Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, and the Tanner Lectures on Human Values make for a good marriage. Pagels lectures and writes widely about religion and social ethics. The Tanner Series loves nothing better.
"A driving consideration for these lectures is to discuss human values," says Dr. John Francis of the University of Utah. "And Elaine Pagels is a scholar who can speak to a broad audience about them."Pagels will dip into her latest book, "The Origin of Satan" (Vintage; $12) for her lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 14, at Kingsbury Hall. Her topic will be "Satan: Sketching His Social History." Then on Thursday, May 15, at 1:30 p.m. in the U.'s Fine Arts Auditorium she will participate in a panel discussion. Both events are free.
But anyone who shows up hoping to hear about voodoo, pentagrams and boiled chicken heads will be disappointed. Pagels's demons are closer to home. And her book - as well as her lecture - will discuss the ways human beings will demonize everything from ice cream to races of people to suit their needs.
"My book on Satan has a great deal to do with the way people envision other people and the way they treat them," she says. "But I'm not a preacher, I'm a historian. I'm interested in how we got the way we are and how our cultures develop certain patterns - partly so we can reflect on such things and decide if we need to undo them."
Pagels received her doctorate from Harvard in 1970 and has taught at Columbia University and Barnard College. In the 1980s her study of the "Gnostic Gospels" - the little-known writings of an early Christian sect - won the National Book Award and sparked national interest in early Christian scripture and belief.
"People who study such subjects do so because of personal reasons," she says today. "When I wrote about the `Gnostic Gospels' I knew I was on something of a personal spiritual quest to look at the origins of the early Christian movement. I think that's true of most scholars in this field. On the other hand, you can't do it if you're determined to see what you're looking for. You can't project your own feelings onto the texts."
That dry-eyed approach, and a buoyant writing style, give Pagels' books credibility (they all are heavily footnoted) and also a popular appeal. That marketability is not always seen as a plus among academics. But Pagels has walked the line well.
"I've been fortunate," she says. "When you're an academic you have to be very careful. You don't want to make sloppy generalizations that startle people. What I've done is write scholarly articles first, where I don't always have to explain the terms. Then, in effect, I take those articles and `translate' them; adding more context so that people who don't know, say, who Josephus was, will be able to understand more about him."
The result has been several very readable and well-received books on the early Christian era.
And it goes without saying the Tanner Lecture that Pagels plans to deliver will follow suit.