Why Religion?: A Personal Story
byElaine Pagels
Key insights from Elaine Pagels'
Why Religion?: A Personal Story
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How a historical investigation of religion shaped the life and faith of Elaine Pagels.
The history of religion is replete with violent crusaders, annoying evangelists, and blatant hypocrisy — so why does anyone still bother with it? In this Snapshot, you’ll learn a new perspective on the function of religion within a culture and how one historian’s personal challenges shaped her most important academic and religious insights.
READ THIS SNAPSHOT IF YOU:
- Are interested in the career of renowned religion scholar Elaine Pagels
- Want a new framework for making sense of religion, suffering, and human nature
- Are curious about the intersections of academic religious study and personal faith
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Review
"A minimalist work of great majesty, akin to a shimmering Agnes Martin Painting, whose stripped-down aesthetic allows light to pour forth from her canvas."--New York Times Book Review
"An intimate, evocative memoir."--Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Lucid, inspiring personal testimony."--National Book Review, "5 Hot Books"
"A wide-ranging work of cultural reflection and a brisk tour of the most exciting religion scholarship over the past 40 years. . . . Pagels is as fearless as she is candid."--Washington Post
"In clear, unsparing prose, Pagels enmeshes personal mourning, scholarly rigor, and one of the smartest modern testaments to the consolations as well as the inadequacies of spirituality. A small revolution in memoir to match the one she led in theology decades ago."--New York magazine
"Searing and wise. . . . tender and wrenching, sketched with exquisite detail."--Boston Globe
"Both fascinating and heart-wrenching, Pagels's highly personal account presents behind-the-scenes glimpses into the inner workings of a brilliant scholar's mind."--Library Journal
"Looks back on a rich life of learning, writing, loving, seeking truth and, inevitably, suffering. . . achingly beautiful . . . Readers of all faiths and none can learn from her brilliance and courage."--Dallas Morning News
"You don't have to be religious yourself to enjoy her thought-provoking work."--Bustle
"Pagels unpacks the relevance of religion in the twenty-first century--how religious traditions continue to shape the way we understand ourselves and the world and provide a framework for facing our most painful losses."--Lion's Roar
"A raw and often moving autobiography . . . The story of her grief . . . will touch all. A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith."--Kirkus
"Beautiful . . . Pagels treats readers to the examined life behind her intellectual feats with extreme grace and depth. This luminous memoir strips religion to its elementary particles: love, suffering, and mystery."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Engaging both head and heart . . . this brilliant book . . . stimulates intellectual curiosity and thought while giving equal weight to Pagel's emotional life."--Booklist (starred review)
"Elaine Pagels' study of new gospels and revelations challenged our understanding of ancient Christianity. In this mesmerizing memoir, we see how she was also grappling with devastating loss and struggling within to find "the light that never fails," even in deepest anger and guilt, grief and desolation. A must read."--Karen L. King, Hollis Professor Divinity, Harvard University
"Pagels has done it again, but more personally. The scholar's tale of loving, grieving, enduring, and searching will grab readers at the outset and never let them go. A memorable story unforgettably told."--Madeleine Albright, author of Fascism: A Warning
"In this compelling, honest, and learned memoir, Elaine Pagels, takes us inside her own life in a stirring and illuminating effort to explain religion's enduring appeal. This is a powerful book about the most powerful of forces."--Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America
"A magnificent, searing, soul-affirming memoir. Pagels shines the bright light of her brilliant mind on the most essential of human dilemmas: how do we go on in the face of immeasurable loss? I came away from this book transformed."--Dani Shapiro
"With characteristic intelligence and wisdom, Elaine Pagels lays bare her own life-shattering losses, offering up the possibility that suffering might afford each of us membership in a profoundly connected human--and cosmic--community. Why Religion? is a revelation and an immense consolation."--Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States
"Elaine Pagels has written an extraordinary memoir of loss, spiritual struggle, illumination and insight--emotionally heartrending, intellectually exciting, a model of what a memoir should be."--Joyce Carol Oates
From the Back Cover
In the wake of great personal tragedy, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Elaine Pagels reflects on the persistence and nature of belief and why religion matters
Why does religion still exist in the twenty-first century? And why do so many people--even, and especially, those who challenge religion--continue to argue about the questions it raises? What purpose does it serve in our lives? These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when she was dealing with unimaginable loss: the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves her personal story with the work that she loves--illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most important, how we get through our most difficult challenges.
In the process, Pagels opens up unexpected ways of understanding this stubbornly persistent aspect of our culture. A provocative and deeply moving memoir from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.
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Hande Z
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3.0 out of 5 stars Why indeed?Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2018
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Pagels had written several books on Gnosticism. She had long rejected Christianity, and for a long time, religion itself. Then tragedy struck her, not once, but twice – her lovely son, Mark, whose photographs appear in the book, died. She was devastated, and not long after, her husband, Heinz, died. She has two other children, David and Sarah, but two great loves in her life had been extinguished.
Pagel’s love for Mark and Heinz is touchingly made clear in this book. In it, she tells about how she struggled to understand their deaths, and how to overcome her grief. She revisits Christianity and other forms of spiritualism. Eventually, settling on a form of Christianity through her own interpretation of Paul’s words. Her interpretation, of course, was gleaned from her long-study of Gnosticism. At page 261, she asks, ‘What, then is the true gospel? Fascinated, I realized that the anonymous author of ‘The Gospel of Truth’ writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom – or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words “The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!” Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.’
Although this is a thoughtful, personal, and sincere book, the point that comes through mostly clearly is that when we cannot overcome grief through reason, we have to overcome it with another emotion. We are individuals and have to pick our choices. Those who can overcome grief through reason will not need religion even if that may, from some viewpoint depict them as cold. The second option, the one Pagels chose, was to overcome grief through the feeling of another emotion – in her case, she calls it ‘grace’ through God, not necessarily the Christian God, though.
There is a third option, which is to overcome grief (and the fear of death) not through reason or emotion. It is the Buddhist way of staring at death without a need to rationalise its purpose nor to feel grief or dread. It is to meet death and grief with plain equanimity.
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Santiago Escobedo
5.0 out of 5 stars Hope, Always Hope.Reviewed in the United States on 22 November 2018
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Many years ago when I first learned of Dr. Pagel's husband death, I was at the time a subscriber to the Sciences magazine and his obituary was part of an editorial, I thought to my self, bad things do happen to good people. As I read this book, Why Religion? I became more and more intrigued by the continual questioning of personal misfortunes by the author. Through it all—the frightening aspect of being the sole provider, becoming accustom to loneliness, and the slow passing of time, became too real to this reader. Afterward, I stood and questioned my beliefs in good and evil and what those concepts meant to me. I could not put down the book as I was drawn into Dr. Pagel's narrative and wanted to know the end result. But like a cushioned landing I was let down gently and walked away knowing all humans share the same questions. At the end, I immediately remembered the Pilgrims Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compestla, Spain and that part of the mass where the expression of peace is shared by the attendees...suddenly, the words, "May peace be with you," are expressed in Spanish, French, Portualgese, German, Japanese, Italian, so many other languages but all conveying the same sentiment. I feel enlighten by the book and the fact that humans believe in hope and in a better tomorrow. Thank you, Dr. Pagel for sharing.
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Roger Lipsey
5.0 out of 5 stars The height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heartReviewed in the United States on 24 November 2018
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There is reading a book, and there is drinking up a book as if you are unexpectedly thirsty for precisely its taste, for what it is. This is a drinking book. It offers much to readers who have been moved by Dr. Pagels' previous works, to those who have found their way independently to the Gnostic Gospels, to any for whom the question "Why Religion?" is vivid. In a time when there is so much idiocy, this book represents the height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heart.
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P. N. Jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars Another amazing book by this exceptional authorReviewed in the United States on 21 November 2018
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The first half of the book tells the story of the death of her son and then her husband. As horrid as this story was and is, it was not what I expected. Just as I was growing weary (?) of this terrible sequence of events and its effect on her, she layers on the texture provided by the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels and the entire story begins to fall in place. This book is different than her other books. I am a loyal fan and, in the end, this book added knowledge and perspective. The answers to our questions may lie, in part, in ourselves. And finally, Fr. Barbour, faith is a gift.
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AGrassini
5.0 out of 5 stars A moving personal story powerfully written by a historian with a deep understanding of suffering.Reviewed in the United States on 28 November 2018
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A moving personal story written beautifully and with depth. In asking universal questions about suffering and weaving in her quest for meaning, Dr. Pagel shows us a way to understand the imponderables of life. A must read for anyone who cannot find the answers in dogmatic religion—and for anyone dealing with grief. As poetic and impactful as Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, but perhaps with more hope. It moved me to tears, and I could not put it down!
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Frank Bailey
4.0 out of 5 stars A moving journey shared with all who love her worksReviewed in the United States on 23 November 2018
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I have read most all of Elaine Pagel's works and they along with Joseph Campbell's works (especially Tho Art That) have aided me on a journey to seek the truth of my being. Here she bares her soul to the breaking point and through it al comes out the other side with grace and dignity.
The only downgrade is when Ms. Pagels becomes somewhat political in the last chapter. One quick example is stating President Bush wanted to wage a war on Muslims. To be fair he stated he would protect us from Radical Muslim terrorists wherever they resided. Outside of that minor quibble I thoroughly enjoyed her latest book as I have her other's works.
FR Bailey
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Chad Hammack
5.0 out of 5 stars Survivng the impossibleReviewed in the United States on 10 December 2018
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It may seem odd to say that Elaine Pagels has given us an amiable book. Perhaps it is her understated prose style, the plainsong simplicity with which she deals with the unimaginable, the death of her child, then her husband, then almost losing her ability to navigate the real world. Because the work is a memoir, we know that the author, a religious historian, somehow made it through her living nightmares (including the real nightmares that visited her) and was able, through accumulated experience and deep personal reflection, abetted by continuing pursuit of her scholarly interests,to fashion a survival mode replete with mantras, re-interpreted stories, re-interpreted values,
and an authentic acceptance of a reality that at once resists and embraces most of the homilies we live by. Anyone whose spouse or child has died will see at least a part of their grief in Pagel's raw remembering. She plaits her personal story into what otherwise might be somewhat dry academic reflections on the Gnostic gospels and Hebrew Biblical passages and to great effect. Those of us who have lost someone know the craving for answers, the panicky rummaging of our bookshelves for magical wisdom that will soothe us, and Pagels' knows it too and is an able guide through that search for answers from spiritual dogmas to a resistant universe. For me, she ends this sensitive book a little unconvincingly, only because I think she figured she had to find a way to tie things up, even to leave on a chord of hope, or even resolution. But it doesn't matter. Pain and hope, despair and understanding, anger and acceptance, keep converging throughout her narrative, and we experience Pagels' fine mind and wounded heart learning to make peace with each other. Reading it was like listening to a trusted friend calmly sharing a melancholy life story shaped by those things that most define the fate of being human. But it is also a beautiful story and reminds us that great grief is in direct proportion to the love that was experienced.
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W. A. Simpson
1.0 out of 5 stars A Spirituality for the 1%Reviewed in the United States on 23 February 2019
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In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels writes that creation stories “create the cultural world by transmitting traditional values” (52). For example, the sexual morality implicit in the Adam and Eve story can be read as promoting an ethic of procreation (“fill the whole earth”) in a society in which wealth was understood in terms of livestock, chattels, wives, and children. What becomes invisible or expressly forbidden in such an economy is, e.g., possibility of same-sex attraction, the idea that women children have interests separate from the wealth-aggregating patriarch, or speculation about what happens once the finite carrying capacity of the planet has been reached. In other words, myths have an ideological component and operate, in part, to silence doubts about the tenability of the status quo. Typically, myths as enforcers of ideology begin to dissolve when confronted with data. So, for example, since the 19th century we’ve seen a strong religious backlash to evolutionary biology largely because of fear of what happens to social order once people reject the old Genesis story. Along with the talking snake and 7 days of creation, Darwin calls into doubt more basic assumptions about sexuality, patriarchal claims on women and children, and role of humanity in the environment. (As my mother once said about Santa Claus, “Quit believing, quit getting.”) Yet if Pagels is correct, any religious text, including Pagels’ own work, can be read through the lens of cui bono, as ideological discourse that bolsters vested economic interests while marginalizing dissent. In what follows, I will argue that Pagels is no heretic with respect to the reigning United States ideology of corporate capitalism but appears controversial by virtue of her social issues neoliberalism.
An ideological work will use various rhetorical techniques to direct discourse into predetermined channels. In Why Religion? I’ve noticed the use of (a) the immaculate perception paired with the disappearing hedge and (b) linked ad misericordiam and implied ad hominem fallacies. Let’s take a look at how these techniques operate in Why Religion? before moving on to what I think they are intended to obscure.
American philosopher Alvin Goldman (1967) offers this account of knowledge: A knows x only if (1) A believes x, x is true, and A’s belief that x was caused by x being, in fact, true. Now a statement about a belief, let’s call it a propositional attitude, is true whenever someone sincerely asserts it. On the other hand, a proposition is true regardless of whether or not we believe it. For example, while I might enjoy that you hold the propositional attitude that back in the ‘90s I spent a wild night with Pamela Anderson, I would prefer that the proposition were true (which, alas, it is not). The fallacy of the immaculate perception deliberately blurs the distinction between propositions and propositional attitudes. Thus, we end up with thought-killing phrases like “telling one’s own truth.” Yet truth is universal and accessible to everyone. Were this not the case, A could assert truth x while B at the same time asserted truth not-x with the result that the proposition x would be simultaneously true and false. Thus, the argument would be won at the cost of the logic underwriting the very possibility of meaningful discourse. So much for the immaculate perception taken on its own.
Given its tendency to collapse into paradox, the immaculate perception rarely appears on its own. Typically, a would-be persuader pairs it with another technique such as the disappearing hedge. Taken on its own, the disappearing hedge begins with a hypothetical statement, and then, somewhere along the way, the hypothetical qualifier drops out of the picture. Basically, this is an illegitimate move from an “if…then” statement to an “is.” Here length and prolixity are the ally of the persuader, and this, I suppose, accounts for the rhetorical style of much contemporary theological work. Nevertheless, if the content of the immaculate perception is going to be accepted, the disappearing hedge needs time to do its work—a deferral strategy is needed. One possibility is to divert attention away from the actual content that is purportedly being proved. Both the ad misericordiam (appeal to pity) and ad hominem (personal attack) fallacies are fallacies of relevance. A defendant convicted of killing his parents will not get his sentence reduced by throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan nor by complaining about the sarcastic demeanor of the district attorney. Talk like that isn’t germane to sentencing. But suppose a persuader embeds his propositional attitudes in an engaging, highly personal narrative? Now the reader can be carried away by sympathy or dismissed as churlish for resisting the force of the rhetoric.
In the case of Why Religion? Pagels pairs an extremely moving personal autobiography with an account of her investigation of the Nag Hammadi library. While wisely avoiding the baroque metaphysics and despair about the material world found in many of the texts, Pagels endorses those aspects of the gnostic gospels that see a feminine component to the godhead and offer an alternative to atonement theologies. I agree that these are important discoveries, and I favor the outcomes Pagels wants, viz., more equality and less sexism, fewer bloody sweats and more enlightenment. Unfortunately, Pagels’ choice of rhetorical method works against the views that we both support. For example, the persona of oppressed sufferer with a big idea allows Pagels to dismiss her male critics out of hand: Owen Chadwick (“scolding,” 48); Joseph Fitzmeyer (“mocking,” “vituperative,” libelous, 48); Raymond Brown (subtle back-stabbing, 47). In no instance does Pagels allow us to glimpse the substance of her critics’ arguments. (Brown, for instance, might simply have been making an anodyne point about the inferiority of Hellenistic writing relative to classical Greek thought, a common view among classicists and philosophers.) Instead, the narrative setup demands we take sides.
So far, we’ve seen how Pagels’ rhetorical strategy allows something important to become invisible, but not what that is or to what end. Further, we have seen is that Pagels is prepared to advance the case for reading the canonical gospels through the lens of the Nag Hammadi texts by introducing autobiographical detail. Accordingly, I think it is fair to use the autobiographical material Pagels furnishes to read Why Religion? through the lens of economic justice. Second, as Thomas Piketty (2014) and others have shown, disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor is greater now than since the 19th century, and it is accelerating. Arguably, this is the preeminent social problem of our time. Those seeking to address this problem may find ample inspiration in the canonical gospels: the poor are uniquely attuned to God’s kingdom (Luke 6.20); Jesus begins his public ministry by reading Isaian text about the Year of Jubilee, viz., land reform (Luke 4.16-20); and wealth is regarded not only as an obstacle to perfection but as a peril to one’s soul (Luke 16.19-30). By contrast, the gnostic writings appear to be almost exclusively inwardly focused, and in Pagels herself we find only a sort of front-office feminism where economic power structures remain in place but with greater diversity in management. This is what I meant in my introductory paragraph by “social issues neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is the Chicago School economic orthodoxy of both our political parties. The parties distinguish themselves by promoting either diversity or Christian nationalism, but they are in fundamental agreement about the economic substructure.
So why is Pagels gnostic about Gnosticism but not in the know about distributive economic justice? Several clues are to be garnered from the text. The new parents are able to employ a British nanny (61); the couple spends their summers in Aspen or Santa Cruz (72); they send their son to the Town School (in 2012 tuition was $25,500 per year) in New York City (77); and Elaine foregoes an opportunity to study with Herbert Marcuse (18). One narrative that can be construed from this admittedly sparse fact pattern is that Pagels operates in a privileged, socially liberal environment where one may speak of bisexuality, gender equality, or classical heresies, but where a 70% marginal tax rate is the vice that dares not speak its name. You don’t get invited back if you talk about that over dinner. Ultimately, we end up with a book that’s radical enough about gender and religion to please the socially-liberal-fiscally-conservative set who patronize the Aspen Institute, which nonetheless manages not to be any actual threat to the real power structure. Perhaps Pagels even believes it herself. The indoctrinated are the best indoctrinators.
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Thomas J. Farrell
4.0 out of 5 stars Crisply writtenReviewed in the United States on 4 January 2019
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The James Joyce scholar Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), author of the 1944 book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s experimental 1939 novel, also wrote the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). In the archetypal pattern of the hero that Campbell delineates in his 1949 book, the hero undergoes much suffering to bring forth the boon of life for others to experience and benefit from.
For an accessible scholarly informed account of how the heart-broken followers of the historical Jesus of Nazareth imaginatively constructed stories about their hero’s life and death from certain hints in the Hebrew scriptures, see Paula Fredriksen’s new book When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018).
The four canonical gospels are hero stories that follow the broad pattern that Campbell delineates in his 1949 book -- two of which (Matthew and Luke) include stories about the birth of the hero, but the other two canonical gospels (Mark and John) do not include birth stories. Like the two canonical gospels that do not include birth stories, Elaine Pagels’ new book Why Religion?: A Personal Story (Ecco, 2018) does not include a birth story.
Instead, it begins (pages 1-4) with the hero Elaine at age fifteen attending a Billy Graham rally in San Francisco on a Sunday with a group of her high-school friends from nearby Palo Alto – where her father was a science professor at Stanford University. Her mother had taken Elaine and her older brother to Protestant church services on Sundays. So Elaine was nominally a Christian. Nevertheless, the Protestant church services that she had attended with her mother and brother (but not with her father, whose scientific rationalism led him to scorn his own Protestant background) had not moved Elaine as much as Billy Graham’s rally in San Francisco that Sunday did. So fifteen-year-old Elaine became a so-called “born again” Christian. Thus, figuratively speaking, her new book does begin with a birth story – as do the two canonical gospels Matthew and Luke.
While the hero Elaine was in high school in Palo Alto, she had a boyfriend named Paul Speegle, who was Jewish (pages 9-16). Tragically, he died in a car accident. When the hero Elaine’s “born again” friends asked her if Paul had been “born again,” she said no and told them that he was Jewish. They then told her, “‘Then he’s in hell.’” (quoted on page 15; also see page 192). Consequently, the hero Elaine left the Bible-believing Christian church of her friends.
The hero Elaine did her undergraduate studies, and some graduate studies, at Stanford University. But for doctoral studies, the hero Elaine went to Harvard University to study religion, where she joined certain faculty members there in studying the recently discovered materials known collectively as the Nag Hammadi library – texts discovered in 1945 (pages 20-33). From her study of the Nag Hammadi texts, the hero Elaine wrote her popular book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which impressed the gatekeepers of the prestige culture in American culture.
More recently, Willis Barnstone has included certain so-called gnostic gospels in his book The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas (Norton, 2009).
To the further applause of the gatekeepers of prestige culture in American culture, the hero Elaine continued to supplement her scholarly publications by publishing further accessible books on religion-related topics.
But the loss the hero Elaine had experienced when her teenage boyfriend Paul Speegle died foreshadowed the two further experiences of loss she would experience later in her life – the death of her beloved young son Mark, subsequently followed by the accidental and unexpected death of her beloved husband Heinz Pagels, a physicist, on July 23, 1988 (pages 34-211). After those two tragic losses in her life, the hero Elaine has emerged, years later, to write this book about her suffering these two tragic losses. Of course, after each of those two losses, the hero Elaine went on living. So she interweaves certain details about her life and her work with her memories of those years.
The hero Elaine is fond of quoting from the sayings gospel known as Gospel of Thomas – a listing of sayings spoken by Jesus, but with no accompanying narrative. For example, on page 176, she quotes a passage from the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus says the following:
“‘Jesus says: If those who lead you say to you, “The kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds will get there first. If they say, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will get there first. Rather, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU, AND OUTSIDE OF YOU. WHEN YOU COME TO KNOW YOURSELVES then . . . you will know that YOU ARE CHILDREN OF GOD’” (the ellipsis here is in Pagels’ book; my capitalization here replaces the italics in her book).
Now, on page 93 of Fredriksen’s book When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, mentioned above, she quotes that Gospel of Luke 17:20-23 as saying the following:
“Being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, he [Jesus] answered them, ‘The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, “Lo, here it is!” or “There it is!” Behold, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU.’ And he said to his disciples, ‘The days are coming when you will want to see one of the days of the son of man, AND YOU WILL NOT SEE IT. And they will say to you, “Lo, there!” or “Lo, here!” DO NOT GO, DO NOT FOLLOW THEM’” (my capitalization here replaces her italics; this is evidently her own translation; the preposition that she here translates as “in” may also be translated as “among”).
However, the hero Elaine does not happen to mention how the saying she quotes from the Gospel of Thomas bears a certain resemblance to Luke 17:21.
Elsewhere, the hero Elaine discusses certain other Nag Hammadi texts, including the poem she titles Thunder, Complete Mind (pages 179-181 and 198).
For a complete translation of the poem and study of it, see the book The Thunder: Perfect Mind: A New Translation and Introduction by Hal Taussig, Jared Calaway, Maia Kotrosis, Celine Little, and Justin Lasser (Palgrave Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press, 2010) – which the hero Elaine does not mention, not even in her notes (pages 217-223).
Because the hero Elaine interweaves her experiences of the losses of her young son Mark and her husband Heinz with her scholarly investigations, perhaps I should also note here that Maia Kotrosis and Hal Taussig co-authored the book Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma (Palgrave Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
Elsewhere, the hero Elaine quotes another saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas: “‘If you bring forth what is within, what you bring forth will save. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy’” (saying 70; quoted on page 23).
In a certain sense, the hero Elaine has brought forth in her new book the excruciating suffering she experienced after the deaths of her son Mark and her husband Heinz. But your guess is as good as mine as to whether the hero Elaine’s new book will help bring forth the boon of life in others who read it.
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Victor E. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars An Outstanding Scholar’s Very Personal StoryReviewed in the United States on 14 February 2019
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I’ve been long familiar with and deeply impressed by the ground-breaking research and writing of Dr. Elaine Pagels in the realm of traditional and apocryphal biblical translation and interpretation. Her approach to religion and spirituality infused my own writing, which include the role of the so-called Gnostic gospels in the formation of the Christian era. Most of her scholarly works were written before or shortly after the turn of the millennium.
So, I was delighted to discover that Dr. Pagels had authored a new book published in 2018 called Why Religion? A Personal Story. The title struck me as curious for her: what personal connection would an author, who spent her life working with texts that Christianity disdained as heretical, have formed with the typical “religion” (she does not use “spirituality” in her title. As a fan of the underdog, in this case the almost-obliterated Gnostics, I bought the book and started to read with the ample caution I’ve formed against anyone who attempts to sell me something packaged as religion.
I should have known that Pagels would not disappoint. In fact, she surpassed my expectations. This book is more about Elaine the wife, mother, and vulnerable human being that I did not get a chance to meet in her earlier works. I should also have known that it was going to be a tear-jerker. When the core of the story has the author telling blow by blow how she pushed herself through the tragic loss of her five-year- old son compounded a year later by the shocking death of her husband in a hiking accident, no eye can remain dry. Elaine does not spare herself or the reader the pain of so much suffering, but neither does she turn aside from the hard questions such tragedies, which happen in some form to all human beings, slam us with: Why do bad things happen to good people?
She does not run away from self-questioning and, while listening to other, insists on arriving at her own answer. Speaking of her young son, she writes: “During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it. If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”
In another place, she flies into the face of those who would try to console the inconsolable with an appeal to the goodness of the Almighty: “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.” That hurts to have to work your way through.
These are just a couple of examples of the poignant way Dr. Pagels relates the process of facing suffering as it is and arriving to the wisdom that allows us to understand and endure the unimaginable. She informs us of other familiar attempts to escape that she tried, only to return to the deep contemplation she wrote about as a scholar. Speaking of a document, The Gospel of Truth, she once rescued from oblivion and translated into English, she applies it to her tragedy as a balm to help her heal herself:
“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.”
No synopsis or review can replace the experience of a book like Why Religion? A Personal Story. It must be read, cried with, pondered over, and perhaps reread. If you suffer from an event that seemed undeserved, unfair, beyond the ability to bear, beyond the possibility to heal, please read this book.
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Hande Z
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3.0 out of 5 stars Why indeed?Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2018
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Pagels had written several books on Gnosticism. She had long rejected Christianity, and for a long time, religion itself. Then tragedy struck her, not once, but twice – her lovely son, Mark, whose photographs appear in the book, died. She was devastated, and not long after, her husband, Heinz, died. She has two other children, David and Sarah, but two great loves in her life had been extinguished.
Pagel’s love for Mark and Heinz is touchingly made clear in this book. In it, she tells about how she struggled to understand their deaths, and how to overcome her grief. She revisits Christianity and other forms of spiritualism. Eventually, settling on a form of Christianity through her own interpretation of Paul’s words. Her interpretation, of course, was gleaned from her long-study of Gnosticism. At page 261, she asks, ‘What, then is the true gospel? Fascinated, I realized that the anonymous author of ‘The Gospel of Truth’ writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom – or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words “The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!” Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.’
Although this is a thoughtful, personal, and sincere book, the point that comes through mostly clearly is that when we cannot overcome grief through reason, we have to overcome it with another emotion. We are individuals and have to pick our choices. Those who can overcome grief through reason will not need religion even if that may, from some viewpoint depict them as cold. The second option, the one Pagels chose, was to overcome grief through the feeling of another emotion – in her case, she calls it ‘grace’ through God, not necessarily the Christian God, though.
There is a third option, which is to overcome grief (and the fear of death) not through reason or emotion. It is the Buddhist way of staring at death without a need to rationalise its purpose nor to feel grief or dread. It is to meet death and grief with plain equanimity.
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Santiago Escobedo
5.0 out of 5 stars Hope, Always Hope.Reviewed in the United States on 22 November 2018
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Many years ago when I first learned of Dr. Pagel's husband death, I was at the time a subscriber to the Sciences magazine and his obituary was part of an editorial, I thought to my self, bad things do happen to good people. As I read this book, Why Religion? I became more and more intrigued by the continual questioning of personal misfortunes by the author. Through it all—the frightening aspect of being the sole provider, becoming accustom to loneliness, and the slow passing of time, became too real to this reader. Afterward, I stood and questioned my beliefs in good and evil and what those concepts meant to me. I could not put down the book as I was drawn into Dr. Pagel's narrative and wanted to know the end result. But like a cushioned landing I was let down gently and walked away knowing all humans share the same questions. At the end, I immediately remembered the Pilgrims Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compestla, Spain and that part of the mass where the expression of peace is shared by the attendees...suddenly, the words, "May peace be with you," are expressed in Spanish, French, Portualgese, German, Japanese, Italian, so many other languages but all conveying the same sentiment. I feel enlighten by the book and the fact that humans believe in hope and in a better tomorrow. Thank you, Dr. Pagel for sharing.
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Roger Lipsey
5.0 out of 5 stars The height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heartReviewed in the United States on 24 November 2018
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There is reading a book, and there is drinking up a book as if you are unexpectedly thirsty for precisely its taste, for what it is. This is a drinking book. It offers much to readers who have been moved by Dr. Pagels' previous works, to those who have found their way independently to the Gnostic Gospels, to any for whom the question "Why Religion?" is vivid. In a time when there is so much idiocy, this book represents the height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heart.
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P. N. Jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars Another amazing book by this exceptional authorReviewed in the United States on 21 November 2018
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The first half of the book tells the story of the death of her son and then her husband. As horrid as this story was and is, it was not what I expected. Just as I was growing weary (?) of this terrible sequence of events and its effect on her, she layers on the texture provided by the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels and the entire story begins to fall in place. This book is different than her other books. I am a loyal fan and, in the end, this book added knowledge and perspective. The answers to our questions may lie, in part, in ourselves. And finally, Fr. Barbour, faith is a gift.
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AGrassini
5.0 out of 5 stars A moving personal story powerfully written by a historian with a deep understanding of suffering.Reviewed in the United States on 28 November 2018
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A moving personal story written beautifully and with depth. In asking universal questions about suffering and weaving in her quest for meaning, Dr. Pagel shows us a way to understand the imponderables of life. A must read for anyone who cannot find the answers in dogmatic religion—and for anyone dealing with grief. As poetic and impactful as Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, but perhaps with more hope. It moved me to tears, and I could not put it down!
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Frank Bailey
4.0 out of 5 stars A moving journey shared with all who love her worksReviewed in the United States on 23 November 2018
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I have read most all of Elaine Pagel's works and they along with Joseph Campbell's works (especially Tho Art That) have aided me on a journey to seek the truth of my being. Here she bares her soul to the breaking point and through it al comes out the other side with grace and dignity.
The only downgrade is when Ms. Pagels becomes somewhat political in the last chapter. One quick example is stating President Bush wanted to wage a war on Muslims. To be fair he stated he would protect us from Radical Muslim terrorists wherever they resided. Outside of that minor quibble I thoroughly enjoyed her latest book as I have her other's works.
FR Bailey
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Chad Hammack
5.0 out of 5 stars Survivng the impossibleReviewed in the United States on 10 December 2018
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It may seem odd to say that Elaine Pagels has given us an amiable book. Perhaps it is her understated prose style, the plainsong simplicity with which she deals with the unimaginable, the death of her child, then her husband, then almost losing her ability to navigate the real world. Because the work is a memoir, we know that the author, a religious historian, somehow made it through her living nightmares (including the real nightmares that visited her) and was able, through accumulated experience and deep personal reflection, abetted by continuing pursuit of her scholarly interests,to fashion a survival mode replete with mantras, re-interpreted stories, re-interpreted values,
and an authentic acceptance of a reality that at once resists and embraces most of the homilies we live by. Anyone whose spouse or child has died will see at least a part of their grief in Pagel's raw remembering. She plaits her personal story into what otherwise might be somewhat dry academic reflections on the Gnostic gospels and Hebrew Biblical passages and to great effect. Those of us who have lost someone know the craving for answers, the panicky rummaging of our bookshelves for magical wisdom that will soothe us, and Pagels' knows it too and is an able guide through that search for answers from spiritual dogmas to a resistant universe. For me, she ends this sensitive book a little unconvincingly, only because I think she figured she had to find a way to tie things up, even to leave on a chord of hope, or even resolution. But it doesn't matter. Pain and hope, despair and understanding, anger and acceptance, keep converging throughout her narrative, and we experience Pagels' fine mind and wounded heart learning to make peace with each other. Reading it was like listening to a trusted friend calmly sharing a melancholy life story shaped by those things that most define the fate of being human. But it is also a beautiful story and reminds us that great grief is in direct proportion to the love that was experienced.
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W. A. Simpson
1.0 out of 5 stars A Spirituality for the 1%Reviewed in the United States on 23 February 2019
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In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels writes that creation stories “create the cultural world by transmitting traditional values” (52). For example, the sexual morality implicit in the Adam and Eve story can be read as promoting an ethic of procreation (“fill the whole earth”) in a society in which wealth was understood in terms of livestock, chattels, wives, and children. What becomes invisible or expressly forbidden in such an economy is, e.g., possibility of same-sex attraction, the idea that women children have interests separate from the wealth-aggregating patriarch, or speculation about what happens once the finite carrying capacity of the planet has been reached. In other words, myths have an ideological component and operate, in part, to silence doubts about the tenability of the status quo. Typically, myths as enforcers of ideology begin to dissolve when confronted with data. So, for example, since the 19th century we’ve seen a strong religious backlash to evolutionary biology largely because of fear of what happens to social order once people reject the old Genesis story. Along with the talking snake and 7 days of creation, Darwin calls into doubt more basic assumptions about sexuality, patriarchal claims on women and children, and role of humanity in the environment. (As my mother once said about Santa Claus, “Quit believing, quit getting.”) Yet if Pagels is correct, any religious text, including Pagels’ own work, can be read through the lens of cui bono, as ideological discourse that bolsters vested economic interests while marginalizing dissent. In what follows, I will argue that Pagels is no heretic with respect to the reigning United States ideology of corporate capitalism but appears controversial by virtue of her social issues neoliberalism.
An ideological work will use various rhetorical techniques to direct discourse into predetermined channels. In Why Religion? I’ve noticed the use of (a) the immaculate perception paired with the disappearing hedge and (b) linked ad misericordiam and implied ad hominem fallacies. Let’s take a look at how these techniques operate in Why Religion? before moving on to what I think they are intended to obscure.
American philosopher Alvin Goldman (1967) offers this account of knowledge: A knows x only if (1) A believes x, x is true, and A’s belief that x was caused by x being, in fact, true. Now a statement about a belief, let’s call it a propositional attitude, is true whenever someone sincerely asserts it. On the other hand, a proposition is true regardless of whether or not we believe it. For example, while I might enjoy that you hold the propositional attitude that back in the ‘90s I spent a wild night with Pamela Anderson, I would prefer that the proposition were true (which, alas, it is not). The fallacy of the immaculate perception deliberately blurs the distinction between propositions and propositional attitudes. Thus, we end up with thought-killing phrases like “telling one’s own truth.” Yet truth is universal and accessible to everyone. Were this not the case, A could assert truth x while B at the same time asserted truth not-x with the result that the proposition x would be simultaneously true and false. Thus, the argument would be won at the cost of the logic underwriting the very possibility of meaningful discourse. So much for the immaculate perception taken on its own.
Given its tendency to collapse into paradox, the immaculate perception rarely appears on its own. Typically, a would-be persuader pairs it with another technique such as the disappearing hedge. Taken on its own, the disappearing hedge begins with a hypothetical statement, and then, somewhere along the way, the hypothetical qualifier drops out of the picture. Basically, this is an illegitimate move from an “if…then” statement to an “is.” Here length and prolixity are the ally of the persuader, and this, I suppose, accounts for the rhetorical style of much contemporary theological work. Nevertheless, if the content of the immaculate perception is going to be accepted, the disappearing hedge needs time to do its work—a deferral strategy is needed. One possibility is to divert attention away from the actual content that is purportedly being proved. Both the ad misericordiam (appeal to pity) and ad hominem (personal attack) fallacies are fallacies of relevance. A defendant convicted of killing his parents will not get his sentence reduced by throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan nor by complaining about the sarcastic demeanor of the district attorney. Talk like that isn’t germane to sentencing. But suppose a persuader embeds his propositional attitudes in an engaging, highly personal narrative? Now the reader can be carried away by sympathy or dismissed as churlish for resisting the force of the rhetoric.
In the case of Why Religion? Pagels pairs an extremely moving personal autobiography with an account of her investigation of the Nag Hammadi library. While wisely avoiding the baroque metaphysics and despair about the material world found in many of the texts, Pagels endorses those aspects of the gnostic gospels that see a feminine component to the godhead and offer an alternative to atonement theologies. I agree that these are important discoveries, and I favor the outcomes Pagels wants, viz., more equality and less sexism, fewer bloody sweats and more enlightenment. Unfortunately, Pagels’ choice of rhetorical method works against the views that we both support. For example, the persona of oppressed sufferer with a big idea allows Pagels to dismiss her male critics out of hand: Owen Chadwick (“scolding,” 48); Joseph Fitzmeyer (“mocking,” “vituperative,” libelous, 48); Raymond Brown (subtle back-stabbing, 47). In no instance does Pagels allow us to glimpse the substance of her critics’ arguments. (Brown, for instance, might simply have been making an anodyne point about the inferiority of Hellenistic writing relative to classical Greek thought, a common view among classicists and philosophers.) Instead, the narrative setup demands we take sides.
So far, we’ve seen how Pagels’ rhetorical strategy allows something important to become invisible, but not what that is or to what end. Further, we have seen is that Pagels is prepared to advance the case for reading the canonical gospels through the lens of the Nag Hammadi texts by introducing autobiographical detail. Accordingly, I think it is fair to use the autobiographical material Pagels furnishes to read Why Religion? through the lens of economic justice. Second, as Thomas Piketty (2014) and others have shown, disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor is greater now than since the 19th century, and it is accelerating. Arguably, this is the preeminent social problem of our time. Those seeking to address this problem may find ample inspiration in the canonical gospels: the poor are uniquely attuned to God’s kingdom (Luke 6.20); Jesus begins his public ministry by reading Isaian text about the Year of Jubilee, viz., land reform (Luke 4.16-20); and wealth is regarded not only as an obstacle to perfection but as a peril to one’s soul (Luke 16.19-30). By contrast, the gnostic writings appear to be almost exclusively inwardly focused, and in Pagels herself we find only a sort of front-office feminism where economic power structures remain in place but with greater diversity in management. This is what I meant in my introductory paragraph by “social issues neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is the Chicago School economic orthodoxy of both our political parties. The parties distinguish themselves by promoting either diversity or Christian nationalism, but they are in fundamental agreement about the economic substructure.
So why is Pagels gnostic about Gnosticism but not in the know about distributive economic justice? Several clues are to be garnered from the text. The new parents are able to employ a British nanny (61); the couple spends their summers in Aspen or Santa Cruz (72); they send their son to the Town School (in 2012 tuition was $25,500 per year) in New York City (77); and Elaine foregoes an opportunity to study with Herbert Marcuse (18). One narrative that can be construed from this admittedly sparse fact pattern is that Pagels operates in a privileged, socially liberal environment where one may speak of bisexuality, gender equality, or classical heresies, but where a 70% marginal tax rate is the vice that dares not speak its name. You don’t get invited back if you talk about that over dinner. Ultimately, we end up with a book that’s radical enough about gender and religion to please the socially-liberal-fiscally-conservative set who patronize the Aspen Institute, which nonetheless manages not to be any actual threat to the real power structure. Perhaps Pagels even believes it herself. The indoctrinated are the best indoctrinators.
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Thomas J. Farrell
4.0 out of 5 stars Crisply writtenReviewed in the United States on 4 January 2019
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The James Joyce scholar Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), author of the 1944 book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s experimental 1939 novel, also wrote the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). In the archetypal pattern of the hero that Campbell delineates in his 1949 book, the hero undergoes much suffering to bring forth the boon of life for others to experience and benefit from.
For an accessible scholarly informed account of how the heart-broken followers of the historical Jesus of Nazareth imaginatively constructed stories about their hero’s life and death from certain hints in the Hebrew scriptures, see Paula Fredriksen’s new book When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018).
The four canonical gospels are hero stories that follow the broad pattern that Campbell delineates in his 1949 book -- two of which (Matthew and Luke) include stories about the birth of the hero, but the other two canonical gospels (Mark and John) do not include birth stories. Like the two canonical gospels that do not include birth stories, Elaine Pagels’ new book Why Religion?: A Personal Story (Ecco, 2018) does not include a birth story.
Instead, it begins (pages 1-4) with the hero Elaine at age fifteen attending a Billy Graham rally in San Francisco on a Sunday with a group of her high-school friends from nearby Palo Alto – where her father was a science professor at Stanford University. Her mother had taken Elaine and her older brother to Protestant church services on Sundays. So Elaine was nominally a Christian. Nevertheless, the Protestant church services that she had attended with her mother and brother (but not with her father, whose scientific rationalism led him to scorn his own Protestant background) had not moved Elaine as much as Billy Graham’s rally in San Francisco that Sunday did. So fifteen-year-old Elaine became a so-called “born again” Christian. Thus, figuratively speaking, her new book does begin with a birth story – as do the two canonical gospels Matthew and Luke.
While the hero Elaine was in high school in Palo Alto, she had a boyfriend named Paul Speegle, who was Jewish (pages 9-16). Tragically, he died in a car accident. When the hero Elaine’s “born again” friends asked her if Paul had been “born again,” she said no and told them that he was Jewish. They then told her, “‘Then he’s in hell.’” (quoted on page 15; also see page 192). Consequently, the hero Elaine left the Bible-believing Christian church of her friends.
The hero Elaine did her undergraduate studies, and some graduate studies, at Stanford University. But for doctoral studies, the hero Elaine went to Harvard University to study religion, where she joined certain faculty members there in studying the recently discovered materials known collectively as the Nag Hammadi library – texts discovered in 1945 (pages 20-33). From her study of the Nag Hammadi texts, the hero Elaine wrote her popular book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which impressed the gatekeepers of the prestige culture in American culture.
More recently, Willis Barnstone has included certain so-called gnostic gospels in his book The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas (Norton, 2009).
To the further applause of the gatekeepers of prestige culture in American culture, the hero Elaine continued to supplement her scholarly publications by publishing further accessible books on religion-related topics.
But the loss the hero Elaine had experienced when her teenage boyfriend Paul Speegle died foreshadowed the two further experiences of loss she would experience later in her life – the death of her beloved young son Mark, subsequently followed by the accidental and unexpected death of her beloved husband Heinz Pagels, a physicist, on July 23, 1988 (pages 34-211). After those two tragic losses in her life, the hero Elaine has emerged, years later, to write this book about her suffering these two tragic losses. Of course, after each of those two losses, the hero Elaine went on living. So she interweaves certain details about her life and her work with her memories of those years.
The hero Elaine is fond of quoting from the sayings gospel known as Gospel of Thomas – a listing of sayings spoken by Jesus, but with no accompanying narrative. For example, on page 176, she quotes a passage from the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus says the following:
“‘Jesus says: If those who lead you say to you, “The kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds will get there first. If they say, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will get there first. Rather, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU, AND OUTSIDE OF YOU. WHEN YOU COME TO KNOW YOURSELVES then . . . you will know that YOU ARE CHILDREN OF GOD’” (the ellipsis here is in Pagels’ book; my capitalization here replaces the italics in her book).
Now, on page 93 of Fredriksen’s book When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, mentioned above, she quotes that Gospel of Luke 17:20-23 as saying the following:
“Being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, he [Jesus] answered them, ‘The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, “Lo, here it is!” or “There it is!” Behold, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU.’ And he said to his disciples, ‘The days are coming when you will want to see one of the days of the son of man, AND YOU WILL NOT SEE IT. And they will say to you, “Lo, there!” or “Lo, here!” DO NOT GO, DO NOT FOLLOW THEM’” (my capitalization here replaces her italics; this is evidently her own translation; the preposition that she here translates as “in” may also be translated as “among”).
However, the hero Elaine does not happen to mention how the saying she quotes from the Gospel of Thomas bears a certain resemblance to Luke 17:21.
Elsewhere, the hero Elaine discusses certain other Nag Hammadi texts, including the poem she titles Thunder, Complete Mind (pages 179-181 and 198).
For a complete translation of the poem and study of it, see the book The Thunder: Perfect Mind: A New Translation and Introduction by Hal Taussig, Jared Calaway, Maia Kotrosis, Celine Little, and Justin Lasser (Palgrave Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press, 2010) – which the hero Elaine does not mention, not even in her notes (pages 217-223).
Because the hero Elaine interweaves her experiences of the losses of her young son Mark and her husband Heinz with her scholarly investigations, perhaps I should also note here that Maia Kotrosis and Hal Taussig co-authored the book Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma (Palgrave Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
Elsewhere, the hero Elaine quotes another saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas: “‘If you bring forth what is within, what you bring forth will save. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy’” (saying 70; quoted on page 23).
In a certain sense, the hero Elaine has brought forth in her new book the excruciating suffering she experienced after the deaths of her son Mark and her husband Heinz. But your guess is as good as mine as to whether the hero Elaine’s new book will help bring forth the boon of life in others who read it.
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Victor E. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars An Outstanding Scholar’s Very Personal StoryReviewed in the United States on 14 February 2019
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I’ve been long familiar with and deeply impressed by the ground-breaking research and writing of Dr. Elaine Pagels in the realm of traditional and apocryphal biblical translation and interpretation. Her approach to religion and spirituality infused my own writing, which include the role of the so-called Gnostic gospels in the formation of the Christian era. Most of her scholarly works were written before or shortly after the turn of the millennium.
So, I was delighted to discover that Dr. Pagels had authored a new book published in 2018 called Why Religion? A Personal Story. The title struck me as curious for her: what personal connection would an author, who spent her life working with texts that Christianity disdained as heretical, have formed with the typical “religion” (she does not use “spirituality” in her title. As a fan of the underdog, in this case the almost-obliterated Gnostics, I bought the book and started to read with the ample caution I’ve formed against anyone who attempts to sell me something packaged as religion.
I should have known that Pagels would not disappoint. In fact, she surpassed my expectations. This book is more about Elaine the wife, mother, and vulnerable human being that I did not get a chance to meet in her earlier works. I should also have known that it was going to be a tear-jerker. When the core of the story has the author telling blow by blow how she pushed herself through the tragic loss of her five-year- old son compounded a year later by the shocking death of her husband in a hiking accident, no eye can remain dry. Elaine does not spare herself or the reader the pain of so much suffering, but neither does she turn aside from the hard questions such tragedies, which happen in some form to all human beings, slam us with: Why do bad things happen to good people?
She does not run away from self-questioning and, while listening to other, insists on arriving at her own answer. Speaking of her young son, she writes: “During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it. If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”
In another place, she flies into the face of those who would try to console the inconsolable with an appeal to the goodness of the Almighty: “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.” That hurts to have to work your way through.
These are just a couple of examples of the poignant way Dr. Pagels relates the process of facing suffering as it is and arriving to the wisdom that allows us to understand and endure the unimaginable. She informs us of other familiar attempts to escape that she tried, only to return to the deep contemplation she wrote about as a scholar. Speaking of a document, The Gospel of Truth, she once rescued from oblivion and translated into English, she applies it to her tragedy as a balm to help her heal herself:
“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.”
No synopsis or review can replace the experience of a book like Why Religion? A Personal Story. It must be read, cried with, pondered over, and perhaps reread. If you suffer from an event that seemed undeserved, unfair, beyond the ability to bear, beyond the possibility to heal, please read this book.
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Why Religion?: A Personal Story
by
3.97 · Rating details · 2,321 ratings · 397 reviews
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.
These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.
Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.
A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience. (less)
These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.
Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.
A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience. (less)
Mar 26, 2021William2 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: memoir, nonfiction, gnosticism, reformation-protestantism, judaism, roman-catholic, 21-ce, islam, christianity, religion
What surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous suffering: losing her young son and husband. She’s able to write keenly about her irrational moments, when she was waylaid by grief, including her anger at those hoping to condole with her. At the same time, she uses what she’s learned from her work as a scholar of the so called secret gospels. So the book’s to an extent a recapitulation of her agony and subsequent self-analysis. What she had to do to come through. It’s astonishingly moving and filled by uncanny coincidences that remind me of what C.G. Jung said about synchronicity.
“This second loss [of Heinz] striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’:
“In his essay Rosado tells us how he shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief— especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he swore to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off his head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could ‘carry his anger.’
“Dismissing what they told him, Rosado kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidentally fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with ‘powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . The mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.’ At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging, he sometimes wished ‘for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger— can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?’
“His question challenged me: Are the elusive [uncanny] experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls ‘a solution of the imagination’? Noting that some Ilongo men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerful our culture shapes them.”
(p. 141-142) (less)
“This second loss [of Heinz] striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’:
Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring . . . . This culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief.
“In his essay Rosado tells us how he shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief— especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he swore to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off his head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could ‘carry his anger.’
“Dismissing what they told him, Rosado kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidentally fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with ‘powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . The mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.’ At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging, he sometimes wished ‘for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger— can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?’
“His question challenged me: Are the elusive [uncanny] experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls ‘a solution of the imagination’? Noting that some Ilongo men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerful our culture shapes them.”
(p. 141-142) (less)
This memoir in addition to being of an account of overcoming personal tragedy, adds the unique dimension of insights of a respected historian of religion. Elaine Pagels is not only knowledgeable of the historical circumstances under which early scriptures were written, she found personal solace in those ancient words by identifying with the emotions and feeling that may have motivated those early writers. This book tells the story of how her personal and academic life combined to provide a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom when facing the death of her 6-year-old son followed a year later by the death of her husband while mountain climbing.
Elaine Pagels participated in the translation of the Nag Hammadi library and provided insights into them with her books, The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Beyond Belief (2003). Her other books, including Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, and Revelations, have contributed additional understandings of early Christianity and highlighted common issues shared by people of both ancient and current times.
This book, as indicated by the subtitle, is very much a candid “personal story,” but it is also a quick review and tour of much of the interesting religion scholarship over the past forty years. It can perhaps serve as an extended synopsis of her other books for those readers who don’t have time or motivation to read all of her other books.
Pagels draws on a wide array of religious influences including the Gospels, letters of Paul, Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi library, Buddhism, and Trappist monks. It is clear that her spiritual journey has not been confined by the strictures of orthodox Christianity.
Why Religion?—Was that question answered? It was a question that was asked of her when she applied for graduate school. She came from a family that was opposed to religion of any sort, and when she applied to graduate school she applied to five different schools in five different disciplines. Because of her background and scattered interests up to that point in her life, "Why Religion?" was a logical question to ask. I got the impression that she selected religion because it was Harvard University, though the quota of women had already been filled the year she applied so she had to wait a year to begin her studies. (view spoiler)
Other than the above, the question in the book's title is not explicitly answered. However, her life as recounted in this memoir provides the lived answer.
The following are some excerpts from the book that I found poignant. (Thanks to David Nelson for highlighting them in an email he sent out for Vital Conversations book group. The introductory comments to the individual quotations are my own.)
I liked this definition of "being religious."
Elaine Pagels participated in the translation of the Nag Hammadi library and provided insights into them with her books, The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Beyond Belief (2003). Her other books, including Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, and Revelations, have contributed additional understandings of early Christianity and highlighted common issues shared by people of both ancient and current times.
This book, as indicated by the subtitle, is very much a candid “personal story,” but it is also a quick review and tour of much of the interesting religion scholarship over the past forty years. It can perhaps serve as an extended synopsis of her other books for those readers who don’t have time or motivation to read all of her other books.
Pagels draws on a wide array of religious influences including the Gospels, letters of Paul, Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi library, Buddhism, and Trappist monks. It is clear that her spiritual journey has not been confined by the strictures of orthodox Christianity.
Why Religion?—Was that question answered? It was a question that was asked of her when she applied for graduate school. She came from a family that was opposed to religion of any sort, and when she applied to graduate school she applied to five different schools in five different disciplines. Because of her background and scattered interests up to that point in her life, "Why Religion?" was a logical question to ask. I got the impression that she selected religion because it was Harvard University, though the quota of women had already been filled the year she applied so she had to wait a year to begin her studies. (view spoiler)
Other than the above, the question in the book's title is not explicitly answered. However, her life as recounted in this memoir provides the lived answer.
The following are some excerpts from the book that I found poignant. (Thanks to David Nelson for highlighting them in an email he sent out for Vital Conversations book group. The introductory comments to the individual quotations are my own.)
I liked this definition of "being religious."
“Am I religious?” Yes, incorrigibly, by temperament, if you mean susceptible to the music, the rituals, the daring leaps of imagination and metaphor so often found in music, poems, liturgies, rituals, and stories – not only those that are Christian, but also to the cantor’s singing at the bar mitzvah, to Hopi and Zuni dances on the mesas of the American Southwest, to the call to prayer in Indonesia. But when we say “religious,” what are we talking about?” (p.32)This is a reminder how pain and grief can strip away the usual comforts of religious faith.
Whatever most people mean by faith was never more remote than during times of mourning, when professions of faith in God sounded only like unintelligible noise, heard from the bottom of the sea. (p. 98)This distinguishment between "find meaning" and "make meaning" makes sense to me.
We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. (p. 104)The following is an articulation of how sorrow from the loss of a loved one can linger for years, and can return at unpredictable times.
“You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.” Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice. (p. 121)I agree with the following
“Do you believe in life after death?” “Yes, of course – but not my life after my death.” (p. 137)Wouldn't it be nice if we could depend on God to make sure that life is fair?
I still wanted to believe that we live in a morally ordered universe, in which someone, or something – God or nature? – would keep track of what’s fair? (p. 167)The followings is Pagel's description of the experience of emerging from grief.
Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in that vision of the net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God. (p. 177)(less)
Nov 06, 2018Ron Charles rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: religion-spirituality
A rare lung disease killed Elaine Pagels’s 6-year-old son, and then about a year later her husband fell to his death while mountain climbing. After that Job-like run of tragedies, no one would have blamed Pagels if she had decided to “curse God and die.”
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
(less)
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
(less)
In 1945, two years after Elaine Pagels was born in northern California, an Arab farmer on the other side of the world made a stunning discovery. In a cave near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, he found a six-foot-long jar containing 52 secret texts. They were gospels in Coptic Egyptian, which presented mystical sayings, beliefs, and ideas of Jesus that were quite different from those found in the New Testament. Deemed heretical at the time of their transcription, the scripts were apparently buried by defiant monks, who’d been ordered by religious authorities to destroy them. About a millennium and a half later, Pagels, now a Harvard-trained religious scholar, would be part of a team who translated those texts. In 1989, she wrote a best-selling non-academic book which explores them. One reviewer, referring to Pagels, observed that women were “easily seduced by heresy”. Some readers sent personal letters damning Pagels to hell. Yes, preoccupation with textual purity and heresy remains alive and well in the modern age.
Early in Why Religion? Pagels explains that over the course of her career she has been regularly asked about the role of religion in her own life. Is she, for example, a believer? Or is her interest in religion purely academic? Why Religion? is a focused memoir which seeks to explain how and why Pagels was attracted to the discipline of religious studies, a very unconventional calling for a young woman coming of age in the 1960s (and one in which she encountered a fair bit of male chauvinism). She also addresses some of the ways in which religion and a sort of mysticism have given shape and meaning to a life marked by significant tragedy.
Pagels’s family of origin was repressive and not at all religious. Her mother, who was uncomfortable with both physical closeness and emotional displays, did sometimes take Elaine and her brother to the local Methodist church for Sunday school, but the children’s attendance was not a significant part of their lives. Pagels’s father, a research biologist, had traded his Calvinist upbringing for Darwinism. Passionately anti-religious, he was also given to unpredictable fits of rage, and his daughter learned early on to adhere to a code of silence. Being quiet was the only way to be safe. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that when she was 15, Elaine was attracted to evangelical Christianity. Some high school friends were attending a Billy Graham “crusade” at a Palo Alto stadium. Pagels went along with them. Swept up in the emotional intensity of the experience, she found herself walking towards the altar, moved by Graham’s words to surrender herself to Jesus. She believed that if she were “born again”, she could break out of her family and “enter into the family of a heavenly father . . . [who] loved her unconditionally.”
Pagels’s parents were horrified. “Their reaction,” she writes, “secretly pleased me, confirming that I’d struck out to find a different world.” Hers was an atypical teenage rebellion; for several years during adolescence she attended an evangelical church once or twice weekly. However, when Paul, a young Jewish artist friend (from a different crowd) died tragically in a car crash, church members harshly pronounced that since he had been a Jew, he could only have gone to hell. Pagels was shocked. The exclusiveness and superiority of the group was exposed, and she broke permanently with evangelicalism. Her friend’s sudden death had left her not only grieving, but questioning, too: Where do the dead go, and how do we go on living when death is ever present and inevitable?
Around the same time, Pagels participated in a UCLA seminar on the sociology of mental illness, which also played a role in her decision to pursue religious studies. The course required students to make regular visits to Camarillo, a state psychiatric hospital. There she met a young Mormon who’d had a mental health crisis after he’d begun reading texts along the lines of The Origin of Species. These had filled him with “bad thoughts” that made him question the religion he’d been raised in. Pagels’s interest in the religious impulse and the early days of Christianity was further stimulated. She was particularly curious about the persistence of religion in an age of science.
In her memoir, Pagels considers major events in her own life through the lens of religion. One point that she hammers home is that the old stories, the myths of the Old and New Testaments, do not have to be accepted as the truth to exert an influence on even a fairly liberal person’s mindset. The stories of the Bible are repositories of the cultural codes of a nomadic sheep and goat-herding people, and we may not be aware of the degree to which they still govern modern attitudes. For instance, biblical texts reflect a culture that valued fertility and therefore condemned sexual activity of a non-procreative kind. Such views have echoed across the millennia and still impact modern attitudes to homosexuality.
