Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

notice the old photos), and Henrietta Seiberling and Dr. Bob and his wife Anne

were Episcopalians, along with Marty Mann's right-hand man Yev Gardner, who

was an ordained Episcopal deacon. Mel B. tells me that when he once asked Dr.

Bob and Anne's son Smitty what it meant that they had all gone to the

Episcopal Church in Akron when he was child, Smitty gave

the standard Episcopalian quip, mimicking the light beer commercials touting

their product as containing "all the flavor but only half the calories."

Smitty said that the Episcopalians were "kind of 'Catholic Light,' all the

ritual but only half the guilt."

The Episcopalians read a lot of traditional Roman Catholic theology and

spirituality, but also read a lot of the Protestant literature on theology and

especially biblical studies, although they tended to be conservative about

taking up radical German Protestant theological fads, of which they were

inherently suspicious.

~~~~~~~~~~

Out of this extremely complex mix we see early A.A. being born: (1) a strong

Augustinian theology, perhaps mediated partly through the influence of

Reinhold Niebuhr, (2) classical Protestant liberalism, (3) New Thought and

perhaps also New England Transcendentalism, (4) the old eighteenth and

nineteenth-century evangelical movement, (5) modern psychology and psychiatry,

particularly the Neo-Freudians, and (6) a strong Roman Catholic (and

Episcopalian Anglo-Catholic) influence.

The Akron List is especially important, I believe, because it does such a good

job of pointing us towards some of these major ingredients which went into the

A.A. synthesis.

It was a fascinating world out of which early A.A. emerged, but it requires

some knowledge of the history of ideas, including especially American

religious history and the history of twentieth-century psychology and

psychiatry, to appreciate the full richness and depth of the ideas which

informed this little handful of inspired men and women, who remade American

life at any number of significant levels over the sixty years that followed.

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++++Message 1928. . . . . . . . . . . . The Akron Reading List Part 4 of 5

(notes #1-3)

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/21/2004 12:11:00 AM

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NOTES TO THE ARTICLE:

NOTE 1. Barefoot Bob told me that he was sure that this Akron pamphlet was

produced within a year of the time when the Big Book was published, which

would mean at some point in late 1939 or early 1940. Since the Akron Manual

tells alcoholics to use the Big Book as their basic text, this means that it

has to have written after that book was published, which means at some point

after April 1939.

We can be further aided in dating the pamphlet by investigating what was going

on in Akron A.A. and in St. Thomas Hospital in Akron during this period. Mary

C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous (Chicago: Loyola

University Press, 1992), Chapter 3, "The Spiritual Connection," gives the

fullest account.

In August 16, 1939, Dr. Bob approached Sister Ignatia for the first time about

admitting an alcoholic to St. Thomas Hospital. In the late summer of 1939, she

started arranging to have alcoholics admitted on a regular basis and put two

at a time into private rooms. But St. Thomas was a Roman Catholic hospital,

and before anything further could be done in setting up a formal program of

alcoholism treatment, A.A. had to separate itself from the Oxford Group, which

was Protestant. When A.A. made its separation from the Oxford Group in

November 1939 and then started meeting at King's School in January 1940,

Sister Ignatia was able to take the next steps. She said later that "It was

not until, probably, January, 1940 that a definite working agreement was

achieved with the knowledge of my superior, Sister Clementine, Dr. Bob, and

probably, the Chief of Staff. Had we proposed it to the whole staff, at that

time, you may be sure that we could not have

gotten a foothold."

By 1941, there were so many alcoholics who needed admission that Room 228, a

four-bed ward, was assigned for permanent use by Dr. Bob's alcoholic patients.

Not long after, Sister Ignatia was also able to gain the additional use of a

two-bed hospital room right across the hall, giving them six beds they could

employ. Then she was eventually able to trade these two rooms (across the hall

from one another) for an isolated place in the hospital where there was a

seven-bed ward, a utility room with plumbing connections, and a door leading

into the balcony at the back of the hospital's chapel. This new ward opened

its doors on April 19, 1944.

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, p. viii, agrees with this basic time

framework, that is, that Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia first began working

together extensively at St. Thomas Hospital in August 1939. And Dr. Bob and

the Good Oldtimers, pp. 187-8, gives us additional information, and tells us

that in August 1939, the problem facing the A.A. people was that Dr. Bob had

been told by the other hospital in the area which he had been using for drying

out alcoholics, that they would no longer admit these drunks, ever again. So

he came to Sister Ignatia and pleaded with her for the use of a private room

for an alcoholic they were currently working with. She finally thought of a

little room which the nurses used for preparing flowers which had been sent to

patients, and they discovered that it was just barely possible to push a

hospital bed through its door.

How does this information help us in dating the manual? The little pamphlet

assumes that the alcoholic will usually be put in a hospital room for several

days in order to dry out, and also that A.A. visitors will be coming into the

room and talking with the patient continually throughout the day. But the

pamphlet does not state that the hospital would be St. Thomas Hospital, which

means that it could have been written even before August 1939. But since it

could also have been written later than that, we need to ask further

questions.

On internal grounds from within the text of the manual, how much later than

that could it have been written? The pamphlet seems to assume that the

alcoholic patient is going to be in that hospital room completely alone except

for the A.A. visitors who call on him. By 1941, Room 228 at St. Thomas

Hospital, a four-bed ward, had been assigned for the A.A.-sponsored patients.

The Akron Manual certainly seems to have been written before that point, when

it was only one alcoholic in a private room. And in April 19, 1944, a large

ward was opened at St. Thomas where a group of alcoholics could be housed

during the initial treatment phase. I think we can say quite conclusively that

what is described in the Akron Manual does not match up at all with the

treatment program at the Alcoholic Ward which was established at St. Thomas

Hospital in 1944.

So I believe that Barefoot Bob's dating has to be basically correct: the Akron

Manual definitely has to have been written after April 1939, but it likewise

was fairly certainly written before 1941. And the assumption that the

alcoholic is going to be all by himself in a private room, as opposed to the

system of having two or more alcoholics sharing a room, actually makes the

date of composition look to me like the summer of 1939, and no later than the

fall of 1939.

~~~~~~~~~~

NOTE 2. FUNDAMENTALISM: The modern evangelical movement which began in the

1730's and 40's had a positive attitude toward science until the debate over

the theory of evolution began to heat up a century and a half later. When

Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man

in 1871, public controversy over the idea that human beings were descended

from apes continued to mount in the United States. Most of the evangelical

churches began to fall into bitter disputes and split apart into fiercely

opposed factions.

The Fundamentalist movement, which was a reaction against the Darwinian

doctrine of evolution and also the spread of classical Protestant liberalism,

was born when the Niagra Conference in 1895 issued its statement of the "Five

Points of Fundamentalism": (1) the verbal inerrancy of scripture, (2) the

divinity of Jesus Christ, (3) the Virgin Birth, (4) the physical resurrection

of Christ and his bodily return at the end of the world, and (5) the

substitutionary doctrine of the Atonement, that is, adherence to the medieval

doctrine which was first introduced by St. Anselm in 1098 in his Cur Deus

Homo. (This was the new theological theory that we were saved by Christ's

death on the cross because it paid the penalty due to God for the sins we

human beings had committed. For the first thousand years, Christianity had

understood the work of Christ in other kinds of ways, and tended to place the

power of salvation in the Incarnation rather than

in the Crucifixion, often expressed in the kind of way which we see in the

vision of the Divine Light at the very end of Dante's Divine Comedy.)

It is important to note that being a Fundamentalist meant adherence to certain

specific theological doctrines. It was not the same thing as simply reading

the Bible regularly, praying daily, and singing the traditional hymns to Jesus

at church on Sunday. The classical Protestant liberals did all that, and any

Fundamentalist whom you asked about it would make it clear these things did

not count unless you agreed with all five of those "fundamental" dogmas at a

bare minimum.

Around 1909, a series of twelve tracts called The Fundamentals began being

published in the United States and distributed in other parts of the

English-speaking world with American money. In 1919 the World's Christian

Fundamentals Association was formed, which began sponsoring rallies in many

American cities. Then came the event that really put the new Fundamentalist

movement out in the public eye: In 1925 William Jennings Bryan helped

prosecute a Tennessee school teacher named J. T. Scopes for teaching the

doctrine of evolution to his students, in a court case widely reported by the

newspapers, which came to be called the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Ten years later Bill W. met Dr. Bob and the A.A. movement began. The two of

them, along with all the other early A.A. writers and leaders whom I know

about, seem basically to have tried to stay out of the new Fundamentalist vs.

Modernist controversy as much as they could. But they also were very careful

indeed to make sure that A.A. members knew that A.A. people were not required

to believe in any of the Five Points of Fundamentalism. It is my own belief

that there were relatively few genuine Fundamentalists in A.A. during its

first five or ten years, and that the largest single group in A.A. during that

period held more what we would call classical Protestant liberal beliefs.

