Elaine Pagels is one of America's foremost religious scholars, known for her groundbreaking work on early Christianity and the Gnostic Gospels. In her book "Why Religion?", Pagels explores the role of religion in her own life and in human experience more broadly. This deeply personal memoir interweaves Pagels' academic research with her journey through profound loss and grief, offering insights into how religious traditions can provide solace, meaning, and ways of coping with life's greatest challenges.
The book's title poses a question Pagels is often asked, given that she has dedicated her life to studying religion despite not adhering to any particular faith tradition. Through sharing her own story, Pagels offers a nuanced perspective on why religion continues to be a powerful force in human culture and individual lives, even for those who may not consider themselves traditionally religious.
Early Encounters with Religion
A Teenage Conversion
Pagels' journey with religion began in her teenage years, sparked by an unexpected encounter with evangelical Christianity. At age 15, she attended a Billy Graham sermon in San Francisco out of curiosity, accompanying a friend. Despite her initial skepticism, Pagels found herself deeply moved by Graham's charismatic preaching and his invitation to be "born again" by accepting Jesus into one's heart.
For the young Pagels, this religious experience offered an emotional outlet that was lacking in her family life. Raised in a household that prized rationalism and suppressed emotion, she found in evangelical Christianity a way to express feelings that had long been bottled up. Her father, a research biologist, dismissed religion as nonsense incompatible with science. Her mother was emotionally distant, often dismissing Pagels' feelings with the refrain "You shouldn't feel that way."
In this context, Graham's message of God's unconditional love was deeply appealing. Pagels saw it as an opportunity to free herself from her earthly father's emotional limitations and embrace a heavenly father who knew and loved her completely. She joined thousands of others in coming forward to accept Jesus, feeling she had discovered a new world where emotions could be freely expressed and love reigned supreme.
Disillusionment and Loss
Pagels' fervent embrace of evangelical Christianity was relatively short-lived, however. About a year and a half after her conversion experience, she received devastating news: her close friend Paul had been killed in a car accident. This loss forced Pagels to confront difficult questions about death and the meaning of life.
In grappling with her grief, Pagels found solace not in her newfound Christian faith, but in a group of artistic friends who encouraged creative expression and open questioning. These friends provided the emotional support and space for wrestling with life's big questions that Pagels' family could not offer. Her mother's response to Paul's death was characteristically aloof, dismissing him as having been "no good" for Pagels anyway.
Even more painful was the reaction of Pagels' Christian friends. When she shared the news of Paul's death, their primary concern was whether he had been "born again." Learning that he was Jewish and had not converted to Christianity, they concluded that he must now be in hell. This callous response deeply wounded Pagels and led her to leave the church, never to return as a "Bible-believing Christian."
This experience marked a turning point in Pagels' religious journey. While she abandoned evangelical Christianity, she retained a broader interest in religion, particularly in how people use religious traditions and rituals to engage the imagination and cope with life's challenges. This perspective would shape her future academic work and personal approach to spirituality.
Academic Pursuits and the Gnostic Gospels
Graduate Studies and a Fateful Discovery
Pagels' early experiences with religion and loss set her on a path of academic inquiry into religious studies. After completing her bachelor's degree at Stanford, she was accepted into Harvard's graduate program in religious studies. This decision would prove fateful, as it brought her into contact with one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the field of early Christianity: the Nag Hammadi library.
In 1945, near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, a farmer had unearthed a collection of ancient texts, including previously unknown Christian gospels and other writings. These documents, dating back to the early centuries of Christianity, offered new insights into the diversity of early Christian thought and practice.
Harvard was one of only two U.S. universities granted access to facsimiles of these texts, giving Pagels a unique opportunity to study them firsthand. The Nag Hammadi texts were particularly intriguing because they represented alternative Christian traditions that had been suppressed or lost to history. Many of these writings were considered "gnostic," emphasizing personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over adherence to orthodox doctrine.
The Appeal of Gnostic Texts
For Pagels, the gnostic approach held great appeal. Unlike the rigid belief systems she had encountered in evangelical Christianity, these texts offered a more open-ended, exploratory approach to spirituality. They encouraged readers to seek their own insights and understanding rather than accepting a predetermined set of beliefs.
This resonated with Pagels' own evolving spiritual perspective. After her disillusionment with evangelical Christianity, she was drawn to religious traditions that allowed for questioning, personal interpretation, and engagement with the imagination. The Nag Hammadi texts seemed to offer just such an approach.
