Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him. Welcome to Episode 180 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon.
Scott Langdon 1:08: This week is episode 180, and it's the episode of the Life Wisdom Project that you have all been waiting for because Jerry's special guest for this week's sit-down is none other than his very own wife, Abigail Rosenthal. As you undoubtedly already know, none of this experience of Jerry's, chronicled in his book, would have even happened if it weren't for Abigail. After all, it was Jerry's prayer of gratitude that preceded his first encounter with God, and what he was grateful for was the love he had found with Abigail. So if all you need is love, then what really happened with Adam and Eve, the first ones to know love in this way? Well, that's the topic of Episode 17 and the topic of discussion today between Jerry and Abigail in our latest edition of the Life Wisdom Project. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 2:02: Well, I'm very pleased to invite my wife, Abigail Martin, who publishes under the name Abigail Rosenthal, to join me on this Life Wisdom discussion. I thought of you, sweetheart, for two things, because of two things in this episode. One is– it's where we hear from God what was going on with Adam and Eve and how did God react to what was going on with Adam and Eve. And your name actually comes up toward the end of the episode, and so at some point I'll direct your attention to that. But let's start with Adam and Eve. What did you make of that, sweetheart?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 3:16: Gosh, Adam and Eve. They, well what caught my attention was that they go into an obsessive vortex where each is all-and-all for the other. There’s a French poem that translated says, “If one being is lost, the whole world is empty,” so they fill the world for each other. It's a romantic apogée, a romantic intensification to the vanishing point almost, and we celebrate it. I guess, when we celebrate famous romances, but God doesn't seem to be celebrating it, there ought to be a third at the party, the third being God, and otherwise there's some kind of idolatry and nihilism. Finally, they exhaust each other. Dante's lovers in the Inferno are chasing each other endlessly. In the French version, Tristan Isolde, they can't live in time. They can't live in time and space. In the real world, or, as I like to say, in history, there's no before and after. There's a kind of almost paralytic now. In the 20th century there was the perfect orgasm and it was now. So it seemed as if to get into that now was the ideal in the romantic framework. But God doesn't share this ideal. It seems to obstruct God's purposes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 5:19: Yeah, and they're almost purposely ignoring God. They're hiding from God, right, they're hiding.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 5:24: Yeah, they fill the screen, they don't need….
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 5:30: Yeah, that's interesting. It's not that they're hiding… I'd always kind of read this as they're hiding, because now they're being sinful, though the whole stress here is no, they're completely innocent. You know, they're just frolicking in this new discovery of each other and each other's bodies. And what else would you do suddenly, presented with this? You know, she's always described as beautiful, good to look at or something like that, and she responds to him. And there they go. And, as you put it, they don't need God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 6:06: And what God says in the passage. You know, they hid their nakedness, which is to say they hid their creativity and sexuality from me, detached it from my purpose, used it solely for their own pleasure and intimacy, innocently enough, but still wrong.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 6:27: And finally, in that same passage, God was telling me detached sexuality, hiding from God, has its own intrinsic price the loss of full bounty and blessing of God. But the point here, I gather, is from what God is telling me here is not being expelled from the Garden of Eden, you know that particular oh, now you've got it, you've asked for it and we're going to punish you, but rather you're living in the wrong way. Okay, this is part of reality, it's a vibrant part of reality, just the pure encounter with one another of the two lovers, and so it's natural that that somewhat, as you say, fills the screen of their lives. And yet, well, there's a price. You've left something out, and you've left out what you might say is a more fundamental aspect of reality, anyway, something kind of ultimate in defining lives. You've left that out.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 7:33: I have always contrasted what I call the French view, which is the one we've just described, with the biblical notion of couples like Jacob and Rachel meeting at the well as sort of the archetypal case of romance in the biblical frame. Jacob has absconded with the birthright, the right to have a privileged and leading relation to God. He somehow filched that from his brother, Esau, but he's on the lam, and so his mother, who's complicitous in this stealing of the birthright, advises him to go to her brother, his uncle Laban. So he takes himself across the desert on whatever vehicle was available donkey or camel and he gets to Laban's property and it's bordered by a well, to Laban's property and it's bordered by a well, and of course, a well is everything in a dry land, and so people come to get water to drink and to fill their cisterns at the well, and among the people who come is the daughter of Laban, Rachel, and he looks at her. He's smitten. He rolls away the stone that covers the well to show his manly prowess and apparently, they're just it for each other.