294. Romantic Love, God’s Love, and What Makes Love Real | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

What makes romantic love feel more powerful than reason, safer choices, or even self-preservation? And what does it mean to experience God’s love through the person who loves you?

In this intimate dialogue, Jerry and Abigail return to God’s striking instruction: “Let Abigail love you. You will feel My love through her.” Jerry reflects on why God’s love might need to become tangible through another person, while Abigail considers what it means to embody that love through presence, touch, sacrifice, and a shared life.

Abigail reflects on falling in love as an overwhelming force that resisted every attempt to explain or contain it. Not psychology. Not philosophy. Not even Husserl’s phenomenology could give her enough distance from the pull of erotic and romantic love.

Their conversation moves through desire, sacrifice, feminism, sexuality, and the difference between casual sex and a love that asks something deeper of us. Abigail recalls leaving behind an ideal life in New York, not in search of comfort or happiness, but because love itself carried an authority she could not ignore.

From the Garden of Eden to Dante, Jane Austen, the Brontës, D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, and Dickens, Jerry and Abigail ask what modern culture may have lost when sex became detached from romance, courtship, nobility, and risk.

Can erotic love still awaken courage, devotion, and sacrifice? And can the love between two people reveal something of God that cannot be felt any other way?

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Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

A Good Look at Evil

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Transcript

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:00:17,229 ]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

