Why Religion?

by Elaine Pagels

  Once, when I spoke of this to another scholar, he objected. “Stop right there—now you’re no longer writing history. What use is the Gospel of Thomas if you’re simply reading your own experience into those cryptic sayings?” Like me, he’d first come to know these sayings through historical analysis, seeking to take into account all available evidence in order to understand them in their own linguistic, cultural, and historical context. But although such scholarship is necessary and valuable, it offers only limited understanding.

  I chose to concentrate on these specific sources not only because they open up new historical perspectives, but also—and primarily—because I find them so compelling. However difficult it is to investigate a source we know only from a handful of Greek fragments and from a translation into Coptic, I love the challenge: while I work on these sayings, they work on me. My colleague’s question also clarified that for many of us, the “use” of such poetic and mysterious words is precisely that we may discover our own experience in them. Many of us read them as we might read the Bible, the Koran, the sutras, or the poems that we love—not primarily for whatever they meant in the past, or for whoever wrote them down, but for what they might mean to us today.

  What we’re looking for may not be anything supernatural, as we usually understand what we call “spiritual.” Instead, as one saying in Thomas suggests, we may find what we’re seeking right where we are: “Jesus says: ‘Recognize what is before your eyes, and the mysteries will be revealed to you.’” Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, such sayings remain opaque as stone to anyone who has not experienced anything like what they describe; but those who have find that they open secret doors within us. And because they do, what each person finds there may be—must be—different. Each time we read them, the words may weave like music into a particular situation, evoking new insight. Some secret texts calm and still us, as when listening in meditation; others abound in metaphor, flights of imagination, soaring and diving.

  During the years that followed, as I explored other texts from Nag Hammadi, I have found others, too, that strike me powerfully, and nurture hope. The poem called Thunder, Complete Mind, for example, echoes how, for countless ages, people have heard thunder as a divine voice. But instead of envisioning the Lord Zeus speaking in thunder, as Greeks did, or Israel’s God, as Jewish and Christian poets and prophets did, this poem personifies thunder—bronte, a feminine word in Greek—as a feminine power. Speaking in paradox, her voice confounds those who expect clarity, and frustrates those who need certainty. Here she declares that the divine presence, often unseen, shines everywhere, in all people, whether they live in palaces or garbage dumps, embracing all that we are. And instead of seeing the divine only in positive attributes like wisdom, holiness, and power, Thunder presses us to envision divine energy with our “complete mind,” even in terms of negative experiences like foolishness, shame, and fear, as this short excerpt from the poem shows:

  I am the first and the last.

  I am the one who is honored, and the one scorned;

  I am the whore and the holy one . . .

  I am the incomprehensible silence,

  and . . . the voice of many sounds, the word in many forms;

  I am the utterance of my name . . .

  Do not cast anyone out, or turn anyone away . . .

  I am the one who remains, and the one who dissolves;

  I am she who exists in all fear,

  and strength in trembling.

  I am she who cries out . . .

  I am cast forth on the face of the earth . . .

  I am the sister of my husband,

  and he is my offspring . . .

  but he is the one who gave birth to me . . .

  I am the incomprehensible silence

  and the thought often remembered . . .

  I am the one who has been hated everywhere,

  and who has been loved everywhere.

  I am the one they call Life, and you have called Death.

  I am the one whose image is great in Egypt,

  and the one who has no image among the barbarians . . .

  I prepare the bread and my mind within;

  I am the knowing of my name.

  Whoever sang, chanted, or wrote Thunder wove Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek images into a single, complex pattern. One scholar, noting allusions to the Genesis creation story, suggested that the speaker is Eve, since some of these paradoxical lines allude to her Hebrew name, “Life,” while Jewish and Christian sources accuse her of bringing death into the world (“I am the one they call Life, and you have called Death”). But rather than identifying the divine voice exclusively with Eve, this anonymous poet mentions her only as one of multiple forms through which this divine presence reveals herself. For as the next line suggests, the poet has adopted the form of a hymn to Isis, Egypt’s divine protector, “she who is great in Egypt,” praising her as another of thunder’s countless manifestations. Noting that she “has no image among the barbarians,” this poet, perhaps Greek or Egyptian, likely alludes to Jews, who startled their pagan neighbors by banishing feminine images from their visions of God. And it may have been women who especially delighted in Thunder, for even today, contemporary women artists including Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Julie Dash, and Kara Walker have loved this ancient poem and incorporated it into their own creative visions.

  Other texts, some Christian, some not, speak of spiritual awakening in ways that “speak to my condition,” as the Quakers say. The Revelation of Zostrianos, for example, speaks in the voice of a young man secretly planning to kill himself. After struggling for a long time to make sense of his life, and finding no answers to his most urgent questions, Zostrianos says that “I dared to act,” walking alone into the desert “to deliver myself to the wild animals for a violent death.” But as he steeled himself to do so, he says that suddenly he became aware of a luminous presence challenging him, saying, “Zostrianos, have you gone mad?” Zostrianos tells how, with huge relief, he turned to enter a cloud of light, which rescued him from despair and offered illumination. Finding new courage, he declares that “then I knew that the power in me was greater than the darkness, because it contained the whole light.”

