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As you may know, I am a mega Elaine Pagels fan. Her books on religious history and faith have reshaped the way I see the world. Elaine is a professor of religion at Princeton University. In 2015, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Throughout her truly extraordinary career, beginning with the publication of The Gnostic Gospels in 1979—which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award—Elaine has been known for discovering things that have altered the historical landscape of Christian religion. Her newest book is called Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. And it is fascinating.
Today we talk about the surprising things she’s learned about Jesus and his followers, and what his most radical teaching was. We talk about why Jesus, this essentially unlikely traveling rabbi, emerged as the figure he did in our culture. And why this all still matters today.
We talk about Elaine’s own story, and her personal spiritual pull; as well as a vortex I went down in boarding school that made me understand how susceptible we all are to constraints that explain the world in overly reductive and simple ways.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we also reflect on how natural it is for us to want some sense of connection with a transcendent being. And how this has shaped the way Elaine approaches her work: Not with the intention of destroying a framework, but looking for ways to expand it.
MORE FROM ELAINE PAGELS, PhD:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
Thank you for joining me. I've been waiting for this day with so much excitement and just in general wanting to have you on my show because your books besides being formative and culture have been incredibly formative for me, all of them, the way that you have introduced the world to The Gnostic Gospels. When did that book come out? 1979.
ELAINE:
It did. I was almost out of graduate school and we had the first women's conference at Barnard, started by Kate Stimson, who was then the dean, and they said, well, why don't you add something to the conference? Tell us what you learned about women in the early Christian movement. And I said, okay. What I learned at Harvard is nothing. We don't know anything about that because they don't write books and they're not on the record. And then I realized that this literature I was working with this secret gospels are full of women disciples and also women divinities, I mean feminine divinity like wisdom and spirit and so forth. And when I was talking about one of the texts that I think I put this in my religion where the Lord is saying, I'm the larger God, there is no other God before me. And his mother says, don't tell lies yalda. His mother speaks from above and her name is holy wisdom. Holy
ELISE:
Wisdom
ELAINE:
Don't tell lies for Saba. And he's looking at what? Who said that? And 2000 women just roared laughing. And I thought, yeah, this is not about what's up there. This is about social history too.
ELISE:
Yeah, and it's interesting about wisdom and Sophia and this feminine tradition, and you could say too, we're at a time if you want to create a binary where knowledge is only getting us so far, and now we're sort of handing knowledge over to ai. And what we desperately need in this culture is wisdom and the return or the reinstatement of the feminine.
ELAINE:
Absolutely.
ELISE:
Well, it's actually difficult to know where to even start with you because your scholarship is so wide and fascinating. You must feel so excited that these gnostic gospels and obviously this book is about the New Testament and the canon as well, maybe even more so than the gospel of Thomas and some of these other incredible texts. But what a rich life in academia to be able to be one of the first people to climb into this material and expand our conception of who Jesus is, who all these figures are, and how this came to inform consciousness and our understanding of the world in each other. So fun, Elaine.
ELAINE:
Well, it's really been fascinating this time. I wanted to write about what do we know historically right about Jesus of Nazareth? What do we not know, which I would say is 90%, and why do we care? I mean, why does anybody care? And I thought, why am I teaching this stuff for so long? Why did I even start? And this book helped me understand that, but also as you see, I included some painters, contemporaneous painters or nearly so like Al and Salvador Dali and Titus Kahar and also filmmakers and poets as well just because how do they choose these stories as vehicles for what they want to say? And then three films that did the same thing.
ELISE:
One of the things that I think is so important, and this was a big theme of your book on Satan too, the origins of Satan is that you contextualize the creation of the New Testament, which happened. Well, these gospels weren't written until decades, many decades after Jesus supposedly lived and died. But also the way that this canon came together was a cultural event and an act of editing and selection and also that this is wartime literature and to understand it requires that context as well.
ELAINE:
Yes. So I wanted to use and did whatever we know about Judea in the first century from Jewish participants in the war and prominent people, and also from Romans about military, social and political history because that's a huge part of the story. I mean, when I was taken to church, which was rarely, Jesus was blonde and blue eyed and very nice and had children on his lap, there was no sense of the kind of stress that you see in the actual stories, the tension and the danger.
ELISE:
I think that, and I count myself as this, I'm not an amazing student of history, although I love this particular event, but I think that people don't realize that that Jesus was a Jew, he was a rabbi, that the Romans were absolutely not only in charge but violently in charge that Jews built the coliseum. I don't think that people realize that enslaved Jews ruled by Rome was the reality of an extended period of time. And it puts the whole Jesus story and the way that it's told in a completely different light, particularly in the way that he's crucified
ELAINE:
And maybe even in the way that he's conceived. I mean, we don't know what happened obviously, and I didn't want to make a big point of that, but you have to make a point of why would they tell a story like that there was something about his birth that was troublesome, embarrassing or whatever obviously had to be required. Some kind of do over by Matthew and Luke, neither of which story anyone thinks happened. I mean any scholar thinks happened.
ELISE:
And this you're talking about this idea that his mother was a virgin and even though that was mistranslated from parts and it's really bah, which means young woman, that virginity was ascribed after the fact.
ELAINE:
Well, yeah.
ELISE:
Well, we don't know.
ELAINE:
I'm assume so. Yeah, absolutely.
ELISE:
Let's talk in the context of sort of wartime you tell this story and I love this story and it's in Mark and it's one of the clearest cues of the way that this is coded language about Rome, and this is the story of Jesus recognizing this demon possessed man. And can you tell us that story?
ELAINE:
Well, this is as you know, the strangest story in a strange book, and it's a story about Jesus leaves his country and goes into the country of the Capernaum people and into Capernaum. And as he gets off the boat, suddenly this man runs toward him naked shrieking, a man who's obviously we would say seriously demented and he's living in the graveyard and he's screaming and bruising himself with stones and obviously possessed. And Jesus says, what is your name? And the man is stopped because he's asking of course the demons, what is your name? And they say, Legion because there are many of us and in Jesus orders the demons to come out of the man as he does in other exorcism stories of course. And the demons try to make a deal and they say, oh, well please don't make us come out of him, but look, there's a herd of swine over there.
2000 pigs over on the hill, let us go into the pigs. And so he says, alright, go. So they go into the pigs and suddenly this huge stampede of pigs, 2000 pigs start stampeding over a cliff and drown in the sea and the herders are terrified and they run away and they ask him to leave the neighborhood. Please get out of here. You think what is going on here? I mean, it's obviously an exorcism miracle being told, but it was only more recently that I realized that the face of Roman brutality was the 10th legion of Roman soldiers and their banner is of the wild boar the pig. And I realized that this is the kind of story, I mean it's a parable really, but it's told in the code that the Romans would never understand or the Greeks would never understand that you'd have to know the code if you only knew the Hebrew Bible very well or simply the Passover story.
It's a resonance of the Passover story told in a way that only devout Jews would recognize because the whole sequence of stories there is about how Moses brought his people out of slavery across the dead sea by commanding the sea to stop. And then after they escaped from Egypt, the story says that the waters of the sea closed over the Egyptian armies and they all drowned in the ocean. That's obviously an image of the legion of soldiers that's being alluded to. It is like Jesus is saying what Moses did releasing his people from foreign oppression is now going to happen again. The Messiah is here and that's going to happen. But it's told in a language that people who talk about hybridity, do you know the term
Cultural hybridity? This is man at Harvard who talks about, he's Indian and he talks about how Indian people and African people when they're ruled by the British are making jokes and stories and speeches in a language that the Brits couldn't get at all because they were their stories, but they had a point. They're giving a message. And I finally realized that miracle story, which seems so bizarre, is told as a parable. And so much of these gospels is written entirely as a script on top of the Hebrew Bible because the Hebrew Bible of course is Jesus's Bible. There's no other Bible. And the people who write what Christians call the Bible don't know their writing scripture. They're just trying to show you that what happens today in their world or happened recently is an echo of what happened before and a promise that it will happen again.
ELISE:
All right. Can I tell you my understanding? I'm not a Bible scholar. Jesus also, and you write about this in the book, the way that this desire to have him fulfill this role as the Messiah as prophesied in the Old Testament. And so it's like trying to fit puzzle pieces together to make him the thing that will theoretically redeem Israel and reinstate, get them out of slavery and overturn Rome and all of this. And so there's a lot of Jenga being played to try to make the story fit and to make Jesus into this messiah. And it's not a perfect match. And this miracle doesn't immediately happen where all the Romans fall into the sea and then you have this period after Jesus dies where Jews are still persecuted followers of Jesus, even more persecuted in some ways, right? This is not Christianity at this point.
ELAINE:
Oh, much more because it's right after this horrendous war in which the Romans have just utterly gutted Jerusalem burned the temple to the ground, the stones are still there, and they want to hope that somehow God will deliver his people again. And as you say, they want Jesus who obviously was some very charismatic speaker and prophet of some kind to be the one that God actually had in mind that he looked like a total failure though because he was crucified by his enemies. How can you say He's sent from God to rule the world, but they find prophecies and also sayings that supposedly David said when he was in trouble, king David, and they apply them to Jesus. They said, it's obviously about Jesus. So all of the Hebrew Bible obviously is foreseeing Jesus, and that's the card they play to keep their hope alive.
ELISE:
And it makes sense logically, particularly when you think about it in that context. But then they also have this predicament, right, where the Pharisees and the powers that be within Judaism are rejecting of Jesus and they're trying to stay alive under Roman rule. And so there's this retelling which has unfortunately created a lot of strife in our world and mass murder and antisemitism, although I would imagine that was not their intention, where they take Jesus' execution as a potential insurrectionist and recast it as him being murdered by the Jews. And as a Jew, I heard this as a child, the Jews killed Jesus. You're going to hell.
ELAINE:
I know I was stunned. Last year after I'd finished my class on the beginning of the Christian movement, I met the son of my former colleague whose father was a famous rabbi and she's very conversant in Jewish history. I asked this young man who was her nephew, oh, you took my class. So what surprised you? And he said that the Jews didn't kill Jesus. And I was shocked. I said, really? In the 21st century? I said, you believe that? And he said, well, yes. When I realized I wasn't looking for it at all, when I wrote The Origin of Satan, I didn't have that in mind and I wasn't aware of it. Unfortunately, Christians should be aware of it and I never had seen it, but it's deeply written into the story and as you say, the intent of saying Jesus was innocent, the Romans never really condemned him.
It was the Jewish crowds outside screaming for his death. That's completely counter historical. It couldn't happen. You could not have a crucifixion that the Governor had not ordered. It had to happen that way, but they told it differently because they were, as you say, they were in great danger. They were also being accused of being the followers of a convicted like saying, you're the follower of Bin Laden, so we know what your politics are. You can deny it, but we know you're one of those. They were being tortured and arrested and beheaded and lynched all of the leaders that we know about, and they were trying to protect themselves by claiming it didn't happen that way. I don't think Jesus was an insurrectionist. There was no sense that he had a military support, although some people try to make that case. It doesn't seem to hold water, but certainly the Romans assumed that, and certainly the Jewish leaders thought He's dangerous anyway because making public disturbances against the Romans and that's going to start a lot of public turmoil and the Romans are going to come in here in power and just destroy our people.
And that was a real danger. So the leaders were required to avert the danger to the people at Passover of somebody starting a demonstration and get rid of this man.
ELISE:
I don't want to take us into a total parking lot, but I've been thinking a lot and writing about that event too in the context of René Girard and the scapegoat mechanism and the unconscious action of the mob and the way that we get caught up in that regardless of the historical or cultural reality of what happened, it's the scapegoat mechanism and action and biggest stage still, right?
ELAINE:
Yes. The consequences of it are horrendous. That's not the only thing that aroused antagonism against Jewish communities, but it was by far the strongest thing because before Christianity, there were protests by Egyptians and Greeks saying, well, they want to be citizens, but they're not willing to fight on Shabbat and they're not contributing enough money to our temples because they won't do that, and anyway, they worship this other God. So there was antagonism in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, but nothing like when it has a religious power behind it that gave it huge energy and it still has.
ELISE:
Yes. And one of the things that you write that's so beautiful, you were talking about this function of Jesus, which is so different. You write about how Plato in his reception and re-articulation of the Genesis myth, which is the story of our formation in the Torah, the Old Testament, whatever you want to call it, and that you talk about how Plato had recommended, I'm reading, had recommended helping people in need, but only people of one's own status, certainly not indigents the poor or people enslaved and other rabbis of Jesus's time preached as he did the scriptural injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. But instead of focusing such charity primarily on other Jews in his community, he shocked his listeners by urging them to lend compassion and practical help to anyone who is sick in prison or hungry to a disgrace and ungrateful son or even to an enemy. That is really his most radical teaching.