A discussion of the rage that is part of intense grief leads to a stimulating and fairly accessible discussion of the figure of Satan, who was invented, Pagels says, to deflect blame (about the injustices of life) from God. (The Ancient Greeks, she explains, had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Buddhists, too, don’t wrestle much with “the problem of evil” for different reasons: for them, the most basic premise is that all life is suffering.) Biblical storytellers, however, chose not to blame God for disasters, but a member of his heavenly court instead: “a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path . . . to lure his targets toward danger and death.” He is a kind of psycho-religious construct, an “invisible antagonist” envisioned for millennia by people “bushwack[ing their way] through rough emotional terrain”. Pagels tells about one of her own powerful dreams featuring Satan—whom she doesn’t believe in—which she had the anxiety-ridden night before her son’s open-heart surgery.
Quite bravely for an academic, Pagels writes about many spiritual experiences she has had during her lifetime. For many years Pagels and her first husband, Heinz, struggled with infertility. When she finally did have a son, Mark, quite late in life, the boy’s time would be cut short by untreatable congenital heart disease. Shortly after Mark’s death at the age of six and the adoption of two young children, Heinz, too, would die. Most of the mystical episodes Pagels recounts are related to these tragic personal losses. Before the deaths of her son and her husband, she had taken for granted that death was the end; her experiences challenged that assumption.
Pagels also touches on a number of other unusual experiences—including a controlled LSD “trip”, being the focus of a fertility ritual, and attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she recognized that willpower alone could not release her from alcohol’s anesthetic powers. Through these personal stories and others, she shows how religion meets the imaginative needs of humans, serves the significant irrationality within, and receives, contains, channels, and sometimes inflames some of our most intense emotions.
Pagels’s memoir took seven years to write. That doesn’t surprise me. For the most part, it is a rich, stimulating, and thoughtful work, simultaneously personal and scholarly. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, the personal is almost entirely abandoned for the academic. Pagels provides an analysis of The Book of Revelation and looks at the ways it has been used fairly recently in the War on Terror. Some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle and a few of the secret texts found at Nag Hammadi are also examined. The discussion might have been meaningful to me if I had some background knowledge of the material. I don’t, so it was pretty hard-going. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I felt that Pagels was no longer telling the personal story promised in the subtitle of her memoir. I thought this was an unfortunate way to end a book that had otherwise melded the personal and the scholarly quite well.
Rating: 3.5 (less)
Early in Why Religion? Pagels explains that over the course of her career she has been regularly asked about the role of religion in her own life. Is she, for example, a believer? Or is her interest in religion purely academic? Why Religion? is a focused memoir which seeks to explain how and why Pagels was attracted to the discipline of religious studies, a very unconventional calling for a young woman coming of age in the 1960s (and one in which she encountered a fair bit of male chauvinism). She also addresses some of the ways in which religion and a sort of mysticism have given shape and meaning to a life marked by significant tragedy.
Pagels’s family of origin was repressive and not at all religious. Her mother, who was uncomfortable with both physical closeness and emotional displays, did sometimes take Elaine and her brother to the local Methodist church for Sunday school, but the children’s attendance was not a significant part of their lives. Pagels’s father, a research biologist, had traded his Calvinist upbringing for Darwinism. Passionately anti-religious, he was also given to unpredictable fits of rage, and his daughter learned early on to adhere to a code of silence. Being quiet was the only way to be safe. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that when she was 15, Elaine was attracted to evangelical Christianity. Some high school friends were attending a Billy Graham “crusade” at a Palo Alto stadium. Pagels went along with them. Swept up in the emotional intensity of the experience, she found herself walking towards the altar, moved by Graham’s words to surrender herself to Jesus. She believed that if she were “born again”, she could break out of her family and “enter into the family of a heavenly father . . . [who] loved her unconditionally.”
Pagels’s parents were horrified. “Their reaction,” she writes, “secretly pleased me, confirming that I’d struck out to find a different world.” Hers was an atypical teenage rebellion; for several years during adolescence she attended an evangelical church once or twice weekly. However, when Paul, a young Jewish artist friend (from a different crowd) died tragically in a car crash, church members harshly pronounced that since he had been a Jew, he could only have gone to hell. Pagels was shocked. The exclusiveness and superiority of the group was exposed, and she broke permanently with evangelicalism. Her friend’s sudden death had left her not only grieving, but questioning, too: Where do the dead go, and how do we go on living when death is ever present and inevitable?
Around the same time, Pagels participated in a UCLA seminar on the sociology of mental illness, which also played a role in her decision to pursue religious studies. The course required students to make regular visits to Camarillo, a state psychiatric hospital. There she met a young Mormon who’d had a mental health crisis after he’d begun reading texts along the lines of The Origin of Species. These had filled him with “bad thoughts” that made him question the religion he’d been raised in. Pagels’s interest in the religious impulse and the early days of Christianity was further stimulated. She was particularly curious about the persistence of religion in an age of science.
In her memoir, Pagels considers major events in her own life through the lens of religion. One point that she hammers home is that the old stories, the myths of the Old and New Testaments, do not have to be accepted as the truth to exert an influence on even a fairly liberal person’s mindset. The stories of the Bible are repositories of the cultural codes of a nomadic sheep and goat-herding people, and we may not be aware of the degree to which they still govern modern attitudes. For instance, biblical texts reflect a culture that valued fertility and therefore condemned sexual activity of a non-procreative kind. Such views have echoed across the millennia and still impact modern attitudes to homosexuality.
A discussion of the rage that is part of intense grief leads to a stimulating and fairly accessible discussion of the figure of Satan, who was invented, Pagels says, to deflect blame (about the injustices of life) from God. (The Ancient Greeks, she explains, had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Buddhists, too, don’t wrestle much with “the problem of evil” for different reasons: for them, the most basic premise is that all life is suffering.) Biblical storytellers, however, chose not to blame God for disasters, but a member of his heavenly court instead: “a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path . . . to lure his targets toward danger and death.” He is a kind of psycho-religious construct, an “invisible antagonist” envisioned for millennia by people “bushwack[ing their way] through rough emotional terrain”. Pagels tells about one of her own powerful dreams featuring Satan—whom she doesn’t believe in—which she had the anxiety-ridden night before her son’s open-heart surgery.
Quite bravely for an academic, Pagels writes about many spiritual experiences she has had during her lifetime. For many years Pagels and her first husband, Heinz, struggled with infertility. When she finally did have a son, Mark, quite late in life, the boy’s time would be cut short by untreatable congenital heart disease. Shortly after Mark’s death at the age of six and the adoption of two young children, Heinz, too, would die. Most of the mystical episodes Pagels recounts are related to these tragic personal losses. Before the deaths of her son and her husband, she had taken for granted that death was the end; her experiences challenged that assumption.
Pagels also touches on a number of other unusual experiences—including a controlled LSD “trip”, being the focus of a fertility ritual, and attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she recognized that willpower alone could not release her from alcohol’s anesthetic powers. Through these personal stories and others, she shows how religion meets the imaginative needs of humans, serves the significant irrationality within, and receives, contains, channels, and sometimes inflames some of our most intense emotions.
Pagels’s memoir took seven years to write. That doesn’t surprise me. For the most part, it is a rich, stimulating, and thoughtful work, simultaneously personal and scholarly. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, the personal is almost entirely abandoned for the academic. Pagels provides an analysis of The Book of Revelation and looks at the ways it has been used fairly recently in the War on Terror. Some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle and a few of the secret texts found at Nag Hammadi are also examined. The discussion might have been meaningful to me if I had some background knowledge of the material. I don’t, so it was pretty hard-going. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I felt that Pagels was no longer telling the personal story promised in the subtitle of her memoir. I thought this was an unfortunate way to end a book that had otherwise melded the personal and the scholarly quite well.
Rating: 3.5 (less)
I've been reading Elaine Pagels since 1990, the summer after my sophomore year in college. I remember stealing little reading breaks while canvassing for Greenpeace in Kansas City. I'd sit on the grass and read 10-20 pages of The Gnostic Gospels, and feminist theologian Carol P. Christ's Laughter of Aphrodite, and Catherine Keller's From a Broken Web. A few weeks later I'd begin Adam, Eve, and the Serpent - I was finding such intellectual excitement in these books! At school, I recalled hearing that Pagels's husband, Heinz, a renowned physicist, had died in a tragic hiking accident. I wondered about her story.
This is sort of two types of memoir in one: Pagels describes her family, youth (she hung out with with Jerry Garcia in the Bay Area as a teenager), early attraction to evangelical Christianity, academic career, marriage, and she explains what inspired her to research each of her books and then short synopses of the book topics - but readers most interested in the scholarship don't really need to read this (read the books instead). The other memoir here is of her heartbreaking, life-shattering losses, and this is what I can't forget. Her story of her grief is as truthful and sad to read as anything by Joan Didion or Isabel Allende (in Paula). I cried for her as I read.
I was surprised to learn that Pagels is herself quite spiritual - not religious - but spiritual and rather mystically-minded. When I was majoring in religious studies my peers and I, and most of our teachers, tended to assume that the academic study of religion eventually made us LESS religious (if we began that way at all) and less capable of spiritual experience. (This is a whole topic of its own that I don't want to write about today.) But Pagels's question of "why religion?" is not just a book title for her - she seems to be continually searching in some way for meaning, and like any religious scholar she is fascinated why human beings have turned to religion for answers. Unlike the New Atheists she knows that to understand human culture we must study religious history as well as religious experience. (less)
This is sort of two types of memoir in one: Pagels describes her family, youth (she hung out with with Jerry Garcia in the Bay Area as a teenager), early attraction to evangelical Christianity, academic career, marriage, and she explains what inspired her to research each of her books and then short synopses of the book topics - but readers most interested in the scholarship don't really need to read this (read the books instead). The other memoir here is of her heartbreaking, life-shattering losses, and this is what I can't forget. Her story of her grief is as truthful and sad to read as anything by Joan Didion or Isabel Allende (in Paula). I cried for her as I read.
I was surprised to learn that Pagels is herself quite spiritual - not religious - but spiritual and rather mystically-minded. When I was majoring in religious studies my peers and I, and most of our teachers, tended to assume that the academic study of religion eventually made us LESS religious (if we began that way at all) and less capable of spiritual experience. (This is a whole topic of its own that I don't want to write about today.) But Pagels's question of "why religion?" is not just a book title for her - she seems to be continually searching in some way for meaning, and like any religious scholar she is fascinated why human beings have turned to religion for answers. Unlike the New Atheists she knows that to understand human culture we must study religious history as well as religious experience. (less)
Sep 16, 2018Rebecca rated it really liked it · review of another edition
(3.5) Pagels is a religion scholar best known for her work on the Gnostic Gospels of the Nag Hammadi library, such as the Gospel of Thomas. She grew up in a nonreligious Californian household, but joined a friend’s youth group and answered the altar call at a Billy Graham rally. Although she didn’t stick with Evangelicalism, Christianity continued to speak to her, and spirituality provided a measure of comfort in the hard times ahead: infertility, followed by the illness and death of her long-awaited son, Mark, who underwent heart surgery as an infant and died of pulmonary hypertension at age six. Little more than a year later, Pagels’s physicist husband Heinz fell to his death on a hike in Colorado.
The author doesn’t gloss over the horror of these events, the alternating helplessness and guilt she felt, or the challenge of continuing in her normal life as a Princeton University academic and mother (to their two adopted children) in their wake. Nor does she suggest that religion was what got her through. It’s more that she sees religion’s endurance as proof that it plays a necessary role in human life. She also had experiences that she couldn’t explain away as coincidences, including dreams, moments of consolation, a vision of the connectedness of life while on LSD, and the continued presence of her husband and son after their deaths. These are more successfully conveyed than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God.
Along with her continued scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, Pagels has published works on the Adam and Eve myth, the origin of the concept of Satan, and the book of Revelation. There is more about her academic output than I expected from a memoir, and less than I expected about what happened in the 30 years since these major bereavements. I wanted to know more about how she rebuilt her life, but the book sticks doggedly to loss and its immediate aftermath, and focuses on Pagels’s intellectual development, sometimes to the exclusion of her emotional journey. It’s comparable to Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own in that respect. Potential readers should keep the title in mind and ponder whether they’re interested enough in the question to read a whole book about it – it really is all about religion. (Releases November 6th.) (less)
The author doesn’t gloss over the horror of these events, the alternating helplessness and guilt she felt, or the challenge of continuing in her normal life as a Princeton University academic and mother (to their two adopted children) in their wake. Nor does she suggest that religion was what got her through. It’s more that she sees religion’s endurance as proof that it plays a necessary role in human life. She also had experiences that she couldn’t explain away as coincidences, including dreams, moments of consolation, a vision of the connectedness of life while on LSD, and the continued presence of her husband and son after their deaths. These are more successfully conveyed than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God.
Along with her continued scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, Pagels has published works on the Adam and Eve myth, the origin of the concept of Satan, and the book of Revelation. There is more about her academic output than I expected from a memoir, and less than I expected about what happened in the 30 years since these major bereavements. I wanted to know more about how she rebuilt her life, but the book sticks doggedly to loss and its immediate aftermath, and focuses on Pagels’s intellectual development, sometimes to the exclusion of her emotional journey. It’s comparable to Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own in that respect. Potential readers should keep the title in mind and ponder whether they’re interested enough in the question to read a whole book about it – it really is all about religion. (Releases November 6th.) (less)
Elaine Pagels is clearly more comfortable addressing her chosen field of study than she is writing about her own personal struggles. While she outlines the horrific tragedies of losing her young son and husband within a year of each other, she never does a deep dive into her agony and any ramifications it may have had on her own religious experience or faith.
To say it's "A Personal Story" is only partially true. She gives us the physical details but, unlike most successful memoir, there's too much "telling" and too little "showing." We understand the events and can imagine their devastation, but that's all we can do is imagine because Pagels keeps the reader at arm's length. We are not drawn into her raw emotion on a deep, personal level. We are moved because of our own empathy and not because she strips herself bare and invites us in.
We learn nothing of the childhoods of the two children she adopted and suddenly we're at the end of the book with a lengthy, scholarly discussion on reframing the gospel narrative. The question of Why Religion? never quite dovetails with her own journey.
She writes: "My own experience of the 'nightmare'--the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified--has has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores, equanimity, even joy."
So this is what Pagels tells us, but she never shows us what that isolation, vulnerability, terror and joy look or feel like. I think fans of Pagels earlier work (The Gnostic Gospels, for example) will love this book. Others, who are looking for a memoir along the lines of Mary Karr's Lit, Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle or, more recently Tara Westover's Educated and Julie Barton's Dog Medicine will be sorely disappointed. (less)
To say it's "A Personal Story" is only partially true. She gives us the physical details but, unlike most successful memoir, there's too much "telling" and too little "showing." We understand the events and can imagine their devastation, but that's all we can do is imagine because Pagels keeps the reader at arm's length. We are not drawn into her raw emotion on a deep, personal level. We are moved because of our own empathy and not because she strips herself bare and invites us in.
We learn nothing of the childhoods of the two children she adopted and suddenly we're at the end of the book with a lengthy, scholarly discussion on reframing the gospel narrative. The question of Why Religion? never quite dovetails with her own journey.
She writes: "My own experience of the 'nightmare'--the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified--has has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores, equanimity, even joy."
So this is what Pagels tells us, but she never shows us what that isolation, vulnerability, terror and joy look or feel like. I think fans of Pagels earlier work (The Gnostic Gospels, for example) will love this book. Others, who are looking for a memoir along the lines of Mary Karr's Lit, Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle or, more recently Tara Westover's Educated and Julie Barton's Dog Medicine will be sorely disappointed. (less)
1.5 stars (I am being generous).
I had so many problems with this book even from the first chapter, but I wanted to finish it because I thought surely this lady has something meaningful to say about why we seek the comfort of religion; after all, she has suffered the loss of a child and her husband. Also, she is a professor of religion so presumably she knows what she is talking about. Disappointingly, she never answered the question Why Religion? which is odd since it is the title of the book.
This book was all over the place. Apparently she could not decide whether she wanted to write about the Gnostic texts (she is supposedly something of an "expert" on this subject, although this is highly questionable to me as she seemed to know very little about the New Testament Gospels themselves), about her personal stories of loss and experiences with death, or about the meaning of the New Testament gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and the letters of Paul to the early church. She jumped all over the place, seemingly at random. The most interesting and cohesive part of the book is about the death of her 6-yr old son and her husband one year later. She tells these heartbreaking stories unflinchingly, although as far as I can remember, never really talks about religion during this part of the book. I would have thought that was the whole point of the book (Why Religion? A Personal Story).
Her ideas about the Gnostic texts (not accepted in the Biblical canon) and about the supposedly real gospel message of the New Testament (as interpreted by Elaine Pagels) made me so angry. For someone considered to be a scholar, she made broad, sweeping generalizations based on her own opinions. She didn't back anything up with facts or footnotes. She would say things like (and I am paraphrasing here, these are not direct quotes) "Mark obviously added this coda later in order to convince people of so and so..." or "John clearly wrote Revelations as an attack against the Romans who he hated" or "Paul was contemptuous towards the other disciples and angrily cursed them" or that Paul gave one gospel to the Corinthians because they couldn't understand the real gospel, then secretly gave a different (true) gospel to those more mature Christians, a different gospel other than Christ crucified...This last one is utter hogwash as anyone who has read Paul's letters knows. In Galatians 1:8 he says "even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we have preached to you, let him be cursed." He would never have given one gospel to one group of believers and then another gospel to others.
Pagels seems to have contempt for the accepted canon of the New Testament, but she accepts the Gnostic texts wholesale, even though they have been discredited as heretical by the Church at large. At the end of the book we can see exactly where she stands when she states, and I quote: "With so many people offering different 'revelations,' someone asked, how do we know which to trust? That question pushed me further: Why trust any? Why had I, or any of us, looked to 'authorities' to validate our sense of what's true--whether what 'the Bible says,' as Billy Graham loved to claim, or what he or any other religious leaders say?"
That quote explains the whole book. Here is a "religious scholar" who has total disregard for the reasons why--and the conscientious methods by which--the Christian Church, over 2000 years, has been very careful about what is accepted doctrine, holding church-wide councils to come to an agreement about what is orthodoxy and what is heresy. She ignores the church councils and church fathers throughout millennia and chooses to believe whatever suits her fancy in the last 20 years.
This book is very sloppy and presents some outrageous, bizarre, and patently unfounded ideas about Christian belief. It is based wholly on the author's opinions and feelings (I don't like Paul's strict letters to the early church, so I'm going to cherry pick some writings found at Nag Hammadi that appeal to me even though they are considered heretical by the church, and I will present these as the true meaning of Christianity). This is very slipshod writing and it is unconscionable, let alone embarrassing, to call it "scholarship."
And another thing, name dropping is not attractive. You have descended further in my esteem when you tell me about all the famous people you know and hang around with. (less)
I had so many problems with this book even from the first chapter, but I wanted to finish it because I thought surely this lady has something meaningful to say about why we seek the comfort of religion; after all, she has suffered the loss of a child and her husband. Also, she is a professor of religion so presumably she knows what she is talking about. Disappointingly, she never answered the question Why Religion? which is odd since it is the title of the book.
This book was all over the place. Apparently she could not decide whether she wanted to write about the Gnostic texts (she is supposedly something of an "expert" on this subject, although this is highly questionable to me as she seemed to know very little about the New Testament Gospels themselves), about her personal stories of loss and experiences with death, or about the meaning of the New Testament gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and the letters of Paul to the early church. She jumped all over the place, seemingly at random. The most interesting and cohesive part of the book is about the death of her 6-yr old son and her husband one year later. She tells these heartbreaking stories unflinchingly, although as far as I can remember, never really talks about religion during this part of the book. I would have thought that was the whole point of the book (Why Religion? A Personal Story).
Her ideas about the Gnostic texts (not accepted in the Biblical canon) and about the supposedly real gospel message of the New Testament (as interpreted by Elaine Pagels) made me so angry. For someone considered to be a scholar, she made broad, sweeping generalizations based on her own opinions. She didn't back anything up with facts or footnotes. She would say things like (and I am paraphrasing here, these are not direct quotes) "Mark obviously added this coda later in order to convince people of so and so..." or "John clearly wrote Revelations as an attack against the Romans who he hated" or "Paul was contemptuous towards the other disciples and angrily cursed them" or that Paul gave one gospel to the Corinthians because they couldn't understand the real gospel, then secretly gave a different (true) gospel to those more mature Christians, a different gospel other than Christ crucified...This last one is utter hogwash as anyone who has read Paul's letters knows. In Galatians 1:8 he says "even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we have preached to you, let him be cursed." He would never have given one gospel to one group of believers and then another gospel to others.
Pagels seems to have contempt for the accepted canon of the New Testament, but she accepts the Gnostic texts wholesale, even though they have been discredited as heretical by the Church at large. At the end of the book we can see exactly where she stands when she states, and I quote: "With so many people offering different 'revelations,' someone asked, how do we know which to trust? That question pushed me further: Why trust any? Why had I, or any of us, looked to 'authorities' to validate our sense of what's true--whether what 'the Bible says,' as Billy Graham loved to claim, or what he or any other religious leaders say?"
That quote explains the whole book. Here is a "religious scholar" who has total disregard for the reasons why--and the conscientious methods by which--the Christian Church, over 2000 years, has been very careful about what is accepted doctrine, holding church-wide councils to come to an agreement about what is orthodoxy and what is heresy. She ignores the church councils and church fathers throughout millennia and chooses to believe whatever suits her fancy in the last 20 years.
This book is very sloppy and presents some outrageous, bizarre, and patently unfounded ideas about Christian belief. It is based wholly on the author's opinions and feelings (I don't like Paul's strict letters to the early church, so I'm going to cherry pick some writings found at Nag Hammadi that appeal to me even though they are considered heretical by the church, and I will present these as the true meaning of Christianity). This is very slipshod writing and it is unconscionable, let alone embarrassing, to call it "scholarship."
And another thing, name dropping is not attractive. You have descended further in my esteem when you tell me about all the famous people you know and hang around with. (less)
Dec 12, 2018Eilonwy rated it really liked it
Elaine Pagels is fairly well-known for her writing about early Christianity, especially the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This memoir doesn’t so much answer the question of “Why have religion?” as it does the question her not-yet-husband asked her with the two title words, which was “Why study religion, of all possible subjects?”
Pagels was brought up in an atheist family. But she was drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teen when she attended a Billy Graham rally (where he preached a fiery socialist message that sounded very different from what evangelical Christian leaders seem to preach these years). She then lost her specifically Christian faith after the death of a close Jewish friend, when her Christian friends insisted that he could not enter Heaven on account of having the wrong religion. But she never lost her fascination with why people have religion at all. Then, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in Egypt and their delivery to Harvard when she was studying in the divinity school there, her curiosity was fueled as to how modern Christianity came to be the particular collection of books that it is, when there were so many gospels to choose from 2000 years ago.
Around these intellectual concerns, she married and gave birth to a doomed son, whose heart defect at birth led to fatal pulmonary hypertension. (If you would rather not know what it’s like to care for a child who has no hope of ever reaching adulthood, do not read this book. It will tear your heart out.) She also had several mystical or psychic experiences: the feeling of the presence of her deceased friend and the awareness that a group of friends was praying for her while she was giving birth, among others.