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 9:19: And then there's quite a lot of trouble to get her from the man who will be his father-in-law. His father-in-law substitutes the wrong sister for the wedding night and then asks for seven more years of hard labor before he can get the second sister. And he has to labor for her in the beginning for seven years and the text says they passed like days because of his love for her. So there's something in love that compresses time and takes charge of time, but they are still embedded in time. There's a rivalry with a sister, there are the requirements reasonable and unreasonable of the father-in-law. There are other ways in which he has to propagate in order to build a tribe, there are property considerations. They live in the real world, not in Gan Eden, not in the garden, not outside of the human condition, but within it, and the tragic comedy of their lives unfolds in real time.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:46: Yeah, that's amazing. That's an amazing story and it's real love and it's real love immersed in history. The whole Old Testament is, in a sense, history. It's things moving through time because God has purposes and people are trying to align with those purposes or they're not. That's a lot of the story. If you take all of what you just said, this contrast of you might say, two visions of love, and apply it to 21st century America, imagine you're giving advice to a young woman or a young man, what would be the implications of that advice?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 11:29: Yes, I have given that advice, at least to one young man student. I think he told me that there was some kind of barrier between him and the woman he loved and she was observant and Orthodox Jewish and he lived a more secular modern life and she was under the aegis of her family and didn't feel she could throw that over, even though she acknowledged that there was a love that bound the two of them, that connected the two of them and always would. The implication was I advised the young man well, why don't you study orthodoxy? See if you can stand it, see if it still feels like you, can you meet her conditions? And he thanked me for my advice and took it. And sometime later I saw him and he said he was becoming an observant Jew and the marriage would be on. So he met the real-life, historical conditions. Different couples have different real-life conditions, so he's not an archetype for all couples, but the meeting of the conditions is archetypal.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:06: That reminds me of a story told by our friend Leon Cass, who was at the time a professor at the University of Chicago, taught great books courses, among other things. He's also a great medical ethicist and so forth. But Leon said one year he used to teach Genesis, the book of Genesis, as a great book in the kind of great book style, Genesis, and I don't remember it may have been the very section on Rachel and the well and so forth. But a student came after class, a guy came in and said you know, I want that, I want to find a woman for me. I think I will go join the temple and see if I can find a wife. Leon told him if you go to the temple to find a wife, you will probably find nothing. If you go there to find something more, then you might find a wife. A year later of that very conversation, Leon is teaching in Jerusalem as a visiting prof and is at the Rachel at the Well or whatever section, and he gets a phone call in his office. Oh, it's that very student. I joined the temple for the right reasons and I now have a wife. We're getting married in June. So anyway, those things can work out, but they work out, part of what you're stressing is you've got to be doing it for the right reasons and somehow grounding yourself in the reality of your situation, not the reality necessarily as understood by Abigail or by Leon or Jerry or the next person over.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:34: I want to direct your attention to the end of the episode where I mentioned we talk about whether– I am always wanting to know. I repeatedly ask you know, what's the grand design, what's the goal of it all? Is there an aim? And I'm always frustrated and I mention you in this connection because when I told you about it you didn't like it, because you don't like movies without happy endings and what I was told, well, let me just read what God told me. I ask is there an aim, like perfecting the world or uniting us all into the Godhead? “No,” God says, “not exactly. There is a purpose, but not an endpoint. The notion of an endpoint derives from the model of the human will and its desires, getting what it wants. The purpose of singing a song is not to get to the end,” but of course I object. So history comes to nothing? You just go and nothing?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:35: And so the question raised really, as I stated in my own words at the end, is whether life had any meaning or purpose at all, because God isn't saying oh, there's this great purpose, namely such and such. It's never quite laid out that way in the book, although I think slowly one comes to understand it better. One question for how to live life, and I guess I kind of wanted to start with your own not liking movies unless they have happy endings is in terms of life wisdom, let's say, not necessarily the whole of life wisdom, but a life, a mode of living life, what does looking, expecting, whatever, a happy ending do for you? Do for a person, not just for you, but for a person? What are the benefits of the happy ending viewpoint and how do you live differently?