ELAINE:
Yes, it is. Rabbi Hillel would say, do not do to anyone else what you don't want done to you. And Jesus would turn it a bit and say, and whatever you want done to you due to others, he just turned it into a positive direction. He's obviously interpreting Torah, but in a way that's very powerful,
ELISE:
Very powerful.
ELAINE:
I've often thought about Jefferson saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Well, there's nothing self-evident about that at all. Aristotle said, it's evident that some people are born to be slaves, some people born to be masters and to say it's evident. I mean, he was lying, of course. He was talking about created, he's talking about the creation story about Genesis one, which has been revised to mean actually not only all men but all people.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, and it's wild. And also that Jesus was not antithetical to Judaism. He was just evolving it. He was just making it bigger. He was expanding the tent,
ELAINE:
Not antithetical at all those antithetical messages. For example, if you read Matthew 23, Jesus is talking about the Pharisees as hypocrites, and he calls 'em all sorts of terrible names, sons of Hell, even that's written at a time when after the war, it's 20 years after the war when the Jewish groups that are trying to reestablish a judicial system and a sort of overseer role for their own people in a Roman empire were very much opposed to Jesus as followers who were seen as ionist. They were dangerous. They wanted to dissociate from them. They strongly did, and they strongly attacked people who followed Jesus as followers of a heretic. And Jesus' followers retaliated. This is 20 years after the war and about 70 years after the death of Jesus that you see that antagonism between Jews who follow Jesus and Jews who despise it, but early on you don't see it that way.
ELISE:
One of the things that I relate to in many ways, and it's interesting, I was with my parents when I was reading your book, we were skiing together in Montana, and my mom knows who you are and she finds my fascination with, she would call herself a recovering Catholic, and she hates any organized religion and particularly fundamentalism, and I understand it to some extent, but she's very wary of my appreciation and interest in Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this period of time and similar to you, and you write at some point about how for so many historians, yes, you're historians, but there's a spiritual quest involved. And when you think about his story, it is wild that he would emerge. I mean, it's incomprehensible that this itinerant traveling rabbi who is crucified along with thousands and thousands of other people would emerge as this figure in our culture, but because something incredible about him, what is that? What ineffable pull?
ELAINE:
That's a great question. I'm not sure I could answer it adequately. I'm sure I couldn't answer it adequately. We don't know what he was like. He must've had a huge impression on people, but just the idea of treating other people as oneself with that kind of care, I think that mattered for one thing. Secondly, you remember that this movement, very unlikely movement began to flourish in the Roman Empire. And when you look at who are the gods of the Roman empire, they look like the emperor. They look like the emperor and his court with beautiful banquets and making love, making war aristocrats. But this Jesus of Nazareth, I mean they say he was illiterate probably he was a country person. He was killed as a slave in the horrible, worst way. And yet people who were convinced that God had sent him and God was in him, and God had transformed the world through him, that spread in the Roman empire among slaves, among people at the bottom who didn't agree with the Roman aristocratic understanding of what the empire was, they saw the cruelty, the brutality of it, and they joined a movement that was being intensely persecuted,
Followers of a crucified Jew. As TAs said, how could you be so stupid? He was saying, but they did because it was a message of compassion and care.
The earliest fathers of the church, Churchillian says, our group, our Christian society in Africa, we take care of orphans. We take care of women who are widowed so they don't have to be prostituting themselves. We feed people, we give them what they need in our community the way Jews always did, right? The Jewish community would take care of its people, and that's the ethic that they took up in very cruel parts of the empire. And that must have attracted many people to them.
ELISE:
So interesting because to this day, the way that Jesus is so foundational to so many communities who would, I guess widely be perceived as those who are oppressed continually by our culture, and then how he also becomes, he's wielded in Christian nationalism and white supremacy, which is so funny because he wasn't white as justification for oppression. It's so interesting to watch the split in the way that he is perceived, translated and then held. Is that true of other people who are perceived as being divine? You don't really see that with Buddha.
