Elaine Pagels: Why Religion?

hello and welcome to st john's lafayette square my name is rob fisher and i'm the rector of st john's church i'm really happy to welcome you here virtually to our speaker series this morning and we are delighted and honored to have as our guests professor elaine pagels who is a professor at princeton university also a religious historian and a public thinker and so thank you for joining us this morning and i will now turn it over to clark urban thank you so much rob good morning everyone thank you so much for joining us we're so pleased to have back with us today professor elaine piggles some of you may remember that professor peggles was with us in person pre-code a few years back to talk about her groundbreaking work on the gnostic gospels she is a professor of the history of religion at princeton university she's been there since 1982 shortly after winning the prestigious macarthur fellowship in addition to the gnostic gospels she's the author of a number of other important books including beyond belief the secret gospel of thomas the origin of satan adam eve and the serpent and revelations visions prophecy and politics in the book of religion her most recent book is called why religion and as you will hear it is a sharp departure from the previous books in that as the subtitle a personal story suggests it's a deeply personal account of her own journey of faith and she has asked that we depart from our traditional format of lecture followed by q a and instead have it as completely a conversation first between her and me and then between her and you a number of you have sent questions beforehand and i'm sure others of you will be sending questions as we go along professor pagels earned her bachelor's degree and master's degree from stanford and her phd from harvard in addition to the macarthur fellowship she's also the recipient of a number of other prestigious awards including the guggenheim fellowship for humanities a rockefeller fellowship and president obama presented her with the national medal for the arts so with that please join me in welcoming back professor elaine paglius welcome elaine thank you i'm very happy to be here i wish it were in person but it's good that we can do this virtually that's right well thank you so much well great well why don't we start right at the beginning the title of the book as i said is why religion and you write in the book that it was seven years if i read that correctly in the making so how did where did the title come from and uh what prompted it the title is is kind of a theme of my work um i was brought up in a family in which my father had given up the kind of presbyterian christianity of his family for darwin and i was told that science was had made religion obsolete that was only for uneducated people who simply didn't know anything about science um so you know in this kind of secular academic world that my father lived in where science was king religion was non-existent and any kind of a spiritual dimension as well so it's only much later that i that i realized i was deeply engaged and fascinated with the traditions that we associate with religious traditions particularly the christian christian traditions but it's a question people often ask why religion why do you do that and when i met my husband he asked he was a theoretical physicist he said religion i mean why why don't you study something of importance in the real world and i said well why do you study elementary particles you know nobody can see nothing so but of course you know these traditions have great impact in the world absolutely you mentioned your parents and i was going to ask specifically about that you talked about their at least your father's approach to religion did your mother have a similar one and could you talk in particular about your relationship with your parents and your relationship with her in particular because that figures into the discussion later well they they just she followed you know him in a kind of traditional family he was very much the head of the family and she rather adopted his views about religion her family was nominally christian um so we went to a rather boring methodist church i mean they had nice sort of you're supposed to be nice to people that was sort of what i got out of it but that was about it it didn't have much intensity or passion the way the original methodist church did with the social gospel that wasn't much present so this was just not an important part of my life i loved poetry music drama dance now those are all the the arts that religious tradition has energized in every tradition whether it's you know navajo or whether it's buddhist or whether it's jewish or christian or whatever but i didn't know that then in fact you danced with martha graham which is a fun fact that i didn't know until i read the book right well it would be nice to say that that way clark but actually i just went to classes that her her troop taught they were elementary classes by their standards and they were phenomenal teachers one of the early scenes in the book that that really grabbed me because i had a similar experience is your exposure to billy graham you're watching the crusades uh and the impact that they had on you and your thoughts about religion at the time could you describe that well i didn't really know who billy graham was but i was living in palo alto which was very boring and friends of mine said they were going to san francisco for something so i just jumped at the chance i was 14 anything going on in san francisco was more interesting what i didn't know is that billy graham was an evangelical preacher and that the entire sports stadium you know where you could see baseball played was packed with thousands and thousands of people to hear this young evangelist then and i was 14 and he was a stunning preacher and the choir the music the power of what he said was was something that took me by surprise and it opened up a spiritual dimension and when it came to the altar call i just loved it i just jumped right in and i mean it was 14 so the idea that you could be born again and start over in a new family and you know belong to the family of god i loved it it was a powerful experience my parents though were horrified so your life was shaped by three horrific tragedies and as i read about them i thought of job and in fact later in the book you talk about joe but i hope we'll get a chance to talk about that a little bit but the question you know is prompted by reading about those tragedies how does one person bear so much grief so i want to talk about each of