Why Religion? Read online

  Since earlier generations of scholars had no access to what “the heretics” actually wrote, most took Irenaeus at his word and assumed that such teachers were foisting off their own inventions onto naive Christians—“gnostic gospels” that Irenaeus warned them not to read. And while the distinguished group of European scholars who first published the Gospel of Thomas didn’t find this text as bizarre as they expected, since about half of its sayings also occur in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke, many assumed that such gospels were opposed to genuine Christian teaching. Even today, you can find dozens of books and articles that treat the Gospel of Thomas as an alien text, and interpret it as “gnostic” heresy.

  The more we looked in these secret texts for answers, the more questions opened up. Even a first dive into them showed that what we call “Christianity” is a huge, messy heap of traditions, stories, images, and practices, collected by people all over the world—much that may be of value, and much that may not. When I began to sort these out, a “Bible-believing” Christian warned me that: “Picking and choosing is self-indulgent. We call it cafeteria Christianity,” he said, “since people who do that simply refuse to accept the whole tradition as it stands.” In a sense, of course, he’s right. Ever since the second century, Christian leaders calling themselves orthodox (“straight thinking”) have defined choice as heresy. The Greek term translated as “heresy” (hairesis) means exactly that: “choice”!

  So we’re still asking, “How did these texts end up buried, unknown for nearly two thousand years?” Now we’re beginning to see some pieces of the puzzle come together. Nearly two hundred years after Irenaeus waged war on “heretics” and their gospels, another powerful bishop named Athanasius, bishop of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, ordered Christians all over Egypt to reject what he called “illegitimate, secret books.” But although monks in the central monastery copied out Athanasius’s order in large letters on a wall where everyone could see it, some monks apparently defied the bishop’s orders, and removed over fifty texts from the library that held their sacred books, sealing them into a heavy jar, and hiding them under the cliff near Nag Hammadi, where Mohammed Ali said he found them sixteen hundred years later.

  That’s lucky, since some of us need heresy—choice, that is. The collection of traditions that includes everything from the stark and simple Gospel of Mark to the prayers and hymns of Saint Francis, Saint Bernard, and Hildegard, along with stories of martyrs and wild-eyed saints, all kinds of music, dozens of “rules” for various Christian communities, poems of John of the Cross, George Herbert, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Dylan Thomas, as well as decrees that countless church councils forged centuries ago, diatribes, polemics, heavy volumes weighed down with centuries of theological debate—and now a whole library of censored “heretical” writings—is overwhelming. No one can swallow it all; it’s indigestible.

  Instead, in each generation, leaders, from the apostle Paul to Martin Luther King Jr. and Saint Mary of Paris, have selected elements from that vast collection, discarding some and reinterpreting others, focusing on those that deal with the specific challenges each one faces. Far from destroying Christian traditions, this selection process enables them to survive, adapt, and spread, even today, in radically different cultures as new situations unimaginable in previous generations arise. Yet nearly every group, from Roman Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, Mormon, Methodist, Christian Scientist, Quaker to Ethiopian Orthodox, tends to claim that its version of Christianity is the only right one, the only one that goes back to Jesus himself.

  “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 a 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 “religion,” what are we talking about?

  Like most people, I used to think that religion was primarily a matter of “what you believe.” But I’ve had to abandon that assumption, since seeing how the particular circumstances of Christianity’s origin led certain leaders to equate “true religion” with a set of beliefs, especially since the fourth century, when certain bishops hammered out the list of doctrines called the Nicene Creed, and Emperor Constantine and his successors decided to use it as a test of who is—or isn’t—legitimately religious. Even today, many Christians insist on a single set of beliefs—whichever one their denomination endorses.

  What I love about sources like the Gospel of Thomas is that they open up far more than a single path. Instead of telling us what to believe, they engage both head and heart, challenging us to “love your brother as your own life,” while deepening spiritual practice by discovering our own inner resources: “Knock upon yourself as on a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on that road, you cannot get lost; and what you open for yourself will open.”

