Illustration · An office desk in New York at dawn in March 1941, with the Big Book’s second printing open at its new appendix, “Spiritual Experience,” a pile of letters, a desk clock and a calendar. Not drawn from a photograph.

The educational variety

A new printing of the Big Book changed one word in Step Twelve and added a page at the back, for readers who thought recovery took a sudden upheaval.

“…I was obsessed with the idea that everybody must have a ‘spiritual experience’ just like mine.”

Bill W., remembering his first months sober, in a paper read to the American Psychiatric Association · American Journal of Psychiatry, 1949

One word

When AA’s book came out in April 1939, its Twelfth Step began, “Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps…” The phrase appears in seven of the book’s eleven chapters, eighteen times in all. “Spiritual awakening” isn’t in them once. The first chapter’s central experience is Bill W.’s own, at Towns Hospital in December 1934 (Hot flash follows how he told it).

Readers took the book at its word. Its first chapters told of a number of sudden changes, and many concluded, the book itself admitted two years later, that to recover they needed an immediate and overwhelming “God-consciousness.”

In March 1941 the Saturday Evening Post ran its article on AA, and a “deluge of pleas for help and orders for the book” followed, as Bill remembered it (A bunch of actors, in A Bunch of Actors, tells the article). That same month a second printing was ordered. Step Twelve now began, “Having had a spiritual awakening.” At the back was a new appendix, headed “Spiritual Experience.” The first printing, it said, had given many readers the impression that these changes “must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals.” Most members’ experiences were what William James called the “educational variety,” because they developed “slowly over a period of time.” Often a newcomer’s friends saw the difference before he did.

The rest of the chapters kept the old phrase. In today’s book “spiritual experience” is still in their text seventeen times, and Step Twelve is the only place in them where “spiritual awakening” appears.

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In the record

Which word

Seven tellings, in the order each was set down, and which word each uses for what happens to a member: experience, awakening, or both.

From the Big Book’s first printing and its fourth edition, Bill W.’s talks to doctors (1944 and 1949) and to clergy (1960) as transcribed at silkworth.net, the Twelve and Twelve, and Father Ed Dowling’s talk as printed in AA Comes of Age. Quotations are short excerpts.

1939
The Big Book, Step Twelve“Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps…”
experienceawakening
1941
The second printing, MarchStep Twelve: “Having had a spiritual awakening…” The new appendix is headed “Spiritual Experience.”
experienceawakening
1944
Bill W., to the Medical Society of the State of New YorkThe Steps, as his talk was printed, still say “spiritual experience.” By it, he said, members meant “a certain quality of personality change.”
experienceawakening
1949
Bill W., to the American Psychiatric AssociationLeft alone, a newcomer “will surely report the gradual onset of a transforming experience, call it what he may.”
experienceawakening
1953
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Step Twelve“Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them.”
experienceawakening
1955
Father Ed Dowling, at AA’s convention in St. Louis“I still weep that the elders of the movement have dropped the word ‘experience’ for ‘awakening.’”
experienceawakening
1960
Bill W., to a conference of clergyEvery member has “a transforming spiritual experience,” though seldom a sudden one. “What happened to me in perhaps six minutes, may in most cases require six months or even a year or more.”
experienceawakening

One word

AA changed one word of its Twelfth Step in 1941. Bill W. went on using both, and the old one never left the book.

For a closer look

Go deeper

How often the book says each phrase, a priest’s reason for missing the old one, and the line the appendix ends with.

Used many times

The appendix opens by saying that the terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are “used many times in this book.” Counted in the eleven chapters’ own text, not their footnotes, the first is there eighteen times in the first printing and seventeen today. The second is there once, in the Step that had just been changed.

Today’s book sends readers to the appendix twice: an asterisk on the words “spiritual experiences” in “There Is a Solution,” and a footnote at the end of “We Agnostics,” “Please be sure to read Appendix II on ‘Spiritual Experience.’” When each was added, the sources on hand don’t say.

Dearer to God

Father Ed Dowling, the Jesuit who became Bill’s friend in 1940 (Some Bum from St. Louis tells his story), spoke at AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention in St. Louis in July 1955. Experience, he said, was one of the ways to God, and the Twelfth Step had named it, before he broke off to say he still wept that the word was gone.

Experience came in two kinds, he went on. One was “a sudden, passive insight like Bill’s experience.” The other kind, he said, was everyday observation, such as “I am sober today,” and those were “probably dearer to God since they are commoner.” (Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only, quotes his regret.)

Spencer, or Paley?

Today’s appendix ends with a line credited to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, about a principle that can keep a man in everlasting ignorance: “contempt prior to investigation.” In 1939 the same line opened one of the members’ stories, “An Artist’s Concept.” When later editions dropped the story, the line stayed, at the end of the appendix.

Michael StGeorge, a researcher who isn’t an AA member, went through Spencer’s writings and found nothing like it. The idea, he found, goes back to William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, of 1794, which speaks of “contempt prior to examination.” The earliest he found crediting it to Spencer were two British homeopaths, in 1931.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939 (first printing, as reprinted): the eleven chapters and “An Artist’s Concept.” Fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001: the chapters, and Appendix II, “Spiritual Experience,” first added in 1941.
Box 4-5-9, August–September 1989, “Big Book Celebrates 50th Birthday As A.A.’s Most Effective ‘Sponsor’” (aa.org), on the second printing.
Recovery Collectibles, “The First Edition Big Book: A Printing-by-Printing History (1939–1954).” For the second printing.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 14, quoting Bill on the mail after the Saturday Evening Post article.
Bill W., “Basic Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous,” New York State Journal of Medicine, August 1944, as transcribed at silkworth.net.
Bill W., “The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1949, read to the American Psychiatric Association in Montreal, May 1949, as transcribed at silkworth.net.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Publishing, 1953. Step Twelve.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. Father Edward Dowling, S.J., at St. Louis, July 1955, in “Religion Looks at Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Bill W., talk to the Twelfth National Clergy Conference on Alcoholism, New York, April 1960, printed in the conference’s “Blue Book,” vol. 12 (1960), as transcribed at silkworth.net.
Many Paths to Spirituality (P-84). AA World Services, 2014.
Michael StGeorge, “The Survival of a Fitting Quotation,” edition 1.1, anonpress.org.