By 1939 the A.A. leaders were increasingly recommending that newcomers only

read a small selection of biblical passages deliberately chosen because they

did not speak about the divinity of Christ or contain any notion that people

had to pray to Jesus or rely upon his death and resurrection to save them. In

the Sermon on the Mount, prayer is to God the Father, and in the Letter of

James, it is to God the Father of Lights. In chapter 13 of First Corinthians

(unlike the chapters that come before it and after it), the higher power is

spoken of only as the one who already knows us fully, whom we shall at last

see face to face.

When Richmond Walker published his Twenty-Four Hours a Day in 1948, it swept

the country rapidly, and put an end to A.A. use of the classical Protestant

liberal meditational book called The Upper Room. This means that by that

point, the center of gravity in American A.A. had clearly moved from the

classical Protestant liberal position to something much more radical, that is

a desire among many members for a kind of spirituality which made little or no

mention of Christianity at all. Individual members were free to be

Fundamentalists or conservative Baltimore Catechism Roman Catholics or

anything else they wanted in their private prayers, but in most parts of the

United States, it was made clear that Christian references were to be kept out

of A.A. meetings, with very few exceptions to that rule.

Several months ago, I conducted a memorial service for an A.A. member who had

just died. He was a Roman Catholic and the overwhelming majority of the two

hundred or so people present were from Christian backgrounds. There was one

Jew, and a few who were hostile to organized religion in almost any form. But

I wore my black suit and clerical collar and used the traditional words of the

Christian funeral service, even though some A.A. readings and prayers were

also included, and everyone seemed to feel comfortable. On the other hand,

this was not an A.A. meeting in the formal sense and, as is always the case,

those A.A. members who were not Christians came to do honor to the memory of

the A.A. member who had just died, and recognized that he would have wanted

the Christian liturgical material. I have attended both Fundamentalist

Protestant funeral services for A.A. members and Roman Catholic funeral

masses. I am sure that if the A.A. member who had

just died were Jewish, everyone would have come to a Jewish funeral service in

order to pay their last respects, and so on with other religions.

NOTE 3. Adolf Harnack (1851-1930) was Germany's leading scholar in the history

of Christian dogma at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in

the area called patristics, that is, the history of Christian ideas and

practices in the first five to seven centuries of the Christian era. One of

his other major works was his seven volume History of Dogma (original German

edition 1886-9 as three volumes, English translation 1894-9), which was still

being used well into the twentieth century. In other words, Harnack's

criticism of traditional Christian doctrine was not that of an ignorant man

who knew nothing about that which he criticized!

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++++Message 1929. . . . . . . . . . . . The Akron Reading List Part 5 of 5

(notes #4-6)

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/21/2004 12:19:00 AM

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[The Akron Reading List Part 5 of 5 (notes #4-6)]

NOTE 4. Beginning in the eighteenth century, before the American Revolution,

it had been noted that the same sayings of Jesus are frequently given in

slightly different words when they appear in more than one gospel. In the

United States, Thomas Jefferson was already aware of this, and had attempted

to write an account of Jesus's words and actions involving a synthesis of the

different gospel accounts. There were also German scholars who were aware of

this problem.

By the early twentieth century, when liberal Protestant scholars taught

courses on the New Testament, they would frequently have the students purchase

a kind of book which had a title like "Harmony of the Gospels" or "Gospel

Parallels." This book would put the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in

parallel columns, so that the students could see the slight variants that

occurred in the different accounts of what Jesus had said.

It had become clear by that time that the gospels were not written until after

the great Jewish War that had ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the

Second Temple in 70 A.D., and in fact Matthew, Mark and Luke were probably not

written until somewhere between 80 and 90 A.D. Jesus had been executed by an

Italian businessman who was the Roman governor of Judaea in 30 A.D. (or no

more than a year or two later at most). The letter of James said that it was

the wealthy Italian, Greek, Syrian, and Judaean business community in

Jerusalem which was basically responsible, because they regarded Jesus'

attacks on materialism as "bad for business." During the fifty to sixty years

that passed between Jesus' death and the writing of the gospel accounts, the

information about what he had said on various occasions was passed down mostly

by oral tradition. This made the differences in wording between the three

gospels make perfect sense.

Protestant liberals were therefore aware that we could not know the exact

words that Jesus said on many occasions, at least not down to the precise

letter, but they also believed very strongly that anyone with a modicum of

simple common sense could easily work out what the main points were in his

message. So they rejected the Fundamentalist belief in the literal inerrancy

of the scriptures (anyone who could pick up a Harmony of Gospels and read what

was right before his eyes could see that this was impossible) but they

nevertheless regarded Jesus as their inspired Lord and Teacher. One can see in

Ligon at all times the incredible respect he had for the teaching of Jesus,

which he regarded as the truth about the nature of human life and the correct

relationship between God and the human race.

~~~~~~~~~~

NOTE 5. The New England Transcendentalists need to be studied in order to

understand certain ideas contained in both New Thought and in some A.A.

circles. Two useful websites are:

http://jackhdavid.thehouseofdavid.com/papers/4334_1.html

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/transcen.htm

In 1836, a group of young Unitarians, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic

Hedge, and George Ripley, rebelled against the staid teachings of Harvard

Divinity School, and formed the Transcendental Club of America. Henry D.

Thoreau and Louisa M. Alcott were other famous names associated with the

movement. They believed in the divinity of nature, that mind was more

important than matter, and that there is an inner light within the human soul

which can perceive divine truth. There is something of the Absolute and

Eternal in every human soul. There was an immortal mind residing within every

human being which was distinct from the outer Self. Time and space are not

external realities, but ways in which the mind constructs its sense world.

God, freedom, and immortality are transcendental ideas which the mind intuits

via a special kind of knowledge which is not the same as ordinary sense

perception. God is immanent in the world, and because of this

indwelling of divinity within the realm of nature, the individual soul can

apprehend the beauty, truth, and goodness incarnate in the natural world, and

appropriate for itself the spirit and being of God.

Their ideas came out of the Kantian philosophical tradition, particularly as

that tradition was expressed in England by the great poets Samuel Coleridge

and William Wordsworth, and they were strongly influenced by Plato's

philosophy too. They also knew just a little bit about Asian religions, such

as the Hindu tradition, and some of them were willing to embrace ideas like

the transmigration of souls. This may have been one of the sources of the

occasional Buddhist and Hindu ideas which sometimes appear in early A.A.

writings, such as advising people to act without being over-concerned about

the results of their actions, and some sort of awareness of the dangers

represented by what Buddhism called the chains of karma, and how one can free

oneself from them.

In this regard, the early Akron pamphlet called Spiritual Milestones in

Alcoholics Anonymous - - see http://hindsfoot.org/AkrSpir.pdf Adobe Acrobat

file - - assumes throughout that the members of their A.A. group have come

from Christian backgrounds, which was fairly close to 100% true at that time.

But the little booklet also says, "The modern Jewish family is one of our

finest examples of helping one another . . . . Followers of Mohammed are

taught to help the poor, give shelter to the homeless and the traveler, and

conduct themselves with personal dignity. Consider the eight-part program laid

down in Buddhism: Right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right

living, right effort, right mindedness and right contemplation. The Buddhist

philosophy, as exemplified by these eight points, could be literally

adopted by AA as a substitute for or addition to the Twelve Steps. Generosity,

universal love and welfare of others rather than considerations of self are

basic to Buddhism."

The people in early Akron A.A. had no difficulty with someone bringing in

Hindu or Buddhist ideas to help them develop a better spiritual program, and

Buddhism clearly was the non-Christian religion which fascinated them the

most. The influence on American thought of the New England Transcendentalists

-- some of them quite famous authors regularly read by American school

children -- may have been one of the background factors which made them open

to the world of Asian religious ideas.

Richmond Walker, an A.A. member who got sober in Boston, developed some of

these New England Transcendentalist ideas in the little meditational book

which he wrote in 1948, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, the book that took the A.A.

world by storm. He put a quotation from the Hindu religious tradition at the

beginning of the little volume to make sure that his readers understood that

one did not need to be a Christian at all in order to practice the spiritual

life. He also took the Oxford Group work God Calling by Two Listeners and

inserted ideas like the concept of the little spark of the divine in every

human soul, and the idea that mind (and the world of ideas) is more basic than

matter. His references to the Kantian concept that our minds are locked within

a box of space and time when it comes to observing the physical world, may

have partially been mediated to him through New England Transcendentalist

influences, although he probably

had been exposed to Kant himself in his college courses - - he certainly

understood what Kant's philosophy was about, and what the philosophical

problems were which were raised by that system for any attempt to talk about