Beaten first
James, 1902
“…so we drop down, give up, and don’t care any longer.”
Exhaustion like that, he wrote, “not infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis.”
Bill W. to Carl Jung, 1961
“The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania.”
Two ways
In 1901 and 1902 William James, a Harvard philosopher and psychologist, gave two courses of ten lectures on religion at the University of Edinburgh. In June 1902 they came out as a book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Much of it is in the words of people who said they had been changed.
Some of them were drunkards. Samuel H. Hadley told of sitting in a Harlem saloon, “a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard,” and of kneeling the next Sunday at Jerry McAuley’s mission in New York: “I felt I was a free man.” An Oxford graduate was converted at three o’clock one July afternoon and got drunk in the hay-field the next day. Then he prayed on his knees and committed himself to God. “From that hour drink has had no terrors for me,” he wrote.
Change came two ways, James wrote. The old doctors had spoken of lysis and crisis, a disease passing slowly or all at once, and “in the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the other sudden…” With the psychologist Edwin Starbuck he named two types: a volitional type, “usually gradual,” built up “piece by piece,” and a type by self-surrender. But slow or sudden, the last step nearly always came by giving up, and “self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life…”
In December 1934 the book reached Bill W. at Towns Hospital, a day or two after his own experience there (Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby, tells who brought it). He read it cover to cover. What he took from it, he said for the rest of his life, was that the people James wrote about had been beaten first. He called it “deflation at depth.”
He remembered, too, that James allowed for both kinds. In 1953 he wrote that it “mattered little whether these awakenings were sudden or gradual.” But in his first months sober, he told psychiatrists in 1949, “I’d forgotten that there were many varieties.”
It’s 1901, in Edinburgh. An American professor, William James, is giving a series of lectures on religion, built from the stories of people who say they have been changed.
Some of them are drunkards. A man named Hadley tells of kneeling at a mission for drunks in New York, and feeling, he says, that he was a free man. Another, a graduate of Oxford, is changed at three o’clock one afternoon, gets drunk the next day, and then never wants a drink again.
James sees two ways a change like that can come: all at once, or slowly, piece by piece.
In December 1934, the book of those lectures reaches Bill W. at Towns Hospital. He reads it cover to cover, and finds his own night in it. What he forgets, for a while, is that James wrote about the slow kind too.