ELAINE:
I don't know. I don't know enough about that. I mean, I do know in the Buddhist, in the centuries of empire, in Buddhist cultures, there are dominant groups that oppress others and so forth. So I don't know whether they picture the Buddha differently. I can't imagine they do. I don't think anyone sees Jesus as a ruthless ruler. It's clear that ruthless rulers, and we can name a few, feel that they need the support of the most widely spread religion in the world to persuade people of their message. And that's what we saw happen. Just numbers of people turn to a kind of Christian nationalism and white supremacy. That is staggering.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting too. I did not know this, but you write about three 12 ce A miracle happened. Constantine, a military leader and the illegitimate son of one of Rome's rulers sent shockwaves throughout the empire by becoming emperor after suddenly shifting his allegiance from Rome's God to Christ the divine champion who he insisted had helped him kill his chief rival in battle and given him victory. So interesting that that's the event
ELAINE:
Absolutely right. That Christ becomes a conqueror, and the image that he had over his palace was of Christ spearing Satan, and he identified Satan as his rival for sole rule of Rome. And so the military, Jesus arrived with Constantine. That's true. I wasn't thinking of that. And then you see it throughout the Middle Ages as well in the so-called Christian empires, and even in Britain, the insignia of the royal family is God and my rights.
ELISE:
I did not know that.
ELAINE:
Well, yeah. It's the insignia
ELISE:
Of the royal
ELAINE:
Family of Britain, and it's all about the state and it's all about God and also even torturing and killing heretics.
ELISE:
So thinking of the spiritual pull for you, and I know that you briefly dabbled, that was part of your formative, you came from an academic family, then you were drawn into an evangelical church, right? Until was it a Jewish friend that was condemned? Yeah. So interesting.
ELAINE:
Yeah. What happened was my father had given up religion as your mother had because he was very disturbed that it was irrational. As soon as he discovered Darwin, he said, religion is for people who just silly old stories. We don't need that. We follow rationality. And he became a biologist. But when I went to a Billy Graham crusade and the age of 14 or 15 and suddenly, and I was overwhelmed with the power of the thing, I didn't even know what I was getting into at all, but it was all about how America was a sinful nation, and I'd never thought that in my family, in which science was the highest learning of the world, Graham was saying, well, they've killed a hundred thousand people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima with these weapons that scientists have built with no thought of ethics at all. And he talked about a sinful nation and my family were immigrants from Holland and Switzerland, and they thought, this is the best nation in the world.
And suddenly he spoke about slavery and oppression in a way that really spoke to me as an adolescent. And then he said, and you could have a whole new life. I just went into it and it felt joyful. It felt like opening up the sky to this great drama which you could participate. It's God against Satan, and you're with this whole crowd of people. It's a huge imaginary vision of good and evil, and I found that whole idea of Jesus and God and all of that very compelling. For about a year I went to an evangelical church, but it was, as you said, when one of my friends in high school was suddenly dead after a car crash, after a party 16 years old, I went back and I said to my friends there, my friend was just killed in an automobile, very close friend actually, and they said, well, was he born again? And I said, no, he was Jewish. And they said, well, then he's in hell. I felt like I'd been socked in the stomach. I just couldn't, couldn't respond. I was just utterly speechless and I just walked out of there and never went back. I'm done. I'm done
With that. It didn't make any sense. And it was only about four years, five years later when my other career didn't work out becoming a dancer, becoming the next Martha Graham. It didn't happen.
ELISE:
So glad it didn't happen it.
ELAINE:
I had to find a plan B. So I thought, well, what was that all about that it kind of experience with these evangelicals? I wasn't going to go back to them, but I thought, could it have been Buddhism if it were Judaism? Why is there still religion around anyway if it's all obsolete? So I went back to graduate school to a secular school and studied it, and that's when these secret gospels were suddenly released for our group to translate. And I found the whole different vision of Christianity in the gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary in the gospel of Philip, much more open-hearted, much more not about sin and damnation, but about opening oneself to divine reality. And I really believe Elise, that the gospel of Thomas is rooted in Jewish mysticism more and more. I see that. I mean, the people who first read it made that suggestion, geisha, Schlom, Moses Gaster and others. That was much earlier when those texts were discovered. And I think that is probably the case because the language of the gospel of Thomas is very much the kind of imagery and language you find in kabbalistic texts thousand years later, but they're not written down. That's on principle. So the only kinds of things like that that you get written down that early, are written by followers of Jesus who by that time are somewhat distant from the Jewish community, but probably not that either. And Jesus probably was aware of secret teaching.
ELISE:
Yeah. Didn't he allude to it? Wasn't that part of it that he was like, there are certain teachings that I reserve only for, although wasn't he also frustrated with the apostles in terms of their ability to understand the underlying message?
ELAINE:
Absolutely. I mean, the gospel of Mark in chapter four says, when he was alone with his disciples, he said to you, is given the secret of the kingdom of God. I'm not telling them, I'm just giving them parables. And Christians, pastors will say, well, that's because he'd make it nice and simple, blah, blah, blah. But it's not to make it simple. Mark says, Jesus said, I tell 'em that so they won't understand it, but I'm telling you so that you will understand it. But no, I'm not telling anybody outside and the New Testament gospels are all claiming to be the public teaching of Jesus. These secret teachings were reserved and they weren't public, and they take everything to a very different level.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, it's gnostic right to know it's more of an interior experience.
ELAINE:
Yes. It's about spiritual experience. Paul, who was also deeply immersed in Fara tradition, also knew mystical tradition and said that he sent his spirit up into the heavens and he was allowed to have experiences of visions. And there are many Jews in the second and third century who are writing a mystical literature. My colleague Michael Stone at the Hebrew University has done enormous work on this. In fact, we're working on some of it together even now because some of those texts are mystical texts. That's another level of this tradition that was suppressed for 2000 years.
ELISE:
Couldn't you say, and I've read some channeled, quite out there texts about this, but that the resurrection and this resurrection experience, which you quote another historian who says, we have to take this as fact. It's so widely reported of people experiencing a resurrected Jesus eating with him, talking to him. We obviously have Paul on the road to Damascus, et cetera, but the way that I would interpret that in modern parlance is like an experience of his ethereal body, medium ship coming in, some sort of other etheric body, psychic body, that it's quite mystical. I don't know.
ELAINE:
Well, I think I would've written it differently if it hadn't been that I had a couple of experiences of people who died that were close to me. I didn't think they were there. Exactly. Certainly not physically, but often people talk about the presence of someone who's died, whom they suddenly are aware is right there. I mean, you can read many accounts of this. I've been interested in some of those, and Jesus was a very charismatic person, as I said. So it is not surprising, and especially when somebody dies, suddenly people often have that experience.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I was just thinking of your experience this experiencing and the gnostic gospels and this knowing, and this is such an essential ingredient in any sort of faith. Otherwise it becomes a cognitive process where you're trying to understand what to believe, and meanwhile what seems to be experienced is a deeply felt deeply encounter with something.
ELAINE:
Well, yes, and that's really what most religions really are. I mean, people make a mistake of using Christianity as a paradigm for what religions are, that Christianity turned into a set of beliefs in the fourth century. Do you believe this, this? And then they say, and what do Jews believe in? What do Muslims believe in? What do Buddhists believe? Well, mainly as I understand it, you don't have to believe things to be Jewish. The question is, are you orthodox? Are you reform? What is the level of your practice if you have one? It's not about what you believe. You don't even have to believe from the guys that I know you practice and the work of Tanya Luhrman. I don't know if you've ever encountered it. She's brilliant. She's this anthropologist at Stanford, Tanya Luhrman. She wrote a book called How God Becomes Real, and she says, why do people in the world still practice religions?
Tanya's not a religious person. She didn't start that way. She started working with a cove of witches in London to try to understand how do they really think they could be witches? And she practiced their practices and she said she began to see the things they saw. She said, what changes people is not beliefs? What changes people is doing certain things, practices like if you say a prayer three times a day, if you follow the rules for Shabbat, if you talk to Jesus, if you do your Buddhist meditation, she said, it's not that people believe things that you and I, that their practice transforms them so that it's not about what they believe. They have relationships in the community. They have relationships with the invisible being that the community focuses upon about the Lord, right? The prayers to the prayers that are given every day and so forth. And she says, those practices are what transform people. And so it's relationships that transform people, and they are created by communities teaching how to transform your consciousness, your awareness by meditation, by prayer, by fasting, by sleep deprivation. There are many techniques that'll do that hallucinogenics will as well. So she says they're not just people who believe things we don't. They're people who experience things differently.
