Beyond Belief

by Elaine Pagels

  Whatever form the ritual took, the candidate usually was required to answer a set of questions. Just as the sacraments of baptism and marriage involve a ritual dialogue that shows what the person intends and pledges (“Do you believe in God, the Father . . . ?” “Do you take this man/this woman . . . ?”), so those who receive apolutrosis were asked questions like these: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going? Many religious groups, including the mystery religions, adapted such a set of standard questions—the kind that a local border patrol might ask travelers—to use in their initiations. We have already seen that the Gospel of Thomas shows Jesus teaching his disciples to respond to questions like these, questions that members of Thomas’s circle were probably asked during baptism, or second baptism:

  Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where do you come from?' Say, ‘We come from the light; the place where the light [first] came into being . . .’ If they say to you, ‘Who are you?' Say, ‘We are the children [of the light], and we are the chosen of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your Father in you?' Say to them, ‘Movement and rest.’ ”81

  Those who responded appropriately showed that they knew who they were spiritually, and knew how they related to the “living Father” as well as to Jesus, who, like themselves, comes “from the light.” Although such teachers practiced apolutrosis in many ways, what mattered most to them, Irenaeus says, was that a person experience spiritual rebirth: “They say that it is necessary for those who have received full gnosis to be born again into the power which is above all things.”82

  But Irenaeus was dismayed at the way such practices were dividing Christians from one another; he declares that “no reform of the church could possibly compensate” for the damage these people were doing as they “cut in pieces and destroy[ed] the great and glorious body of Christ.”83 What apolutrosis really means, Irenaeus charges, is not redemption at all but something very different—namely, that Satan was inspiring these so-called spiritual teachers to “deny that baptism is rebirth to God, and to renounce the whole faith.”84 By devaluing what they held in common with other believers and initiating people into their own smaller groups, such teachers were creating potentially innumerable schisms throughout Christian groups worldwide, as well as in each congregation. Irenaeus concludes by declaring that any spiritual teachers or prophets who do these things are actually heretics, frauds, and liars. He writes his massive, five-volume attack, The Refutation and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge, to demand that members of his congregation stop listening to any of them and return to the basic foundation of their faith. Irenaeus promises that he will explain for them what the Scriptures really mean and insists that only what he teaches is true.

  His primary challenge was this: How could he persuade believers that the “common” baptism, which all believers receive, far from being merely the preliminary step in the life of faith, actually effects, as he claims, “rebirth to God”? And how could he persuade them that it conveys not just the elementary teaching that beginners need but nothing less than the “whole faith”? In response, Irenaeus helped construct the basic architecture of what would become orthodox Christianity. His instructions to congregations about which revelations to destroy and which ones to keep—and, perhaps even more important, how to interpret those they kept—would become the basis for the formation of the New Testament and what he calls its “canon of truth,” which, in turn, would become the framework for the orthodox creeds. None of these, of course, were Irenaeus’s single-handed accomplishment; on the contrary, as he was the first to point out, he built upon what he loved to call “apostolic tradition” and incorporated the efforts of many others. This does mean, however, that the actions he took, developed by his ecclesiastical successors, proved decisive for what would become Christianity as we know it—as well as what we would not know of it—for millennia to come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CONSTANTINE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

  When I found that I no longer believed everything I thought Christians were supposed to believe, I asked myself, Why not just leave Christianity—and religion—behind, as so many others have done? Yet I sometimes encountered, in churches and elsewhere—in the presence of a venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor’s singing at a bar mitzvah, and on mountain hikes—something compelling, powerful, even terrifying that I could not ignore, and I had come to see that, besides belief, Christianity involves practice—and paths toward transformation.

  Last Christmas Eve, I went to the midnight service with my sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, who, as an infant, when I carried her with me to the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, would raise her head to listen intently to the singing cascading down from the choir loft. When she was eight, she joined the choir at Trinity, a Protestant church in Princeton, because, she said, “the music helps my heart.” Now, eight years later, after walking in the cold, we slowly pressed our way through the crowded church and found a place to sit close together on the stone stairs behind the lectern, where the choir was standing. This celebration was one that I loved as a child, and had come to love again as an adult, especially since the birth of our first child, Mark, and later of Sarah and David. Since Mark’s death, however, I had found participation difficult.

  But this year I found myself wholeheartedly singing the carols and listening to the stories of the child born in Bethlehem, angels breaking through darkness to announce the miraculous birth—stories that most New Testament scholars, knowing that we have little or no historical information about Jesus’ birth, regard as a mixture of legend and midrash, that is, storytelling that draws upon Israel’s stories of the miraculous birth of Isaac, of the prophet Samuel, and of the rescue of the infant Moses. On that night, my own associations with those stories seemed to be embraced in the joy and solemnity of the festival, laced, as it is, with intimations of Jesus’ impending death as well as the promise of his continuing radiant presence. Attending to the sounds and the silence, the candlelight and darkness, I felt the celebration take us in and break over us like the sea. When it receded, it left me no longer clinging to particular moments in the past but borne upon waves of love and gratitude that moved me toward Sarah, toward the whole community gathered there, at home, or everywhere, the dead and the living. For a moment I was shocked by the thought: We could have made all this up out of what had happened in our own lives; but, of course, we did not have to do that, for, as I realized at once, countless other people have already done that, and have woven the stories of innumerable lives into the stories and music, the meanings and visions of Jesus’ birth. Thus such celebrations are borne along through all the generations that have shaped and reshaped them, and those that continue to do so, just as encountering the tradition may shape and reshape us.

