies. Heinz, an experienced hiker soon died in a fall. And the roof fell in on Elaine, a double dose of tragedy in a relatively short time. And now she had two adopted children to deal with by herself..

Once again she went through the grief process, buffeted by it by now. Once again some people were understanding and some weren’t. She had along the way made friends with some in the Episcopal Church and some Roman Catholic Trappist monks. These helped some but nothing could fill the void. She tried to understand and to deal with pain and anger again. She seems never to have succeeded entirely but did find some hints and these hints she shares with us the rest of the book.

One of her first efforts when she began to search for the answers(or the lack of them)was, understandably, the Book of Job and the concept of Satan. Here we have the world’s best known story of pain and guilt or guiltlessness and of Evil personified and working against man. She reviews the story. I imagine you know it. Satan, or anyway an evil one(“a satan” in at least one translation)confronts God mockingly regarding the loyalty of those who worship him. God responds “Have you considered by servant, Job?” And Satan, having looked at Job carefully, brings down a series of disasters on him-loss of family, wealth, etc. Now, according to Elaine, an original version of the story has Job holding fast through this all, But in the one most of us know now, Job rebels and asks God why all this is happening. God replies, in an utterance that is unbeatable in its majesty and frankly theatrical beauty,, but still I think morally unsatisfying, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” In other words, you don’t know the whole story, And Job repents in ashes and dust and then has nearly everything restored to him.

Elaine hypothesizes that Job was likely originally two stories or at least a story with two distinct parts. She thinks the writer pulled these two apart, inserted his own thoughts after part 1, then addended part 2. And this makes both literary and psychological sense to me, particularly if you accept her idea that the middle part, added by the later author, was the author speaking for himself and for all the others in the world who have suffered without noticeable sin and who would like to know why. And he–the writer–uses his anger and sarcasm in what amounts to a confrontation with God. Of course, for all this, he never gets a satisfactory answer((See p 148 for Elaine’s reasoning of which I have given you a short and perhaps inadequate interpretation.)

One of the big unanswered questions(the big one, in fact)is why do these people suffer without having sinned? And Elaine doubles down on this commenting that Western theologies, even the ancient Greeks, seemed to think that pain was a punishment for sin, while eastern faiths such as Buddhism see the natural order as almost without evil. Of course the first noble truth of Buddha is “Life is pain,” but the pain is seen as part of nature, not as an intrusion as Western faiths believe.

She still wondered how she could go on. A fellow writer told her she should put aside academics for awhile and write about grief .And this took her back to Satan and the questions about good, evil and pain. And so she began to study the Bible carefully with an eye to these questions–and reached a conclusion that should be obvious to anyone somewhat familiar with the Bible but which I think is not. Actually, it had never called my attention to itself. And it is simply this–

In the Hebrew Bible–The Old Testament–Satan does not appear “as an evil supernatural power. Christians who identify the snake in Paradise as Satan actually are projecting a far more recent invention into that ancient story…..(some)stories in the Hebrew Bible do speak of a supernatural character they call ‘the satan’–, but …he acts more like a storytelling device than a dangerous enemy.” Christians later made changes in this and the author thinks she knows the(well “a”)reason. After the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule was crushed in 66 AD(or CE if you prefer)the Roman vengeance was severe. Many Jews, including the followers of Jesus were in danger of their lives from the Romans. And therefore they went to great extremes to shift the blame to others. Frightened of the Romans, they settled on the Jewish priesthood and other leaders who had often not been friendly to Jesus. Now they were blamed for anything including being in league with Satan, the representative of all evil and assuming his role that to some degree survives today. Pagels has a book about this simply called “The Origins of Satan” which I suspect would be worth a read.;

For twenty pages or so after this Elaine struggles with good, evil and the New
Testament, particularly Mark(acknowledged by nearly all bible scholars to have been the first gospel written despite how the books are arranged). She shows the contrasts between earlier and later version and analyzes the conflicts involved. Her conclusion is, more or less, that Mark and the Resurrection stories make no sense without Satan as the enemy and victory over him as the “good news.” Now she does not take this as necessarily being the literal, historical truth(a proposition I feel she would reject), nor suggest that anyone else must do so. But she does reach the stage where she` begins to accept that something may be going on in the universe that we are not aware of(Elaine doesn’t mention it, but Teilhard de Chardin said “Something is afoot in the universe”). Tentatively and without certainty, she thinks perhaps pain has a meaning.