  While urging us to seek a deep connection with reality, they encourage us to walk without a map, expecting turbulence and surprise: “Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds; and when he finds, he will be troubled; when he is troubled, he shall be astonished.” And when asking where to start, we find another saying from the Gospel of Thomas: “Recognize what is before your eyes, and the mysteries will be revealed to you.”

  Chapter 2

  Love and Work

  Heinz and Elaine Pagels, on their wedding day, New York City.

  Gray skies and damp wind, early spring in Cambridge, on the day I flew back to California, grateful to walk off the plane and see blue skies, feel light breeze, smell the eucalyptus. I’d come to see my grandfather, now ill, who would linger only a few more weeks. I drove straight to the hospital and found his room. He clasped my hands to his chest and held them, his voice rasping in his dry throat, and said, “Where’s your husband?” Startled, I wondered, Now that I’m twenty-three and not married, is he saying that my eccentric choices are taking me away from what means everything to him? What I could not have imagined is that this trip would answer his question.

  Several days later, driving up to Los Altos Hills to see Mike Schick, a tall, good-humored, red-bearded physicist, and Pamela, his wife, a dancer, I was surprised to see another physicist, whom I’d met at Stanford, now visiting from New York. I’d first seen him when I was seventeen, when he walked into the coffee shop in Palo Alto called Saint Michael’s Alley, a tall young man with a radiant smile. Stunned, I turned to my high school friend and whispered, “Do you see that beautiful young boy?” A year later, when I was a freshman at Stanford, we met. His name was Heinz Pagels, and he told me that on the day I’d first seen him he’d just driven from Pennsylvania through the Sierra Nevada mountains to the sea, to begin graduate study in physics at Stanford. When we did meet, I didn’t tell him how I felt, of course, since I was going out with someone else, and I already knew two of his former girlfriends. At the time, he liked to say that he was a serial monogamist—and I felt far too susceptible to become another episode!

  During our years at Stanford, we’d seen each other only in passing, most recently before I left California for Harvard. He and his roommates were giving one of their Saturday-night parties, when they would drive to the coast to get abalone, then cook spaghetti and spread a red-checkered tablecloth on the floor to serve dinner, before clearing everything away to dance. Heinz and I flirted often, and loved to dance—he was tall and agile, a marvelous dancer. That evening, as we were dancing, he teased me, saying, “Why are you going to Harvard? You’re going to price yourself right out of the market!” While dancing, amused and annoyed, I replied, “I’m not in any market, thank you very much,” thinking, If a man this attractive and intelligent says something this stupid, what hope is there for the rest of the male species? But then, with his most charming smile, he said, “I’ll make a deal with you: I won�
��t get married for five years, if you don’t,” and I laughed, finding him irresistible as ever. When I left for Cambridge, he went on a trip around the world with his current girlfriend, giving physics talks from Japan and China to Cambodia and the Himalayas in India, before returning to join the faculty at New York’s Rockefeller University.

  Now, on this spring evening in California, five years later, we were meeting again. We sat close together and talked for hours. As I was leaving, he invited me to New York; I invited him instead to the Princeton–Harvard football game in Cambridge in the fall. That October, I was excited that he came, and we enjoyed the day, absorbed far more in each other than in football. At dinner, he challenged me: “Why religion, of all things? Why not something that has an impact in the real world?” Good question—one I’d been asking myself—but why did he love the physics of virtually invisible elementary particles: hadrons, bosons, and quarks? After an intense discussion, contentious and hilarious, we came to see that each of us was hoping to understand something fundamental. I began to see what fascinated him about investigating the natural world, from the “big bang,” to elementary particles and galaxies; and he became intrigued with the secret gospels. That evening, as he kissed me goodnight, I impulsively said, “Don’t go”—and he immediately agreed, sat down and took off his shoes. Years later, when we traveled to Egypt, Israel, and Sudan, we both began to see how ancient traditions as familiar—or strange—as those biblical stories do have impact, even now, in our world.

