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June 1960

An interpretation of the Steps by an eminent scholar who was not one of us—but was always one with us

It was no theologian, spinning theories about God, who wrote AA’s Twelve Steps. They were hammered out of the hard rock of experience by men in desperate need. But, speaking as a clergyman who never was an alcoholic, I read those Twelve Steps with profound intellectual admiration. They state with amazing clarity and conciseness the essential truths, both psychological and theological, which underlie the possibility of transformed character.

It is not the alcoholic alone who comes to the place where he has to admit that he is powerless to manage his life. A nervous breakdown brought me there. Completely knocked out, in a sanitarium, my will power so far gone that the harder I tried the worse off I was, I had to admit that my life had become unmanageable. It was then, when I was powerless to save myself, that I desperately welcomed a Power from beyond myself. When I read Step Two—Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity—that hit my target in dead center.

The Twelve Steps of AA are not true for alcoholics only; they are basic and universal truths. So it was when Robert Louis Stevenson was transformed from aimless, feckless, irresponsible living into a vigorous, purposeful life, and ascribed the change to “that unknown steersman whom we call God.”

There are two techniques indispensable for a sane and healthy life. The first is will power—putting our backs into it and trying hard. The second is intake—hospitality to power from beyond ourselves, what Paul called being “strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man.” The first is like a tree’s fruit; the second is like a tree’s roots. After many years of personal counseling, I am sure that, soon or late, every life runs into some experience where the first technique peters out and the second technique becomes critically necessary.

Here again, the Twelve Steps state a universal truth. Of course, we must try hard, but even physical output is not the whole story; intake—air, food, sunlight—is essential. My basic religious faith is that, just as around our bodies there is a physical universe from which replenishing power comes into us, so around our souls there is a spiritual Presence in whose fellowship our lives can be sustained and our characters transformed. So Step Eleven—Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God …—describes a universal need.

To be sure, one sometimes meets a self-confident, two-fisted man who thinks he needs no power but his own. He likes to quote Henley’s “Invictus”: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” That sounds splendid, but the story runs that Henley had a friend who knew him through and through, and who understood how weak as water he sometimes was when the temptations of the flesh assailed him. One day, this friend quoted that line to Henley, “I am the captain of my soul,” and then added, “The hell you are!”

Many a man, proudly confident that he by himself alone is the master of his fate, needs to have it said to him: No! The Twelve Steps are right about that.

I can imagine a certain type of theological thinker who lifts his eyebrows at that italicized phrase twice used, God as we understood Him. I applaud it. It is more than an expression of tolerance which makes it possible for Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to join in asserting the Twelve Steps. Once more, a universal and indispensable truth is involved.

God can be thought of as Absolute Being. He is that. But in a crisis, where a man grapples with an unmanageable habit or an abysmal grief, Absolute Being can be as distant, cold, and useless as the man in the moon. What we need in a crisis is the near end of God, God as we understand Him, God as an available resource close at hand, our unseen Friend, our invisible Companion. Granted that our diverse and partial ideas of God are inadequate! But anyone who, because of alcohol or for any other reason, has gone through the experience which the Twelve Steps describe, can understand at least a little what the psalmist meant when he said, “O God, Thou art my God.”

Some time ago, I heard a man talk about God. He was not dogmatic. He was not a formal creedalist. But he was not indefinite, either. He had been in an immoral hole that seemed hopeless. All his friends thought it was hopeless. And in that hopeless situation, although he had always thought himself an agnostic, he threw himself back on any God that might be. And something happened to him, for which I know no better description than the phrase Virgil used when he led Dante up out of hell through purgatory and left him at the gate of paradise, saying, “Over thyself I crown and miter thee.”

So this once-helpless man stood crowned and mitered. No theologian could have been more sure of God than he was. To him, God was not “a sort of something,” or, as one college student described God, “an oblong blur.” Rather, like the blind man whom Jesus healed, he had had an honest-to-goodness experience that no materialism could explain, that only a real God could account for, and that gave to his testimony certitude and definiteness: “One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

It is this accent of realistic experience in the Twelve Steps that makes them so vital. Through them, one feels a gospel of hope: No man need stay the way he is. John Callender was a captain in George Washington’s army, and at the battle of Bunker Hill, he was guilty of such rank cowardice that Washington publicly cashiered him, telling him that what he had done was infamous in a soldier, most injurious to an army, and the last to be forgiven.

So was that the end of John Callender? No! He reenlisted as a private, and at the battle of Long Island, displayed such conspicuous courage that Washington restored him to his captaincy. I will wager anything that, if John Callender could read the Twelve Steps, he would recognize the experience that he went through.

Especially impressive is the way the Twelve Steps avoid all self-pity with its inevitable accompaniment of blaming others for our failures. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves—that is ethical realism and psychological common sense. And from there on, admitting the exact nature of our wrongs, being willing to have God remove all these defects of character, and the rest, the Twelve Steps trace a course of penitence, confession, and restitution which makes a personal counselor wish that a lot of other alcoholics would take the same indispensable path to moral transformation.

No words can adequately express the gratitude felt by many of us who have watched with admiration the amazing progress of Alcoholics Anonymous. Among the many factors which have contributed to this success, I am sure that one is central: The Twelve Steps represent the everlasting truth about all personal regeneration. Their basic principles are eternally so, not just for alcoholics, but for everyone.

Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick