Why Religion?

by Elaine Pagels

  What surprised me was to see that biblical stories reserve anger, especially righteous anger that motivates killing, as the special prerogative of the Lord himself. The Bible’s Exodus stories, for example, praise the Lord for destroying the entire Egyptian army “in his fury.” Later, when the Lord’s “anger burns hot” against his own people, he resolves to kill them, too. Although initially Moses pleads with the Lord to relent, when Moses sees his people worshipping a Canaanite god, his own “anger burns hot” on the Lord’s behalf. Summoning the Levites, he shouts out orders: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth . . . throughout the camp, and each of you, kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’” After the Levites go on a rampage through the camp and mercilessly slaughter three thousand of their own people, Moses praises them for having “served the Lord.” Then he announces that since each one of them has killed his own brothers and sons, “you have . . . brought a blessing upon yourselves this day.”

  Yet even these early biblical stories I found hint that the people who told them felt conflicted, as I did, about acknowledging anger. Another story, for example, tells how “the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he incited King David” to take a census in order to initiate taxes and conscript men into the army—an innovation that intensely angers many people, including the storyteller. But he ends this story with a strange contradiction: even though the Lord himself initiated the census, the Lord harshly punishes David for having done it, sending an avenging angel to destroy Jerusalem and all its inhabitants, relenting only after David humbly repents, the angel having killed seventy thousand Israelites!

  Some anonymous writer, however, obviously uncomfortable with this story, wrote a second version, inserting Satan into the story to make it more consistent. This second version, also in the Bible, says that Satan incited David’s evil act, and that after “Satan opposed Israel, and incited David to count the people . . . God was displeased with this thing, and struck Israel.” This revised version concludes by telling how God sends his avenging angel to punish the king, killing seventy thousand people. But as the angel raises his sword to destroy Jerusalem, David does elaborate penance, wearing sackcloth and offering lavish atonement sacrifices, until “the Lord took note, and relented . . . and said to the angel, ‘Enough! Stay your hand . . .’ and the angel put his sword back into its sheath,” canceling further slaughter.

  Comparing the two versions, I felt that perhaps I could understand why the second writer revised the story. For even though talk of being “angry at God” sounded to me like nonsense, I felt it would be a relief, when grieving and raging, to have someone to blame. So, too, these storytellers chose not to blame God for disaster, and blamed instead a member of his heavenly court, whom they called “the satan,” imagining him as a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path, sometimes hidden like land mines, to lure his targets toward danger and death.

  So, I thought, with some irony, why not blame Satan, rather than reflexively blaming myself, or allowing anyone to blame those who died? For me this started almost as a joke, or, rather, as a way of deflecting anger, since I thought of Satan, if at all, as a kind of throwaway figure, two horns and a tail scrawled onto a cartoon, or a bogeyman that only children and superstitious people feared. Yet now I realized that for millennia, people had bushwhacked through rough emotional terrain partly by envisioning Satan—or, in the case of those who worshipped the traditional Greek gods, the gods themselves—as invisible antagonists.

  Recalling that a vision of Satan, menacing and dangerous, had appeared in my dream the night before our son’s open-heart surgery, I realized that although I didn’t believe in him, the figure often called “the old enemy” nevertheless lived in my imagination, shaped by ancient cultural traditions, catalyzed by crisis. And although at the time I did not practice prayer, in that dream I’d spoken the words “Jesus Christ,” involuntarily crying out a powerful name to ward off a threatening presence, as Christians have done for thousands of years. So even if Satan is a figment of the imagination, he’s the shape imagination has given to some of our most immediate experiences—in my case, fear of our child’s death, and desperate hope.

  I recalled that what triggered that dream was having heard, that afternoon, a choir singing the famous hymn in which Martin Luther pictures God as a mighty fortress, a refuge in time of war. For this hymn goes on to warn that “still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe / His power and craft are great / And armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.” When Luther wrote this, he took his cues from the New Testament’s stories of Jesus’s conflicts with the devil—one of countless ways in which Christians and Muslims have adapted and transformed stories of Satan for thousands of years. Such stories acknowledge the power that death holds over all of us, but they also speak of hope for reprieve, even from a God whom many no longer believe in but who may, nevertheless, live in our unconscious, when we cry out “Oh, my God!”

  During those dark, nameless days and months, like many people feeling overwhelmed, I did think of Job. Surely only a woman who’d failed as mother and wife would see both her child and husband die. Could this be punishment for some unknown, unacknowledged sin? Struggling to untangle such messy emotions, I sensed how unconsciously I’d absorbed cultural messages from those ancient traditions, long after my family had given up Christianity. For when those biblical stories turn grief away from anger, they turn it toward guilt. For me, then, as for many others, when grieving, guilt crashed in with harsh and dissonant chords that nearly drowned out anger. Job’s problem—acknowledging only one God, while insisting that he’s both good and just—is that when something goes wrong, there’s no one to blame but yourself.

  Much as I’d resisted Palo Alto’s suburban cocoon, growing up there had allowed me to assume that disasters wouldn’t happen to people like ourselves—not, at least, to those who hadn’t done something dreadfully wrong. Wasn’t there some kind of moral system in the universe, some afterimage of an ancient God whom we could count on to keep track of what’s fair? Especially after the unimaginable had happened, the death of our child? Sufferings that others endured, many much worse, since they were intentionally inflicted, like those of countless people whose lives were stolen, ravaged, and destroyed by slavery and racial hatred, and like the millions slaughtered or damaged in the Nazi death camps and countless other genocides, had so far remained at some distance and failed to penetrate my naivete.

  Yet it wasn’t only the smugness of suburban America that kept the sufferings of others at a distance. Even the storyteller who wrote Job’s story thousands of years ago apparently objected to the earliest version of that ancient folktale—the version that tells only of a man who suffers without complaint, never losing his trust in God. As I reread that ancient story now, it seemed to break open like a pomegranate, bloodred on the inside, showing how schizophrenic it is, or, if you like, how brilliantly complex. For what we call “the Book of Job,” as if it were a single book, actually stitches together what look like two distinctly different writings. Whoever wrote the version we now have in the Bible apparently began by telling only the first part of an ancient folktale, then split it into two parts, placing the second part at the end. Spliced into the middle, he added his own voice—the voice of an anguished, angry poet, who speaks for countless people devastated by war, driven as exiles into poverty, who’d seen their children die and buried them while living as refugees scrambling for scraps of their previous lives. This poet outrageously protests—even mocks—the folktale’s simple moralism, while claiming to give voice to Job’s anguish.

  So I felt driven to probe into his story. The folktale, then, goes like this: First the satan, a member of God’s heavenly court, appears before God to question Job’s piety, insinuating that his loyalty to God depends only on his good fortune. Apparently stung by this challenge, the Lord then allows the satan to test Job. First, enemy soldiers kill Jo
b’s servants and steal his oxen and donkeys; then “fire from God” falls from heaven and burns up his flocks of sheep; finally, his oldest son’s house collapses, crushing to death all ten of his sons and daughters. And even after the satan goes further, inflicting him with horrible sores all over his body, Job maintains his simple faith in God. While mourning his dead children, he never speaks a word against God—or so says the folktale that opens his story.

  The Book of Job ends with the second half of this moralistic folktale: the Lord rewards Job’s patience by giving him back “twice as much as he had before”—fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys, and seven more sons and three beautiful daughters. By adding this “happy ending,” the storyteller reassures his hearers that no matter what happens, “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world,” or will be—just as the Colorado policeman wanted to tell me when delivering news that my husband was dead.

  But as the third chapter starts, the poet’s Job first opens his mouth, cursing the day he was born, crying out that he wishes he were dead. This Job tears open the tension hidden in Israel’s claim that there is only one, all-powerful God; for if so, then God himself creates all the horrors of the world, and hope for divine justice is futile. When Job’s friends come to console him, they wrap themselves in traditional pieties, telling Job that although he looks like an upright man, he must have done something wrong, likely in secret; otherwise, surely he would not suffer like this. But Job insists that although he isn’t perfect, he’s done nothing to deserve such huge catastrophes. Now he wants to subpoena God—demand that the Lord himself appear in court and admit that Job is telling the truth. But when he fails to bring his divine tormentor to justice, Job cries out that his tormentor is none other than God himself: “He has torn me apart in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me,” hunting Job down to destroy him. “If it is not he, then who is it?”

  To answer that question—and deflect blame from God—later generations would invent the figure of Satan. But the poet leaves Satan out, picturing the Lord himself as a terrifying figure who arrives in a whirlwind. Instead of answering Job’s questions, the Lord challenges him, sarcastically demanding that he answer to him: “Who is this who darkens understanding with ignorant words? . . . Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me—surely you know!” This ferocious apparition dares Job to “behold Behemoth, whom I made as I made you,” the “first of the great acts of God,” along with Leviathan—the two mythological monsters of Jewish legend who embody chaos, danger, and the raging, devouring sea. Now Job confronts a vision of the universe radically different from Genesis’s orderly creation: a world on fire, like a monstrous being exploding with primal energy that “not even the gods dare challenge,” since “terror dances before it.” That’s the kind of vision in which the Greeks, like many others, envisioned the powers of their capricious gods, givers of life and death—powers that contemporary culture has sought to domesticate as “forces of nature.”

  Greeks who worshipped such gods had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Poets like Homer told how they might favor or kill you, depending on their changing moods. Apollo, who rides with the sun, bringing light and glory, might suddenly turn and shoot his bow, sending deadly plague; Aphrodite, who graced Helen of Troy with astonishing beauty, turns harsh and hostile the moment Helen questions her orders, threatening to abandon her former favorite to her enemies’ revenge. Such traditions, from Homer’s Iliad to the story of Job, speak of powerful forces, variously seen as natural or divine, bringing wonder and terror, acting like the sunlight and rain that sustain our lives, yet sometimes turn into drought, lightning, and deadly floods.

  Why, then, do disasters still shock and surprise us? As I see it, the priests who arranged the present composition of the Hebrew Bible, starting with the first creation story, effectively set up what philosophers call “the problem of evil.” For if we believe that an all-powerful God created a “very good” world, what happened to it? While the Buddha declared as his first noble truth that “all life is suffering,” Jewish and Christian theologians, on the contrary, speak of “the problem of suffering,” as if suffering and death were not intrinsic elements of nature but alien intruders on an originally perfect creation. And although Western culture offers a range of conflicting traditions, from Homer’s Iliad to the poem of Job, most biblical stories insist that the divine source is good—that, in Einstein’s witty phrase, “The Lord may be subtle, but he is not malicious.” Maybe we need to believe that: even the Book of Job, in its present form, ends with the folktale’s happy ending. So we’re stuck with this problem, and left with no answers.

  Months after Heinz’s death, when I was able to sleep at night, sometimes for minutes, sometimes an hour or more, I’d often spend them with him in dreams, and wake to the shock of his absence. Sometimes, though, in a dream, I’d run to embrace him, only to have him turn away, inexplicably indifferent, as he’d never done in life. The following spring, I panicked. What to do? Going back to where that happened felt impossible. Where, then, to go? Finally I realized that even going to the other side of the world would make no difference; the grief would be right there with us. So I booked our tickets for Colorado. Holding David in a baby carrier, and Sarah by the hand, dreading the moment of arrival, I finally stepped off the airplane into the small mountain airport, surprised, at that moment, to feel some slight relief. The vast forests and surrounding mountains seemed to place our situation into a far greater perspective.

  That July, on the first anniversary of his death, I drove out to the monastery. Seated with two monks on a wooden bench in that simple brick chapel, I began to meditate, hoping, even expecting, that the day might bring some consolation. Instead, the opposite happened. When I closed my eyes, what I first saw was that familiar tape loop, visualizing him starting to descend down the path on Pyramid Peak, then suddenly falling, falling fast, toward the rocks below. That’s where the tape always had stopped abruptly and started over. For a year I’d seen him slip and fall, over and over, an endless cycle.

  This time it changed. As the silence enveloped us, the meditation went deeper, supported by the presence of the monks engaged in prayer. The same scene appeared, but this time it did not stop. Instead, to my shock, I saw him dash against the rocks that shattered his body, as rivers of blood gushed forth, more blood than I’d ever imagined could come from one person. Transfixed with horror, I watched, sitting entirely still, uttering no sound. I had the distinct impression—and still do—that somehow I’d actually seen it happen but had blocked it out of consciousness until that moment. When we finally emerged, I walked unsteadily out of the darkened chapel into startling sunlight, and drove home.

  That evening, our home was filled with friends from town, close friends among the physicists, and Father Joseph from the monastery. When I’d first invited him, he gently explained that he could not come, having taking the vow that required him to stay at the monastery. “But Joseph,” I protested, “even Jesus went to dinner parties!” After consulting with his spiritual director, he did come to join us, wearing jeans and a plaid work shirt. Feeling strange at what I’d seemed to have seen, I was grateful to be surrounded with friends that evening. A week later, I talked with a grief counselor, who explained that when someone dies in an accident and survivors cannot see the body, they do not fully comprehend that the person has died until they completely visualize what happened. Now, involuntarily, that had happened. But, I told her, the only thing about that experience that wasn’t realistic was how much blood I saw. “That’s what happens in a real accident,” she replied.

  How to go on? Viktor Frankl, in a far more drastic situation, wrote that when our lives turn out different from what we expect, we have to do “what life expects of us”:

  We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who are being que
stioned by life—daily and hourly. . . . Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems, and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

  What I had to do next, since my salary alone could not pay the mortgage for our apartment in New York, was to put it on the market and take the children to live in Princeton, since now I’d be supporting the three of us alone, and, I hoped, somehow, find the resources to forge a new life.

  The next January, in 1989, the New York Academy of Sciences’ annual dinner was to be held at the Museum of Natural History. Especially since Heinz would not be there, his colleagues expected me to come. A year earlier, he had invited his respected senior colleague, the physicist Freeman Dyson, to be the speaker. Walking alone to that dinner, braced against an icy wind on a winter night, felt nearly impossible; crying uncontrollably, I almost turned back home. But when I finally arrived, I was relieved to be seated next to the speaker, having deeply appreciated his kindness, as the father of six children, during Mark’s illness. As we talked over dinner, he suggested that I take a year off from teaching and come as a visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study. Since often I felt exhausted, depleted of the energy that teaching requires, I was grateful for his suggestion, but since membership in the Institute is a privilege that its faculty offers on the basis of prospective research, I didn’t want to be there simply because kind friends might suggest it. So I applied to the Institute’s School of Historical Studies, proposing as my project the research that would lead to my book The Origin of Satan.