GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
266. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Abigail's Confessions on Childhood, Time, and Spiritual Awakening
In this special edition of What’s Your Spiritual Story?, philosopher Abigail Rosenthal sits down with her husband, Jerry L. Martin, for the most extended and personal telling of her spiritual story to date.
Drawing on her memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail traces the formation of her inner life from an Edenic childhood and early encounters with loss, to adolescent philosophical crisis, homesickness, and the search for a reality that could withstand time, absence, and illusion.
Along the way, she reflects on formative influences, including Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels, Homer’s Odyssey, Gandhi, existentialism, political idealism, and the dangers of moral absolutism and ideological guilt.
This conversation explores themes of time and impermanence, spiritual longing, innocence and disillusionment, femininity and intellectual life, and what it means to test ideas by living them.
Abigail recounts her experiences in Paris, London, and the American academy, examining how philosophy, spirituality, and personal history intersect—and sometimes collide—in a woman’s life.
Rather than offering tidy conclusions, this episode presents a lived spiritual journey: one shaped by curiosity, risk, error, and hard-won clarity. It is a story about becoming—not only a philosopher, but a person capable of resisting illusion while remaining open to meaning.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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Scott Langdon [ 00:00:17,220 ] 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.
Scott Langdon [ 00:00:58,820 ] Episode 266: Hello, and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, and I'm very excited this week to bring you our latest edition of What's Your Spiritual Story? In this episode, Jerry sits down with his wife, Abigail Rosenthal Martin, and the couple dive more deeply than we've ever heard before into Abigail's spiritual story.
Scott Langdon [ 00:01:33,300 ] With her latest book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, as a reference, Abigail does much more than just sum up her memoir. Jerry's questions and curiosity allow Abigail to expand and even draw some deeper meaning from her experiences, as these spiritual stories so often do. This is one, I'm sure you'll enjoy as much as you'll be enriched. Here's Jerry. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:02:08,500 ] Well, hello, sweetheart. Thanks for joining me for What Is Your Spiritual Story? You know, we have a dialogue we do about once a month, and a lot of your story has come out in bits and pieces, but never as a story. As somebody pointed out, we've never heard Abigail's story from this to that to the next thing. And that's quite different from plucking out an episode illustrating some point, which is what tends to happen when we have a dialogue. But anyway, if you think about this question— of your story— every story has to start somewhere. And at what point, if you can remember this, did you first think about things like: What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Or think in terms of what your own ideality is, you know, what you want to live up to. You got to go back.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:03:17,420 ] Oh dear. Well, I remember a sort of edenic pre-history when I was just busy being a child, active, and to my recollection, not particularly burdened bye layers of reflection. I was running around playing and having fun and crossing sword branches with my playmates. It was in the summer place, Camp Hilltop where we used the summer in New Jersey.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:04:17,640 ] And run by Reba Gopan, a theosophist, whose husband had been a theosophist, died accidentally while on a long fast.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:04:33,570 ] Oh my goodness.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:04:36,050 ] Anyway, starved to death, accidentally hadn't meant to do that. This slightly hi kush place where things unfolded. In a natural way, when... Dandy. Our canary. Died. Dandy, a kind of a magic bird that had flown in the window. On 86th and Park after my sister had expressed the wish for a canary. Dandy flew in the window and finally Dandy died. And the landlady, Reba, said, 'Oh, stop your blubbering. The bird has fulfilled its mission.’ So, you know, these kind of zany events were part of our norm. And I was a normal child. But there came a moment in Hilltop, I don't know how it happened. But no one was around to play with me. And I remember feeling, a feeling I've never felt before. Boredom.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:06:03,250 ] Oh, really? You've never been bored as a child? Too much to do to be bored.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:06:09,130 ] You know, my life was extroverted, was consumed in playing. And I thought to myself, 'Oh, this is what grown-ups meant when they said, you'll see.' And their threatening voice says, 'You'll see.' And I thought, 'No, I won't. I'll stay. A child, not like you, you big lunk.' But I saw, oh, my God, you boring phony. And stop grimacing at me. I know you don't like me, and I can feel it in your pretended affectionate faces that you're making. But all of a sudden there I was stuck bored.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:07:02,850 ] And... thinking here it comes, the march of, the steady march of Weltschmerz, you know, world weariness or sadness. And I think it was on a larger canvas, back in the city, tied with the death of my grandfather. The young rabbi, as his pen name had it, Rav Tsair, who looked a bit like God in the Sistine Chapel.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:07:46,910 ] And when, you know, people now that I'm grown up, people say they do believe in God, but not the old man with the white beard. I always think, what's wrong with the old man? He's perfect.