  During those first few days we discovered that we could not be apart, and began traveling every weekend between New York and Cambridge; he’d carry a small suitcase packed with books to read on the way. I’d never felt so close to anyone, loving his open, enthusiastic embrace of new experiences, his instinctive generosity, his quick insight and wit, and the warmth of his arms around me. The following spring, when Harvard offered me a year’s fellowship to study at Oxford, I secretly hoped he’d say “Don’t go; stay here with me.” Instead, to my disappointment, he said, “I don’t know much about love, but I know it doesn’t tie people down,” so I went. Since we’d hardly dared speak of love, let alone of a future together, I resolved to forget him, or try to. But when I arrived in England, the moment I stepped out of the train at the Oxford station and saw a billboard advertising canned soup that read “Heinz Souperman,” I laughed and nearly cried; already I’d failed to forget him! A few weeks later, having agreed to go out with an intriguing American student who wore a black leather jacket and offered me a ride on his motorcycle, I burst into tears because he wasn’t Heinz.

  During Christmas break, Heinz invited me to New York, taking me to his family home in Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas and to meet his widowed mother. Clearly, this was a test. I was nervous. I was relieved to meet a beautiful, stately, and reserved woman, who firmly placed us in separate rooms; we all pretended that this was normal. After we returned to his New York apartment on Friday, the week after New Year’s Day, he was unusually quiet. Then he put his arms around me, and asked me to marry him. At first I didn’t reply, since we’d never talked about marriage. After a few moments, nervously, he said, “You may need time to think about it.” Finally I found my voice, and said, “There’s nothing to think about; I’m just surprised you asked!” That afternoon we walked in the snow that had been falling steadily all day, transforming Central Park into a brilliant, unfamiliar wilderness. When we reached the Museum of Natural History and walked through the halls of dioramas, each showing pairs of male and female antelope, kudu, and herons, I felt complete, like an animal who’d found her mate.

  When I told my adviser—the one who’d repeatedly tried to seduce me—that we were going to marry in June, he exploded. “You what? You’re one of our best students; we’ve wasted four years on your education, and you’re getting married?” Astounded that he took this to mean that I was quitting graduate school, I stopped myself from saying, You’ve wasted what? And said only, “Whenever one of the men says that he’s getting married, you say, ‘Good—now you’ll settle down.’” He was so adamant—both of us aware of his previous advances—that he tried to cut off the Harvard scholarship that supported me; but this time Krister Stendahl, now the dean, stopped him.

  What kind of wedding? At the time, many people we knew were reinventing rituals, choosing to marry in exotic places, in hot-air balloons, on mountaintops, sometimes on psychedelics, writing their own vows. Although Heinz had no liking for churches, he said, “People who write their own vows are trying to control what’s happening to them; but getting married takes us beyond anything we can control.” I suggested the archaic vows of the Episcopal prayer book service (“With this ring I thee wed; with my body I thee worship.”), a service that reminded me of the stone doorways at Oxford, worn down by people who’d entered them for hundreds of years. He agreed, since it would be short, just ten or fifteen minutes. But how could we invite our friends, since most of them had nothing to do with religious services? We asked the organist to play Bach quietly, at first, as people were entering the small Church of the Resurrection on Seventy-Fourth Street in New York, creating a spacious harmony, then gradually building to glorious chords that led into the short, simple ceremony. After that, we all went to Rockefeller University on the East River, where a rock band was warming up to play, for a joyful evening with close friends and family, hugging, laughing, and dancing.

