Why Religion?

by Elaine Pagels

  The Gospel of Truth then offers, in poetic language, other transformed images of the cross. The author clearly knows that Jesus’s early followers often pictured the cross as a post for publishing official announcements. Matthew’s gospel, giving a literal interpretation, says that Pilate ordered his soldiers to post his death sentence on the cross, worded to mock his Jewish subjects: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Sometime later, Paul, or whoever wrote the New Testament letter to the Colossians in his name, suggested instead that what was written on the cross wasn’t Pilate’s sentence against Jesus, but rather God’s “sentence of condemnation against us”—the death sentence we deserved for our sins.

  But the author of the Gospel of Truth rejects the picture of God that both images imply—God as a harsh, divine judge who sent Jesus into the world “to die for our sins.” Instead, he suggests, the loving and compassionate Father sent Jesus to find those who were lost, and to bring them back home. So rather than see the writing on the cross as any death sentence—whether Pilate’s or God’s—this author suggests instead that Jesus published there “the living book of the living,” a book “written in our heart” that teaches us who we really are, since it includes the names of everyone who belongs to God’s family.

  Now this author breaks into praise, marveling that “love made a body” for Jesus as he voluntarily descended into this world, even knowing that he’d have to suffer and die in order to “publish that book”: “O such great teaching! He draws himself down to death, although eternal life clothes him . . . entering into the empty spaces of terror . . . stripping himself of the perishable to put on imperishability.” This vision suggests that suffering and death are simply the necessary cost of entering into human life, motivated by love.

  The Gospel of Truth, then, is all about relationships—how, when we come to know ourselves, simultaneously we come to know God. Implicit in this relationship is the paradox of gnosis—not intellectual knowledge, but knowledge of the heart. What first we must come to know is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding. But what we can know is that we’re intimately connected with that divine Source, since “in him we live and move and have our being.”

  As I imagine it, around the time this gospel was written, someone told this story to men and women fasting and staying awake all night in darkness, as they waited to be baptized into Christ’s family on Easter morning, telling them, “This is your story, and mine.” For as we’ve seen, when the storyteller talks about “all beings,” he’s also talking about us. Although Bishop Irenaeus ridicules “heretics” for telling such stories in myth, this is myth as Plato told it: imagination revealing the deeper truths of human experience. So, the speaker concludes, “If, indeed, these things have happened to each one of us,” then we can see that this mythical story has real consequences.

  Those who lack the sense of connection with others, and with the source of all being, live, he says, as if in a nightmare:

  As if we were asleep, deep in disturbing dreams; either running in terror, or as if we are striking out, or receiving blows, or falling from high places, or as if someone were murdering them, or they themselves are filling their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood.

  Those who recognize this story as their own, as I do, may realize how this “nightmare parable” coincides with experience. We all know that people who feel isolated, overwhelmed by terror and anger, can turn their own nightmares into horrific reality, from the inner cities of our nation to war-ravaged cities throughout the world.

  On the other hand, when we recognize how connected we are with one another and with “all beings,” this author says, we may “say from the heart that you are the perfect day; in you dwells the light that does not fail.” And recognizing this, in turn, impels us to act in ways that acknowledge those connections:

  Speak the truth with those who search for it . . . support those who have stumbled, and extend your hands to those who are ill. Feed those who are hungry; give rest to the weary . . . strengthen those who wish to rise; and awaken those who are asleep.

  Is this really Paul’s secret teaching? We can’t know for sure. As we’ve seen, some scholars agree that the renowned Egyptian teacher Valentinus wrote this gospel, since its language resonates with a famous poem that he wrote, and with the few fragments of his teaching that survive. Did the author receive Paul’s secret teaching orally, handed down in succession from a disciple named Theudas, who received it from Paul? Maybe so, since that’s what Valentinian tradition claims; alternatively, its author may have drawn on Paul’s letters to write it himself. But whoever wrote it wasn’t trying to impress the reader, since he doesn’t consider his own name worth mentioning, and doesn’t specifically claim that Paul wrote it. Instead, the story he tells speaks for itself—or doesn’t—depending on who’s reading it.