those tragedies and those tragedies were the death of your then boyfriend during the college years paul the the death of your precious son mark at the tender age of six and then shortly thereafter about a year thereafter the tragic death of your beloved husband hein so i want to talk about each let's start with paul tell me a little bit about paul and a little bit about the circumstances of his death and what you learned from that well actually i would say my life has not just been shaped by those things but many others but those were certainly very powerful moments um this is a high school friend um very talented artist who had quit high school and um to paint and he knew so much about painting and he was doing remarkable things at the age of 16. we had a group of maverick friends who were making music and um all kinds of havoc um when i was in high school it was very interesting um and but but i was in this evangelical group for about a year after going to the billy graham crusade however paul was killed in an automobile accident after a party in which he was with other friends of ours one of whom was jerry garcia from the grateful dead who was a friend and uh and i went back to the evangelical church and and said you know my friend has been killed in this accident they said that's terrible i mean um was he born again and i said no he was jewish and they said well then he's in hell and i felt like i'd been smacked and you know just just hit down i i was stunned and i just walked out of there stunned by myself and never went back because i thought what they're saying has nothing to do with the love of god which is what i thought this was about right so i i just had to leave and in the book you say instead of drawing people together as billy graham had when he spoke of god's love for everyone these people were like a club for people spiritually superior to everyone who didn't share their beliefs well too often that happens in every tradition as you know or at least in the traditions the monotheistic traditions judaism islam christianity and and i had to i had to abandon that for a number of years and it was much later that i thought wait a minute something powerful happened at that moment something that hit me very deeply some opening to a spiritual dimension of life you know even if not the entire evangelical community works that way he opened something in that preaching and that event so i wanted to find out whether it was christianity or religion or what so i went off to graduate school to um to find out what do we know about jesus anyway and that's when i discovered these texts called the gnostic gospels that wasn't what i was looking for i was looking for what we knew about jesus and it's hard to find that because we only have sources that are written maybe 40 years after his death but these texts show that there's much more to the christian tradition than what orthodox christianity had transmitted right and you say that in particular the quest the questions that paul's death prompted for you were where did the dead go and how do they and how to go on living alert to death's presence and its inevitability yes i mean you know it's it's shocking that someone that young can suddenly be gone like that so so that of course raised a very painful kind of question and later the very personalness i mean our son that was hard to bear he was a marvelous child and but born with some kind of um pulmonary defect that he died when he was six and my husband's death as you know was was a mountain climbing accident and so completely unexpected after we had just adopted two babies in the wake of our son's death right and let's talk about mark now your son so there were a number of what i would call in the book intimations of the divine in at least one intimation of the demonic and to talk about the divine to start with at one point i'm not quite sure when this was in relation to mark's death but i think you were putting him to bed and he said to you i love you all my life and all my death and that suggests that even at that tender age he knew he was going to die and he wanted you to know that even in death he would go on loving you and he hoped that you would find some comfort in that could you talk to us about that moment that happened two days before he died and his death was unexpected it was pulmonary hypertension which is a condition in which either children or people in their 20s typically will suddenly die of a heart harder heart attack because it's a it's an unseen illness it's it's not too symptomatic until it happens but it was stunning and my husband said i i just i was so shocked when you said that that i walked out and i said you'll never believe what mark said he said he can't have said that and i said i could not have made it up i don't know what happens you know but there were there was a sense of a spiritual dimension about all of this and an awareness in that child even and our experience of him that that was quite extraordinary yes and there's another anecdote that's like that you said that he as you said earlier was a very very spirited and lively boy and he liked to play a game that he called king of the dragons and he said at one point i am the king of the dragons and the queen of the dragons is sarah and you ask him you know who's who's sarah how does that name come to you do you have friends somebody you know named sarah he said no and then later you adopted a daughter and when you went to the adoption agency you asked them what they were calling her and they said sarah and later in later years she would wonder because she knew she was adopted whether she really belonged to your family and you were able to tell her that she did belong because her late brother knew that she was coming by having mentioned that years ago right yes and that's how that's how stories and narratives and and weaving together perceptions and hints and dreams and who knows where they come from creates meaning um in events so that i could give her the assurance just as you said clark that she did belong she was part of it um because he had known and welcomed her in fact he had uh come in with her when when when this baby was first brought to us so it was it was um it felt very connected and still does i mentioned intimations of the demonic there's by my count one instance of that and it was so arresting i'd like to talk about it for a minute and actually read from the book this was when mark was uh was dying and he was just about to go into a surgery if i had that right and you say i was startled by something else that may have been a dream although it i didn't seem to be asleep in that dream or whatever it was a menacing being male but inhuman approached me smelling like danger wordlessly threatening death mark's death terrified i fought and impulsed to turn and run feeling that if i did everything would be lost then i recall something our dance teacher often had said put weight in your feet and stand when i did the dark figure retreated but then he came forward toward us a second time even more frightening again i longed to run but resisted and managed to stand against him once again he retreated only to return a third time more terrifying than ever feeling that i could not possibly stand a moment longer i spoke a name jesus christ and at that the dangerous being fled and my fear dissolved could you talk about that experience well that was very strange actually it was years before he died he was he was then going into open heart surgery at the age of one and and of course i was worried about his survival um but that that was like a trance or something and later i asked a colleague of mine i was in teaching at columbia a colleague who studied islam and uh is a lebanese christian i said you wrote a book about iblis about satan in muslim tradition i had this weird experience and he said well that's how the stories about the satan always appeared they he three times he said this is typical story story stuff in stories about satan and i thought it's interesting that people have experiences like this and that's why although it wasn't that i thought it was satan there was an experience that i had that made me aware that when people talk about spiritual experiences and the presence of other beings spirit beings they're talking about something that actually happens it's not just a fantasy it's some kind of experience now whether it's psychological projection or whether it's some presence impinging on ours our consciousness i don't know so i just call them experiences i can't explain and i thought you know i'm a professor of religion and if i put this in the book people are going to think she's really off the deep end you know whoa and it's not something scholars do right speaking about experiences i can't explain but i know now that people have them many people have them uh many people have intimations of uh of of the the loss of someone they love of the death of someone who can be far away many people have stories they think of as miraculous i don't know how they happen i can't explain them but i do know that they happen and it makes me aware that i think christians place far too much emphasis on belief because christianity was turned into a set of beliefs in the fourth century at the nicene council but really it's what the early christians called away it's a way of life and it is about experiencing a spiritual dimension of life which is what william james wrote about in his wonderful book the varieties of religious experience so that's where i felt i was speaking to those kinds of awarenesses fascinating now let's talk about your beloved heinz he said that he was a theoretical physicist and he died as you mentioned in an accident about a year or so after mark's death let's start at the beginning though you mentioned on your wedding day you got the feeling that paul was present could you talk a little bit about that actually it was only when we went to palo alto after that just the presence of somebody who who had died seemed to be in the room with me i didn't dare say this to my new husband at the time um but i felt that i had to acknowledge this presence and i just decided to welcome it and then it changed i don't know what to make of these things as i said but it does seem to me we're living in a universe where there are many things that are mysterious and it's not that they're against science or nature it's just aspects of our nature that we don't yet have ways to understand could you talk a little bit about the circumstances of of heinz's death well he he was a theoretical physicist loved nature and like all the physicists i know was always outdoors loving to be in the mountains and the wilderness that's where they always meet that's where they met every summer in the colorado uh mountains and they do that because these are people who just grow up loving to be outdoors so it was um one of the two hikes he took every week every summer for 22 years we were married and he he just lost his footing it could well have been um a kind of post-polio syndrome he'd had polio as a five-year-old child and sometimes that creeps up on people and immobilizes nerves in the in the feet that's what his mother thought that's what i think is probably what happened but it was very shocking and it could have destroyed us it could have destroyed me i knew that and speaking of mothers your mother did not come to mark's funeral i think you said nor to heinz's right well in the family that i grew up in partly because they had abandoned any religious tradition there were no ways to deal with the the transitions in life i mean i think i was baptized and i was married in a church though heinz wasn't much of a believer it was it was a wonderful event so baptism and marriage and adolescence and death are all transition moments when religious traditions have celebrations and rituals that help people make those transitions right my family didn't do that they simply sort of pretended those things didn't happen deaths didn't happen i thought it was a very sort of middle-class kind of thing it was just a kind of awkward silence so i didn't have ways of coping with it and having to deal with it so my mother didn't come she said she couldn't leave my father at that point um there were other excuses for just avoiding acknowledgement even of what had happened but i had to deal with it and so the traditions that i study became a kind of yoga that i could explore because if you look at the hebrew bible if you look at the the new testament it speaks about it articulates it works with the things that happen to people and also the most difficult things from the garden of eden on it's about how to cope with suffering and death in a world which otherwise has beauty and life and glory there are these moments of of terrible suffering that people endure how do we do it so part of what i wrote i didn't want to write a grief memoir clark because everybody knows about grief we all do i wanted to write about the surprise that i could have joy and have a life even after those things happened and do right and that's to me very surprising and kind of wonderful that that there are ways that that human beings have learned to to get through these things and these traditions which we share culturally christian tradition being one of them and the one most closest to me offers ways of of working with that thanks be to god let's talk about intimations of the divine in connection with heinz's death so could you explain what you write about his comment your uh your your your thought that he said it's fine with me and what that means in this context well many people as you know have experiences in which in which they have a sense that the person who died is there i didn't have any expectation of that um but i was actually up at a trappist monastery roman catholic monastery way up in the mountains of colorado where through a jewish friend who's a musician i got i'd gotten to know the monks and and these monks were very were monks who conversed with buddhists all the time i mean it's a it's it's a cistercian monastery um where the monks live in silence and contemplative prayer and they were so helpful and receptive and i went there a year after uh no is it only three days after heinz died i was up at the monastery sitting with one of the monks who was a man of great spiritual depth and and after we meditated for about an hour i suddenly it occurred to me that i could ask heinz questions so i said well how do you feel about this i mean i didn't expect an answer but it was instantly as though he spoke and said it's this is fine with me it's you i'm concerned about now and i was so shocked because i thought wait a minute i would have said that's coming out of my unconscious right maybe it did but i would not have said that it wasn't fine with me at all it was devastating it was excruciating and i was so shocked that he said it that i was angry i thought he said what do you mean fine with you how can you say that we have two little babies and suddenly you're gone but but it did seem like something he would say actually because he was quite a remarkable person so i don't know what to make of these but and i thought i shouldn't include these things in the book because they sound a little weird to some people especially coming from a scholar but that's all part of the grist for the mill the sense that these traditions are not talking about ideas in your head do you believe in god do you believe in jesus it's not just that that's a different matter and to me a lot less provocative and powerful than the experiences we have that change our lives i'm so glad you wrote about these experiences in your book precisely because you are a scholar and because one wouldn't have expected uh you to speak to them or even to have these experiences frankly one more i'd like to talk about and then i want to ask what for me is the big question posed by your book and that is but but first another intimation of the don can you talk about the watch stopping heinz's watch and well that was another strange one um one of the things that that the mountain rescue gave me after his death was his timex watch which had the date and time on it and he died on the 23rd of july and i put it in the top drawer of my bureau and in new york and and was looking rummaging around there six months later around the time of his birthday he would have been 50 he died at 49. um and i suddenly saw that the time on the timex watch was the day of his 50th birthday this is six months after he died i mean i don't know what to make of that but but there's it just you know reminds me of shakespeare saying there are more things on heaven and earth than than are dreamed of in your philosophy uh or in your science because science is magnificent but it addresses certain sets of questions as my husband well knew it doesn't address questions of ultimate meaning or of questions about transcendence right doesn't try to let's talk about a major theme in the book and that is the issue of guilt you know the question is if god is as we have all been taught in the christian tradition uh all powerful and if he is all loving how is it that these kinds of things happen and you go on after posing that question to talk about guilt can you can you elaborate on that well i don't think there's a simple answer to that and i certainly don't think god sits around planning events like this uh that's that's not a view of that i share but but i do know that i felt when our son had this very rare condition of pulmonary hypertension which is a invariably fatal disease the doctors told us when he was one you know i felt i had done something wrong what what had i done what had we done what how could this happen and i felt somehow guilty and and ashamed um of of being the person who had given birth to a child with that kind of fatal defective you know pulmonary system and later i began to realize that it's not an accident that people feel when something happens they say why did this happen to him how could this happen to me why does this happen to you why did that person get this terrible diagnosis and and they we say it as though it's someone's fault but part of the reason we do it's not an accident because our culture has taught us that the garden of eden story says we would not die had someone not sinned sin is is what creates death as a punishment adam and eve sinned because they died because they sinned and furthermore i was reading the story of david king david and bathsheba bathsheba being the the woman he he desired and then had her husband killed in battle so that he could claim her as one of his wives but before they married um they had an infant son and the story in the bible says and the lord smote the son of david and boshiba because of their sin because of the sexual sin that they were together before they were married and i thought wow so this is saying when a child dies and you remember that in the ancient world 50 of children or 40 would die in infancy or childhood very high mortality rate in almost every culture so when that happens in almost every family the family is told it's your fault you did something wrong and so this is our culture it's not like you might say in a buddhist culture well life and death are part of a cycle they happen to everyone they are not your fault they are just the way the universe works but our culture teaches us that there is blame there is fault and it's probably your fault and so that adds a great deal of pain and agony especially when the person who dies as a child uh the family feels implicated in some kind of blame and that adds a great deal of suffering so i wanted to write about that for other parents because as you may know and many of us know the the death of a child is something that many people never talk about and i wanted to say wait a minute if this happens to you or people you know try to let go of the guilt and the shame because those are unnecessary sufferings when you're already suffering a great deal i'm so glad you did and that that notion is so deeply ingrained as you said in our culture that i recall from the book that your daughter sarah said after her father's death make daddy come home i'll be even she thought that she was partly responsible for his death children do feel that when a parent dies you know uh they think that the parent has left because they did something bad i mean that's just a reflex so yes i was i was saddened that she had that perception um but as i say one reason for studying the history of christianity is to see the powerful and positive influences it has on our culture it also has negative influences and has been used in many ways to have negative influences as we all know like saying that that a jewish boy who dies in an accident is going to hell well jesus was a jewish boy who died um by violence i mean that kind of that kind of um there's a lot so i study these traditions both to find what they contribute to our lives and what and what uh ways in which they can have negative influences and to say we need to let go of some of those because they're they become so unconsciously part of our perception we don't even know they're there often well now to turn some to some questions from the audience one question is and this is a particularly good one i think for you since heinz was a theoretical physicist how has nature inspired human beings quest for a higher power and i might amend that to say how if it all has nature inspired your quest for a higher power your understanding of a higher power well that's a very interesting question because in in our western traditions even the the story in genesis separates humans from animals and the rest of nature but what i found in some of the secret gospels is a different view i mean i grew up in a world loving the outdoors feeling that the awareness of the aliveness of the natural world is deeply part of us too which inspires the religious traditions of native americans of people in all parts of the world right all parts of the world have recognized spirits in in the natural world and so when i was reading the gospel of thomas for the first time i realized there were parts of the christian movement that also embraced the intimate connection between what we call nature and what we often separate as supernatural in the gospel of thomas jesus says i am the light that is before all things i am i am what brought all things into being all things come forth from me they all returned to me split a piece of wood and i am there lift up the rock and you will find me so this speaks of jesus speaking as a devoi of as a voice from the divine energy that brings the world into being and rock stones stars hippopotamuses people all of it um as part of the divine energy it may come from jewish mystical tradition which does speak of the world that way we were talking beforehand about the church in princeton that you you go to do you consider yourself to be an episcopalian now and if so uh how did you come to the episcopal church i came to this church again it was kind of an accident i was i was actually jogging around central park in a cold day after my son's diagnosis he was then two years old and i i decided to go into the church of the heavenly rest which is right there to get warm from this run and started hearing the choir sing and it was so moving and powerful and the church was beautiful and i felt a kind of peace in it and i thought you know i could actually go there on purpose so i went and met the rector and he he was a wonderful person is a wonderful person and understood very well what i was dealing with and i became a member of that church i love this church yes i'm an episcopalian i don't feel that defines entirely my understanding of of the history of religion because it's much broader than that but it's my entry into it is through the traditions with which i grew up and which are most familiar and i i love these i mean they the worship service opens with music and prayer and liturgy and it's designed to open us up to make us available for the presence of the divine final question um we talked a little bit about this yesterday the distinction between being a professor of religion history of religion in your case and a theologian a lot of people i think confused the two could you talk a little about the distinction in the importance of the distinction yes it's important to me um theologians talk about god that's what theo logos means literally and historians i think we talk about people we talk about the customs the traditions that people come up with the way they create rituals the way they create songs and hymns and prayer um not so much about god but many people so so i'm not trying to preach to my students but to invite them to think about these traditions how they have been shaped by them or not what is it about these traditions they might resonate with and find depth and spiritual energy and what in them they might discard because they find them those traditions useless or mistaken um just you know it and also recognize that what i'm thinking of is a spiritual dimension isn't limited to religious traditions and whether people go to church or any of the markers of church attendance that sociologists write about it's deeper than that i think many people who reject the churches that we like and love do so because they they're looking for something they haven't found there they're also on a spiritual quest thank you so much elaine it has been such a joy and pleasure to talk to you today about this remarkable book why religion a personal story it's right here i commend it to everyone for for your reading in fact i should have mentioned elaine that our reading group here at st john's has read uh white religion and i'm sure many of those who belong to this group have done did so and i'm sure many of them have joined the call and i hope others of you likewise will read this remarkable book thank you so much for being with us next sunday our speaker will be jim tankersley from the new york times who will be talking about his book on the american middle class thanks again to elaine pagels and thanks to all of you for joining us this sunday morning thank you thank you thank you enjoyed it good talking with you you too all the best

Channel: St. John's, Lafayette Square

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Length: 41min 19sec (2479 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020