  While Zostrianos recounts a sudden breakthrough, the source called Allogenes (“the stranger,” in Greek) prescribes instead an intense, long-term practice of meditation and prayer. Here a spiritual teacher, Allogenes, perhaps mingling Jewish themes with elements of Buddhist tradition, tells his student Messos how he’d struggled to overcome his own fear, confusion, and mental turbulence, saying that a divine presence named Youel “gave me power” by teaching him to meditate, saying, “If you seek with everything you have, you shall come to know the good that is within you; and you will know yourself as one who comes from the God who truly exists.”

  Encouraged by Youel to withdraw temporarily when he is afraid, Allogenes says he continued to practice for what seemed like an impossibly long time—a hundred years!—until his anxiety and mental turbulence began to subside. Then, he says, sometimes he experienced “a stillness of silence” in which “I knew my true self,” until finally “I turned to myself and saw the light surrounding me, and the good within me, and I became divine.” This doesn’t mean that Allogenes thought he was God; rather, the Greek language that he speaks suggests that he felt he was experiencing his “true self” in continuity with “the unknown One.” Yet even then, Allogenes speaks in language that mystics call the via negativa, the “negative way,” acknowledging that the divine presence he occasionally glimpses is beyond human comprehension.

  When we started working on these sources, many of us wondered why the monks who collected these texts included writings like this in their monastery library—writings that aren’t even Christian. After coming to know these texts over time, I can only conclude that what mattered most to these monks wasn’t dogma. They weren’t judging the value of sacred writings by whether or not they conform to Christian doctrine. For the most part, th
e creeds by which later bishops defined who was Christian had not yet been invented. From the first to the mid-fourth century, before various creeds were increasingly formalized, many Christian monks were open to exploring other traditions along with their own, just as monastics today often include in their libraries writings that range from the works of Moses Maimonides to the Buddhist sutras; apparently they were less concerned with what to believe than with deepening their spiritual practice. 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!

  Chapter 8

  Listening to Thunder

  Sarah and David Pagels in Princeton, New Jersey, with Wolfgang, thanks to Kent Greenawalt and Robert, Sasha, and Andrei.

  On a brilliantly clear September morning, when the children were much older, I was walking to a breakfast meeting to welcome new students to the university when explosions in New York changed our world—two airplanes weirdly crashing into the World Trade towers, suddenly surreal scenes on television of the towers burning and crashing to the ground, countless people leaping out of the windows to die rather than burn alive; scenes of catastrophic confusion playing out like a horror movie, only shockingly real. Many scenes were unforgettable: George W. Bush vowing to lead a “crusade” against terror; Christian evangelicals denouncing homosexuals for bringing down God’s wrath on this sinful nation; reporters hastily stumbling to account for Egyptian and Saudi engineers who’d come to American schools to learn to fly planes but not to land them, while planning this suicide mission.

  What horrified many of us even more was that when the camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden based his movement and trained his suicide bombers proved too difficult for American troops to find and subdue, the president and his allies rammed through Congress a plan to invade Iraq. Having traveled for decades to Israel, Egypt, and Africa, I was dumbfounded. And finally, since more than ten years had passed since Heinz’s death, I was able to think about what this could mean for our nation. How could this war fail to turn Muslims throughout the world against America? Joining with many others, I protested; but although millions of us publicly opposed the war, our protests were banned from television news—suppressed—while nearly every member of Congress voted to support the president’s planned invasion.

  Even after Bush publicly censored his initial rallying cry for a crusade, he and his team sold the war as a battle of good against evil, invoking biblical language. “Shock and Awe,” the popular name for the bombing of Baghdad, was meant to signal to believers that while the massive bombing might shock unbelievers, it would arouse awe among those who understood that American bombs were delivering God’s righteous wrath. Like the president, many supporters of the war interpreted these events through the Book of Revelation’s prophecy that on the day of God’s wrath, massive explosions and flashes of light would shatter Israel’s ancient enemy, Babylon—today’s Baghdad—as people on the ground writhed in agony, “cursing God” while dying, just as the Bible said they would. Later we learned that every day, George W. Bush, then president, received his intelligence briefing from Donald Rumsfeld’s office with a quote from the Bible on the cover page to indicate that God endorsed the war.

  As furious action raged all around us, religious visions and convictions fueled wartime fever, even—perhaps especially—when stated covertly, in culturally sanctioned code. Although I’d avoided the Book of Revelation since leaving that evangelical church as an adolescent, now I went back to read it again. This final book in the Bible is surely the strangest, consisting only of visions—dreams and nightmares, vivid with monsters, the Whore of Babylon, heaven and hell, and weird, unearthly creatures fighting wars that finally explode into the battle of Armageddon, when an angel from heaven, holding a key and a giant chain, seizes Satan, throws him into a bottomless pit, and locks and seals it for a thousand years. Then the dead are raised back to life from the sea and from Hades, to stand before a terrifying being seated on a great white throne who judges everyone who ever lived, allowing the righteous to enter the heavenly Jerusalem as it descends to earth, while casting evildoers into a lake of fire that burns forever.

  How, I wondered, have these strange visions energized soldiers to fight in war for over a thousand years? The language of crusade seemed to come as naturally to a twentieth-century American president steeped in evangelical piety as it did to Christians in the seventh century, when Muslims attacked Constantinople, and in the eleventh century, when the Catholic king of France preached Revelation’s visions to fire up the armies he marched to the holy city of Jerusalem to fight the “infidels.”

  What astonished me even more is that warring antagonists on both sides of the same conflict often claim the same visions, seeing themselves as God’s people and their opponents as Satan’s; many still do. When Martin Luther’s Reformation divided Christians throughout Europe, for example, Luther, who’d dismissed the Book of Revelation in 1523, saying “there’s no Christ in it,” endorsed it seven years later, after he realized how he could wield it as a weapon against the Catholic Church. So when he published his popular German translation of the Bible, eager to ensure that readers would interpret Revelation his way, Luther had the artist Lucas Cranach illustrate this book—and only this book—picturing the pope as the Whore of Babylon, seated on a seven-headed beast. Luther’s first Catholic biographer struck back and published a hostile biography of Martin Luther prefaced with a caricature that pictures him as “the beast”—a seven-headed monster. Some years later, when war between Catholics and Protestants raged through Europe, Protestants saw in Revelation a vision of their Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, as the heavenly woman “clothed with the sun,” while Catholics pictured her as the Great Whore of Babylon.

  Like countless others, Americans fighting wars later drew on that same resource. During the Civil War, a Mississippi artist pictured Lincoln being strangled by “the beast” that he labeled as the Union, while Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” encouraged Union soldiers to fight their Confederate brethren with stirring words that she drew from Revelation. During World War II, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed that Adolf Hitler was about to fulfill Revelation’s prophecies and bring in the thousand-year reign of Christ—the third millennium (in German, dritte Reich)—after purifying the earth from massive human “pollution” that included unconverted Jews, the Roma people, homosexuals, and anyone who dared oppose Hitler. At the same time, during the freezing winter of 1941, when the French Catholic musician Olivier Messiaen, imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp, saw a rainbow in the sky, he recalled a scene from Revelation in which an angel haloed by a rainbow announces that “there shall be no more time.” Messiaen then wrote his brilliant Quartet for the End of Time, which he and other prisoners performed for the prisoners and the guards.

  And now, as if unable to wake from a nightmare, we watched wild visions we’d seen in fantasy films like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings catch fire again, fueling war. Since then, of course, some radical Muslims have adopted these same visions of God’s victory over Satan and made them their own; even as the war party in the White House invoked biblical prophecies to justify invading Iraq, radical Muslims aroused jihadi to attack America, the “Great Satan.”

  I was amazed to see how powerfully John’s Book of Revelation has engaged people in Western culture for two thousand years. How is it that these ancient biblical visions are still playing out in our politics? How can people claim to find contemporary events—different events, in each generation—prophesied in a book written two thousand years earlier? To find out, I went to the Princeton Theological Seminary Library, and was startled to find thousands of books about Revelation that packed an entire wall from floor to ceiling. What sense would it make to write one more? But as I worked my way through a huge pile of those bo
oks on the library’s concrete floor, I could see that virtually all of them were written to interpret John’s visions, or, at least, what each author thought his visions meant.

  I was looking for something more down to earth. Who wrote this book, and why did he write as he did? What is it about his visions—or the way he tells them—that allows people to interpret them in wildly different ways? While engaged in that research, John’s nightmare images invaded my dreams, and I kept wondering, Who was John? What impelled him to write this? And how can people still read his book today as if it were about their own time, not his?

  This book is famously hard to understand, but it helps to know that it’s wartime literature. John may have fled as a refugee from Jerusalem after 70 CE, when Roman armies finally defeated the Jewish revolutionaries, leaving the holy city in ruins. Hating the Romans, but wary of openly attacking Rome, while passionately longing for Israel’s God to avenge his peoples’ suffering, John did what Israel’s classical prophets had done centuries earlier. He transposed the horrors of war into prophetic imagery, picturing Rome as Isaiah had pictured Israel’s enemy Babylon, as a monster and whore. So John’s Book of Revelation offers “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as Marianne Moore said of poetry. But precisely because he does write in images so vivid and elemental that they appear in children’s dreams, his readers have been able to plug them in, so to speak, to whatever conflict they confront. Countless people who have never read that book nevertheless have absorbed its pattern of interpreting conflict as nonnegotiable and war as the only possible response.

  While offering some perspective on Revelation—and on the war fever swirling around me—these investigations alerted me to something I hadn’t focused on before: that besides finding other gospels at Nag Hammadi, we’d also found many other books of revelation—not only Thunder, the Revelation of Zostrianos, and Allogenes, but also many Christian books of revelation. Surprised to see that John’s Book of Revelation wasn’t the only one, I then realized that, on the contrary, it was only one of an outpouring of “revelations” written around the end of the first century, not only by Christians but also by Jews, Greeks, Africans, Egyptians, and Syrians, and by prophets and worshippers of the many gods whose images filled cities throughout the Roman Empire.