  I’ve come to love this poetic and moving story for the way it reframes the gospel narrative. Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, or somehow as “good for you,” this author sees it rather as Buddhists do, as an essential element of human existence, yet one that may have the potential to break us open out of who we are. My own experience of the “nightmare”—the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified—has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.

  But while this myth “speaks to my condition,” many other sources do as well, and it may not speak to yours. Through teaching and talking with friends, I’ve come to see how differently various people interpret their lives, depending on temperament and situation, as psychologist William James shows in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience. James wrote Varieties after he recovered from a crippling depression by clinging to certain religious slogans, even though he says that he didn’t actually believe them. Still, the experience was so compelling that it led him to investigate case studies of conversion, and to challenge Freud’s view that religion is nothing but illusion.

  James defines religion instead as a person’s “total reaction upon life.” Drawing on poems, philosophy, accounts of conversion, reports of healing, and claims of mystical union, he notes, for example, how Walt Whitman’s ebullient poetry may appeal particularly to optimists, while more cerebral, emotionally controlled people may prefer Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy. Of course, these need not be separate categories; both might speak to any of us in different ways. James goes on to note that people experiencing intense internal conflict often identify with what the apostle Paul and Saint Augustine say of their own emotional turmoil in accounts that, even today, people ranging from Catholics and evangelical Christians to members of Alcoholics Anonymous take as models for conversion. And since James was acutely aware that religious experience often looks like psychosis, he was especially intrigued by what religious radicals, saints, and mystics report of visions, voices, and extreme mood shifts, such as Count Leo Tolstoy’s account of recovery from suicidal depression, which lent James perspective on his own recovery.

  Some of the books found at Nag Hammadi include a similar scattershot range of sources, often bound into the same volumes. Like William James, the second-century Christian author of the Gospel of Philip observes that people of different temperaments, situations, and levels of insight need different kinds of spiritual “food.” And just as James turns from Whitman’s poems to Stoic philosophy, whoever compiled Nag Hammadi’s sixth book placed the poem called Thunder next to a passage from Plato’s Republic. Yet while William James focuses primarily on Christian sources, and tends to ignore collective and ritual aspects of religious experience, some of these ancient scribes embraced a far wider cultural range, apparently less concerned, as we’ve seen, with belief than with approaches to spiritual practice. For then, as now, city people and travelers lived in a cosmopolitan world, in which the second-century Greek-speaking Christian in Rome named Hippolytus knew of “naked Hindus by the Ganges,” whom he called “heretics.” At the same tim
e, Indian sculptors were producing images of the Buddha influenced by the conventions of Greek sculptors; and the author of Allogenes, perhaps Jewish, may have incorporated Buddhist practice into his “revelation.” And although I think it’s extremely unlikely that Jesus spent his “lost years” in India, as some people like to speculate, Syrian Christian tradition suggests that the apostle Thomas brought Jesus’s teachings to India, where Hindu or Buddhist teaching may have influenced some sayings now found in the Gospel of Thomas.

  Book VI from Nag Hammadi, for example, mixes a wide range of perspectives, starting with a story of how the twelve apostles, fearful and discouraged after Jesus’s death, meet a doctor who calls himself a “physician of souls”—the literal translation of the word “psychiatrist”—who turns out to be Jesus. Suddenly revealing himself, Jesus offers them a box of ointments and a medicine pouch, saying, “first heal [peoples’] bodies,” and then “heal the heart.” Six more sacred texts follow this story—are these meant to be their “medicines”? If so, this ancient scribe offers prescriptions that range from Thunder, which celebrates the divine presence shining through the world, to Plato’s Republic and the Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth, a ritual text in which a spiritual “father” teaches a young, impatient disciple to chant and pray, “singing in silence,” so that he may attain ecstatic union with the Greek god Hermes. This volume closes with another short text on the “mystery of sexual intercourse” and a prayer, both dedicated to Asclepius, Greek god of healing. Other books in this collection, as we’ve seen, include Zostrianos’s story of his surprise encounter with the divine presence that rescued him from despair, and Allogenes, which prescribes what another person might find healing: an intense, disciplined practice of meditation. So I like to imagine that whoever bound these diverse texts together may have had a perspective something like that of William James—that when Jesus, or anyone else, acts as “physician of souls,” the “medicine chest” might include a variety of treatments, depending on each patient’s need and response.