And she then quotes the American poet Wallace Stevens–“After the final no, there comes a yes/And on that yes, the future world depends/No was the night. Yes is the present sun.”

But her enquiring and questioning mind was still not wholly satisfied and by the time she considered the Stevens poetry she was already delving into “secret gospels” and trying to extract more meaning about what is and isn’t true and what the past has to teach us about it. The “secret gospels” are the ones found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. They have become eclipsed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, found about 2 years later, but their importance is immense.

There are many other books on these findings. I will not deal with any of them so as to keep our attention on Elaine Pagels’s book and to avoid distracting ourselves. Suffice it to say that like the Scrolls the Nag Hamadi findings have been reported upon and written about to a very large degree, though there may still be things there to learn. But I’m sure many have read them with profit and learned a great deal. Elaine is one of them.

In her time of depression and loneliness she pursued the bible reading which she had begun with Job further and it lead her to other places in the Bible and to places outside of it. Did it lead her to the Final Answer? No, but it led her to ways of dealing with the questions and her thought is very much worth following for its approach to pain, philosophy,. religious thought and we may or ought to believe. Not all will, of course get the same answers. But I like Elaine’s well enough to pass them along.

She recounts again the original Mark which ends with a forsaken Jesus on the cross and then with the women going to the tomb. They find it empty but are frightened and confused and this part ends on a note of despair. It is impossible to know exactly what happened but apparently someone wrote a different ending, a sort of addition to what was the original story and gave it a “happy ending.” Mark had not the intention, she thinks, of writing bad news. but the good news, that good wins over Satan in the end, This includes that there may be pain along the way.” God’s victory is coming soon.” she says, “but coming from beyond the frame of his narrative, perhaps even beyond the frame of human history.”

She thought more about her own loss and wondered–“could there be something mysterious going on in the universe that we don’t see yet?”

She was of course, already familiar with the largely unknown religiious writing(After all she did write
The Gnostic Gospels.”)previously mentioned. But most people weren’t and among those who were there were a lot of clergy and others of official Christendom who disapproved of these writings and of people reading them. You can find this information in about any book on the Nag Hammadi findings, and among them will be a writing knows as the “Gospel of Thomas,”

This would play a large part in Elaine’s journey for she had had a sort of vision during her worse times, of “a huge net made of ropes, surrounding all of us, with open spaces into which we might be propelled into infinity, yet bound with knots that held us in this world.”(see p 176 for fuller quotation). “What drew me back to ;;; Thomas….was a particular cluster of sayings that seemed to speak of what that vision meant”–especially sayings that were previously unknown, strange and compelling.

She noted that unlike Mark which portrays Jesus’s comments about the Kingdom of God coming as a catastrophic event, the Gospel of Thomas suggests that this was a metaphor. Jesus is seen to be saying the Kingdom is not an event expected in human time. It is a state of being that humans may reach when they come to know who they are and to know God as the source of their being. “These sayings suggest what later becomes a primary theme of Jewish mystical tradition, that the ‘image of God’ divine light gives in creation is hidden deep within each one of us. …(we should)keep on seeking until we find it”
Elaine felt that this “helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God.:”

Her pursuit of the Nag Hammaddi writings led her more and more to sayings and ideas that were powerful and hopeful. There is a long(too long to quote here)passage from “Thunder, Complete Mind,” a poem told from the point of view of a female and mysterious being(a god?)which deals in contradictions and is scornful of easy answers . .”I am the first and the last. I am the one who is honored and the one scorned” is the beginning. Some have identified the speaker as Eve, but the poet seems to Pagels to mention Eve, but as one of a number of forms through which this divine presence reveals itself. And, she points out, many female authors including Toni Morrison and Kara Walker have used this vision in their own creative works.

She concludes this chapter with the following-“many of us wondered why the monks who collected these text included writings …that aren’t even Christian. After coming to know these texts over time, I can only conclude that what mattered most …wasn’t dogma …For the most part the creeds by which later bishops defined who was Christian had not been invented. From the first to the mid-fourth century …many Christian monks were open to exploring other traditions along with their own …Many people raised, even nominally, as I was, within Christian culture find Christianity’s traditional exclusion of anything outside its boundaries too confining, . And while finding truth for ourselves is difficult, often elusive, some of us can’t avoid the challenge: Instead, we dive in!” To me this sentence is comforting and freeing. Not that I hadn’t thought of it before–I had, maybe hundreds of times–but to have it ratified by a person of such a mind and heart is a comfort and an encouragement to push own with my own journey.

And so we come to Pagels’s last chapter. Entitled “Listening to the Thunder,” it is about the Book of Revelation” and her re-searching and researching it after it began to be used as support for US attacks on Iraq and other presumed Arab enemies in the 2000’s. By the way, I am not personally going to dispute the US on all of these actions, but clearly the invasion of Iraq was a horrible mistake resulting in an unnecessary and terrible war.

Our author states that she had avoided the “Book of Revelation” since leaving her Evangelical church as a girl. Now she revisited it and concluded(as I’ll bet many have)that of all the books of the Bible it is “surely the strangest, consisting only of visions–dreams and nightmares, vivid with monsters” and she gives a long but startlingly arresting description of some of its images. She also found that it had been used often over the centuries including by both sides during the Reformation and the US Civil War.

She began to wonder about all this and about the book’s influence, so she visited the Library at the Princeton Theological Seminary where she was “startled to find thousands of books” on Revelation. She quickly determined that nearly all of them were written to interpret what this strange writing meant. She wondered,, “Who wrote this book and why did he write as he did?” She also wondered why so many people even today read it as if it were about their own time, not the author’s.

There is no knowing who wrote it, of course. But she says it likely was “wartime literature,” written around 70 after the Romans brutally put down the Jewish revolt. He wrote at least in part to equate Rome with the Babylon of the Old Testament, “a monster and a whore.” It is an effective piece of writing in that its images, however violent and grotesque, have somehow worked their way into the human subconscious and many who have not even read it have accepted its approach and its violent and bizarre language. Unfortunately this has frequently led to the choice of war as the only answer.

So she re-examined some of the Nag Hammadi findings and discovered that there was a large number of books about “revelation” at that time. She was also taken with the question–since there are so many revelations, which (if any) do you trust? She found contradictions, such as “The Secret Revelation of John,” in which Jesus says “I am the one who is with you always: I am the Father; I am the Mother: and I am the Son.”

She also noted and notes for us that when church authorities realized, about the 2nd-3rd century, that these writings, were gaining popularity they were very displeased. The writings, after all, were of about the right age to be from the same era in which the New Testament was mostly written but many had no direct instructions on what to believe.; Some didn’t appear to be definitively Jewish or Christian. About the middle of the 2nd century Bishop Iraneus began an serious attack on all literature that was non-canonical, that is that had not been sanctioned by the church and which in some cases seemed vaguely or more than vaguely to challenge orthodox beliefs.

Elaine’s primary comment on this is–“For some of us, though, finding no easy answers doesn’t mean that we can shut questions down.” That is the truth for so many and so many have been driven out of the church, that is removed themselves from it because they were not allowed to maintain those questions and still be made to feel they belonged. It also occurred to her to ask, “Why do so many Christians,
Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, insist that Jesus ‘had to die’ before God could forgive human sin”(See pp 192-193 for her fuller comments on this)

And she reflected that after listening to an old friend wax ecstatic over Mel Gibson’s performance in “The Passion of the Christ,” she had a serious question. How could a God who “is love” withhold forgiveness from his human creatures except through the torture of his son? She notes that she does not take the whole thing literally, but even so the question remains. And she refers to St Augustine’s idea of “original sin” And she remembered the teaching of her Evangelical past, that you must “accept Jesus as your savior or be damned.” And while some will think these questions inappropriate and unanswerable they are questions that have dogged me and many others for decades. And we see what she means and we are moved.

She goes on to note that really, Paul, not Jesus is responsible for this idea. And indeed, you will search uselessly to find it in any of Jesus’ sayings quoted in the New Testament. So whether you take that part of the Bible as literal or not, there is no basis for the teaching in his own words. This opens up the question of Paul, and this is an extremely difficult subject which I will make no attempt to broach or even to say too much about Elaine’s take on him.

But her main point is that in Corinthians Paul drops some hints that he found his earlier listeners “children” in their understanding of things spiritual and so he had to feed them what amounted to baby food in understanding. He goes on to say there is a mystery in the teaching that is only to be revealed to the wise and the more spiritually mature.

Now this is likely true of Paul’s writing. Neither Elaine nor anyone else can explain why he never wrote anything about this further truth that made it into the Bible. But it’s one of those thoughts that once it’s planted will not go away easily, if at all. And she came to believe that the answer may lie in “The Gospel of Truth,” one of the Nag Hammadi books. The unknown author of this gospel says of the “secret wisdom” that “The true gospel is joy” and that it doesn’t begin with human history but rather before the world was created.

It was not “In the Beginning” that counted, but before that in what Elaine calls “primordial time,” that is before the beginning.. And she believes that about the time of these writings it was common for Jews and non-Jews to speculate on what God was doing before creating the world. They reflected on known writings such as
Genesis and Proverbs and thought they gleaned some further truth from them,. This included the thoughts of another female entity, “wisdom” who claims that “when he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was there.” And many apparently contributed to this effort that gave a feminine voice a role in creation AND explained creation in a poetic but to many more acceptable way.

This upset some Rabbis then as it would upset Iraneous and other bishops centuries later. But speculation could not be stopped and according to Ms Pagels, the author(s?) of the Gospel of Truth may have revealed the truth about Paul. They asked , what happened before the beginning of time?(I’ve often wondered and quit speculating quickly for fear of my mental stability), But in this version, all the different beings created by the One from whom they all came began to search for their progenitor. And ,unable to find him, they wandered in the dark. And, the author says, what separates us from God is not sin but our own limited capacity for understanding. According to this version of the story, God, seeing these people lost, sent Jesus, His Son, himself “the hidden mystery,” to lead them home, back to God. She doesn’t use these words, but it appears to me that in this version Jesus was saving people not from sin, but from loneliness and meaninglessness.

Ms Pagels is never overwhelming in her belief and never demanding that others agree with everything she says. She obviously had had enough of that approach in the past and was(correctly in my own opinion)finished with it quite permanently. But she does go on to give us not her strong belief, exactly, but her wondering and her inclinations here, near the end of her book. “Is this really Paul’s secret teaching?” she asks. “We can’t know for sure.” But she points out that some scholars agree this was likely written by Valentinus ,the “renowned Egyptian teacher.” Its style resembles that of what there is of writing attributed more directly to him. Did Valentinus receive it orally from Theudas who might have received it from Paul? Apparently we’ll never know, not on this earth anyway. But Ms Pagels loves the poetry of this gospel and its meaning– for its meaning, not for who wrote it. For it takes away the perverted(many of us instinctively feel) pain is “good for you” or sent for sin, but is, for whatever reason, part of the human condition. But out of it we–some, anyway-may learn of our connections to this, our role as part of humanity, and through that a kind of joy. So, and this is my observation, not a quotation from the book, in the long run, Jesus is a savior., who saves us from loneliness, from disconnectedness and from despair. And in the long run, who could ask for more than that?

This is not quite the end of the book but I hope I have captured the essence of it though, perhaps not as well as she wanted to capture the essence of Christianity when little more than a girl. There is no easy answer here and no really definitive one, except to say that she comes down on the side of compassion rather than anger and of exploration of ideas rather than accepting or rejecting them easily. She also sums it up with a description of her feelings on the occasion of her receiving an honorary degree from the Harvard graduate school. Overcome by the joy of this gift and the gift of her children and friends around her, she reflected upon it all. This is her final paragraph. “I don’t know how to answer those questions. What I do know is that for moments, during that joyful and noisy ceremony, the pomp and privilege of that scene receded, and the invisible bonds connecting everyone there, and connecting all of us with countless others and with our world and whatever is beyond it, felt stronger than ever, echoing the words of the ancient Jewish prayer: ‘Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day.’ However it happens, sometimes hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace.”

There is nothing I wish to add. I have already added more than enough, but I hope I have stimulated your minds to pursue the challenging but comforting work of this great lady.