Religion: A Life on the Brink

Nothing that James Pike touched seemed quite the same thereafter. People, ideas, institutions: none of them was immune to the intensity of his presence. All his life he pushed himself at such a headlong pace into anything new—a new project, a new theory, a new friendship—that he often seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His role was to sting minds, being provocative rather than profound. His life was one of dazzling transitions that sometimes made him seem unstable—from attorney to churchman, from Catholic to Protestant, from bishop to dropout. Recently he had turned spiritualist. His last transition—his disappearance and almost certain death in the Judean desert—was the strangest of all.

A life so intense must exact its costs. Pike read, wrote and talked about theology, but he seldom had time to do his own serious thinking. Although books poured out of his typewriter as fast as words clicked off his tongue, he was not a theologian but a publicist of theology. His pace took its toll in personal as well as intellectual terms. He admitted at one point that he had become an alcoholic. He chain-smoked so frantically that he sometimes had two or three cigarettes going at the same time. But in recent years he had quit both alcohol and tobacco cold.

There were deep personal troubles. His 25-year marriage to Esther Yanofsky Pike, his second wife, ended in divorce in 1967. Less explicable in terms of his own energetic personality, but even more tragic, were the suicides of two people close to him. One had been Pike’s personal secretary and close friend. The other was his 20-year-old eldest son, James Jr., who shot himself in a New York hotel in 1966. Not long after that tragedy, Pike began involving himself in psychic research and spiritualism. His efforts to reach his dead son were unabashedly and painfully recorded in his most recent book, The Other Side, which he wrote with Diane Kennedy, later to be his third wife.

Glib Sermons. Pike’s earlier interest in religion was far more prosaic. Raised a Roman Catholic, he rejected Roman Catholicism in college, drifted into agnosticism, and married briefly (the marriage was later annulled by the Episcopal Church). He became a lawyer and joined the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. Religion did not re-enter his life until after his second marriage, when as a wartime Navy intelligence officer he started going to church again—the Episcopal Church. A deacon by war’s end, Pike zipped through heady advanced courses at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, and was ordained in 1946.

By 1949, Pike was at Columbia as university chaplain and head of a religion department that had no courses. When he left three years later to become dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the department had Paul Tillich as an adjunct professor and a full complement of 32 courses. At St. John’s, Pike became a celebrity and regularly drew thousands to his glib Sunday sermons. Although his belief remained “smooth orthodoxy” (he helped write an Episcopal doctrinal handbook that is still in use), he gradually became an outspoken social activist. When he rejected a degree in “white divinity,” as he put it, from the segregated Sewanee School of Theology, the Episcopal trustees belatedly desegregated the school. His early concern for civil rights was one of the forces that helped shape the Episcopal liberalism so apparent in the church’s convention last week.

In 1958 Pike was consecrated Bishop of California, moved to San Francisco’s long-uncompleted Grace Cathedral, and soon raised funds to finish it. It was in Grace, at Pike’s invitation, that Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake first proposed the Protestant unification plan that has since become the nine-church Consultation on Church Union.

What may well have been Pike’s most important legacy to his church, paradoxically, was the result of his “heresy.” He had started publicly to drift away from orthodox Episcopal interpretations in 1960, and by 1964 had gall enough to use the pulpit of Manhattan’s revered Trinity Church to call the doctrine of the Trinity “excess baggage.” Calling for “more belief, fewer beliefs,” he was willing to trim down the Credo in favor of a few basic truths: the importance of imitating Christ, for instance, as “the man for others.” Often accused of heresy by fellow clerics, Pike narrowly escaped a trial in the House of Bishops in 1966. As a result of the 1966 effort, a study group headed by Bishop Stephen F. Bayne virtually threw the entire concept of heresy out of the Episcopal Church.

Toward the end, Pike had retreated from the church. In 1966 he resigned as Bishop of California and became a fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in California. A squabble over his 1967 divorce and remarriage last year put him at odds with his friend, Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, who had succeeded him in San Francisco. Finally, he and his third wife, Diane, declared that they were leaving the church—”a dying institution”—altogether. In Santa Barbara they established a Foundation for Religious Transition for others who were leaving organized religion. Yet the church he had repudiated still carried Pike’s name on the roster of its House of Bishops at last week’s convention—which, even in disappearance, he once again upstaged.

Pike still thought of himself as a believing Christian. He questioned the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, but Jesus was still, for him, a remarkable man in whom God had “broken through”—a breakthrough, he felt, that all men should seek in their own lives. He dabbled in parapsychology, but in his confident vision of a personal afterlife, he loved to cite Psalm 84 to describe death as going “from strength to strength.” Despite the strangeness of his recent activities, friends say that he seemed happy, rested and, as usual, eagerly involved in his latest project. In a sense, it was part of an old pattern that the Right Reverend James A. Pike, once again on the brink of something new, should perish in the wilderness of the Judean desert, looking for Jesus.