[ 00:00:58,279 ]Episode two ninety four.  Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:01:15,449 ]I'm your host, Scott Langdon. On today's edition of Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, the two discuss Abigail's point of view about God's statement to Jerry, "Let Abigail love you." If that was a shock to Jerry, imagine how Abigail must have felt. How did she feel about that? In this intimate dialogue, Jerry asks Abigail that very question. Her response is both fascinating and illuminating. Here's Jerry to begin the conversation. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:01,699 ]Well, hello, sweetheart.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:04,249 ]Thanks for joining me in another intimate dialogue. You know, I was thinking recently, about this experience I wrote about early in God: An Autobiography, that at one point God said, "I want you to come into my heart," into the heart of God, and I didn't know what that meant, but I always just tried to go along with these things. But I found it kind of scary because I thought, well, the heart of God, for one thing, it sounds like might be like the center of a hurricane or something. God, a kind of a powerful, awesome being.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:43,199 ]But also it sounded kind of like out of body travel. And I thought, that's kind of scary.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:48,709 ]What? You're out… where are you? And, so I asked. I always try to go along, so I said, okay, I'll kind of make an effort at this and you just yield to whatever is going to happen. But I said, God, since I was kind of scared, be with me for this, show Your love to me for this.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:11,339 ]And God replied, "Let Abigail love you. You will feel My love through her."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:20,719 ]And I was reflecting on that. That's kind of strange and I was thinking of what you often say, sweetheart, that seems apt in so many contexts: God can't mail a letter. I mean, there's a level of reality, God however awesome and even pervasive, still there are things God can't do, like mail a letter.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:44,549 ]And though God loves us and I think that since God is intensely personal as I experience God, that love is not just an abstraction or motto or something, you know, God is love the way a business has a slogan, but God actually loves us. However, that's not a close-up visceral love. It's not something you see in somebody's eyes or feel when they grab your hands, you know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:18,889 ]And we need each other.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:20,889 ]We need people for that. And it's funny because it means there are a lot of reasons for loving each other, but it means there's a kind of extra reason. There's a kind of divine element in our loving each other. When you could count for love, human love as an extension of social, we're social animals, as they say. Aristotle says political animals, animals living in a community, organized community. And therefore this, you account for social relations, friendship among gregarious beings like ourselves. And of course the procreation of the race, the basic biological reality.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:09,349 ]However, in my experience, sweetheart, love goes beyond sociability, likability, comradeship, and procreation. That extra element, the only word I've ever been able to think of it besides divine, is sort of magical. There's something extra that just transcends these other things. Anyway, those were my reflections. Does that make sense to you or how would you think about if God sent it to you, what would you make of it?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:48,359 ]So, I'm expressing some wonderment or puzzlement that God in dialogue with you pointed to me as somehow the one who's got the knowledge or the know-how and I'm sort of asking, well, what does that mean? What is that knowledge or know-how and going through, it can't possibly mean in order to close in on what it might mean.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:28,599 ]And along the same lines, one thing it isn't is a phenomenon, because once I was,, as I felt it, threatened in my way of life and and all the supports for that way of life and the environs of it, I felt threatened by the fact that I was in love and that seemed to override a lot of stuff and I was trying to get perspective on it.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:05,459 ]I tried Husserl's phenomenological reduction and tried to, survey my feeling for you, sweetheart, as a phenomenon, and you know, sort of bracket the practical implications which worried me and just sort of look at it for what it was, but it didn't work.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:36,809 ] The phenomenological reduction, the one thing in my experience that it hasn't worked on is romantic love, because I couldn't get that distance on it.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:53,899 ]That is the sine qua non for Husserl's practice of regarding appearances in experience as just that without making value judgments or classifying them, just look at it for what it is. I tried to look at my feelings for you as just that, just what it is, and found that it isn't a phenomenon like any other phenomenon.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:32,379 ]It was rather something like a huge magnetic force that pulled me into it. It couldn't be regarded as an appearance among appearances.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:50,389 ]The wiseacres in Brooklyn College who said, you know, it's the coup de foudre, it's a romance, you enjoy it for six months, it'll wear off, it's some kind of hormonal imbalance that creates the delusion that this is a perfect wonderful thing, and then you wake up and it's over and you can't remember why you cared.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:18,209 ]That obviously didn't fit. So there are a lot of categories within modern life that my… what shall I say it pulls toward you, my existential, my ontological pull in your direction and the pull of my life into the direction of your life, those categories didn't encompass that pull. On the contrary, they were pulled into the pull and disappeared in it, while the pull kept going.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:58,029 ]Now, it could have been madness, you know, maybe I was just having an attack, a delusional attack and I was quite aware and wouldn't have missed it because all the yentas, all the wiseacres in Brooklyn College brought it to my attention that this could be a bad attack of a delusion. You know, that's how it was categorized by the clever people I knew.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:27,929 ]But, there comes a point in life where you are at a frontier of your experience, and that frontier is risky. It's dangerous. It could be a delusion because frontiers of one's common sense are famously prone to being delusional. But if it wasn't, and here I went through something like what you, darling, went through with the God voice, it could be you said to yourself that I'm Looney Tunes, that's happened to wiser heads than I own on my shoulders.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:21,909 ]But just in case it's God, just in case it's God, and I discount it, what in the world could replace that self-betrayal, that moment of challenge, of adventure, of stepping across the frontier of life? Nothing will come up to it if I walked away.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:49,339 ]So, in the same vein, it wasn't… God didn't tap me on the head, but romance, true love tapped me all over the place. And I'm not a cynic, I'm not a modern type who doesn't credit stuff like that. I'm more pre-modern. I do credit it. More 19th century, Jane Austen or whatever, the Brontes, you know, they know about this. But the moderns don't. They forgot about it. They outgrew it. So I'm not a modern...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:37,539 ]All the same, it did have, perhaps because the culture doesn't approve of it anymore, and so you're really stepping at the frontier of what the culture would say is a smart thing to do. But, my feeling for you had overwhelming authority for me.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:07,019 ]And when something has overwhelming authority, you can't map it because if you could, edge to edge, it wouldn't have that authority. It would be an object within under your conceptual system instead of something that supervenes on it.  

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:32,159 ]You made the analogy to my God encounter, and although I knew just as you reported here that this could be a delusion, hearing voices, that's found, that's prima facie prima facie delusional. However, I did due diligence. How do you check out such a thing? However, deep down, I never doubted the God voice and the reason I always stated first and is and has remained true for me, the voice is so real, authoritative, and benign for real doubt.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:11,619 ]I could say I doubt it. I could hold it at arm's length and check it out in various ways. Nevertheless, when you encounter something that's real, authoritative, and benign, not dangerous but good, then you go with it. And it sounds as if you were mentioning the way in which falling in love was authoritative. It filled the screen of authority. It sounded like wall-to-wall authoritative.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:43,209 ]It raised, you know, the the feminists, in order not to be fall prey to the ways in which women's romantic hopes have been abused by unfairness from husbands, from social constraints, from the abuses, the tight corsets, petticoats, you can't vote.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:19,719 ]If you're too smart, the boys won't like you, you know, all the ways in which the flowering of the human soul, if she's has- if it's housed in a feminine a body, a female body has been crushed even by masters of subtle thought like William James with his poor sister Alice, who was treated as a nutcase and advised by the best medical opinion of the day not to read, not to think, because it would give her a bout of hysteria, when what was creating the hysteria to my post-feminist, modern eye, was her effort to repress her intellectual powers. That that was suicidal. She was killing herself. She was killing the mind in her body. And it was giving her these involuntary hysterical outbreaks.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:36,509 ]And James, wise as we now agree that he was, was too thick in the head as a self-confident male in a sexually hierarchical society, to think about what's going on with his own sister. So, you know, I was well aware that to give up everything for romance has a very questionable history.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:12,029 ]And here I am, I'm living in the most desirable neighborhood, in the most desirable, then, most desirable city in the known world, in the Western world, the Upper East Side of New York. And I've got a great job that I fought for seven years to regain after being fired for voting for the loser in a department election for chair. So, you know, all the instruments agree, Abigail, don't do something stupid.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:49,769 ]And yet, it's almost a model case. Here’s this liberated woman, enviably situated. I've been married and divorced, so nobody can say nobody wanted you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:07,869 ]Better divorced or it used to be widowed, you know, that was considered, I think in one of the James novels, widowed had the same standing that divorced does today. You've been there, you did that, but you don't have to do it anymore. You can be yourself, as you were before adolescence, you know, you can be a real person.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:34,629 ]So here I am at the pinnacle of what anybody would want in the way of attainment on lifestyle.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:50,849 ]This is the ideal lifestyle. You were within walking distance of the great museums, art museums, the great cafes. Drugs were just delivered.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:01,889 ]Hey, I don't have quote personal happiness. Hey, this'll do instead of personal happiness. And I didn't fall in love with you for personal happiness. Love seemed it wasn't about happiness. It wasn't he'll make me happy, he'll give me a fur coat. I didn't want a fur coat. I didn't want to be happy. I was fine.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:25,249 ]No. I don't know all that. And I didn't need to break my fool head again. So this was, I sometimes use the word ontological, you know, that it could be a sort of a mystery word.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:44,419 ] A sort of a spooky word that doesn't conjure up anything and therefore you think it's deep. But in case it's not, just a pretend word, in case it refers to the moving, forming features of reality…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:13,719 ]I had known from the deaths of my parents and how they were at the end, they both from each one their emanated an authoritative love that seemed to confirm Dante's way of ending each of his contributions to to his Divine Comedy, the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:51,769 ]Not, we can just bracket Ptolemaic physics and astronomy and just look at no matter how the universe plays out and configures differently from how the Ptolemaic world looked to Dante. At the bottom of things is not just subatomic particles at the bottom of the bottom of things is love.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:31,189 ]Deeper than subatomic particles, more sub-subatomic atomic. So, there was our physics, our metaphysics, our epistemology, our psychology knows nothing of this knows meaningful relationships until they are meaningless. You know,  it doesn't know this ontological thing. But I'm not stupid, I'm an educated woman, but that doesn't make me say stupid.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:10,029 ]As our educated sense of things can make one, I could recognize something's going on here, deeper than the deepest argument.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:12,859 ]In light of all that, what do you make of God telling me to feel my love, God's love through Abigail?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:23,599 ]Hmm

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:26,039 ]What's the role of God? You've told the story of romance.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:29,829 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:30,619 ]It's ontological grounding meaning it's grounded in the deepest levels of reality. That's just what that fancy word means.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:38,129 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:42,139 ] And I'm told to feel God's love through Abigail, through the person with whom I am in love and whom I love and she loves me.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:57,939 ]Well, one of my advantages is that I'm here. I ain't going nowhere.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:24:07,219 ]I mean, I did decide give up the Upper East Side apartment and give up New York, give up, you know, everything, the divine wonderful job at Brooklyn College, and let  you and me get on a magic carpet and fly off. So, what I did can contribute that God isn't quite, not only God can't write a letter, he can't share your bed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:24:37,959 ]Yeah Yeah, we can't make a life together in the same way.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:24:42,039 ]He doesn't have breakfast with you

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:24:44,169 ]Hug and kiss.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:24:45,409 ]Yes, there God being, you know, omnipresent, whatever else God the the correct divine attributes might be, which I don't possess. One that I do possess is being here and now. I ain't perfect, but it's not about perfect.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:12,609 ]Not about perfect.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:13,849 ]It's about real. I'm real. God didn't give up anything that I know of anyway to love you. It belongs to the God nature.  

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:26,609 ]You gave up the ideal life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:28,339 ]I gave up what every girl dreams of having. And a lot of people would say you're crazy, so I also gave up my reputation for being smart.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:46,139 ]Same for being sane.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:50,129 ]There goes Abigail off the deep end.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:25:52,699 ]Off the deep end. You know, as I used to do as a baby, I I would not look at the fact that the table comes to an end and I would see my mother and I would walk off the table into her arms, I hope, and she managed to keep me from breaking every bone in my body, but, you know, that I grew up, I stopped being a silly three-year-old and here I go again, walking off the table.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:29,609 ]Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:26:31,409 ]So, I think what God meant, unless I'm missing something more sophisticated, is that unlike God, I'm actually here.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:42,679 ]Yeah. Yeah. And that's important. It's kind of funny.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:26:50,129 ]Yeah! I'm real.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:53,059 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:54,639 ]Yeah, you know, there are the places in in God: An Autobiography and my dialogues with God where I raise this question we all have, why didn't God make the world more perfect instead of its flawed in so many ways, so very many ways. So that has enormous human suffering, animal suffering. That's just the beginning of a long list of problems it's got. And the answer is basically, here I'm not quoting God, but I'm just kind of restating it in different words, that God had to make a world that's real. It's real. And a real world is going to be material.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:34,049 ]The world where you can stand on the floor and if you step off the balcony you fall and hurt yourself, you know, that's real world. And, you could imagine, I don't know, in some ideal world where you didn't have material, maybe we were all just free floating spirits and God radiated love like a sublime light over us, but well, that doesn't seem very real either, does it? I mean, that's just a kind of science fiction or some kind of fantasy.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:07,439 ]Whereas in real life, there are all the vulnerabilities. And you've described a lot of them in falling in love, the vulnerabilities, and that's part of its being real.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:28:20,039 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:20,889 ]And the plus side, as you say, is we can share a bed together. We can kiss and hug. We can say hello. I missed you this weekend when you were away.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:32,349 ]Oh, God never misses me, as far as I know. But it's nice to be missed when you're away, right? And you return...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:39,629 ]Oh, good to see you. And that's real life and you help each other in troubles. That's a lot of real life. Sometimes people apologize, or a good friend will apologize for sharing their troubles with me and I say, oh no, thank you. " It's a blessing for someone to share their troubles with you. That means you're just living real life, you know, in somewhat in partnership with them, sharing that friendship as a real friendship in real life including its hardships, its ups and downs.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:10,309 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:11,379 ]I'm thinking I seemed to my... I gave the impression, I think, of faulting God for not doing what I can do for you. But as if God were real, as omnipresent and omnipotent and so on, omnibenevolent as they say, He could fill in for what Abigail can contribute to your life. But that ain't quite correct.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:29:47,939 ]If God were something like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, Walt Disney or some kind of a good fairy who could always rush into the rescue every time you got in trouble…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:30:08,909 ]Athena often does that for Odysseus because she's got a thing for Odysseus. The goddess does it, sort of rescues him.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:30:19,229 ]No, that would detract from life's real quality of being real. God isn't a safety net under every fall and every stumble and every precipitous bail out without a parachute.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:30:48,699 ]So, I can do something for you, for your life, that God simply being God must not do, does not do, cannot do. That's not God's part in our story.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:31:12,609 ]I'm reminded it's not exactly an analogy to what you're saying and I'm saying, but in the garden of Eden when I prayed about that scene, God reports, after tasting of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve realize suddenly they're naked, which means they've discovered sexuality. And they're off together. And the God I'm praying to talks about having felt left out. They now love each other more than they love God, for obvious reasons, that they're in the present and God becomes the third wheel. And well, that's not God's role.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:32:04,429 ]God's role is not to cavort in the garden of Eden, though this very intensely personal God who talks to me reenacted the scene in much that way, as if His personal side was sort of offended or felt rejected or put off. Well, God is kind of rejected as we seek all these other goods.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:32:29,469 ]And rather neglect the divine element in our lives, the divine messages, the divine partnership, but the relationship of male to female, of person to person in real flesh and real time is powerful. And the kind of more spiritual relation one has to God, really can't compete with it on its own terms. It can compete with it in some other category of kind of ultimacy or something. It's more sublime maybe. I don't know what the right language would be. But it can't really compete with it in its own terms.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:33:16,679 ]What you're saying puts me in mind of something that happened to the romantic erotic component of modernity in the course of the 20th to the 21st century. When I was coming of age in high school and college, very dominating of the youthful imagination were the sex scenes in D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, where the earth moves as Pilar and what's his name get together. And sorry, not Pilar, she's this old wise woman who says that happens very rarely, the earth moving, but yes, I know all about the earth and the moving.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:34:24,869 ]Anyway, that for us growing American virginal girls at the High School of Music and Art in New York where we were very intellectual and advanced at the ages of fifteen and sixteen and whatever, that was the pinnacle of our youthful hopes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:34:52,369 ]I can't, not being a sociologist of the sexual imagination, I can't pinpoint what must have happened, but I know today after feminism marched through the the wastelands and that romantic hope, that erotic romantic hope replaced the true love of an earlier premodern imagination, the true love of the Brontës and of Jane Austen and I suppose even Dickens, all that was gone. The Victorian hopes were gone, World War One had smashed them to smithereens. But, what was left was an eroticization of a sexualization of the romantic hope that dominated, say, the first half of the 20th century through novels more than through essays and prose of other kinds.  

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:36:18,169 ]It somehow seeped into and permeated the culture, people gave up virginity, the barriers to sexualization of their attractions, their youthful, usually youthful attractions, and the more they gave them up, the less they seemed to be romantic, and the more they looked like either healthful antidotes to repression, which, you know, that ain't romance.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:36:55,359 ]Antidote to repression is just a medical thing. The more they got somewhat medicalized and you apparently from what I've seen, the young woman was told that she shouldn't be puritanic, she shouldn't be repressed, she shouldn't have age-old prohibitions against this natural liberated, but it seemed more less and less to be valued.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:37:30,999 ]The more it was advocated and practiced, the less interesting it seems to have become.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:37:42,029 ]So that we in the 21st century, the culture in the 21st century doesn't seem to include romantic aspirations. It's not that they've gone away, certainly not for young women, probably not for young men, but they're not culturally sanctioned.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:38:10,799 ]The feminists are busy overcoming barriers and widening their reach so that it's not no longer just about heterosexual women but it's about same-sex couples and then no longer same-sex but people who've been surgically altered and then the question is, is that fair in sports competition? Is it fair if a sexually altered fellow is put in a woman's jail cell, you know, at what point does that become actually abusive and there are legal struggles about that, but none of this includes the romantic element for which I risked my worldly attainments and took deeply seriously.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:39:14,109 ]It now seems to have been scared out of the public arena altogether, and the competition between the traditional wives that somehow have organized themselves, I forget under what caption or heading or rubric…

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:39:38,119 ]But back to traditional wife and mother and stay home womanhood on the one hand and on the other hand this far-reaching feminism which has expanded to such a degree that it can't protect real women in vulnerable situations like sports or prison, and none of it has to do with a woman qua woman