  After a welcome weekend by the sea in Providence, we flew to California, where physicists had invited Heinz to engage in research with them for the summer, while I would continue writing my dissertation. As we drove up to the apartment that the Stanford Linear Accelerator staff assigned to us for summer housing, I was shocked into silence. In a city of over sixty thousand people, they’d rented for us the same apartment where I’d so often been with my friend Paul, the apartment where his grandmother had lived. As we walked up the stairs into the familiar living room, I suddenly felt that Paul was present, invisible, standing near the window that overlooked the garden. Astonished, I resisted an impulse to turn and run, wondering, Is he actually here?—or, as seemed more likely, in my imagination? In a flash I realized that I could not tell—and that it didn’t matter. What did matter was how to respond. Instinctively I spoke to him internally, saying, “You are welcome here.” At that moment I felt the presence depart. Too startled to tell Heinz about it then, I told him much later.

  Heinz, too, was fascinated by qualities of consciousness, often wondering, as he put it, “When we do physics, are we actually discovering elementary particles, or just creating mathematical constructs?” Hearing him talk, I began to appreciate how physicists invent images of particle interaction—glue, string, n-dimensional space—and how physicists interweave imagination with close analysis of data. He also liked to have lunch at the Stanford Research Institute to talk with scientists there about their experiments testing mental telepathy, distance vision, and extrasensory perception. Years before, as a graduate student, having heard that scientists at Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital were offering volunteers seventy-five dollars to participate in a double-blind experiment in which each participant would receive either a placebo or LSD, he’d promptly volunteered. What he took “wasn’t a placebo,” he told me later, saying how astonished he was to see stars and galaxies being born and dying, while others emerged, through what felt like innumerable ages. Although he didn’t take LSD again, the summer after we married he encouraged me to try it, promising to cope with any difficulty that might arise.

  When I did, we anticipated that what would happen might involve what I was writing about, some kind of Christian vision. Instead, as I sat in the apartment, looking out at the sky, the trees in light wind, and the garden, I saw everything alive as fire, gloriously intertwined. Watching, ecstatic and speechless, for about five hours, I finally managed to say, “I guess that solves the dying problem,” and he laughed. What had horrified me before, when Paul died—that a beloved person could simply disappear, and disintegrate—n
ow seemed to resolve into a deeper unity of the whole.

  That fall, returning to Cambridge, I worked hard to complete doctoral exams and finish the dissertation, and was relieved and happy to graduate with distinction. Our closeness felt like a refuge, a source of joy, encouraging each of us to try new things. We found a small rent-controlled apartment, the top floor of a brownstone near Central Park West, and I was excited to begin teaching in September. While beginning to teach, I wrote two scholarly books and several articles, and continued doing what I loved best, working with a group of nearly thirty scholars to translate, edit, and publish more than fifty texts from Nag Hammadi: a quickly done English translation first, and then a scholarly edition in five volumes, which would take decades to complete. But as we struggled to translate from Coptic and write detailed notes on every line, sometimes every word, I kept thinking, “Just publishing these isn’t enough. Like the Bible, these ancient texts are hard for people to pick up and read. How can we show what a difference these texts make—how they change our perspective on everything?” That question wouldn’t go away, and eventually it impelled me to write a book I called The Gnostic Gospels.

  As we plunged into a new life in New York, I began to teach at Barnard College, a school for women built in 1889, when women were excluded from Columbia University, which its founders built in 1754 to educate men. As I arrived in 1970, women were starting to challenge traditional gender roles, energized by the civil rights movement, which had demanded the equality America claimed to offer, but didn’t. Colleagues at Barnard who initiated our first conference on women asked me to participate, saying, “Just talk about women in the early Christian movement.” At first I said no, repeating what I’d learned about women at Harvard—nothing! “We don’t have enough information.” After all, hadn’t men written almost everything we’d read? Of course, we couldn’t know; but what we knew of ancient education made that seem likely. When I asked a favorite professor, George MacRae, who’d written an article on the story of Eve, he said with surprise, “Why ask me? How should I know?” He was right: Why ask MacRae, a Jesuit priest?