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:08:03,350 ] Yeah, I've seen the photos. He could well have been Michelangelo's model. He could have sat for the portrait of God on the Sistine ceiling.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:08:11,700 ] Yeah. You know, and there's Grandpa who could ask for better. But Grandpa astoundingly was dying. And... You know, you move to some kind of world of ideas as plan B. You know, first the concrete, you can sit on their lap reality, is the thing And you don't even consider that it might fade out of reach. But there he went. Grandpa was gone.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:08:57,330 ] And all of a sudden, the world had to be recalibrated, reframed. Who was going to take the place of that kind of authority where you didn't need to ask a question, is there a God, is there a 'this,' is there a 'that'?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:09:16,890 ] Because, there was palpable presence. And I think that's what we ask. We ask it of God. We ask it of each other. Unless... the person of whom the question might be asked is too obnoxious, and you want them absent. But anybody you like or love you want near you don't want them to fade or to disappear, or be chancy.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:09:52,580 ] And yet the world is filled with this chanciness. And I began to have… I've read about people like Buber and I don't know who else, had adolescent crises. For me, there was definitely one, and it had to do with time. Time. All of a sudden, time presented at the crisis of insubstantiality, of nothing to hold on to, somehow focused. Concretized in the fact that the present is already the past, as soon as you say the present. What you were referring to,what you intended to pick out is gone already. Every moment of presence is on the way to absence.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:10:55,760 ] Your whole reality as you look at the world and believe there's a world there, and your own body included in that world that is there, by the time you get through the sentence I just said, that world is gone. Poof. It's gone. And the new world's hard to grab onto because in a moment it's poof.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:11:17,590 ] It'll be gone. Yes. Even a good time will be gone. It was unbearable. It was untenable. It couldn't— it was ungraspable. There was nothing solid. There was no footing. And no handholds. And I don't quite know when this crisis... past, it surely did. But by that time— more abstract matters seemed to provide the missing footholds and handholds, I became very interested I think in the past, I was reading Thomas Mann's Joseph stories, and I would on the Egyptian rules of the Metropolitan Museum. I would think, I wish I could be there, safe in the past. You know, the past where nothing can harm real life. Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:12:28,170 ] Yes. The past is done. It doesn’t just drift away, poof. The museum stays there with all these very old Egyptian artifacts and doesn't go poof on you. And you're right. Whatever the travails of the present moment, they're not there. You know, in what, 8,000 BC or whatever it might be.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:12:49,480 ] Yeah, the past seems safe. It was like the lost happy land. And there was a homesickness in my themes of early adolescence. I was all so busy. You know, Joseph, once he's kidnapped and brought to Egypt, has this zein, this yearning. For home. And it won't be fulfilled. And he doesn't even go home once he's Pharaoh's vice regent, he senses as he says, as Mann has him say, that he's in a story. And the time for reunion and homecoming is not yet.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:13:38,470 ] And the other book I liked for similar reasons was Homer's Odyssey, which is another long homesickness. Odysseus is stuck on Circe's island, the goddess who's enamored of him. And he's longing for home. Finally, a happy dolphin or this or that. I'm now sick as people... they get him back to Ithaca and he comes. He has to don a disguise and he has to kill all the young men of Ithaca who are laying siege to his wife, whom they think is a widow. and they want fortune of Odysseus, and he has to plot when will he and his son Telemachus throw off the disguise and start picking them off one by one with a bow and arrow. And when will the marital bed be rediscovered and reappropriated. So, you know, those homesick themes seemed to console my youthful days, I didn't fit in the American teenage at all. The grown-ups who modeled grown-upness, especially the women. They were foreign. René was French. Béthia was Russian. Mother. was whatever she was, a medley. She spoke well or badly seven languages. She'd been raised in French-Switzerland. She also spoke, as two Russian ladies assured me in later years, a refined Russian. A literary, you know... A very good Russian.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:16:00,080 ] So these European... origin women were basically, they were in the New York area, New York, New Jersey, I gather. And were basically friends of your mother, people your mother. And those were your feminine role models? Is that the right way to put it?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:16:19,490 ] Yes. They were exactly that. They probably were in midlife, so my role model didn't include the young unmarred. It included the seasoned woman who boor with intuitive knowingness the flow of the years, and it marked me with the certainty that womanliness, being a woman, required know-how.