Then her husband also died, only a year after their eldest son, leaving Elaine to care alone for two small children.
This is a memoir about grief as much as it is about religion. And while it doesn’t really answer the question “Why religion?” -- at the same time, it does. In Pagels’s experience, at least, religion mitigates grief. It provides a hope that we may know our lost loved ones again, even as we miss them with all of our hearts every day that we are here and they are not. It provides comfort, whether it seems like a “rational” comfort or not.
This book is beautiful, moving, and thoughtful. I’m glad I read it, but at the same time, parts of it left me so sad that I’m hesitant to recommend it. Judge for yourself whether you want to experience this vivid recounting of love, loss, and continuing onward. (less)
Pagels was brought up in an atheist family. But she was drawn into evangelical Christianity as a teen when she attended a Billy Graham rally (where he preached a fiery socialist message that sounded very different from what evangelical Christian leaders seem to preach these years). She then lost her specifically Christian faith after the death of a close Jewish friend, when her Christian friends insisted that he could not enter Heaven on account of having the wrong religion. But she never lost her fascination with why people have religion at all. Then, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in Egypt and their delivery to Harvard when she was studying in the divinity school there, her curiosity was fueled as to how modern Christianity came to be the particular collection of books that it is, when there were so many gospels to choose from 2000 years ago.
Around these intellectual concerns, she married and gave birth to a doomed son, whose heart defect at birth led to fatal pulmonary hypertension. (If you would rather not know what it’s like to care for a child who has no hope of ever reaching adulthood, do not read this book. It will tear your heart out.) She also had several mystical or psychic experiences: the feeling of the presence of her deceased friend and the awareness that a group of friends was praying for her while she was giving birth, among others.
Then her husband also died, only a year after their eldest son, leaving Elaine to care alone for two small children.
This is a memoir about grief as much as it is about religion. And while it doesn’t really answer the question “Why religion?” -- at the same time, it does. In Pagels’s experience, at least, religion mitigates grief. It provides a hope that we may know our lost loved ones again, even as we miss them with all of our hearts every day that we are here and they are not. It provides comfort, whether it seems like a “rational” comfort or not.
This book is beautiful, moving, and thoughtful. I’m glad I read it, but at the same time, parts of it left me so sad that I’m hesitant to recommend it. Judge for yourself whether you want to experience this vivid recounting of love, loss, and continuing onward. (less)
Apr 26, 2021Lynne King rated it it was amazing
This is an absolutely brilliant and compelling memoir. I just didn't want to put it down either to eat, do the shopping, sleep etc. Pagels' interpretation of religion explained a lot to me. And this then combined with the tragic loss of her six year old son Mark, to be followed eighteen months later by the unexpected death of her husband Heinz rather shook me as it obviously did her. He had been enjoying a hike on a well known pathway, with a friend in Colorado when suddenly death decided to enter into the equation.
This did indeed make Pagels wonder "why me"?
This book magnificently succeeds in re-enforcimg my view on life as that of the twenty-four hour mayfly. Literally here today and gone tomorrow. Also my continuous questioning of what were we before we were born? Food for thought and a book to browse through on a regular basis. (less)
This did indeed make Pagels wonder "why me"?
This book magnificently succeeds in re-enforcimg my view on life as that of the twenty-four hour mayfly. Literally here today and gone tomorrow. Also my continuous questioning of what were we before we were born? Food for thought and a book to browse through on a regular basis. (less)
I went back and forth about whether or not I should even assign a star rating to this book, but I don't think I'm going to. What I was expecting was vastly different from what this book offered, and I once read you should review a book based on what it was, and not what you wanted it to be (thanks, Pamela Paul), and my star review would not be favorable.
That being said, here were my issues: I realize the subtitle is "A Personal Story," but I did not expect the book to be SO much personal memoir. The marketing begins: "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not?" I did not feel this book answered any of these questions. Even in the second half when Pagels talks more about religion, I felt she was debunking Biblical myths rather than talking about "why religion" from a larger social context. However, I don't know how much control authors have over the marketing blurbs for their books, so I don't want to punish her for the misleading material.
I almost didn't finish this audiobook after the first few chapters, and having finished the whole (because it was so short), I probably should have abandoned it. (less)
That being said, here were my issues: I realize the subtitle is "A Personal Story," but I did not expect the book to be SO much personal memoir. The marketing begins: "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not?" I did not feel this book answered any of these questions. Even in the second half when Pagels talks more about religion, I felt she was debunking Biblical myths rather than talking about "why religion" from a larger social context. However, I don't know how much control authors have over the marketing blurbs for their books, so I don't want to punish her for the misleading material.
I almost didn't finish this audiobook after the first few chapters, and having finished the whole (because it was so short), I probably should have abandoned it. (less)
I was drawn to this title because years ago I read and admired Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. This audio version, narrated by Lynde Houck, was a fantastic listening experience. Houck creates just the right tone for the content.
Pagels tells her life story from how she first became interested in Christianity, to her graduate studies and early career, to the death of her son and a year later the unexpected death of her husband, physicist Heinz Pagels. These tragedies both compelled and shaped her scholarly interests. The relationship the Pagels shared seems like such a true partnership and a beautiful intertwining of their love and intellectual interests.
One of the things I admired about this memoir is how Pagels seamlessly weaves together her interest in religion and her love for Heinz and their children with her work. I can't recall reading a memoir that so deftly and relevantly entwines the writer's work, love, and life. Perhaps this is due to the nature of Pagels' work in religion. She also brings in anthropology, philosophy, and science to look at issues of emotional pain, loss, and mourning. Pagels' work in religion after these tragedies was an exploration of how others have dealt with death and grief. She blasts traditional Christian platitudes around pain and death (e.g., God doesn't give us more than we can handle).
An excellent read (and listen) for those interested in a scholar's journey, religious studies, and dealing with the pain of death.
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Pagels tells her life story from how she first became interested in Christianity, to her graduate studies and early career, to the death of her son and a year later the unexpected death of her husband, physicist Heinz Pagels. These tragedies both compelled and shaped her scholarly interests. The relationship the Pagels shared seems like such a true partnership and a beautiful intertwining of their love and intellectual interests.
One of the things I admired about this memoir is how Pagels seamlessly weaves together her interest in religion and her love for Heinz and their children with her work. I can't recall reading a memoir that so deftly and relevantly entwines the writer's work, love, and life. Perhaps this is due to the nature of Pagels' work in religion. She also brings in anthropology, philosophy, and science to look at issues of emotional pain, loss, and mourning. Pagels' work in religion after these tragedies was an exploration of how others have dealt with death and grief. She blasts traditional Christian platitudes around pain and death (e.g., God doesn't give us more than we can handle).
An excellent read (and listen) for those interested in a scholar's journey, religious studies, and dealing with the pain of death.
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Key insights from Elaine Pagels'
Why Religion?: A Personal Story
Wrestling the Devil
About a year later, Pagels' grief reached a breaking point. She and Heinz had managed to move forward with their lives: They'd adopted another child and continued to find some satisfaction in their work. Then, during a vacation in Colorado, Heinz lost his footing on a trail and fell to his death at the age Of 49.
The loss of her husband launched not only a fresh wave of grief but a feeling of intense anger that Pagels had never felt before. She was surprised to discover that she couldn't find a safe space to experience this new rage. Pastors encouraged her not to be angry with God, an admonition that drove her crazy. Why shouldn't she be angry with God for taking not only her son but also her husband?
Pagels' anger pushed her research in new directions. She began to study how different religions and cultures dealt with such complex and volatile feelings as her anger. She was particularly attracted to the research of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who studied the Ilongot tribe of the Philippines. Rosaldo explored how the ritual of headhunting plays into the Ilongots' communal emotional life. According to Rosaldo, headhunting is a form of grief management. Although it's a violent strategy, headhunting gives the individual an outlet for his anger and a tangible strategy for experiencing and processing his pain. Ros-aldo couldn't make sense of this tradition until his wife died unexpectedly. Suddenly, it made sense to him that the Ilongot might need a tangible, concrete method for dealing with anger and grief.
Enraged over her husband's death and curious about how religions make use of anger, Pagels began studying the roles that these emotions play within various biblical narratives. She also became increasingly curious about Christianity's primary scapegoat, the Devil. How did Satan become a character in theology, and how did this literary figure help early audiences process feelings of blame, rage, and guilt? Oddly enough, Pagels found that the Devil described in Christian theology doesn't actually exist in the Hebrew scriptures. The only possible reference occurs in the Book of Job, which describes a character in God's divine court
known as ha-satan, "the satan" or "the adversary." In Job, the
satan isn't the source of all evil; he's just another guy in God's circle who makes a bet that Job won't stay righteous if God tests
his faith. While the satan doesn't come off as an especially nice guy, he's certainly not the dastardly villain depicted in the Christian tradition.
As she dug further into early Christian theology in search of Satan, she found that talk of Satan typically crossed paths with
the roots of Christian anti-Semitism. For instance, the Gospel of Mark describes Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor, who sees Jesus' innocence and tries to save his life. According to Mark, it's the Jewish leaders that put Jesus to death, not the oppressive Roman Empire. Two hundred years later, when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the anti-Jewish rhetoric in the New Testament scriptures inspired all-out persecution.
Based on her research, Pagels theorizes that the writers of the gospels cast blame on Jewish leaders because they wanted to deflect blame from themselves. After all, Christ's own followers contributed to his betrayal and execution. The choice to cast blame on the Jewish religious establishment was a way for the early church to deny its own feelings of guilt over the execution of the Christ.
Making Peace with Chaos
In the course of her research, Pagels realized that the character of Satan was just another strategy for ancient authors to impose order on a disorderly world. Satan was a way of explaining events that didn't make sense, and even today, the concept of Satan enables believers to draw simplistic boundaries between right and wrong, good and bad, and us and them. The power to vilify is clearly a toxic act, yet it continues to occur because it fulfills the human need to create meaning amid grief, anger, loss, and guilt.
This need for clear-cut explanations also informed the most important sections of the Gospel narratives. In the earliest versions of Mark, there's no appearance by Jesus after the resurrection - he simply dies, and his body disappears. However, it appears that certain early readers weren't satisfied with this uncertain outcome, so in later centuries, church leaders added another ending in which Jesus physically appears and gives his followers a joyous Easter morning celebration. The Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John - which were written after Mark - continue this trend and include even more elaborate resurrection appearances.
However, in a Gnostic text called the Gospel of Truth, a mysterious author presents an alternative understanding of Jesus' death. Unlike traditional theologies, which posit that Jesus had to die as a necessary sacrifice for humanity's sin, the Gospel of Truth claims that Jesus died to illustrate that God is present in the full spectrum of human experience, from the joy of life to the pain of death. According to this perspective, the Gospels don't need a happy resurrection ending, and there doesn't need to be any kind of meaning in the midst of suffering.
Pagels found that she could make peace with her painful losses when she was able to accept that there was no meaning in the death of her son and husband. In the story of Jesus, death is important precisely because it demonstrates that there is still communion between God and humanity, even amid meaningless events. Although suffering is certainly painful, perhaps it offers an invitation to community in spite of pain.
Conclusion
After years of research and grieving, Elaine Pagels was able to articulate a reality that she'd known for many years ago as a girl but had been unable to explain: It's not the beliefs that define religion but the communities, activities, and rituals that enable humans to be close to one another, even in hard times.
Perhaps suffering is just another part of the natural chaos of human existence, an experience that is painful but normal. Perhaps religion isn't about believing the same thing but about the healing that happens through the rituals, poems, and relationships that enable survival and human connection, even in the midst of the unimaginable.