Pagels threw herself into the work of translating and interpreting these ancient writings. Her enthusiasm and skill in this area led her to complete her graduate studies with distinction. Shortly after finishing her degree, she wrote "The Gnostic Gospels," a book that would launch her career as a prominent religious scholar and introduce these fascinating texts to a wider audience.
Challenging Orthodox Narratives
Through her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, Pagels began to challenge traditional narratives about early Christianity. The existence of these alternative gospels and teachings suggested that early Christianity was far more diverse and complex than orthodox accounts had portrayed.
For instance, some of the gnostic texts presented radically different interpretations of Jesus' teachings and the nature of spirituality. They emphasized personal spiritual experience over institutional authority and offered alternative views on topics like the role of women in spiritual leadership.
Pagels' work in this area was groundbreaking and sometimes controversial. By bringing these alternative Christian voices to light, she challenged long-held assumptions about the uniformity of early Christian belief and practice. This academic work allowed her to continue engaging with religious ideas and texts, even as her personal beliefs had shifted away from orthodox Christianity.
Personal Trials and Spiritual Challenges
The Journey to Parenthood
As Pagels' academic career flourished, she also embarked on a personal journey toward motherhood. She had married Heinz Pagels, a theoretical physicist, in 1969, and after seven years of marriage, they were eager to start a family. However, they struggled with infertility, a challenge that led Pagels to explore alternative approaches to conception.
In a somewhat uncharacteristic move for the academically-minded Pagels, she participated in a fertility ritual organized by her artist friend Mary Beth Edelson. This experience, while outside her usual comfort zone, proved transformative. During the ritual, Pagels had a powerful realization about her own fears surrounding childbirth and motherhood. Whether due to the ritual or coincidence, Pagels became pregnant shortly after.
A Child's Health Crisis
The joy of pregnancy and childbirth was soon tempered by a frightening discovery. The day after giving birth to her son Mark, doctors detected a problem with his heart. Mark was diagnosed with a hole in one of his heart walls, a condition that would require surgery to correct.
This health crisis thrust Pagels into a world of medical uncertainty and parental anxiety. While the required surgery was a relatively new procedure, offering hope for Mark's recovery, it also carried significant risks. The doctors advised waiting a year before performing the operation, as surgery on newborns was particularly dangerous.
For Pagels and her husband, this meant a year of joy mingled with constant worry. They cherished every moment with their new son while living under the shadow of his impending surgery and the possibility that he might not survive.
Uncanny Experiences Surrounding Mark's Surgery
As the date of Mark's surgery approached, Pagels experienced a series of events that challenged her rational, academic mindset. The night before the operation, while staying in the hospital with Mark, she had several unusual experiences that she struggled to explain.
First, she sensed the presence of a group of women, including a retired colleague, sitting in a circle around her. This vision, while fleeting, provided her with a sense of comfort and support. Later, she had a more disturbing vision of a threatening, inhuman figure that seemed to portend Mark's death. In this dreamlike state, Pagels found herself confronting the figure, ultimately driving it away by invoking the name of Jesus Christ.
These experiences left Pagels with a strong conviction that Mark's surgery would be successful, which indeed it was. Adding to the uncanny nature of these events, Pagels later received a note from the colleague she had "seen" in her vision, stating that she and her "sister circle" had indeed been praying for Mark and his parents on the night before the surgery.
While Pagels' academic training inclined her toward skepticism of such experiences, she found it difficult to dismiss them entirely. These events challenged her to consider the limits of rational explanation and the potential validity of more intuitive or spiritual ways of knowing.
An Unexpected Gift
In the aftermath of Mark's successful surgery, Pagels received an unexpected piece of good news. She was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as a "genius grant." This award provided her with financial support for five years, allowing her to focus on her research and writing without the pressures of full-time teaching.
The timing of this award seemed almost providential, as it allowed Pagels to spend more time with Mark during his recovery and early years. Little did she know at the time how precious this gift of time would prove to be.
Tragedy Strikes: The Loss of a Child
A Devastating Diagnosis
Just as life seemed to be settling into a new normal after Mark's heart surgery, Pagels and her family were dealt another, far more devastating blow. During a routine checkup less than a year after his surgery, Mark was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a rare and terminal lung disease.
The news was shattering. The doctors offered no hope of a cure or even a treatment. The disease was fatal in all cases, leaving Pagels and her husband to grapple with the knowledge that their young son's life would be cut tragically short.
Living with Terminal Illness
Despite the grim prognosis, Pagels and her husband were determined to make Mark's remaining time as full and joyful as possible. They became an inseparable family unit, cherishing every moment together. Annual trips to a cabin in Santa Cruz became a treasured tradition, allowing them to create lasting memories in the midst of their ongoing grief.
Pagels and her husband made the difficult decision not to tell Mark's teachers about his condition, hoping to allow him as normal a childhood as possible. They wanted him to be treated like any other child, not as someone fragile or doomed.
Yet there were moments when it seemed that Mark had an innate understanding of his situation. Pagels recalls a poignant moment when Mark, standing atop a tree stump, declared that he was "here to fight." This warrior stance seemed to Pagels a reflection of the battle his body was waging against his illness.
The Final Days
As Mark's condition worsened, the family's time together became even more precious. Just two days before his death, Mark told his mother that he would love her "all his life, and all his death." This statement, profound beyond his years, left both parents in tears, acutely aware of the limited time they had left with their son.
The end came suddenly. One day, Mark barely ate, prompting Pagels to take him to the hospital. There, he lost consciousness during a routine blood draw. In the chaos that followed, Mark's heart stopped beating. Though it briefly restarted, giving his parents a moment of desperate hope, it soon stopped again for the final time.
Grappling with Guilt and Grief
In the aftermath of Mark's death, Pagels found herself not only plunged into deep grief but also grappling with intense feelings of guilt. As a mother, she felt that it had been her responsibility to protect Mark and keep him safe. His death, therefore, felt like a profound failure on her part.
Seeking to make sense of these feelings, Pagels turned to the religious texts she had studied for so long. She realized that many Biblical stories intertwine grief with guilt, often presenting tragedy as divine punishment for wrongdoing. For instance, the story of King David and Bathsheba's firstborn son dying as punishment for David's sins, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah due to the wickedness of their inhabitants.
Pagels began to see how deeply ingrained this connection between suffering and guilt was in Western religious thought. The idea that bad things only happen to those who deserve it provided a sort of cosmic justice, but it also placed a heavy burden of guilt on those experiencing tragedy.
Recognizing this pattern helped Pagels begin to challenge her own feelings of guilt. She started to consider a different worldview, one more aligned with her husband's work in chaos theory, which emphasized the randomness and unpredictability of events. This shift in perspective – from a world governed by divine justice to one of chance and chaos – was difficult but ultimately liberating, allowing Pagels to begin processing her grief without the added weight of unwarranted guilt.
A Second Devastating Loss
Moving Forward as a Family
In the years following Mark's death, Pagels and her husband Heinz found strength in their shared grief and love. Contrary to the common belief that the loss of a child often leads to marital breakdown, their relationship deepened and intensified.
They were also still parents. About a year before Mark's death, after experiencing a miscarriage, they had adopted a baby girl named Sarah. And roughly a year after losing Mark, they adopted a baby boy, David. These children brought new joy and purpose to their lives, even as they continued to mourn Mark.
Slowly, painfully, the family began to move forward. The grief over Mark's loss never truly faded, but it became possible to envision a future and to find moments of happiness again.
An Unthinkable Tragedy
Just as life was beginning to regain some semblance of normalcy, tragedy struck again. About two years after Mark's death, while the family was vacationing in Colorado, Heinz went on a hiking trip with one of his doctoral students, Seth Lloyd.
When the hikers didn't return at their usual time, Pagels began to worry. Her fears were confirmed when she received a phone call with devastating news: Heinz had fallen while hiking. In a state of shock and denial, Pagels initially hoped that perhaps he had only been injured.
However, when Seth returned with two policemen, the terrible truth became clear. Heinz had fallen to his death when a path crumbled beneath his feet, plummeting some three hundred feet down the mountainside.
The Aftermath of Loss
The shock of Heinz's sudden death was almost incomprehensible to Pagels. In the span of just a few years, she had lost both her young son and her husband, leaving her a single mother to two small children.
The night after Heinz's death, Pagels found herself haunted by a recurring vision of his fall. The suddenness and violence of his death made it particularly difficult to process. Unlike with Mark's illness, there had been no time to prepare, no opportunity to say goodbye.
In the depths of her grief, Pagels once again turned to religious texts for solace and understanding. She found herself particularly drawn to the Gospel of Mark, with its stark portrayal of Jesus' suffering and death.
Finding Meaning in Ancient Texts
The Gospel of Mark begins with the optimistic announcement of the "good news of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God," but then proceeds to tell a story of tragedy and apparent defeat. Jesus is captured, mocked, tortured, and executed, crying out in his final moments, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
Pagels had long been intrigued by how this narrative could be considered "good news." Now, in the wake of her own losses, she found new resonance in this story of suffering and apparent abandonment by God.
She noted that some early readers of Mark's gospel, uncomfortable with its bleak ending, had added a more upbeat conclusion in which Jesus appears to his disciples after his death and ascends to heaven. But Pagels found herself drawn to the starker original ending, with its unresolved tension between suffering and hope.
In Mark's gospel, Pagels saw a reflection of her own experience – the coexistence of devastating loss and the possibility of meaning or hope beyond immediate understanding. While there was no happy ending to be found in Heinz's death, Pagels took comfort in the idea that something hopeful might still be at work in the universe, even if it was not immediately apparent.
The Long Journey of Healing
Gradual Recovery
In the years following Heinz's death, Pagels faced the enormous challenge of rebuilding her life while caring for two young children. The process of healing was slow and non-linear, marked by moments of despair as well as gradual steps forward.
Pagels found that her academic work provided both a distraction and a source of meaning during this difficult time. Her continued study of religious texts, particularly those from the Nag Hammadi library, offered new perspectives on suffering and resilience.
She was particularly struck by a story from Book VI of the Nag Hammadi, which tells of the apostles encountering a "physician of souls" who turns out to be the resurrected Jesus. This figure gives them a pouch of medicine and a box of ointments, instructing them to "first heal [people's] bodies" and then to "heal the heart."
Pagels began to see the various texts that followed this story as potential "medicines" for the soul, offering different remedies for different spiritual ailments. This metaphor resonated with her own experience of seeking solace and understanding in ancient writings during her times of greatest need.
Returning to Harvard
Nearly 25 years after Heinz's death, Pagels received an honorary degree from Harvard University. Initially reluctant to attend the ceremony, as it brought back memories of her first Harvard graduation which Heinz had attended, she ultimately decided to go, accompanied by her now adult children, Sarah and David.
Sitting among the crowd of graduates, Pagels experienced a profound moment of realization. She felt that she had, in a sense, graduated from life's harshest school – that of surviving unbearable loss. This moment brought forth a flood of emotions: gratitude for her surviving children, amazement at her own resilience, and a bittersweet acknowledgment of how far she had come.
The Healing Power of Religious Texts
Reflecting on her journey, Pagels recognized the crucial role that engagement with religious texts had played in her healing process. While not adhering to any particular faith tradition, she had found in these ancient writings a kind of "medicine for the soul."
The diverse texts of the Nag Hammadi library, with their varied approaches to spirituality and meaning-making, had offered her different "prescriptions" for healing at different times. Sometimes she found comfort in poetic celebrations of the divine, at other times in philosophical explorations of life's mysteries.
Pagels came to see that her academic pursuit of religious studies had prepared her, in an unexpected way, for the profound losses she would face. The texts she had spent her life studying became sources of solace and insight when she needed them most.
Moreover, her engagement with these ancient writings helped her feel connected to a long lineage of human beings who had grappled with similar questions of loss, meaning, and survival. This sense of connection across time and culture provided a form of comfort and perspective that transcended any specific religious doctrine.
Conclusion: Why Religion?
As Pagels sat at her Harvard graduation, overcome with emotion and gratitude, she felt she had found an answer to the question that had driven much of her life's work: "Why religion?"
For Pagels, the value of religion lies not in adherence to any particular set of beliefs, but in its capacity to provide frameworks for understanding and coping with the most challenging aspects of human existence. Religious texts, rituals, and traditions offer ways of engaging with life's deepest questions and most painful experiences.
Through her personal journey of loss and recovery, intertwined with her academic study of religious texts, Pagels had come to see religion as a rich repository of human wisdom about suffering, resilience, and the search for meaning. The diversity of religious traditions reflects the many ways humans have sought to make sense of their lives and find comfort in the face of life's inevitable hardships.
Pagels' experience demonstrates that one need not be a traditional believer to find value in religious traditions. Her approach to religion is one of engagement rather than adherence – a willingness to explore, question, and find personal meaning in ancient texts and practices.
In the end, Pagels suggests that religion endures because it addresses fundamental human needs: the need for community, for rituals to mark life's transitions, for stories that give shape to our experiences, and for ways of coping with the inexplicable tragedies of life.
Her book, "Why Religion?", stands as a testament to the ongoing relevance of religious inquiry in a modern world. It offers a deeply personal yet intellectually rigorous exploration of how engagement with religious traditions can provide solace, insight, and a sense of connection to something larger than ourselves.
Through her story, Pagels invites readers to consider religion not as a fixed set of beliefs to be accepted or rejected, but as a rich cultural inheritance to be explored, questioned, and engaged with in times of both joy and sorrow. In doing so, she opens up new possibilities for finding meaning and resilience in the face of life's greatest challenges.