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:17:05,569 ] They each had younger sisters or older sisters who envied them and didn't have the neck of it. And once they were widowed, except for my mother, these envious sisters moved in with them and sucked the life out of them. So I understood this wonderful essence of the feminine is endangered. It has to be know. It has to be cherished. It has to be defended. There's going to be a lot of women who don't have it, and they'll want to take yours. I wouldn't have been able to say anything so grammatical and complete as what I've just said. You know, a very young person takes in the landscape. And I couldn't take in the American landscape. What was I supposed to do? The social dances of the year, I couldn't do them.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:18:17,460 ] My mother had been to some kind of a nightclub in Paris where she saw Valentino.Maybe I could have done the tango a la Valentino, but I sure couldn't do it, whatever you did, whatever you had to do. Teenageness was a tyranny, and I just fell off the playing field. It was nothing. I had or wanted that could achieve popularity. I didn't know the least thing about it. It seemed to be some kind of tomboyish girlhood where you didn't stress the feminine. You were one of the boys. But, you were kind of sexy in a way. In an understated popular way. Well.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:19:26,180 ] I didn't know what they were doing, and I didn't know why they were doing it, and it wasn't going to happen. And I was miserable about it. It's not that I was proud of my of being different. I was different. I was also very intellectual. My father was probably some kind of a genius. Lionel Trilling, with whom he'd been best friends at Columbia and some years thereafter, thought he was a genius and maybe the most genius-like man he'd ever met.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:20:12,510 ] Yeah, I guess what... I don't know what a genius is, but... You have a power of originality, not because you're trying to be different or stand out, but because you simply are— you know, quite markedly yourself and not a type. And so that extremely self-delineated originality of a male also marked me in a disadvantageous sense that there wasn't an American boy on the landscape who could compete with daddy. And that's not the same as a father fixation. That's a quite dispassionate estimation of the landscape.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:21:18,310 ] Yeah, he's the most interesting guy in the greater New York area and maybe beyond. Just as a fact, everyone who knew him knew that he was extraordinarily special, a kind of penetrating insight, but a cryptic way of speaking, so you never quite knew what the further depths were that his remarks came from. But anyway, that was your father, and of course, therefore... I gather major influence on you, and... Was he religious?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:21:52,990 ] He'd been a rabbi in his young days. He was the rabbi of the 92nd Street Y, and he founded that school of adult studies that has so magnified the influence of the 92nd Street Y. But he sure didn't fit into the rabbinate of those days.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:22:20,630 ] And I mean, he would give these marvelous sermons and leave. He couldn't stand to meet the congregation. He'd leave my mother to greet the congregation after he went home. He didn't fit any pattern. But the people who entranced and mesmerized young women of my generation, people like Lionel Trilling and all that Columbia medley of names were boring to me. They were predictable. I didn't group myself around Lionel Trilling, when I could spend five minutes with my father. I had taste.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:23:20,400 ] But your parents did send you to some kind of summer camp when you were a little bit older. And I know you sometimes talked about a guy named Warren Stetzel. I mean, I don't know if this is a major moment in your spiritual story or a minor note. But anyway, it seemed to have had some influence on you, or at least you reacted to that situation, and you and maybe your friends reacted to this guy, who's a little bit of a spiritual teacher or something, put himself in that role. Is that right?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:23:58,980 ] Yeah. I went off to Quaker Word Camp in Cherokee, North Carolina, to help the Cherokee Indians with some offerings that they didn't want. And, you know, it was typical. What later was done in the Peace Corps, I don't know if that had a better outcome. You know, you go in to help some people. They don't want the help you're offering. You don't know enough about them to know what they want, how to negotiate with them, how to respect them
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:24:39,830 ] Do gooders, Summer at Cherokee, North Carolina. But it was a very... influential on me summer. There was a girl's counselor of camp and a boy's counselor. The Boys' Counselor. It was a man named Warren Stetzel. He was a follower of Gandhi. And like Gandhi, he was celibate.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:25:10,630 ] I didn't even know what celibate, how that was marked off from anything else. But, you know, I kind of picked up some clues. He was a pacifist. He was a vegetarian. You know, ahimsasa, don't do any violence. We had Quaker meditation in the morning by a bubbling mountain brook. And so this was some original take on touching reality that didn't come from my background.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:25:55,520 ] And I thought perhaps this can be a link to the great world, and it sounded very pure. My parents thought it was essentially hypocritical and self-serving, but their cynicism about it only reinforced my sense that purity is the best thing to get. And so for, I think, the remaining years of my teens I wasn't a vegetarian but I was a pacifist and a lover of Gandhi.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:26:43,100 ] And when you and I, sweetheart were in Gandhi's ashram in India, I had a feeling that Gandhi was very close to me, was present to me. And I turned and ssaid to him silently, 'Papa,’ you know, father, ‘Thank you for showing up.’