ELISE:
Well, and I think that, I can't remember the exact stat that just came out from Pew Research Center, but it's a rapidly decreasing number of people who say, I'm Christian, or I abide by this particular religion and this set of beliefs, but it's, I think 80% of people feel that they are spiritual and or have some deeper faith. And in a way, it's almost like Jesus or all of these wisdom traditions, Kabbala, the gnostic, gospels, SuPM, they're all talking about the same thing really in many ways, which is this deeper inner experience. And it feels like that's starting to explode outside of a church, which makes sense. Jesus didn't preach in a church, he didn't have a church. He had 12 followers in the desert
ELAINE:
Outside. Yes, it's exactly that. I mean, I wasn't interested in believing, but what is it about the experience that happens? It can happen in nature, it can happen in music and creative work and love of some reality beyond what's visible in which we all participate. And I have come to the sense that that's very important for me, not believing in a particular church or Jesus or whatever, but the sense of something beyond us. So many people who write kind of thing I write are writing for people who are former evangelicals who say, okay, now I realize it was all stupid, and I want to say, no, it's not stupid. It's just taking, it literally does not transform you the way an openness to some unknown reality does.
ELISE:
And I would say thinking about your experience of evangelism or I was thinking about how in boarding school I went down an Ann Rand Vortex where I just was so deeply I was applying to a lot of people do, right?
ELAINE:
He's quite a writer.
ELISE:
And so suddenly I was applying to Anne Rand scholarships and I had developed this extreme libertarian bent. It didn't last for that long, but there was something about that experience that was very formative for me where I was somehow jostled out of it. But it was a very important thing because it made me understand how susceptible we all are to constraints that explain the world in very reductive and overly simple ways. And that's in many ways, religion with its dogma and its rules, and it has obviously really wonderful parts of it and ritual and ceremony, I think when you recognize that's the thing actually, but being able to have my own experience is the thing.
ELAINE:
Yes. I really have always loved William James with varieties of religious experience.
When I was in graduate school, I found another book called The Spiritual Experience of Man. Of course, that's written by an Oxford Don, but he was a biologist, and he said, it's perfectly natural that humans want some sense of connection with transcendent being, whether they see it as nature or the glory of the world or the universe or whatever, that this is just a very great part of human nature, and I love that. I mean, that's why I'm not trying to destroy these things, but trying to say they're all reaching for something else and many ways to do that. It doesn't have to be in any overt way at all.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think Richard Rohr has this line that's essentially, they're pointing to the moon and we look to them rather than looking to the moon, but just look to the moon. Yes. I just butchered that, but you get the vibe.
ELAINE:
I do. And he's one of those, he's a monk, right? And he's had this practice. He's given up dogmatism. I really am not interested in dogma or
ELISE:
No. Well, and he even in the Center for Action and Contemplation, he talks about putting action first because you have nothing to contemplate until you take action in the world. I think that is so wise. This isn't, again, it's not a way of thinking. It's a way of acting and being.
ELAINE:
Yes.
ELISE:
Well, thank you for this book. Well,
ELAINE:
I really enjoy talking with you.
ELISE:
Yeah, this is so fun. And if you can't tell, I'm so grateful for your pioneering work in the world and what a career. It's amazing.
ELAINE:
Well, it's been really wonderful to be able to explore these things and to be at a place where I could do that with other people who are searching in the same way. I mean, a lot of my colleagues are like that, and it's great.
ELISE:
Such a fun life. I'm glad you didn't become a dancer.
ELAINE:
Well, I still dance, but yeah, I wasn't good enough.
ELISE:
Well, we benefit. We all benefit. I interviewed Elaine several years ago for her memoir Why Religion?, which is about the loss of her son and her husband, her first husband. It is a beautiful memoir about her life and scholarship, and I highly recommend that. And obviously The Gnostic Gospels, if you've never read it, is a classic, classic, classic, classic in this space and miracles and wonders. Another part of the Elaine Page's tradition, and it's really an interesting book, particularly for this moment in time, for all moments in time. But that was really fun. Before I leave you, I want to read, I've read this quote many times to you, but it stands for what we're talking about, which is this idea.
You could say that there is a polarity between knowledge and wisdom, and there's also one between belief and faith. And I think about this all the time. In fact, I police my own language for the word belief because beliefs I think can be destructive. And this is from Alan Watts, and this is in The Wisdom of Insecurity, which is an amazing title because as we know, there's the wisdom of insecurity. There is no certainty. All right, but this is this. I do not at this point wish to seem mysterious or to be making claims to secret knowledge. The reality which corresponds to God and eternal life is honest above board, plain and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind. Just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes, the discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief.
Whether one believes in God or believes in atheism, we must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith because in general practice belief has come to mean a state of mind, which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions. It is a plunge into the unknown belief clings. But faith, let's go in this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
Alright, miracles and wonder by Elaine Pagels, I am so grateful to all of you for joining me today. If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible.