Elaine Pagels affirms life after physical death

Elaine Pagels, History of Religion professor at Princeton since 1982, is best known for her research and books about what are generally identified as the Gnostic Gospels. Her book with this title published in 1989 received both the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Her 2018 book, Why Religion? A Personal Story, reveals her struggle for a religious faith, after the deaths of her son Mark, who died in 1987 from pulmonary hypertension at age six, and her husband Heinz, who a year later fell from a cliff while hiking.

Her son’s death devastated both Elaine and Heinz. “We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. I was moved by what another bereaved mother, Maria of Paris, a Russian Christian whom Orthodox Christians revere as a saint, wrote after her six-year-old daughter died; she felt her ‘whole natural life . . . shaken . . . disintegrated; desires have gone . . . meaning has lost its meaning.’

“But instead of sinking into passivity, she risked her life to save the lives of other people’s children during the Nazi occupation. When German soldiers forced Jews into a central square of Paris before shoving them into trains hurtling toward the death camps, Maria slipped into the square to join them. There, whispering hastily, she persuaded several parents to allow her to hide their children in garbage bins, and so to save their lives, which she did, finding families to care for each one of them. Later, when she and her own son were arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to the death camps, she exchanged places with someone targeted for the gas chambers, serene in the conviction that she’d done what her faith required, choosing to enable others to live. Many other parents whose children have been killed by gun violence, war, drunk drivers, or disease also choose to create meaning by working to spare other people unfathomable losses like their own.”

The death of her son and husband led Pagels to seriously consider if she could believe in a life after death. She writes: “Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.

“More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled ‘Superman at Fifty!,’ which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.

“Could this be coincidence? Of course, it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them ‘across the shining river.’ At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.”

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion?  (p. 104, 137-138). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.