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:27:17,520 ] That is very nice, isn't it?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:27:20,450 ] You know, I've always loved you. I've always loved Gandhi. I'm aware Gandhi wasn't perfect either. You know, but I read everything in English I could about Gandhi. I read his autobiography. I still have it somewhere. Read pamphlets. I wanted to be a nonviolent, I thought if you send waves of love, that will disarm the most person. Aye. Would go down to the Catholic worker on Christie Street because they were also nonviolent and they were interesting. They were quite different. They embraced. Voluntary poverty And trust in God.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:28:09,620 ] And one time, Dorothy Day, the head of that organization, they had nothing. They gave food and shelter to the homeless, the Bowery Bums, to coin a phrase. And so she put a pot of water to boil on the stove. There was a knock on the door. It was W. H. Auden, the poet, with a chicken.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:28:39,219 ] Okay. That's how we want things to work out, isn't it?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:28:42,430 ] Yeah, so there was this sort of supernatural inner-light grace, you know, you take big risks. It seemed courageous. I mean, my parents were quite courageous. They brought over 10 families, saving them from the Holocaust. My mother captured a Nazi spy ring. Working out of our Park Avenue and 86th Street walk-up building, the super had a shortwave radio in the basement and was in touch with enemy ships off New York Harbor. You know, God knows maybe she helped save New York. So my parents were not exactly parlor liberals; they were fighters.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:29:38,910 ] But, I guess for me, they were marvelous people, and they knew a lot of what then passed for psychology. They certainly had no idea of how to both bring me up and cut me loose. They were possessive unapologetically. Though they certainly hoped I would find my way independent of them. They had no idea how to bring that about, how to encourage that. They were frightened for me. They saw my naivete. They saw I didn't know my way around. It's probably still true, or maybe it's more true. But anyway, so I was trying to find some kind of life that could be original with me and was quite attracted to these rather extreme views that didn't fit into the norm of those conformist years in America. And then I was off to Paris for my Fulbright year in Paris.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:30:58,000 ] And this is where Confessions of a Young Philosopher begins.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:31:36,490 ] I had what the French call 'le succès.' Great success as a girl, as a woman in Paris. It seemed that all the acculturation I had received that had no application in the United States of America of those days, fit entirely, or almost entirely. It fit well. It gave me the success. With the French way of doing erotic life, you know, there were some differences. Also, I didn't quite know that in the days that had come and come on the scene since the youth of the women who influenced me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:32:40,940 ] In my childhood, in subsequent years, you were not expected just to allow a man to kiss the hem of your robe.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:32:55,790 ] It didn't stop there.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:32:56,970 ] No, it didn't stop with the hem of your robe. It didn't stop with your robe. I didn't know anything about that. I just relished and felt totally at home like a cat being stroked with the uninhibited wholesomeness of the kind of admiration for the female, the young female that you could get in Paris. You know, that part felt normal to me. I didn't know what came with that territory. Maybe it hadn't come with that territory in the youth of the women who influenced me. But now it did. We were all grown up. I mean, this was post-war Paris, post-World War II. And existentialism was all over the place, and existentialism demanded authenticity and it self-servingly postulated the lubricity of young women. as supposedly equal to that of young men. So, if you had no idea where one, two, three, four, five, and six, we're going it was deemed inauthentic. It was totally authentic. You know, I had no idea where. these numbers were going, but anyway. I sort of felt smitten by this eloquent, banked, passionate young Franco-Greek student of philosophy. I've never been attracted, almost never, to any young man who wasn't a philosopher. Think of that, what we will.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:35:15,660 ] So this was like a student in Paris, but who is Greek, but now sort of French, studying in Paris.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:35:24,910 ] Yes. And I thought, you know, how I'm a philosopher, how wonderful to be with…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:35:29,370 ] Another philosopher.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:35:30,990 ] Yeah, you know, Socrates was Greek, Plato was Greek, Aristotle very Greek. So I thought, you know, this is... Home sweet home. And I had no idea how the progress of advances on the innocence of a young woman.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:35:58,020 ] Right. It's a little more worldly experience than you were.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:36:02,320 ] Oh, he knew where this was going, and coming and going. And I had no idea. You know what? You know, I'd never had a real kiss.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:36:14,920 ] Yikes, what happens here?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:36:16,550 ] Yeah. You know, I just, this was news. And all the acculturation of the European women did not agree including what you might call a moment of truth, put up or shut up type of moment. I didn't know about that. You know, so by the time I thought it's time to reach for such defenses as I might possess, it was kind of late in the game and the defenses should have been in play several stages back. And anyway, there I was RUINED.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:37:10,900 ] And I had no idea what a girl did once she was ruined. It had all been built up, built up, built up, but I knew that was as far as you were allowed to go. You could go through some buildup. You couldn't be on the other side of that cascade. You know, going down the Niagara Falls or whatever to call it. So there I was sitting a foot or so above the River Seine at night. It was at Flood Tide, and I was trying to think what am I supposed to do? Should I drown myself?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:38:04,080 ] What I'd read about in some Russian novels, that's what you did. And... Finally, I thought. No, that can't be. That doesn't resolve the questions of what to do now. It sort of interrupts the Q &A of life. And I had better go on with life. Even though it's got beyond me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:38:45,720 ] I'm also struck, I know from reading your book, he was a communist, young communist, which at the time was one of the things to be. Existentialists, Marxists, they were often kind of combined. The existentialists were often communists, and it was very sort of manly. But communism, Marxism is materialist. And when you even describe his approach to lovemaking... It's very materialist. I mean, here you're full of ideality and Paris exudes romance, but materialism is not either of those two things. And that was off-putting. And yet, when you come back to the U.S. You become a Fidelista, as if... Well, you haven't fully explored, you know, you kind of want to connect with that Paris moment with him, you know, what's the future of this line of thinking is part something like that. And I don't recall where he went next, but the PhilolistaI kind of ran aground on you.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:40:02,960 ] Yes. Well, you know, I had a certain amount of moral taste. So attending one Fair Play for Cuba Meeting where a man who had returned from Fidel's Cuba and talked about firing squads and other things that the revolution was engaged in employing, he stood up and sort of testified to what he'd seen And the crowd of Fidelistas began to chant.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:40:50,380 ] “To the wall, to the wall,” in Spanish, which was the war that they stood you up against when they shot you. And I was like, “Oh no.” You know, this isn't... you know, cha-cha-cha. Susan Sontag had come back from Cuba. We were both assistants in the Columbia Religion Department. And she was talking about, you know, the joie de vivre and the naturalness, sort of like Orwell's early stages of the revolution in Homage to Catalonia, the spontaneity, life is once again a playground, people were coming into the middle of the street to catch a runaway cow and they were herding it back to whoever owned the cow and it was all charming and all, as if the world was washed down and started again. But this pardon to the world. That wasn't new. I read about that. That was the same old, same old. That was the revolution once it got it’s legs. And so that wasn't where I was going to go. And, you know, it was a time of mounting frustration.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:42:27,500 ]For you personally, you mean? Or just the world or something?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:42:33,170 ] As a young woman in Paris, I had wanted to live… to take life on the full, you know, to take life at a high tide. But I hadn't intended for things to fall out as they did in my own case, but I was still up for … I looked like a woman who had a lover. I looked pretty good. I looked a little bit... I had a Parisian flair. What I... the vital energies that I looked to put somewhere on my return.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:43:24,690 ] The Fidelismo didn't work. My friend John Armstrong had gone with a couple of American Fulbrights on a trip that was supposed to take him from Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope to demonstrate the usefulness of some car that was going to pay for the trip. They were murdered, before they left, before they got the cartoon as Richard Wright had predicted. And they wanted to be free and they wanted to find out what their values were tested against. A chosen reality. But the values we're absolutely without heft. In the real-life situation, which these young idealists could never have foreseen. Even though Richard Wright, on my recommendation, told them you won't get past teaching. So, you know, I was looking to the left, I was looking to the right, almost literally, and Colombia, where I started and took grad records, exams, and passed them. But it seems cynical.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:44:53,600 ] It seemed... We're weary, it seemed, without air. Newness. I was looking for experience that was new. That was earned, you know. That had some cutting edge to it. Not polished down by every sort of shop-worn platitude, and Columbia seemed rife with those. Penn State was recommended to me as a place that was kind of new and American.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:45:33,460 ] In its own view, cutting edge in philosophy Stanley Rosen, the Straussian who would later attain some degree of eminence, was a sort of defining figure there. Rosen had an edginess. They had a newness. There was only one other thing that went with that territory. And it was the best they knew, but it had no room for me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:46:15,060 ] It wa male philosophy and maleness had always gone hand in hand and I was told by Stanley, among others: One way or another, if you want to make your mark in philosophy, you have to destroy your femininity. And I didn't resent it because I thought... He's quite sincere. And he's at least putting it to me. Nobody at Columbia put anything to you. You know, they just... um moseyed along as if one rut or cliche or platitude was as good as another.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:47:13,160 ] I've once aced a grad record exam because I could see who wrote it. It was a bunch of Columbia professors whose wrong views I well knew. So I picked all the wrong answers that they wanted. And did, you know, gloriously, just broke the charts. I was such a good philosopher.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:47:40,830 ] Because you knew which wrong answers to give. Because you knew their stupid views.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:47:46,170 ] I knew their stupid views. You can't learn anything from people whose stupid views you can ace like that. I did learn from the Penn Staters. But it left me no recourse. Absolutely, because I didn't want to be a spinster. I didn't want to be a hollowed out woman, because philosophy is the love of wisdom. You can't want to denature yourself.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:48:24,930 ] At the same time and in the same respect that you claim to want and to love wisdom, because that's a very unwise thing to do or to want to do. So I was at a kind of super standstill, you know, sort of short-circuited. Went off to London to do a Hegel degree with British Egalian. Didn't want to go back to Paris because I thought I'll be trying to revive something that's in the past, so I'll try something else foreign.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:49:03,960 ] There were other disappointments that I haven't put into my book, but they frustrated me. They further indicated that there was this America that I'd gone home to was not promising for me. I land in London at a student residence. In London, a fashionable student residence for girls.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:49:58,890 ] They're Canadian. They come from India. They come from the United States. They're in their later 20s, as I am. And they are falling apart.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:50:13,850 ] Really?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:50:14,530 ] Yeah, they're feminine Essence is being peeled off. London is not kind to women. It's not prestigious to be a woman, even a young woman. And the man... are enamored of each other and of their position on the class system where all comparisons are invidious, which struck me as horrible, as counter-erotic. Who cares?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:50:54,760 ] You know, one thing about America, your father was a coal miner. That's interesting. But in England, it ain't interesting unless you can pass what was then the 11-plus and get on a track for Oxford or Cambridge. Otherwise, you go back to the coal mine. And to me, this was so counter-erotic. And then beyond that, there was no place at all for the women. Every culture puts a place on its map for men and for women.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:51:35,560 ] Not the English, so far as I could tell. And it was having an absolutely homicidal effect on the young women in their latter years of their 20s. They were simply losing their female distance. You know, it was getting hidden in a way that would make it irrecoverable. They were losing, I don't want to get too graphic, but it was obvious. To me, it was perilous. I saw— no, this is very, very, very dangerous. I have no place to go back to. I've come to this place. It's not a place that harbors women on any terms. You know, I don't know. What happened to the Brontes? I don't know what happened to George Eliot. I don't know what happened to Tessa the d'Urberville. But they were women writing about women or men writing about women. There's no such a- entity here. There are no women. It's a whole culture without women except you know, self-ironically.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:53:04,240 ] Yeah, women in certain roles. So what did you do?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:53:07,240 ] I found... what promised to be a guide? It was a black American young woman. And she seemed to have their number. She seemed to know what the battle was that these girls were losing. She seemed to call things by their right name that no one was calling by a right name. She had what the culture would later value: street-smarts.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:53:46,390 ] Yes.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:53:46,670 ] I hadn't met street smarts before I was ahead of the game, like I would turn out to be, you know, because I knew the street.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:53:59,300 ] I learned a lot from her. I knew I would. And I knew she was a little nuts. She had a certain brand of a religion that I later... Once I was back on Home territory, I later came to understand, was Gnostic.It denied the reality of the material world, of the empirical world. And said the real world is 100% spiritual. And if you put yourself mentally inside that 100% spiritual... A frame. you can negotiate the empirical world much more skillfully, as she appeared to do. And I didn't know whether I believed her religion and her principles. But I did know that if I was to survive as a woman, I needed to learn some of these street smarts. And if the price of learning them was to pretend or put on for a season her metaphysical claims, I could pay it, because I couldn't see a way back. I couldn't see a way forward.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:55:34,600 ] And, ever optimistic. I had what you might call a certain trust in life, in my life, that there must be a way. Sure. That was the path I saw.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:55:51,690 ] But one of the things you always seem to do, sweetheart, is, you don't just look at ideas like floating in the air. You try them out. Do they work in life? So you did that with the kind of political idealism. Does the pacifism work in life and, you know, various things like that. You test them. By living it out. And that’s what is, I mean, people can mouth words, but to have a belief really means you're willing to live it. To act on it. And then that's what you use, furthermore, not just as a measure of belief, but as a test, does this work? It promises certain things, does it deliver?
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:56:39,900 ] Yeah. It brings back to mind why, in Paris, I stopped being a pacifist. One time I was as a tourist on the Ile Saint-Louis exploring Paris and suddenly saw that I was surrounded by a small group of young French hooligans or thugs. And they were menacing me sexually in you know, whatever way they did. And I said in French, 'Do you want me to call the police?' And I don't know, that wouldn't have worked in America, but maybe they weren't used to hearing somebody say that in French. So they faded. And what faded in me was my pacifism. Hey, the police are going to come with a Billy Club. I didn't know if they were armed at that point in Paris, maybe not. But they would have something that would scare these young.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:57:49,360 ] They were able to use force. Yeah, force.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:57:52,040 ] I thought, well, I'm not a Gandhian pacifist, and I'm not going to call myself one. So in that sense... If I said it, I intended to mean it. Or stop saying it. So anyway, I've followed this. New Telemachus or this new guide. Mentor is the guide for Telemachus in the Odyssey. And she got crazier and crazier. And I didn't know what brainwashing was, but she knew something about generic white guilt. That she could use against me. I knew nothing about it. And so the fact that I was being manipulated, sometimes I've perceived it, but then I thought it's disloyal and runs counter to the belief system I've latched on to.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:59:07,960 ] Yeah, you're trying to live in terms of just the pure spiritual reality, meanwhile you're being ripped off down on the ground.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 00:59:14,440 ] I'm being manipulated up the kazoo. And I'm not prepared to admit that because she's got a vocabulary that can understand it in some other way. And finally, I'm in a trap, I can't get out. I've been mendaciously, falsely, manipulatively accused of every kind of aggressive intent toward her. And in her Gnostic system, intent and actuality are not distinguished. So I've been accused of meaning to harm her and therefore of having done so. Since I'm under this accusation, I intended to, or I thought of it. The accusations were so unfamiliar, and the whole technique of shaping the belief system of someone was... You know, there are people who have very strong gut instincts.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:00:32,220 ] For better or worse. God did not equip me with that. I'm malleable. Kind of transparent and don't have strong animal protectiveness. Even when it would be a very good idea to have that. Anyway, what my memoir describes what Confessions of a Young Philosopher describes are the steps that finally my parents, using every connection they had, which finally involved the cooperation of the Portuguese secret police, the U. S. State Department, and whatever other agencies and forces and factors had to come in on it to get me out of there, without which, we had a family friend who thought, my parents are really not cool. They're acting hysterical. Okay. She was very cool.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:01:51,840 ] I would have perished there with her coolness. My parents... heated on recognition that this was a crisis and could only be met extraordinarily. Not ordinarily. They tried to enlist the psychiatric profession. No, no, no, they weren't going to touch this. I don't think they'd even now recognize the syndrome of brainwashing that Robert Lifton wrote about in the Korean prisoners of war who charged America with germ warfare and didn't know.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:02:41,740 ] Nobody knew why they had done that. We weren't guilty. The United States wasn't practicing German warfare. Lift them. Diagnose. this as a case of brainwashing and wrote about the stages of it, which he also recognized in the case of Patricia Hearst, who seemed to have... come out on the side of her kidnappers and what he recognized both in the body language and in all kinds of giveaway signals was the same syndrome.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:03:23,620 ] It's not officially recognized, but it is sure a fact. And it can be a cultural fact. People can be made to feel guilty of crimes that weren't even their ancestors' crimes, crimes they didn't commit. Crimes that are imputed to them, and they can be controlled by this vicarious imputation of guilt. So, one thing that can be said for me as we're not recapping Confessions of a Young Philosopher, but making out a more extended tour of my life and times, is that I gained some kind of immunity to all this collective, spurious, pretend guilt.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:04:26,630 ] Come and manipulate me. While I pretend to feel guilty because that will exonerate me and identify me as one of the saved. Not the damned. And then I will accuse everyone else of what I narrowly escape being guilty of myself. And I'll accuse people, even the inner circle of the saved of the redeemed because we will accuse each other in good French revolutionary style that Hegel analyzed in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Absolute Freedom and Terror.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:05:14,030 ] It's what leads to the guillotine, right? People start accusing each other. Accusing people, maybe some of whom are guilty at the beginning. They end up accusing each other.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:05:24,240 ] Yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:05:25,070 ] Nobody is safe from the guillotine.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:05:28,380 ] That's right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:05:28,960 ] And there's some tendency of that in these kind of highly moralistic movements that use a lot of guilt. Your family could have gotten off the boat 10 years ago, and now you're guilty in wounded knee, Indian massacres and so on, or for the slavery that came and gone before you even knew there was an America. But suddenly, this is all heaped on you. And as you point out, guilt can certainly be used to manipulate people. Nobody wants to feel guilty.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:06:02,920 ] Hmm. No, people want innocence.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:06:05,720 ] Yeah.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:06:06,510 ] They don't want the grit. And um, hard knocks and gravitational pull of real life—life, as I sometimes call it, life in history, life on the timeline you know, real. We're not perfect.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:06:27,609 ] Hey, this is a big surprise. We're not perfect. You want to accuse me of being imperfect? I've had students try to play that game with me. I won't play. They have to give it up, but my colleagues will be played.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:06:51,000 ] When I taught at Stony Brook, young co-eds were getting forced to take boyfriends, which means lovers, whether they wanted lovers or not. Because there was somebody who was slashing the faces of young women at night and if they wanted to use the library, they needed to get some boy to sleep with them. And escort.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:07:24,420 ] Escort. Yeah, an escort.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:07:25,980 ] To the Library. And I happen to know, as a family friend, a woman who was in charge of some group of concern with human relations, intergroup relations on that campus. And I said, You know, we need more cops and we need more lighting on the campus.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:07:50,600 ] And she said, well, we have identified the slasher, and he's a member of a minority group. So we're trying to hush it up. Hush it up. We've got undergraduates here whose parents did not send them to be forced into effective concubinage in order to use the library. What are you hushing up? You know, what game are you playing that has to do with your idiot image, your image, and not real life. You think you're defending minority image? You're playing to the worst. stereotypes in the most unspeakable fears. The fear of being accused of something.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:08:54,890 ] So you know, in my going on, after the end of Confessions of a Young Philosopher in the life I live, subsequently, I didn't join the regnant movements and subscribe to the Illusions of the day because my father's friend, Leo Bronstein, said to me after he read an early version of Confessions, he said, 'You will always be, in fact, older than your chronological age.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:09:42,800 ] In spite of your naivete. Yeah
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:09:45,420 ] Because, you know... And I was in that way older than my contemporaries because... I'd been there and back.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:09:55,510 ] Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:09:57,180 ] To most of the illusions of the hour.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:10:00,440 ] You know what I'm going to do unusually, sweetheart? I think this would be a good place to stop now. And I think we'll do this in two parts. Because your spiritual journey did not stop. At the point we're now stopping. And yet it's been an hour or something. Complete story, you know, a story with a beginning, middle, and end, you might say side trips along the way. So thank you for sharing this with us. And I will look forward to interviewing you further on your spiritual story.
Dr. Abigail L Martin [ 01:10:43,920 ] Yeah. Thank you, sweetheart, for your questions, for your curiosity, and being my best friend.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:10:56,100 ] I love you all over.
Scott Langdon [ 01:11:12,530 ] 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 1 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.