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:40:13,069 ]The feminist movement seems to have almost erased whatever is in a woman's actual interest, the usual kind of woman.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:40:28,149 ]Given that there's so many kinds of relationships in modern life that are accepted and so on, many kinds of sexuality and ways of living that out, those modes out why is the romantic important? What's lost if it's say casual sex, what sometimes people call recreational sex replaces romance.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:40:58,269 ]I think the sexual exquisiteness itself is lost, which may be nature's way of saying this ain't the way to do this, you know. I think the sex itself gets somewhat rusty and corroded. So that's a little hint from the great mother (capital N) Nature herself.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:41:29,009 ]And there is something like the point of life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:41:42,469 ]Romance is in a funny way, and I don't have any worked out theory, I'm sort of thinking aloud as we speak, but it seems to me that the heroes of 19th century fiction and the heroines of 19th century fiction, and that's the fiction where romance was taken as more global, more holistic, not just the kind of hyper-erotic sensation feature.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:42:30,969 ]What seems to have been lost, what you might call the romance of life.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:42:39,849 ]You know, there's Sydney Carton on his way in the tumbrils on his way to being guillotined because he has replaced the man who is the true love of the woman he cares for. So he's made the ultimate sacrifice for romance. And as he's lived an unworthy life, he's not a candidate.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:43:09,999 ]He never could have been a candidate for her hand, but he wants to be cherished and remembered in a noble style by her and her husband as long as they both shall live, and so he's on his way to the guillotine.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:43:34,259 ]And again and again in 19th century fiction, I can't think of as clear an example, but he seems to me to stand in for anyone, and I'm thinking particularly of the men who want to be noble.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:43:57,089 ]Who want to act nobly in order to be worthy of the romantic style of admiration. You know, when we met, you and I, you nobly came to the rescue of the college in which I taught, figuring out how to save the excellent curriculum which was then endangered, which was why I called you. So your first connection with me was a noble one.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:44:35,109 ]And that is profoundly romantic. And somehow, when God says Adam and Eve shouldn't just do it with each other, shouldn't just do this coupling and rolling around in post-Edenic, enamored, mutual obsession, what was really missing was not so much a third in bed, namely God, as the ennobling element in erotic life. Erotic life, even between animals, as we are now learning, courtship is a very stylized matter between peacocks, between stags and does. It is not a matter of scratching your hairy chest and acting like what in the post-Nietzschean imagination is an animal. No, animals have good taste.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:45:58,729 ]Animals don't desecrate their erotic propensities and we need to emulate animals and restore a high sense of high purpose connected to desire.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:16,819 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:18,459 ]Well, I think that's a good concluding thought, sweetheart, that the ennobling aspect of romantic love compared to, say, recreational sex is something which is completely lacking. And I've seen these animal films where the female lion fights off the male lion half-heartedly, of course. She needs to be conquered in the end, but he has to be worthy of her. And that's a kind of high standard.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:50,739 ]You know, not just not worthy, just strong enough to take her, but these courting rituals are more ritualistic than that. It's got to go through many particular steps of courtship. You see this in various species and, well, we're even higher level of development presumably, and so our rituals are very high.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:16,739 ]They're protective of that ennobling set of ideals that we engage in love, not just to gobble each other up in some sating of appetites, but to actualize certain ideals between us. And you're not just Abigail.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:43,719 ]I mean you are Abigail, but Abigail for me is the ideal woman. It's not just a person, oh isn't she cute or she seems to like me so I'm gonna like her, but there's a kind of ideal there and you want to support that in your partner. Support their noble aspirations and efforts.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:48:04,119 ]We've got the wrong theories, you know, the Freudian theory, all our intellectualized explanations of motivation at this point in Western culture are not elevating and therefore not sufficiently true.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:48:29,169 ]Yes. Well, thank you, sweetheart, for this lovely intimate dialogue.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:48:36,369 ]Thank you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:48:37,739 ]Love you.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:48:39,139 ]Love you.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:49:03,869 ]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.