Not-God (2 page)

In its final stages, this manuscript was read by Dr. Daniel J. Anderson, Dr. Sarah E. Williams, Professor Philip Natale, and Professor John J. Quinn. Their comments, offered from their deep knowledge of the field of alcoholism studies, of Alcoholics Anonymous, and of literary acceptability, led to many minor changes and one major revision. If this study has usefulness to workers in the alcoholism field, it is largely due to the informed suggestions of Dr. Anderson, who also guided the early stages of my research into the alcoholism literature. Dr. Williams at a critical moment facilitated my understanding more deeply an aspect of my subject that until our meeting had eluded me. Professor Natale, beyond encouraging this study in its earliest stages, shared the burden of late stylistic revision. Professor Quinn guided the revision of Part Two, offering substantial as well as stylistic guidance and the encouragement of his contagious enthusiasm for some of the larger ideas attempted in that interpretation. To each of them, I am grateful for much.

The staff of the Hazelden Press, especially Mr. John Burns who exercised final editorial responsibility, offered their skill, patience, and enthusiasm, rendering more enjoyable than tedious the task of turning a technical dissertation into a readable book. I am especially grateful to them for their willingness and care to make available to a wide variety of readers the scholarly apparatus that, on the topic of Alcoholics Anonymous, should interest many readers who are not themselves scholars.

Finally, especially for the beginning of several of the interpretive insights explored in Part Two, I am grateful to my sister, Mary Ann Kurtz, who at the time of this research was Research Instructor in Psychology, Department of Pediatrics, The Medical College of Pennsylvania. Beyond the requirements of siblinghood, she gave generously of her time and skilled insight in drawing on her knowledge of the psychological literature to direct my attention to and aid my exploration of valuable and productive ideas deriving from current research. Whatever contribution this study might make to psychological thinking on alcoholism is largely due to her generosity and patience in assisting this endeavor in the midst of her own continuing responsibilities.

Despite all this diligent assistance from mentors, readers, and others, I am aware that very probably some flaws of citation and infelicities of style remain: the responsibility for these is, of course, only my own.

14 July 1979                                 E
RNEST
K
URTZ

The term
not-God
is the theme around which this history of Alcoholics Anonymous is recounted and its interpretation offered. The exact phrase appears nowhere in either the published literature of Alcoholics Anonymous or the primary sources used in this research, yet the two senses contained in this expression not only pervade the written documents but also lie at the heart of the A.A. fellowship and program.

“Not-God” means first “You are not God,” the message of the A.A. program. As is clear from the epigraph on page vii — a pungent reminder drawn from the very heart of “How It Works,” the key fifth chapter of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
— the fundamental and first message of Alcoholics Anonymous to its members is that they are not infinite, not absolute,
not God
. Every alcoholic’s problem had
first
been, according to this insight, claiming God-like powers, especially that of
control
. But the alcoholic at least, the message insists, is
not
in control, even of himself; and the first step towards recovery from alcoholism must be admission and acceptance of this fact that is so blatantly obvious to others but so tenaciously denied by the obsessive-compulsive drinker. Historically, it has been the concept of divinity, the notion of the deity, that includes the idea of absolute control. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous, then, teaches first and foremost that the alcoholic is
not
God. This insight rules each of the Twelve Suggested Steps, although it is appropriately most clear in the First: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become
unmanageable”
(emphasis added).

But Alcoholics Anonymous is
fellowship
as well as
program
, and thus there is a second side to its message of not-God-ness. Because the alcoholic is not God, not absolute, not infinite, he or she is essentially limited. Yet from this very limitation — from the alcoholic’s
acceptance
of personal limitation — arises the beginning of healing and wholeness. It is this facet of the message of “not-God” that Alcoholics Anonymous as fellowship lives out. To be an alcoholic within Alcoholics Anonymous is not only to accept oneself as not God; it implies also affirmation of one’s connectedness with other alcoholics. It is this connection that historically has provided for hundreds of thousands of people a way out of active alcoholism and the path into a life of health, happiness, and wholeness. The invitation to make such a connection with others and the awareness of the necessity of doing so arise from the alcoholic’s very acceptance of limitation. Thus, this second message that affirms limitation is well conveyed by the hyphenated phrase, “not-God.

The form “not-God” further reminds that affirmation is rooted in negation, that the alcoholic’s acceptance of self as human is founded in his rejection of any claim to be more than human. And the hyphen — a connecting mark — reminds of the need for connectedness with other alcoholics that A. A. as,
fellowship
lives out and enables. The fulfilling of the implications of being not-God, the living out of the connectedness with others that comes about from the alcoholic’s very limitation, is the story of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is this story, this history, that this book narrates.

“Not God,” then, and “not-God”: the alcoholic as essentially limited, but able to find a healing wholeness in the acceptance of this limitation. It is the author’s hope that this distinction is less cute than memorable, for it is his conviction that this twofold message is one that not only the alcoholic but also modern mankind needs to hear and perhaps, then, even to heed.

Two further prefatory points, appropriate because of this book’s origin as a doctoral dissertation. Part Two of the present study is an expansion of the final single chapter of the dissertation. That chapter was directed to scholars and assumed a comprehensive knowledge of interpretive themes in the history of ideas in America. In this expansion for a more general audience, I have at times chosen from among differing interpretations of some of these themes without detailing the historiography reasoning underlying such choice. Scholarly readers interested in that historiographic process may consult the dissertation, which is available in the archives of Harvard University. The general reader will not suffer by not doing so.

Because of the diverse audiences this book hopes to reach and the widespread knowledge among members of Alcoholics Anonymous of many episodes in A.A. history, the dissertation’s scholarly apparatus has in general been retained. The citation numerals within the text refer to the endnotes, which begin on page 308. A few notes that appeared in the dissertation as endnotes are so illuminating that they have been printed herein as footnotes. The general reader will not lose much by referring to those that remain as endnotes only occasionally, on points of special interest to that individual reader. I suggest, however, that readers making any extensive use of the endnotes not only check the “Index to Abbreviations” appearing on page 307, but also read first the brief bibliographical essay that begins on page 409.

NOVEMBER 1934-JUNE 1935

On a dank, cold afternoon in late November 1934, two men sat kitty-corner at the kitchen table of a brownstone house at 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, New York. The home, only partially heated, clearly had seen better days. In the hurriedly tidied kitchen hung the faintly sweet aroma of stale alcohol. On the white-oilcloth-covered table stood two glasses, a pitcher of pineapple juice, and a bottle of gin recently retrieved from its hiding place in the overhead tank of the toilet in the adjacent bathroom. The visitor, neatly groomed and bright-eyed, smiled in gentle but pained mirth as he surveyed the scene; his tall, thin, craggy-faced host laughed a bit too loudly, anxious less over his careless attire and the patches of whiskers on his quickly shaved face than at the announcement his friend, an old drinking-buddy, had just made.
¹

The host’s eyes and heart dropped.
Religion
. His mind wandered as his guest continued to speak. His first thought: “Good! That means more for me!” Now he did not need to worry about replenishing his supply should his wife return home before the visitor left. Although somewhat pleased with that realization, within his mind jarred a less happy awareness. As much as he had looked forward to swapping tales with an old pal, that happy prospect had now suddenly palled — “got religion” indeed! He knew that his friend had been a too-heavy drinker. “Had his alcoholic insanity become religious insanity?”
²

Uninspiring and tawdry as that scene was, a profound significance and a deep irony lay buried within it. The significance: what was witnessed was the birth of the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous. The irony: the carefully groomed, dry, religion-spouting visitor, Edwin T. — nicknamed “Ebby” — would die three alcohol-sodden decades later, a virtual ward of charity; his cynical, moody, too loudly talking and laughing host — William Griffith Wilson — would after this one last binge never drink another drop of alcohol. As “Bill W.,” he would give America and the world a program and a fellowship to which in time over one million people would offer allegiance as being for them literally life-saving.
³

The birth of an idea: such moments of origin are always difficult to pinpoint, and Alcoholics Anonymous itself cherishes the memory of a different “founding moment.” Yet here, in this kitchen, on that dark November afternoon, a seed was planted in Bill Wilson’s own understanding that his alcohol-numbed brain could neither then drown nor later wash away — the seed that he eventually nurtured and cultivated into the core of the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous: “In the kinship of common suffering,
one alcoholic had been talking to another.
”
⁴

That such conversation could be helpful was an important idea. Ideas, of course, do not spring from nothingness. The origins and paths of the concepts that had led to this idea help to explain its development into the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sometime in 1931, another man, a young, talented, and wealthy financial wizard, had found himself on the verge of despair over his inability to control his drinking. Having attempted virtually every other “cure,” he turned to one of the greatest medical and psychiatric talents of the time, traveling to Zurich, Switzerland, to place himself under the care of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. For close to a year, Rowland H. worked with Jung, finally leaving treatment with boundless admiration for the physician and almost as much confidence in his new self.
⁵

To his consternation, Rowland soon relapsed into intoxication. Certain that Jung was his last resort, he returned to Zurich and the psychiatrist’s care. There followed, in Bill Wilson’s words written to Dr. Jung in 1961, “the conversation between you [and Rowland] that was to become the first link in the chain of events that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.” That conversation, in Wilson’s and Jung’s later memory, had made two points. “First of all, you frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned.” Second, in response to Rowland’s frantic query whether there might be any
other
hope, Jung had spoken of “a spiritual or religious experience — in short, a genuine conversion,” cautioning, however, “that while such experiences had sometimes brought recovery to alcoholics, they were … comparatively rare.”
⁶

Concerning the first point, Wilson wrote to Jung: “This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our society has since been built.” In response to the second statement, which offered a slender thread of hope, Rowland had joined the Oxford Group, “an evangelical movement then at the height of its success in Europe.” In recalling to Jung this channeling of his idea, Wilson — who was linked to Rowland H. through their mutual friend Ebby T. — stressed the Oxford Group’s “large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others.”
^7
+