The Death and Life of Bishop Pike

Since we have begun to focus with unusual intensity on the “private” lives and sexual troubles of our Presidents and Congressmen, it may be time —and perhaps even more appropriate —to give the same scrutiny to our ministers, priests and bishops. More appropriate because, in a way that is less true of secular leaders, the professionally religious man makes more claims for the sign value of his life. He tries to say, with St. Paul, “As I imitate Christ, imitate me.” But, paradoxically, humanity both intrudes on and becomes the vehicle of this imitation. In literature and in life the weakness of the “whisky priest” or libidinous pastor can heighten the force of the sign, for here is Paul's shattered “vessel of clay” struggling to allow God to accomplish his will, once again, in the unexpected way.

Today, only seven years after his death, if anyone under 30 remembers Bishop James A. Pike it is as the sad character who “died lost in the desert” or “had that seance on TV.” To others he was the most controversial clergyman of his day: Columbia University chaplain, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bishop of California, social activist, gadfly intellectual, TV personality, then—in a final behavior pattern that led some to question his sanity—ex‐bishop, “heretic,” worn‐out self‐publicist and mystic manqué.

The lawyer‐poet team of William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne have written not a formal biography but a virtually unedited, repetitious, loving but frank compilation of interviews, letters, speculation and polemics, as forensic and disconnected as their subject himself. Somehow, through the confusion, Pike comes back to life and re‐engages us in his cause.

Born and raised a Roman Catholic in a fatherless home, James Pike, who as a child used to put religious vestments on paper dolls, never wanted to be anything but a priest. But it was more than a vocation, Stringfellow and Towne suggest: it was a covenant with his mother, an assurance that their relationship would always endure. After high school, when he wanted to go right into the seminary and his new stepfather wanted to send him to an Ivy League college, his mother insisted he put off the priesthood and go to Jesuit Santa Clara University, lest he lose his faith. He did, and “lost his faith” in two years. Later, in fervent and sometimes hysterical letters to his mother during World War II, Pike, a young lawyer and naval officer in derided his former church for its authoritarianism and “fascism” and pleaded with his mother to join him in his new‐found “democratic” Anglicanism, where the clergy had a “humility and man‐to‐manners” unlike some of the “domineering, slippery, pompous” Jesuits he had known in college.

By William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne. Illustrated. 446 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $10.

If he had stayed with the law he might have become a legal scholar. He was co‐author of an administrative law text which is still useful, and many of his later popular theological writings, like “You and the New Morality” and “If You Marry Outside Your Faith,” are the exercises of a legal mind, case studies balancing and weighing alternatives, avoiding what he calls “pre‐fab” answers, groping for practical solutions.

But his passion was pastoring, incur nated in different—often contradictory —forms: the relative simplicity of the Anglican liturgy (would Jesus wear a stole?); the political heat of the civil rights and antiwar movements (he swooped into the Catonsville Nine trial courtroom and started giving strategy advice to William Kunstler without even studying the case); pursuing and promoting each intellectual fad like situation ethics or the Dead Sea Scrolls as if he himself had discovered them after long research (to use John Cogley's description in Life); raising questions at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara that didn't really grab the other wizards; precipitating a heresy trial embarrassing enough for the church to end heresy trials for all time; acting out his own religious and per sonal crises in public dramas, turning them into causes that fed his own fame and gave some heart to other priests and laymen who were struggling with the same weaknesses and doubts.

There is little reason to read a Pike book, like “If This Be Heresy,” today except to find out what the fuss was about in 1967 when he simply publicized interpretations of the Virgin Birth, salvation and the Trinity that were and still are accepted by academic theologians. The interest today is not in the ideas but in the man. For, if he was God's instrument, he was, in many ways, as flawed an instrument as God could choose.

People loved him. He always held onto a friend. And much of the hatred he inspired was the petty jealousy of fellow clerics who wrote off his natural gift for using the rather susceptible media to spread his version of the Gospel as sheer vanity and self‐promotion. But, except for his 1964 decision to overcome his alcoholism, he had very little of what a priest has to have—discipline. Two of his three marriages failed. His oldest son blew his head off in 1966, disconsolate with fear of his own homosexuality. Pike's daughter attempted suicide two years later. For three years he kept a secretary‐mistress who killed herself at the end of one of their domestic squabbles. He “informally married” his third wife, a student 24 years younger, than he, a few years before he “formally” married her.

Politically naive and gullible, with no sense of how mean other men, particularly fellow clerics, could be, he allowed himself to be tricked and exploited by shyster mediums in ludicrous, public, guilt‐ridden efforts to contact his dead son. Worst of all, he could not listen—to his distraught son, to his colleagues, to real living people around him trying to break through the impenetrable wall of talk‐talk‐talk he threw up to ward off what deep down he did not want to hear. The Archbishop of Canterbury once yelled at him: “Shut up! Will you be quiet!” But he kept yakking. When he claimed the late Paul Tillich was calling him from beyond the grave, the widow Hannah Tillich wrote and told him to stop chasing illusions, to face his demons—“the order of the day is: ‘Face thy Self.’ ”

Although toward the end he said he realized that his hyperactivity was a flight from personal problems, it does not seem he ever really understood. In 1969 he left the institutional church, chased his notion of the “historical Jesus” into the Judean wilderness in a rented car with a bad map he couldn't read, got lost and died with the drama of a religious media hero, but sadly, like the anti‐hero in a Lost Generation novel, looking for God in the wrong places. ■