“Doing philosophy could be a way of loving God”: on Marilyn McCord Adams

God and the Philosophers collects essays by philosophers who believe in God. Midway through is the lightning bolt: Marilyn McCord Adams’s story of her struggles with faith. It’s so good I have to tell you about it, in a shadow play that will, I hope, cause you to read it for yourself.

She was a smart kid, scary smart, and this was not an incidental fact in what followed. Frustrated by the “snail’s pace” of the public schools, she took to “playing hooky,” and secretly enrolled herself in a homeschool program of her own design:

I would get up at 4am to work, then retire at about 6:30, when my mother rose, and pretend to be sick until she left for the school...The I would get up and go back to work at my own pace.

Regarding religion, Adams was raised Protestant and fundamentalist, in a church scandalized by the Revised Standard Version’s departures from the King James Bible. Then, in her teenage years, her “sense of the reality of God faded,” and one day in Sunday school it left her completely, as she asked

What is prayer anyway? Surely it’s more than talking to the wall.

To this she had no answer. She “converted” to atheism, and faced a question that sounds silly if you’ve never known God, and terrifying if you’ve lost him: What is there to live for if God isn’t real? Her answer was “truth,” and truth, or better knowledge, especially academic knowledge, replaced God in her devotions.

In a twist I did not see coming, Adams, still an atheist, began attending a Methodist church, in order to argue her position with the minister. Looking back, she saw herself, in this, a type and not an individual,

[rehearsing] the objections to belief in God that are rediscovered by thousands in every generation whose lives get twisted by deep pain and disappointment.

Replacing God with college exam scores is a bad idea, as they will neither love nor forgive you, and Adams

[contemplated] suicide when I couldn’t do several of the problems on the honor’s calculus test.

In a cruel irony, she got an A—the instructor used the same test for the (harder) advanced and the (easier) honors class, so her middling score was actually proof of her excellence.

A Godless life was intolerable. Pascal’s Wager suggests taking practical steps to cause belief, even if you take your evidence to justify only atheism. This is widely thought to be irrational, though it has been defended. Adams reports no complex calculations on this front, she just says, in a tone of sad desperation, that she

turned over every stone trying to find someone who could help me believe in God again.

Those who should have offered aid and comfort, turned out to be false ministers, promoting a safe Christianity-as-metaphor, when “what I wanted was to taste and see again.” She found her way back to God the way William Alston did: she “attended the complex high [Anglican] church worship services for about a year,” then “found myself believing in God again.” It’s interesting, she does not say that she changed her mind: that she thought it through again, reviewed the evidence and arguments, and reached a different conclusion. Belief was not, in her telling, something she did or brought about, it was something she now found herself with. What exactly happened, we want to know. Lucky for us, she tells us:

I was filled with an overpowering sense of the real presence of God right there in the library.

Amazingly,

[It was not] a fleeting experience. God remained a given in experience, just as He had been in my childhood, along with sunshine, green grass, and the vast Midwestern skies. I was overjoyed.

It seems to have helped, that the standards she was measured by had changed. In her youth, holiness was a matter of “feeling the right way,” but now “participating in the liturgy, fasting on Fridays, and so on counted as genuine steps in God’s direction, even before we had managed to get our feelings straightened out.”

If Adams’ story is ultimately a comedy, in the classic sense, it is a dark one. We are called to worship God as part of a community, but doing this incurs a risk: that a poisonous community will poison our personal relationship with God. After college, during graduate school and her first academic job, Adams found only bad churches, and “God seemed to withdraw from my world, far, far away.” The climate in her graduate program was dark and stormy, with faculty “deliberately humiliating students in class.” Sexism in the discipline left her feeling like a “second-class citizen.” Time passed. Now a tenured professor at UCLA, still “God seemed increasly remote,” even as she attended mass almost daily. A Franciscan scholar visited, lecturing on the “obligation to love God above all and for His own sake,” and Adams said to him, after class,

I would like to love God that way, but I love philosophy too, and I don’t want to give it up.

It’s heartbreaking, her felt need to choose, but time was to grant her wisdom—too much time, a decade she says it was,

before I could believe totally that doing philosophy could be a way of loving God for his own sake.

Adams’ first crisis of faith, as a teenager, was around prayer. It’s interesting that it’s here, in this later crisis, that she says more about her prayer life. She studied St. Francis, and decided she should become more like him:

since then I’ve gone to Assisi many times and prayed, “Lord, make me like St. Francis.”

Jesus said that “if you have faith and do not doubt,” then “whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” Atheists take the infinite account-book of unanswered prayers as proof there is no God, while Christians may say that those prayers were made in a state of imperfect faith, shadowed by doubt. Adams did not become like St. Francis, but I’m struck by the fact that, over time, as (one might suppose) her faith grew, her prayer changed, to “Lord, make me love you as much as St. Francis, but let me love you as myself”: which she proceeded to find herself able to do.

This essay is already too long and there’s too much left to say. Wanting to follow St. Paul’s instructions, to “pray without ceasing,” she asks her spiritual director a simple, straightforward, and bold question: “how can one pray and do philosophy at the same time?” He gave her The Way of the Pilgrim, a story about a man who learns to pray without ceasing, the same book Franny Glass is holding when she collapses in Franny and Zooey; and, more importantly, he recommended that she “pray in tongues.” Imagine, an academic admitting she hoped to pray in tongues! Adams practiced, and “did receive that gift,” telling us that it “can be done while doing philosophy or ‘under one’s breath’ at public meetings”—and department talks and faculty retreats as well, I would guess. Adams was called to the ministry as a vocation, but was given a “failing grade” by a prejudiced examiner, and her life became a “desperate nightmare”; years later she was finally ordained a deacon. She worked with gay men dying of AIDS, and “I did not have to strain to see Christ crucified in these people.” She became a universalist: everyone is saved, and homosexuality is not a sin. This made her enemies, and at her ordination “no authority figures came: one bought a cow, the other married and took a trip...even the bishop went to Hawaii with the football team.” It didn’t matter. Closing the essay, she saw herself as a missionary—

not [in] India or the Philippines...but at a secular arts faculty of a state university, at the social frontiers of Hollywood or Santa Monica, to those who long for God but can’t yet believe that God’s love has always been with and for them.