The Devil Problem by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7363-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Now that Pagels has finished going over the proofs for The Origin of Satan, she is starting to consider her next project. This time, she is thinking about the problem of religious participation—the contrast between how people can participate in religious traditions and rituals quite apart from accepting basic propositions of the Church. “What happens with Christians—people brought up nominally as Christians, as I was—they ask themselves, Well, do I really believe that?” Pagels said. “Do I believe that Jesus was the son of God, or whatever. And if they answer the question in the negative, they tend to abandon the tradition. That’s quite different from Judaism. You can go to a seder and it doesn’t matter if the person next to you is observant or is just home for the holidays. Everybody can participate in the seder, or go to a service. What you think about it or believe about it is not necessarily important. Rather, it’s a kind of connection with a community. In a Christian community, that doesn’t exist as much. Many people, if they don’t believe, leave the religious traditions behind.”

Sometimes, in our conversations, I got the feeling that the invisible world is still very much a presence for Pagels. She talks about Heinz often. He is there in her talk and, it seems, in her being. The loss must still be unbearable. At the same time, she told me that for the past few years she had been seeing “a wonderful man,” a prominent law professor at Columbia named Kent Greenawalt. Like Pagels, Greenawalt was widowed six years ago; he has three sons ranging in age from twenty-four to seventeen.

“When you’re seeing Elaine now, you’re seeing someone who has gone through horrible stuff,” her friend Elizabeth Diggs said. “If something terrible happens to you, you can either become heroic in the face of the awfulness of it and end up a better and stronger person or become diminished by it, become a victim and give in to self-pity and rage. After a time, Elaine came out on the other side. She’s come out larger and more generous, kinder and more mature.”

At the end of my last meeting with Pagels in Princeton, I mentioned what Elizabeth Diggs had said—that she had changed in the years since the deaths of Mark and Heinz. Pagels smiled. “At first, what I really felt had changed was that I unwillingly had to take on many of the tasks that Heinz had taken on in our life together—as a parent, as a provider, as a taxpayer, as an organizer, as the person who takes care of the car,” she said. “There are certain ecological structures in any marriage—some with a traditional gender bias and some not. Simply, people take on certain roles. In a way, I had to do everything. But, most of all, I also wanted to take on the challenge of not giving up, of not despairing. Because Heinz was on the side of life. He loved life. He was full of explorative excitement, interest, passion.

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