  Many Christians today, however, might ask the same question Irenaeus asked: If spiritual understanding may arise from human experience, doesn’t this mean that it is nothing but human invention—and therefore false? According to Irenaeus, it is heresy to assume that human experience is analogous to divine reality, and to infer that each one of us, by exploring our own experience, may discover intimations of truth about God. So, he says, when Valentinus and his disciples opened John’s gospel and wanted to understand what word means, they reflected on how word functions in human experience.1 What this means, he says, is that they mistook their own projections for theology, so that they found in the Scriptures only what they invented, “each one seeking to validate his own experience.”2 But Irenaeus himself believed that, on the contrary, whatever we might say about our own experience has nothing to do with God:

  So it is that heaping together with a kind of plausibility all human emotions, mental exercises, and formation of intentions, and utterances of words, they have lied with no plausibility at all against God. For they ascribe the things that happen to human beings, and whatever they recognize themselves as experiencing, to the divine word.3

  Had those heretics been right, Iren
aeus continues, we would have no need of revelation; “the coming of the Lord will appear unnecessary and useless, if, indeed, he did come intending to tolerate and preserve each person’s ideas concerning God.”

  What Irenaeus objected to was the refusal of those he calls heretics to acknowledge how utterly unique Jesus is, and thus their tendency to place him with ourselves on the human side of the equation. Irenaeus proclaims the opposite: that God—and Jesus Christ, God’s manifestation on earth—wholly transcends human modes of thought and experience. Against those who emphasize our kinship with Jesus Christ, Irenaeus argues that Jesus’ transcendence sets him apart from the rest of humanity:

  I have shown from the scriptures that no one of all the sons of Adam is, in his own right, called “God” or named “Lord.” But that He is himself, and in his own right . . . beyond all men who ever lived, God, and Lord, and Eternal King, and Only-begotten, and Incarnate Logos, is proclaimed by all the prophets, the apostles, and by the Spirit itself, [and] may be seen by all who have attained to even a modicum of truth.4

  Furthermore, he adds, “those who say that [Jesus] was merely a human being, begotten by Joseph” show themselves ungrateful to the “word of God, who became flesh [John 1:14] for them.”5 Not only was Jesus’ birth—his “spiritual generation from God”—completely different from ordinary human birth but so was his death completely different from ours. For just as he alone was born miraculously from a virgin, so he alone, of the whole human race, having died, rose bodily from the dead—“rose in the substance of flesh, and pointed out to his disciples the mark of the nails and the wound in his side.”6

  Nevertheless Irenaeus had to respond to a question that many people—Jews as well as “heretics”—apparently asked him: What is wrong with seeing Jesus as if he were simply “one of us”? Haven’t we all—ourselves as well as he—been created in the image of God? Irenaeus agrees but adds that the original affinity between God and ourselves was obliterated when the human race surrendered to the power of evil. “Although by nature we belonged to the all-powerful God,” he explains, the devil, whom he calls “the apostasy,” captured and came to dominate the human race and “alienated us [from God], contrary to nature, and made us his own.”7 Thus we were all in a desperate situation and would have been utterly destroyed had not the divine word descended from heaven to save us; for “there is no other way we could have learned about God unless our Master, existing as the word, had become man”8 and shed his blood to redeem us from the evil one.

  How, then, could Irenaeus safeguard this essential gospel message—upon which he believed salvation depends? As we have seen, when Irenaeus confronted the challenge of the many spiritual teachers, he acted decisively, by demanding that believers destroy all those “innumerable secret and illegitimate writings”9 that his opponents were always invoking, and by declaring that, of all versions of the “gospel” circulating among Christians, only four are genuine. In taking these two momentous—and, as it turned out, enormously influential—steps, Irenaeus became a chief architect of what Christians in later generations called the New Testament canon, a carpenter’s term meaning “guideline”—often a string with a weight attached—to check that a wall is straight.10

  Yet Irenaeus himself never applied the term canon, as we do, to the collection of writings he called the “four formed gospel,” nor to any other list of writings, since he knew that lists of writings don’t prevent heresy. After all, Valentinus and his followers often drew their inspiration from the same sources that most Christians revered in common, including Genesis, Paul’s letters, and the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Thus Irenaeus was determined to establish an even more authoritative “canon”: it was to be a guideline for understanding any writing or preaching—any gospel at all.

  Since both he and his opponents started with the “canon of faith received in baptism,”11 how could Irenaeus make sure that all believers would take this to mean what he believed it meant—that Jesus is God incarnate? To do so, he declares that he will prove the heretics wrong by using their own favorite gospel against them. He intends to establish what he calls the “canon of truth,” and to produce from his own reading of John—by reformulating the baptismal teaching in language he borrows from that gospel—language that his successors would build into the Nicene Creed, and the creeds that followed. But how did John’s teaching that Jesus is God’s word in human form become what Irenaeus wanted to make it: the very touchstone of orthodoxy?

  This question would be easier to answer if the meaning of John’s gospel were obvious. But we have seen how controversial it was among its earliest readers: Irenaeus complains that Valentinus’s disciples were “always quoting the Gospel of John,”12 while, surprisingly, prominent “fathers of the church,” including three of his revered mentors, apparently were not.13 Irenaeus probably was aware that his own teacher, Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, may not have known John’s gospel; at any rate, he chose not to mention it, so far as we know. Nor is John’s gospel mentioned by another martyr Irenaeus revered, Ignatius, bishop of nearby Antioch,14 nor, for that matter, by Justin Martyr, the Christian philosopher in Rome whose works Irenaeus also admired. He does mention that some Christians, including some who opposed the “new prophecy” movement, rejected John’s gospel. Perhaps he knew that the Roman teacher Gaius had called the Gospel of John heretical15 and charged that it was actually written not by Jesus’ disciple but by John’s worst enemy, the heretic Cerinthus.16 Irenaeus was not, however, the first to introduce this gospel into circles of “ecclesiastical” Christians; some years earlier, another of Justin’s students, the Syrian Tatian, had included it with several others, including Matthew and Luke, when he rewrote these accounts and other sources into his own composite “gospel”; and the many fragments that remain of Tatian’s long version show that it was widely read.17 Irenaeus himself treats the Gospel of John as part of the tradition he received from his home community in Asia Minor; but while he champions this gospel, and repeats the tradition that “John, the disciple of the Lord,”18 wrote it while he lived in Ephesus, he must have known that many Christians found it problematic, even suspect.

  Why, then, did Irenaeus join the Gospel of John with the three much more widely accepted gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and claim it was an indispensable element of the four formed gospel?19 And why did he place John not, as Christians did later, as the fourth gospel but instead as the first and foremost pillar of “the church’s gospel”? Irenaeus says that the gospel deserves this exalted position because John—and John alone—proclaims Christ’s divine origin, that is, his original, powerful and glorious generation from the Father, thus declaring, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God [John 1:1–2].” Also, “all things were made through him [the word] and without him nothing was made [John 1:3].”20

  Irenaeus tells us that Valentinus’s disciple Ptolemy, reading these words, envisioned God, word, and finally Jesus Christ as, so to speak, waves of divine energy flowing down from above; thus, he suggests, the infinite divine Source above reveals itself in diminished form in the divine word, which reveals itself, in turn, in the more limited form of the human Jesus.21 But Irenaeus declares that such an interpretation misses what we saw in Chapter 2 as the central conviction John wants to convey—that Jesus embodies the divine word that comes forth from God and so, on earth, is “Lord and God” to those who recognize him. So Irenaeus challenges Ptolemy’s interpretation of John’s prologue and argues instead that “God the Father” is equivalent to the word, and the word is equivalent to “Jesus Christ.” He states emphatically that John means there is One God all powerful and one Jesus Christ, “through whom all things came into being” [John 1:3]; he says, the same one “Son of God” [1:14]; the same one “only begotten” [1:14, 18]; the same one “Maker of all things”; the same one “true light enlightening everyone” [1:9], the same one creator of “all things” [1:3], the same one “coming to his own” [1:11]; the same one that “be
came flesh, and dwelt among us” [1:14].”22

  What Irenaeus’s successors would derive from this was a kind of simple, almost mathematical equation, in which God = word = Jesus Christ.23 That many Christians to this day consider some version of this equation the essence of Christian belief is a mark of Irenaeus’s accomplishment—and his success. Irenaeus wants to emphasize this point when he repeats that Jesus Christ himself manifests the “one God almighty” who is the “Maker of the universe.” And because Irenaeus’s bold interpretation came virtually to define orthodoxy, those who read John’s gospel today in any language except the Greek original will find that the translations make his conclusion seem obvious—namely, that the man “who dwelt among us” was God incarnate (for discussion of the Greek original, see endnote).24

  This, then, is the “canon of truth” which Irenaeus reformulates in language he borrows from John’s prologue: that “there is one all-powerful God, who made all things by his word. . . . So the scripture says, ‘all things were made through him and without him nothing was made’ [John 1:3].”25 Instead of envisioning God on high remote from this world, especially from its deficiencies and sufferings, Irenaeus declares that God manifests himself in and through this world, even choosing to inhabit it himself, as Jesus Christ, the “word made flesh.”

  Irenaeus argues that this “canon of truth” enables him—and anyone else who uses it—to read not only the gospels but all Scripture in the radical way pioneered by some of his Christian predecessors. Wherever the Jewish Scriptures mention God’s word, or even where they mention the Lord God himself, Irenaeus now claims to find Jesus Christ. So, he argues, when God spoke to Abraham, it was “our Lord, the word of God, who spoke”—not only to Abraham but to all the patriarchs and prophets: