BOOK REVIEW: ‘Why Religion? A Personal Story’ by Elaine Pagels

OPINION:

WHY RELIGION? A PERSONAL STORY

By Elaine Pagels

Ecco (HarperCollins), $27.99, 235 pages

 

Scholar, author, historian, heretic, MacArthur genius and more, Elaine Pagels is a hard person to describe in a word. At this moment, “hero” fits best, namely an individual who faces ordeals of indescribable agony and prevails — incidentally setting an example for others who hear of that victory.

Defined that way, the hero’s tale must be an “epic” despite this book’s brevity. While it appears a memoir straddling the academic and the spiritual, it remains intrinsically personal, as the subtitle declares, and enigmatic, journal of an odyssey without end. Contrary to standard practice, the narrator gives away the plot of the “story” and its climaxes at the start, not even awaiting page one, but on page xiv:

Ms. Pagels’ firstborn son, Mark, afflicted with an incurable disease, dies inevitably at 5, then months later her brilliant and hale husband, Heinz, is killed suddenly, in indescribable violence, falling from a Colorado mountain. And a page earlier she answers “Yes, incorrigibly” in reply to the title’s question recast as “Are you religious?”

What more is there to say? Well, remember Dylan Thomas’ puzzlement at the Christmas present of a book “that told me everything about the wasp except why?” Ms. Pagels goes further: Why religion? Because it’s there. Like Everest it can be approached (or ignored by those who so choose), but for those who acknowledge it, or embrace it without question, or wrestle it like Jacob with his Angel, religion is a fact of life. In Ms. Pagel’s view, belief or faith has been a principal factor in human cultures since time immemorial — and more power to it.

In part autobiography, her ninth book opens with a sketch of growing up in soulless prosperity. Her agnostic parents set her on the path that led to a professorial chair at Princeton. (En route, while studying religion at Harvard, she is assaulted by a professor of divinity who traps her in his basement while his wife and children sleep upstairs; this serial predator is an ordained minister and her adviser.)

Her studies nonetheless open up vast worlds in the newly discovered realm of the secret scrolls that give rise to her books “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979) and “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” (2003). She conducts almost forensic investigations of God, pursued in counterpoint between the cerebral toil of scholarship and the emotional lace of living.

These books are popular, scholarly, provocative and controversial. To risk a summary: They argue that the New Testament as holy writ is incomplete. This Bible, compiled and certified by leaders of the early church (men with political axes to grind), omit testimonies that those compilers found contradictory or inconvenient. Said more positively: Many sacred texts didn’t make the cut and deserve respect if not our reverence. All of this is backstory to “Why Religion?”

Meanwhile she met and married Heinz Pagels, a theoretical physicist and, like herself an Alpha figure in his field. That they thrive in superficially diametric disciplines is not lost on them; each is trying to make sense of reality, Heinz in the invisibilities of subatomic matter, Elaine in the dark corners of distant history.

Then they are blessed with this luminous, doomed child. Her portrait of Mark, and her acid-etched montage of parental grief become a masterpiece, Michelangelo’s Pieta in words on paper. Yet these passages go further, because in the boy’s death his grieving mother experiences an epiphany that I will not risk counterfeiting in a summary. Let two quotes hint at the nature of this family’s blessings: One night at bedtime Mark tells his mother “I’ll love you all my life, and all my death.” Not long after, Heinz admits “I would’ve given my life for him, but no one would take it.”

Similarly and subsequently, Ms. Pagel’s stumbling descriptions of learning the facts of her husband’s violent accident and its sequelae are extraordinary — testimony to the depths of human despair and the elastic breadth of resilience. Facing the indescribable loss of two people closest to her, she addresses the tangled tasks of dealing with guilt and its sibling anger, while surviving a journey through unimaginable pain, then describing the trek and the pain itself.

One mark of genius in this book is its intermingling of disparate events, ideas and people: A physician tested beyond the limits of her skills; a cloistered monk who makes house calls; meditating Trappists (typically bound by vows of silence) who attest to waves of silent, sympathetic forces.

One mark of Ms. Pagels’ religious belief (or faith?) is her distain for religiosity. Witness her reaction to the Sam-Browne piety of the cop who brings the news of Heinz’s death and states, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” She tears a door off its hinges in reply.

Is it fair to unconditionally recommend for inquisitive readers a book that one doesn’t fully understand? Certainly, no less than it’s right to root for the Nationals when you know they cannot win. Or to acknowledge God who you cannot define or describe. Fact is this book, both radiant and opaque, deserves more than one reading.

• Philip Kopper, publisher of Posterity Press in Chevy Chase, Maryland, writes about culture and history.