Why Not?

Why Religion? A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels.  Ecco.  235 pp. $27.99 ****1/2

Why Religion? is a slender graceful memoir, a rare thing in these social media days when people think their every moment is worth recording.  It is directed at the question which the title asks, which meant different things to author Elaine Pagels at different moments in her life.  It is also an honest account of incredible suffering, about events which happened in the late eighties but seem as raw now as when they happened.

First her young son, her only biological child, died of a fatal lung disease when he was six years old.  The photo of his smiling face as he sits in a little chair at school is heartbreaking.  The following year, Pagels’ husband Heinz died in a hiking accident.  He stumbled and fell, clinging to a ledge, then dropped three hundred feet, hit another ledge, and fell another thousand feet.  The body they found was smashed and in pieces.  He hadn’t been on some daredevil climb, though he was hiking in the mountains of Colorado.  He just stumbled—perhaps because of post-polio weakness in his legs—and fell.

The death of a child is unimaginable to most of us, though people go through it every day.  But the entirely unexpected death of her husband a year later took Pagels right to the edge of madness.  Her account of that grief is searing but not overdone.  It centers the book but somehow doesn’t weigh it down.

Both of these events address the question posed by the title, though Pagels had studied religion and become a scholar before either thing happened.  In fact, though her parents were not religious people and were resistant to the whole subject, Pagels attended a Billy Graham revival when she was thirteen and actually answered the altar call, which, by the tenets of the Baptist church as I understand them, meant she was saved right there.  I was as surprised by that moment as I was by her statement that Graham “raised his voice to denounce Christians who used scripture to justify slavery and defend racism while ignoring the poor and our own spiritual poverty” (what happened to that message as he got older?  And what in God’s name happened to Franklin Graham, if he was raised by such a father?).

Pagels was attracted to the church in an emotional way, but eventually decided she couldn’t swallow much of the doctrine, particularly the idea that a friend of hers would burn in hell because he hadn’t been born again.  But she took a scholarly interest in religion, particularly the cache of writings that were discovered around Nag Hammadi in 1945, and which shed new light on the early days of Christianity.  Her first major work was The Gnostic Gospels, in 1979.  She became a bestseller in 2003 With Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

Pagels’ theory, which she has developed over the years and through a series of books, is that the followers of Jesus were once a much more diverse group, with more different beliefs, than the monolithic group that we think of as Christians today.[1]  Certain church fathers, by choosing the canonical texts, led the church in a particular direction, indicating that Jesus was the one and only Son of God and people can attain salvation only by believing in him.[2]  The Gospel of Thomas agrees that Jesus was the Son of God, but suggests that what he had was available to others as well, both those who followed him and those who didn’t.  It may have been necessary for the Church Fathers to suppress such ideas to get the fledgling Christian movement off the ground.  But doing so diminished and distorted what Jesus actually taught.

All of this I find stunning: that these texts were just discovered in 1945, three years before I was born; that they were discovered by sheep herder, whose mother burned some of them as fuel; that they open up an entirely different view of Christianity; that they suggest that a few individuals, including a Bishop named Irenaeus, had an outsized influence in what the Christian religion would become.  Pagels imagines a group of spiritual seekers who were trying to discover the truth about existence, collecting a wide variety of manuscripts because they all pointed to a part of the truth.  But Christianity, for better or worse, became a religion which focused on a small subset of those manuscripts, pointing to a particular view of things.[3]

The word gnostic refers to knowing, but a particular kind of knowing, which Pagels defines as “knowledge of the heart.”  It actually seems to resemble the “not knowing” that Buddhists refer to, or the kind of wisdom that Buddhists call prajna paramita, wisdom beyond wisdom.  It is a deep inner conviction, which has nothing to do with a doctrine someone has told you to believe.  Hence the title of Pagel’s bestseller about the Gospel of Thomas: Beyond Belief.

Pagels of course has been reviled by some conventional Christians, called New Age and Buddhist and various other dreadful insults.[4]  It really is an act of bravery to have published the books she has, and to speak out for them.[5]  In this slender volume, which she reveals the personal dimension behind her work, she makes herself even more vulnerable.  It is a graceful, modest, beautifully written book.

[1] In a way, of course, they’re not monolithic at all.  But they’re far more so than the diverse group Pagels imagines.

[2] Exactly what that means is hard to say.  I had a difficult time figuring that out when I was trying to be a Christian.

[3] Again, the Bible is actually an anthology of rather diverse writings.  It gets distorted when people claim it presents a single message.

[4] She finds it amusing that manuscripts two thousand years old are being called New Age.

[5] Pagels is as eloquent a speaker as she is a writer.  I especially recommend this long conversation with Gustav Niebuhr.