  What these sources do show is that many people in antiquity spent enormous time and energy searching for ways to “heal the heart,” as countless people are doing today, expanding an enormously increased range of chemical medications, therapeutic techniques, exercises, and support groups, as well as practices of meditation and yoga. And while my own plunge into the history of religion began after that first explosive experience with evangelical Christianity, what happened during our son’s illness and death, followed so soon afterward by my husband’s death, compelled me to search for healing beyond anything I’d ever imagined.

  What’s found in the secret gospels, and throughout the process of exploring the history of religion, offers resources we’re now beginning to appreciate. What also helped me was Heinz’s insight and imagination, shaped by scientific inquiry, which often extends beyond personal suffering. Once, as noted before, when he saw me in anguish after we received our child’s crushing diagnosis, he said something I often recall: “Everyone’s life has something like this in it.” Angry, I snapped back; “No, not this—not a child with a terminal illness!” “No,” he said, “not this, but something like this.” Much later, I came to realize how much truth there is in what he said. Even now, writing about what’s so deeply personal, I’m aware that anything I say can speak to you only as it resonates through what you have experienced yourself; yet even within those limits, we may experience mutual recognition.

  A few years ago, I was astonished to receive a letter from Drew Faust, then president of Harvard, inviting me to accept an honorary degree from my graduate school. When I opened that letter, thoughts tumbled in fast: first, “How amazing, when she has so many people to choose from—” then immediately, “But Heinz won’t be there—” as he was when I received my graduate degree. How could I go back there without him? But then Sarah, now twenty-six and married, agreed to come with her husband and their adorable two-year-old twins, Thomas and Rebekah; and David, twenty-five, would fly from Utah with his girlfriend to join us, so I gladly accepted.

  On the morning of the ceremony, converging from Utah, Colorado, and New Jersey at the Boston hotel the university had booked for us, we took Thomas and Rebekah to the public gardens, where they delighted in seeing the ducks and swans, and we rode on the merry-go-round. Then we headed for Cambridge, since university officials had said that thirty-two thousand people would pack into Harvard Yard for the day’s celebration. The June sun was already hot as families, children, grandparents, and friends of the graduates crowded the sidewalks, dressed to celebrate, warding off the heat with fans and sunglasses as we pressed toward the wrought-iron university gates.

  Because the names of those receiving honorary degrees are kept secret until that morning, only when nine of us gathered by one of the gates did we meet some of the others: José Antonio Abreu, musician and activist from Venezuela; Donald Hopkins, the distinguished African American physician; Tom Menino, the beloved mayor of Boston, and, most recognizable of all, Oprah Winfrey, excited and joyful, nearly dancing as she led our procession into the Yard. Seeing her, many graduates gasped with surprise, cheering and shouting, begging her to stop for them, which she often did, laughing and hugging them as they took photos. Trumpets blazed and drummers beat time as we joined an enormous parade, thousands of graduates dressed in black robes, those from the graduate schools robed in bright crimson, and the faculty, like a flock of iridescent birds, robed in brilliant blue, orange, red, gold, black, and purple, led by marshals in formal dress and top hats through the dense crowd of celebrators. In spite of all the pomp and formality, it felt like a huge and glorious party.

  When we reached the platform, people meeting, talking, laughing, greeting, I recalled how, decades before, I’d been among that dense crowd of graduates. Marveling at the celebration going on all around us, and enjoying the entire spectacle, I loved hearing the stories of others sitting near: how José Abreu had founded the project he called El Sistema, which enables impoverished inner-city children throughout the world to join youth orchestras and play music together; how Donald Hopkins had helped eradicate smallpox throughout the world. Tom Menino had just arrived from a hospital bed, determined to join the celebration, while only months before, he’d calmed a city horrified by violence, after bombs killed and maimed people on the morning of the Boston Marathon; and Oprah Winfrey spoke with candor, humility, and humor, encouraging the graduates to persist, as she has, through difficulty and failure.

  Sitting there, feeling waves of revelry and emotion pass through that huge crowd, I was suddenly stopped: Where are they, those who aren’t here, now lost to us? But as the music blared, and the prayers, introductions, and speeches echoed over the microphones, I saw Sarah and David sitting among the families. Suddenly a storm of tears and gratitude broke through me, as I felt, unexpectedly, that I was also graduating, along with those thousands of others. How, I wondered, had I somehow managed to pass the real tests—the tests I never could have imagined surviving, those unimaginable losses? Yet the children left for me to raise were both here, alive and well, and so am I: How is that possible?

  I don’t know how to answer those questions. What I do know is that for moments, during that noisy and joyful 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 an 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.

  Acknowledgments

  This is a book I never thought I could write, as noted at the start—and surely could not have written without the encouragement and help that family members, friends, and colleagues have generously given. And since asking friends to read a manuscript, or some part of it, is asking an enormous favor, I’m especially grateful to those who have be
en willing to do that, and who have offered comments, corrections, and suggestions that have much improved the manuscript throughout seven to eight years of writing. Each of them is well aware of the personal experiences involved, as well as elements of the history of religion woven into them: Sandie Berman, Timothy Brown, Elizabeth Diggs, Phoebe Graubard, Linda Hess, Victoria Juedt, Lyn Lear, Catherine Mauger, Emily McCully, Diane Morris, Susan Morrow, John Pollock, Arnold Rampersad, Judith Schramm, Tracy K. Smith, Idamae Trenner, Marvina White, Michael Wood.

  I am grateful to longtime friends John Brockman and Katinka Matson, who encouraged me to write when we first began discussing this book; and to Dan Halpern, president and publisher of Ecco, HarperCollins, whose enthusiasm and expertise helped me as I wrote, and who guided me to my wonderful editor, Denise Oswald. Many thanks to Emma Janaskie and Ashley Garland for taking this book through the process of production, and carefully taking care of so many details; and to my colleagues, Dr. Lance Jenott and Dr. George Rambow, each of whom offered expert assistance in research, while participating in preparing the manuscript and endnotes.

  I owe special thanks to Jason Epstein, who, years ago, as editorial director of Random House, took a chance on The Gnostic Gospels, and taught me how to write, turning language learned in graduate school, which sounded like a text badly translated from German, into something readable. Ever since, including with this present book, he has generously offered the indispensable expert advice for which he’s renowned. I cannot thank him enough.

  I’m especially grateful to those who helped make possible the year’s leave on sabbatical from Princeton University that allowed me to finish writing. First of all, thanks to Caroline Winterer, director of the Humanities Center at Stanford University; and Andrea Davies, associate director, who invited me to visit the Humanities Center in the spring of 2017, as the Marta Sutton Weeks Distinguished Visitor, to give a lecture on Satan—which turned out to be a popular topic!—and to enjoy the company of colleagues and friends at Stanford. Michael Wood, Leora Batnitsky, and Lorraine Furhmann graciously—and ingeniously—worked out appropriate arrangements with Princeton University. Many thanks, too, to those whose presence made the visit to Stanford so enjoyable—to Tanya Luhrmann and Richard Saller, for their collegiality, scholarship, and marvelous hospitality; to Robert and Mary Ellin Gregg, Kathryn Gin, Kirsti and Mychal Copeland, Jane Shaw, and Linda Hess, my former Stanford roommate; and to Marvina White and Arnold Rampersad, both of whom also generously helped with the writing.