Living the questions.

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels, New York: Random House, 2003. 242 pp.

MY WIFE AND I belong to a Christian Family Movement group associated with a parish that straddles the Maryland/D.C. line. When the group was founded in the 1960s, its members were concerned, as they are still, with issues of peace and social justice as well as with the spiritual formation of their families. What they sought to create was an island of calm amid the tumult of the times, a Lindisfarne where they and their children could mature in their faith and in their religious practice. The children are grown now, many with families of their own. In the past several years, members of the group, nearly all of them cradle Catholics, have been noticeably more interested in talking about questions of belief than was the case when we joined a little over a decade ago. What has become increasingly evident is that the historic creeds, steeped in Hellenistic metaphysics, are Greek to many of us. Nobody, on the other hand, has trouble relating to the Our Father.

I can perhaps justify the anecdotal lead-in to Elaine Pagels's Beyond Belief in the preceding paragraph on the grounds that her book is an unusually personal work of scholarship--in ways that bear on the faith-situation of the Christian Family Movement and, for that matter, many another Christian soul. Pagels begins her first chapter with an account of a visit she made more than twenty years ago to the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York. She was then already well known as an historian of early Christianity, with an award-winning book on the gnostic gospels to her credit; she had not, however, been to church for a long while. On the occasion of the visit in question she had just learned that her infant son was suffering from a fatal disorder, and what she needed at that moment was the support of a spiritual community, "a family that knows how to face death." She turned to the church not because she was seeking the solace of conventional religious assurance but rather because "in the presence of that worship and the people gathered there ... my defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope," including, at times, the "hope that such communion has the potential to transform us." Hers was an experience of the church as, in Philip Larkin's words, "a serious house on serious earth."

As Pagels's punning title indicates, Beyond Belief registers its author's pilgrimage to a point where she no longer feels compelled to accept the--for her, none too credible--tenets of orthodoxy as a condition of engaging in religious practice. This is manifestly a project in which her personal needs and scholarly expertise come together. What Pagels finds most appealing about the early Christianity of which she is a student is its emphasis on agape, as evidenced, for instance, in the exquisite passage in Matthew that runs: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me.... Truly, I say to you, as you did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." She quotes Tertullian to the same effect: "What marks us in the eyes of our enemies is our practice of loving kindness: 'Only look,' they say 'look how they love one another!'" ... [In] his Defence of the Christians, he adds that members of "God's family" also believed that the human family as a whole is interrelated. Thus, he says, "we are your brothers and sisters as well, by the law of our common mother, nature."

The experience of oneness and the sense of mutual concern it entails move Pagels greatly, whether she encounters them in the Church of the Heavenly Rest or among those first-century followers of Jesus described in the Didache, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles, who as they broke bread together uttered the words: "As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains but was brought together and became one loaf, so let your people be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom."

The spirit of solidarity evident in the passages above was undoubtedly a major factor in drawing adherents to the new religion, even in the face of intense persecution. This same early church was, however, an arena of doctrinal dispute, particularly with regard to the nature and role of Jesus. The key theological questions facing the church during its first three centuries were, as they remain for Christians today, the relationship in which Jesus stands to the being he addresses as Father and, correspondingly, the distance that separates ordinary human beings from God. The authors of the synoptic gospels describe Jesus "both as a future king ('messiah,' 'son of God') and a mortal invested with divine power ('son of man')." John's gospel differs from its predecessors in depicting Jesus as the Word become flesh, "a divine being who descended to earth--temporarily--to take on human form." John's Jesus claims for himself, moreover, a role as mediator between God and fallen humanity--"no one comes to the Father, except through me"--that renders him singular and indispensable.

The view of Jesus in John's gospel is, of course, the one defined by the Council of Nicaea, in 325, as orthodox. That council was convened, at the Emperor Constantine's behest, to settle questions that had been the subject of vehement controversy from the earliest days of Christianity. Until quite recently our understanding of the Christologies that rivaled the one enshrined in the Nicene Creed depended largely upon the accounts of them offered by their opponents, since writings advocating these alternative views were suppressed following Nicaea. The recovery of a number of so-called gnostic texts, especially a major find in 1945, at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, of more than fifty of them, has changed that. Like the books that make up the New Testament, these writings are typically attributed to such figures of the apostolic period as Peter, James, Philip, and Paul, although their actual authorship is as difficult to determine as that of many of the canonical texts.

The crucial work for Pagels's purpose is, as her subtitle indicates, the Gospel of Thomas. She relates the Thomas in question to the disciple in John's gospel who doubts the resurrection. Both Thomas's and John's gospels identify Jesus with the light that brought the world into being. In Thomas's account, this primordial light continues to irradiate the whole of creation: "Jesus said, 'I am the light which is before all things. It is I who am all things. From me all things came forth, and to me all things extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift up the stone, and you will find me.'" The gnomic quality of that last sentence is characteristic of Thomas, whose "gospel offers only cryptic clues--not answers--to those who seek the way to God," a God quite plainly conceived as immanent rather than transcendent.

Instead of belief in a Christ who reaches down from on high to redeem impotent sinners, Thomas challenges men, fashioned in the image of their maker, to seek God within themselves: "When you come to know yourselves," declares his Jesus, "then you will be known, and you will see that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty."

Thomas, with his stress on the inner light, estimates human capacities much more generously than does John. He and his fellow gnostics tend to situate Jesus, Pagels observes, "with ourselves on the human side of the equation." The gnostics appreciate the value of metaphor and story in illuminating the numinous, but they refuse to load such devices with finality. Thus they employ anthropomorphic images to indicate the nature of the deity but also speak of him in tones that recall the Neoplatonists' evocation of the One, the God beyond God. Hence also the gnostics' practice of reading the Scriptures symbolically; for example, one of the books unearthed at Nag Hammadi, On the Origin of the World, interprets Adam and Eve's recognition that they were naked not as an experience of shame, sexual or otherwise, but as the discovery that "'they were naked of spiritual understanding [gnosis].' But then the luminous epinoia 'appeared to them shining with light, and awakened their consciousness.'"

Pagels contrasts gnostic epinoia, the imaginative elucidation of experience, with orthodox dianoia, which focuses on the more obvious, albeit not necessarily literal, meaning of texts. Commentators who opposed the gnostics' reliance on epinoia were quick to question the validity of so freewheeling a mode of exegesis. "To what distance above God do you lift up your imaginations, you rash and inflated people?" thunders Irenaeus of Lyons, who goes on to echo the rebuke the Lord administers to Job. "God cannot be measured in the heart, and in the mind he is incomprehensible--he who holds the earth in the hollow of his hand. Who knows the measure of his right hand? Who knows his finger?"

Clearly, Pagels is fully aware of the difficulty of discerning spirits, "how to tell which apparent inspirations come from God, which from the power of evil, and which from an overheated imagination." She does her best to be evenhanded in rehearsing the arguments on both sides of the controversy, but finally she is skeptical of ecclesiastical authority and sympathetic to the party of spiritual exploration. The bishops at Nicaea formulated a firm and clear statement of belief that has served a great many people's need for assurance down the centuries, but there have always been others--Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme, George Fox and the Quakers, Blake and Rilke, to offer but a few examples--who could not lead the spiritual lives to which they had been called within the bounds of this orthodoxy. There are in fact large numbers of people neither poets nor mystics but rather ordinary practicing Christians who can more fairly be described as seekers than as believers. There is every reason to suppose that the alternate dispositions to accept and to inquire will persist, sometimes within the same person; the challenge is to make the tension between the two inclinations fruitful rather than destructive.

"I beg you," urges Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet, "to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.... [T]he point is, to live everything. Live the questions." Living the questions is itself an act of faith, faith in an order of things that supports our inquiries--the doors we go knocking on may indeed open--and allows us to commit ourselves to our hopes and affections.

RICHARD K. CROSS is Professor of English at the University of Maryland.