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 17:43: Yeah. Well, I could say beats me but, you're suggesting one ought to dig a little deeper. What you want in any adventure and life is a kind of adventure, really sincerely, truly and surprisingly an adventure, you want the resolution of the adventure. You have adventure stories in books, especially for young people, at least the kind I used to read. And whatever was the problematic, as we say, you know, whatever set the stage for the adventure, that problematic found a resolution. There was a fortunate, there was a happy, there was a satisfactory, there was a resolution, something was unresolved that became resolved, and we've all had that experience.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 18:50: The unresolved resolves itself- can be disappointingly, but truly- you sort of want a truthful resolution, you don't want to be distracted by a plausible story that isn't true or a happy ending that isn't real. So I guess in any particular life it asks a question and wishes, in the best case, the answer, which is the resolution of the question that was asked. In the case of the human race, one imagines that all the human race might be asking a single question, were that so, then it would want a resolution that would cover the human race and in that sense end history. But it seems that there are quite a few questions that people in different cultures frame differently and from different starting points, frame differently, so that the ideal of a- there's some Kantian expression, I guess some kind of receding endpoint, I forget how he puts it- the ideal of all the questions harmonizing so that they turn into a single question and call for a single answer. That might not be a truthful approach, and we suppose God has a truthful approach, and so if God says don't look for a single resolution, God must know what God's talking about.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:12: Something I want to mention take it from the universal humanity, the whole globe and human history down to the individual level. Something in your own life, sweetheart, that you write about in your forthcoming book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, is you discovered romance very early in life and you had a disappointed romance that nevertheless was extremely compelling in terms of your sense of the goal of life. You know a sense of the desirability of romance and not just making do or paddling water, and one of your life strategies was not to get cynical or give up, get a cat, you know, whatever but to persist, to persist. And when I met you, you were persisting. We were both, you know well, into middle age and you were persisting. And something…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:16: When we were talking about this passage beforehand with Scott Langdon you know my team of helpers, Scott said, interestingly well, the story isn't over until the happy ending comes, and so that's a bit of a Kantian thought. You hold the story open. You don't regard the story as finished.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 22:38: Yes, yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:40: Until the Happy endings come. If it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come, but then the question is well, as a life strategy, is that a good one? You know, to kind of hold the story open, hoping for, expecting whatever the right verb is there, a happy ending, and that would define the culminating moment of the story, the end of the story.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 23:17: Yeah, for my money it's the best strategy, it's unsurpassable, whether a resolution, a satisfying culmination is reached or not. Much better to acknowledge what you might call a frustration than to pretend, in a way, cynically, that it never counted for much. You know oh well, I never wanted that beautiful painting anyway, which many people do. Disappointed of their early hopes, they pretend they never held them, whereas to my mind, one of the romantic features of life, romance has many components besides the girl boy or the two lovers, the two protagonists, and one of them is to hold open the resolved and the unresolved features rather than pretend they never were important, they never were desired.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 24:39: What one needs to honor one's rightful desires, what one needs to avoid pretending that they are unimportant, because what is a human life? We're just grains of sand. God knows best. No, we need to honor ourselves and find out. We are our own detective stories. What is it that I really wanted? And, uh, you know, go very seriously for that. When you and I met, I felt in some kind of romantic despair. You know, finished, that's it. I'm not… but I, you know, despair is better than cynicism because that meant I knew how unsatisfied I felt and I wanted to honor that.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 25:45: And meanwhile, in Brooklyn College where I taught they were about to trash, ruin, bring down to idiotic bits our core curriculum, our prize-winning characteristic frame within the college, and I thought I'm really not thinking that I and the other woman professor who wanted to fight this, I'm not thinking we can win, I’m busy with my despair and meeting my teaching obligations, but I can’t die without fighting this wholeheartedly because I believe, you know, with all that I have ever brought together in my life of work and effort and trying to understand what it was for me to do in life, I believe in a liberal education. So we're going to fight this, you know, to the max, with all of our possibilities- win, lose or draw. In the course of that fight, I happened to meet you, an ally, a key ally that eventually conducted me and Margaret to the victory for that phase of our life in the college. And eventually, what do you know, surprise, surprise, you turn out to be Mr. Right.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 27:25: I didn't, I wasn't going looking for Mr. Right, but I was going to take very seriously whatever it is that I take seriously. Because I think the romantic life requires involves that you have to be here for real, you have to mean it. When you say something, you need to mean it and when you act, you need to act with your full capacities, not with some of the cards held back.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:00: Well, I think that actually relates maybe to what God told me that I quoted, but let me go back to the key sentence again. “There is a purpose, but not an endpoint,” and the purpose means you don't wait for the end to come about. The purpose is here and now and ongoing, it’s today and the next day. It seems to me what you just described is a life of purpose, and a life of purpose is meaningful because you're talking about what was the meaning of your own work as a philosopher, as a teacher in a college, with undergraduates, with young people mainly, what was that all about? Well, all of that was filled with purpose and that means filled with meaning.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:00: You wouldn't say, oh, that was meaningless, and it doesn't have to come out a certain place to be meaningful. That's true, I think, of love itself. I once said to somebody nobody who's in love thinks life is meaningless. If they do, they're not in love. But that occurs, and the narrative you've just given us, sweetheart, that occurs in a life where you have commitments to high purposes. Not just can I get an increase in my salary or buy a prettier dress or something? Not just those things. Those things may have their own role, but it's not just those.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:44: These are the matters you dedicate your life to that define your life, that give it, that bring it… I don't like talking as if you make it up and project it onto life. You're eliciting these from the reality of your life. And so you might say, if you were to draw from this discussion we've just had and these quotes from God, no, the value of looking for a happy ending, on the one hand, and yet happy ending isn't what made life in the middle meaningful. I don't know if you can translate that into, if you're thinking about this and now a young woman or a young man comes into your office, a student and seeking some kind of guidance in whatever, how would you frame some guidance, some useful comments, let's say, to such a young person in a kind of search for how best to live life?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 30:46: I'd want to know the animating desire of that person, that young person. What purpose were it to be fulfilled would be the aim, the ambition of that person, even if they say they want to make money in Wall Street, for what? What will you do with the money? What does that give you that you didn't have without it? I would want to get to the core of motivation, because young people quickly, even in those days, put on a kind of carapace and armor of cynicism, fearing that they would be disappointed if they were too open, you know. So one thing I would want to encourage young people to do is take off that disguise of cynicism in order to tap into, respectfully, find, their animating purpose, what they would really want to be or to do, and then what stands in the way. You know, there are people whose purposes are quite humdrum it seems, quite humble. They don't stretch out.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 32:13: Well, that has to be honored you know, the humdrum may not be as boring or poor in content as one might imagine. Maybe it has its own challenges, its internal drama, its difficulties, its mountains to climb. So it doesn't have to look a certain way, it has to be intrinsically sincere.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:47: Yeah. So that's one of the messages I take from the things you've said here. Honor your desires. You're not a person who thinks you should deny what your desires are. You should. They're the engines of your life, you might say. There's some question of I've already seen you're saying, okay, you want to make money, what is that for? You might say then what? Okay, that's money is a means, by definition. Okay, what are you going to do with it? So that's a good example of philosophical dialectic. You start, desires, you don't just start these are your desires, period, go at it. No, you can think about your desires and reflect on them. But I take it your fundamental message in part A is don't deny them. Explore them and kind of be truthful, which is a life of integrity, and live the best life of desire you can live. I guess something like that?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 33:46: Take yourself seriously, you're important. Something like that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:52: Yeah, well, thank you, Abigail L. Martin, aka Abigail Rosenthal, it's wonderful to see you, and I'll see you again in living color in my study in a moment.
Scott Langdon 34:15: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.