Not-God (32 page)

And so, Alcoholics Anonymous had to be “a spiritual rather than a religious program,” but truly an expression of
religious
insight.
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The fundamental religious
or
spiritual insight is that there
is
a “God,” which is to say that man is
not
God. The human condition is not perfect, but somehow humans are called to perfection. Religious language has classically expressed this by describing humanity as existing in a state of
sin
and therefore in need of
salvation.
A familiar phrasing of this ancient perception and feeling is Augustine’s: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
⁹

Augustine’s “Thee” is of necessity outside the self, a power greater than the self. It offers salvation from the essential limitations of the self, whether this state of limitation — “sin” — be understood as depravity or as deprivation. Because limited, the human condition itself is, in the classic sense, tragic. In the craving for and consequent claim to more than is possible or given abides the essential “tragic flaw” of all tragic characters. The human situation of need — of needing specifically
other
, whether that “other” be an-Other, an-other, or others — has inspired all religion, most love, and much art. From these points of view at least, the history of human existence is the story of the human quest for human fulfillment.
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In that quest, the fulfillment sought is first of the human, but precisely as “human” it implies also a facet of fulfillment
by
the human. Every religious insight strives to embrace and to affirm both aspects. It speaks both to the sense that perfection can be found only beyond the human, at least beyond the individual self, and to the awareness that an essential part of being human consists in the self’s cooperation in, seeking of, or at least openness to that fulfillment of self and others.

According to which of these two aspects is emphasized, religious insights group themselves into two styles. These styles need not — and do not — contradict each other. The history of religious thought, indeed, may be understood as the effort to strike a creative balance between them.

The first of these emphases concentrates upon the separation of the human individual from the fulfilling Other. Attentive first to the lack of freedom imposed by human limitation, it finds a source of awe and a reminder of humility in the possibility of salvation from humanity’s essential alienation. This first style thus stresses “salvation” as from outside the self, and because of its root perception of awe and sense of humility is well-termed “Pietist.” When it joyfully announces its sense and proclaims its perception as “good news,” the style of this emphasis is also called “Evangelical.”

The second emphasis, on the contrary, is impressed first by human participation in the Other. Aware first of the human potential to transcend
some
limitations, it finds a source of hope and a spur to responsible action in its sense of human freedom to fashion human destiny. The second style thus stresses human participation in human salvation, and, because of its profound respect for human possibility, rejoices in the name “Humanist.” Because of its faith in human freedom, this style is also well-termed “Liberal.”

Both these approaches have shaped religious thought in America, and both appear in the fellowship and program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In American history, however, it is the second — the Humanistic and Liberal tradition — that has generally held sway, especially in the twentieth century and among those wary of the claims to certitude and encroachments upon liberty of both organized religion and unorganized religious enthusiasms. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is the other — the Evangelical and Pietist — sense that infuses and dominates. The reason for this is historical, but not merely historical. The Oxford Group, out of which Alcoholics Anonymous sprang, shared deeply in the Evangelical Pietist insight. But the Group also, and precisely as American, allowed its liberal optimism about human potential to overwhelm its specifically Pietist sense. This may be seen in the “aggressive evangelism” that characterized the Oxford Group approach and led directly to the departure from it of Wilson’s early sober alcoholics.
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+

More significant to A. A.’s own specifically Evangelical Pietist religious intuition was the climate of opinion in which the fellowship was born and grew. By an almost too happy historical coincidence, the self-defined seed of Alcoholics Anonymous — Ebby’s visit to the Clinton Street home of the then-drinking Bill Wilson — was planted in November 1934.

The year 1934 has been called, in the history of religion in America,
annus mirabilis
, “that wondrous year.” It marked the blossoming in the United States of the age of neo-orthodoxy. This “new-old” theology strongly reasserted the omnipotence and otherness of a sovereign God. It merged a deep aversion to all emphasis on human strengths with a profound objection to any stress upon merely human sufficiency, and so expressed “protest against the prevailing tendency to glorify man and all his works.” Neo-orthodox thinkers were diverse. Their essential consensus lay not in specific doctrines, but “in a sense of urgency and a demand for moral and intellectual humility.” The “finitude of all things human must not be ignored,” they said; “the tragic sense of life must be apprehended.” Neo-orthodoxy’s sense of hope “rested on faith in the God who was beyond, beneath, and above all human possibilities.”
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Thus, both its proximate origins and its historical context exposed Alcoholics Anonymous to the Evangelical Pietist style of religious insight. But exposure is not determination. Other phenomena shared the neo-orthodox context, and the Oxford Group itself strayed still furthur from its Pietist root in its second re-incarnation as “Moral Re-Armament” in the late thirties. The core of A.A.’s insight into the meaning of “human” resided not in the fellowship’s historical context nor in its program’s proximate origins but in its early members’ experience of their own alcoholism. The very heart of the Pietist insight lies in its sense of being brought low — of essential humiliation in one’s very being. Especially in the context of the assumptions of the modern age concerning rationalization and control, few if any had more reason justly to feel thus brought low than did the alcoholic.
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In the America of the mid-twentieth century, the transfer of social authority from revealed religions to moralizing psychologies rendered the self-pitying plight of the drinking alcoholic even more desperate. The churches had castigated the “sin of alcoholism,” promising salvation through moral regeneration. The psychologists “understood” the “immaturity of the alcoholic” and offered the mature adulthood of diminished latent homosexual oral-fixation as the reward for acknowledging these perversions. Ironically then, more alcoholics experienced being brought low under the ministrations of psychiatrically amateurish friends than under the fulminations of religious professionals. Unfortunately, continuing modern experience taught that neither species of humiliation in itself cured many alcoholics.
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Given, then, A.A.’s Oxford Group background, the neo-orthodox climate of opinion in which Alcoholics Anonymous came into being, and the manifold sources from which any self-conscious alcoholic could derive the sense of being brought low, the deep extent to which the Evangelical Pietist insight infuses and dominates the A.A. program hardly surprises. Yet neither should the Humanistic and Liberal facets of Alcoholics Anonymous astonish. In the first place, A.A. was also American, and it is the Humanistic and Liberal insight that most deeply infuses all thought throughout the history of the United States,
the
Enlightenment nation. Further, granting the Evangelical Pietism of A.A.’s immediate parent and context, it was to the thought of William James that members of Alcoholics Anonymous early and consistently turned whenever they self-consciously sought to understand themselves and their program in terms of intellectual context and content.
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In James they found not only a vehicle for understanding and teaching the importance of their “spiritual experience,” but also profoundly Humanistic and Liberal routes to and justifications of their fundamental Evangelical Pietist insight. Their embrace of James as pragmatist enabled A.A.’s shaping generation to accept and proclaim as a facet of their own experience what their neo-orthodox contemporaries scorned and castigated as a “psychologism” on which no worthy saving faith could be based. Following James as pluralist promoted the open-mindedness that early Alcoholics Anonymous intuited to be not only essential to their fellowship’s growth but also as lying at the heart of their program itself. The pluralistic insight fostered their welcoming of differences among alcoholic insights as well as alcoholic styles; it shaped their dedication to “tolerance” as
active
virtue with curative effect; and in reinforcing their wariness of any monistic claim to absolutes of any sort, it guided the fellowship itself through treacherous hazards in its unfolding history.
¹⁶

Thus the Humanism and Liberalism of Alcoholics Anonymous, for all the program’s Evangelically Pietist core, are neither mere accidental after-thoughts nor overflow effusions of some affinity with mind-cure religious philosophies. Mind-cure explanations of Alcoholics Anonymous fail not least because, in the A.A. understanding, there is no “cure” for alcoholism or for the alcoholic. A.A.’s fundamental impetus derives from an opposite, more ancient insight, one that interprets the dis-ease of pain and illness not as less real because merely mental, but as more than merely real because an aspect of human reality itself. The after-thought understanding ignores the extent to which Alcoholics Anonymous is truly “American” — the program from its beginning was so totally immersed in and infused by the intellectual culture so well-reflected by William James that the fellowship readily found itself in this quintessentially American philosopher’s thought.
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Any expression of religious ideas invites examination under two headings. What was believed? And how was this faith exemplified and conveyed? For Alcoholics Anonymous, the deep answers are clear in the Steps of its program. For the sake of insight into the larger historical context, however, the analysis that follows is carried on in terms and concepts more classically familiar in the history of religious ideas in America. In these terms and concepts, the fundamental impulse revealed by and lived out within Alcoholics Anonymous will be found to be that of a uniquely American expression of Evangelical Pietism.

The substantive faith set forth in especially the first three Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous was in
salvation
attained through a
conversion
, the pre-condition of which was the act of
surrender
.

In the First Step of the program Alcoholics Anonymous, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable,” the individual alcoholic gave up any claim to absolute control over anything. This surrender was made vivid by its style. The alcoholic admitted absolutely
no
control over alcohol, more offering this fact as evidence than claiming it as cause of the unmanageability of his life. The admission of the First Step marked acceptance that “bottom” had been hit. It also echoed a deeper admission — the irony of “original sin” as described by the Book of Genesis. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had sinned by reaching for more than had been given. They ate of the forbidden fruit because the serpent promised that eating it would make them “as Gods.” Their punishment was loss of the garden they had been given. The alcoholic, in drinking, had sought inappropriate control over reality — more than was granted to human finitude. The promise of alcohol was likewise one of Godlike control: alcoholic drinking sought to control how outside reality impinged upon the alcoholic as well as his own moods, feelings, and emotions. As in the mythic parallel, the penalty for such abuse was the loss of any ability to use properly: reaching for more than had been given resulted in the loss of even that which had been given. To this understanding, the alcoholic surrendered by the very admission: “I am an alcoholic.”
¹⁸

Alcoholics Anonymous carefully avoided the term
conversion
. It came freighted with religious rather than spiritual connotations. Yet keen observers of the fellowship and its program consistently noted that successful affiliation with them depended upon the capacity of the individual to experience “a conversion with its attendant emotional components.” Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, premier psychiatric analyst of Alcoholics Anonymous, was even more blunt: he titled his paper suggesting what A.A. might teach psychiatry, “Conversion as a Psychological Phenomenon.”
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In its understanding of the conversion process, Alcoholics Anonymous unconsciously reflected a larger religious tradition that had been exemplified most strikingly in an earlier age of American “Revivals.” Exactly a century to the month before Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening in Towns Hospital, another belated great awakener had in the same city set forth his definitive understanding of “What a Revival of Religion Is.” Charles Grandison Finney listed the “stages” of a “revival” as “conviction of sin, … a deep repentance, a breaking down of the heart, … [and] reformation [of life.]” One hundred and twenty-seven years later, Dr. Tiebout, in his most mature exposition of his understanding of “Alcoholics Anonymous — An Experiment of Nature,” recognized “four elements … as playing an essential role” in the A.A. program: “hitting bottom, surrender, ego reduction, and maintenance of humility.” Earlier, Tiebout had carefully analyzed “The Act of Surrender in the Therapeutic Process” that was the working of Alcoholics Anonymous, in concepts if not terms clearly reminiscent of classic American revivalism. He wrote, “The specific part of the personality which must surrender is the inflated ego … the carry-over of infantile traits into adult life … a feeling of omnipotence.…”
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