Chapter 9 Bill Wilson’s First Great Epiphany

When he went back to his childhood memories of his life in East Dorset, Vermont, Bill W. said,²⁰⁶

contempt of some church folk and their doings; his insistence that the spheres really had their music; but his denial of the preacher’s right to tell him how he

must listen; his fearlessness as he spoke of these things just before he died.
This was an auditory experience of the divine, where at one level the preacher’s words were simply human words, but where young Bill was also impressed by some kind of divine Presence which was vaguely sensed or hinted at in the drone of the preacher’s sermon.

But he also remembered that his grandfather had progressed much further in the spiritual life than he had at that time, and that his grandfather said that on occasion he had actually heard what was the auditory version of a supernatural vision, that is, “the music of the spheres.” This was usually described as a high-pitched musical sound, like many voices singing together in some unknown language, rising and falling in pitch in a way totally different from any known human melodic form. It was traditionally said to be the singing of the angels who sang around the heavenly throne and presided over the sun and moon and planets. English choirboys singing in a cathedral, or people in a Pentecostal congregation singing in angelic tongues, would give a partial impression of how this was usually experienced. Or one might listen meditatively to the long continuous high notes, with their distinct vibrato, in the opening five minutes or so of John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, a 1988 piece for cello and strings by a prominent Eastern Orthodox composer, written to celebrate the Orthodox feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God.

The choir in a Greek Orthodox service, as it sings the Cherubic Anthem (the most sacred part of the holy liturgy), is also attempting to give some partial impression of the song of the angels, insofar as it could be expressed in normal earthly sounds and effects. The very words to that hymn in fact explain that what is going on in the church building is a mystery rite, in which the human choir represents, on a lower ontological level, the ranks of angelic warriors who surround the divine throne up in heaven. A literal translation of the Greek words of the hymn would read:
We who serve in this mystery rite as a Platonic image of the Cherubim sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity. Let us now lay aside all earthly cares that we may receive the King of all things, invisibly escorted by the angelic armies. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.²⁰⁷
The next time Bill referred to this sense of Presence was when he described what he felt and experienced, as a young artillery officer, when he watched the sun rise as the troopship Lancashire approached the coast of England in the summer of 1918:²⁰⁸
When finally Bill was relieved of his watch and had crawled up the hatchway and out onto deck, the sky was growing brighter in the east. A thin rim of gold had appeared on the horizon and at its center he could see, or thought he could see, a dim shadowy indication of land straight ahead.

The sun came up strong and bright and he had been right, the dot ahead was land. Within minutes he was in the midst of a sparkling world of blue sea and tumbling whitecaps. Then suddenly there was another dot, higher up and moving toward them—a British blimp coming out to meet them. The sight of it drawing nearer and nearer pierced him with a thrill of delight. They had made it. The old tub had held beneath them and the speck of land ahead looked solid and hospitable. But more, much more than this, he had come through the night, faced terror and escaped humiliation …. and as he stood watching the blimp’s approach he felt more complete in himself than ever before. He was in harmony with himself, with everything that was happening. And yet, it was the damnedest thing, at this moment of relief, pride and physical excitement, there was once again that sense of something more, as if he were on a borderline of understanding something just beyond what he was conscious of. He couldn’t explain the feeling.

Bill W. would have been familiar with Wordsworth’s poetry from his school days, and would probably also have known something about John Muir (1838-1914), the father of the American national parks system, who led the fight which led to the creation of both the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in 1890. Muir spent a famous night in 1903 camping out with President Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite Park, and was a great admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of the New England Transcendentalists, who offered him a professorship at Harvard (which he nevertheless turned down). John Muir fought to preserve as much as he could of the American wilderness, because he devoutly believed that the place where we could most clearly see God’s presence revealed to us was in the beholding such things as the wild mountain peaks, the giant sequoia trees, and the light beaming down out of the skies and illuminating the crags and rocks. In fact the whole American national parks system is a monument to not only the belief that we can sense the divine Presence in the beauty and majesty of nature, but to a conviction that the solemn beauty of the vistas at the national parks are the American equivalent to the grandeur of the great European cathedrals. The parks are places where God reveals himself to us, and where we can go and find God.

Nevertheless, even though Bill Wilson’s sunrise experience off the coast of England in 1918 was impressive enough for him to remember it even years later, it was not yet the fully conscious awareness of the divine Presence. As Robert Thomsen put it, it was as if Bill “were on a borderline of understanding something just beyond what he was conscious of.” But it was still only a hint, an inexplicable feeling of something more out there.

The first time this awareness of the divine Presence broke into his consciousness in a fully gripping and ecstatic manner came shortly afterwards. Bill W.’s artillery unit, after disembarking in England, was stationed outside Winchester for a while before being sent over to France. The war news was ominous: the Germans were on the offensive and the newly arrived American troops were being sent in as reinforcements in all the most dangerous spots along the line. With this surely on his mind—was he going to die in France, as so many other young men had gone to their deaths?—he decided to visit Winchester’s great medieval cathedral. He opened his story in the Big Book by speaking of that visit:²¹⁰

Who caught his death

Drinking cold small beer.

A good soldier is ne’er forgot

Whether he dieth by musket

Or by pot.”

Robert Thomsen, presumably building on the tape recordings which Bill W. made, gives far more information in his account of that experience:²¹¹

How long he sat or what happened or even what state of consciousness he was in he did not know, but he was aware for the first time in his life of a tremendous sense of Presence, and he was completely at ease, completely at peace …. he understood that all was good and that evil existed only in the mind—and he knew that now, for these fleeting moments, he had moved into some area beyond thought.

When finally he rose and started back down the aisle, the chimes in the high tower had begun to play. He vaguely remembered the hymn from childhood, but he could not recall the words.

Out in the graveyard, a little beyond the entrance, he paused again, listening to the bells ring across the valley and looking back at the cathedral. Something had happened, something he had no way of describing, but the important thing was that it had happened and if it had, could happen again. He was sure he had a long life ahead, and one day he might be able to grasp what it had been and pull it further into the light. Until then—he turned and started along the path—until then he knew he had only to wait, even though he couldn’t be sure just what he was waiting for.

In the Big Book, Bill W. told how strongly Ebby’s story affected him, and how he found himself thinking about those experiences he had had of the divine Presence in earlier years. But then he explained to Ebby that the problem was that he simply could not accept the teachings about God which he heard in the churches. The problem for him with the idea of God was all the doctrines and dogmas and theological and philosophical theories about God that church people insisted on, most of which he totally rejected on rational and intellectual grounds, but also because of what he had seen in Europe of the horrible carnage and destruction produced by the First World War, which simply could not be fit in with the image of a loving and compassionate God which was taught in the churches.

That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last ….

Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough. At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.²¹²
The image of him having scales falling from his eyes makes it clear that this was the centerpiece of Bill Wilson’s conversion story. The reference was to the story of the Apostle Paul’s conversion to Christianity while on the road to Damascus, as it was given in the book of Acts²¹³ in the New Testament, in Acts 9:3-19. Paul had a vision of light which left him completely blinded for three days. But finally a devout Christian in Damascus named Ananias laid his hands on Paul and prayed, “and immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight” (Acts 9:18).

Now most American Protestantism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was at least partially under the influence of frontier revivalism, which emphasized conversion experiences in which people who were attending a revival and listening to the preacher’s voice go on and on for hours, suddenly felt themselves irresistibly compelled to come forward and kneel at some kind of altar rail, and offer their lives to Christ. But there were in fact relatively few stories of conversions in the New Testament that could be fit all that well into that kind of revivalist mode. The story of Paul’s conversion was a notable exception, and could not only be used to justify the emphasis on conversion experiences in the revivalist tradition, but was also vivid and extremely memorable.

This story of the Apostle Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus was therefore an important part of the standard stock of Bible stories taught to children in Protestant churches during that period. Before that point in his life Paul had in fact been battling against God and rebelling against him in every way; now he was suddenly turned into a servant of God who was willing to be obedient unto death. It was still one of the great standard stories in Sunday schools and summer bible schools in the little Protestant churches of the small towns and country areas in the United States well into the 1940’s, as I remember from personal experience.

Therefore, when Bill W. spoke of the scales falling from his eyes, he was not only speaking of suddenly breaking through the barriers of stubbornness and denial which had been blocking him from God, but also stating, in a metaphor that was immediately understood by the Protestants of his time, that this was his great conversion experience. And it was a true conversion experience, satisfying all the basic criteria. Before that point, he had been hostile to the whole idea of God. Now he was suddenly anxious to learn about God, and soon found himself going to the Oxford Group’s mission in New York City in order to try to find out more. The underlying psychic change was enormous and total, in terms of his basic motivation and commitment.

The psychic change did not immediately penetrate far enough and deep enough into his mind to enable him to stop him drinking, at least not right away. But the idea that any and all chronic compulsive alcoholics who had just had a conversion experience should have been able to stop drinking right on the spot is a misconception that can sometimes arise in the popular revivalist mind. This is the misguided belief that somehow or other, a genuine religious conversion will automatically and immediately, right on the spot, allow that person to stop drinking, gambling, and cigarette smoking, and stop committing all major sins. According to that popular myth (which is totally false but is nevertheless found among many of the uneducated), people who “give their lives to Christ” and are “saved” at a revival, immediately turn into sinless angels. Any good evangelist knows better than that, going all the way back to the beginnings of the modern evangelical movement in the early eighteenth century.

And in particular, people who have saving faith and are believing Christians, can nevertheless be alcoholics who are destroying their lives with their drinking and unable to stop. To see examples of this, all we need to do is look at Alcoholics Anonymous experience over the years. Father Ralph Pfau, the first Roman Catholic priest to get sober in A.A., certainly had saving faith in God when he came into the program, but lacked knowledge of how to use his faith to stop drinking. And over the years, any number of other Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers of all sorts came into A.A. the same way. They had a saving faith in God, but no one had ever told them how to use that faith to free themselves from the compulsion to drink.

For some alcoholics, coming back to God and stopping drinking are a one-step process. Both are accomplished in the same dramatic experience. For Bill Wilson however, it had to be a two-step process: he first had to first make his peace with God and break through all his stubborn skepticism and hostility in that area, so that then, a couple of weeks or so later, he could make the kind of special additional commitment to God that would enable him to stop drinking.


Chapter 10
Bill Wilson’s Second Great Epiphany:

December 1934

His vision of the light at Towns Hospital on December 14, 1934. Bill W. was admitted to Towns Hospital once in the autumn of 1933, and three more times in 1934 (around July probably, and then on September 17 and December 11).²¹⁴ It was most likely during the first 1934 stay that Bill W. met Dr. William Duncan Silkworth for the first time. As Bill describes this in the Big Book (on page 7):
I was placed in a nationally-known hospital for the mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics. Under the so-called belladonna treatment my brain cleared …. Best of all, I met a kind doctor who explained that though certainly selfish and foolish, I had been seriously ill, bodily and mentally.
Bill Wilson employed an odd phrase here: “the so-called belladonna treatment.” Why did he use the word “so-called”? Was it because even though ordinary people in New York still referred colloquially to “taking the belladonna treatment at Towns,” patients were no longer necessarily being given belladonna? Or was it because even if they were, they were not given very much belladonna, and only for as long as they seemed on the verge of going into delirium tremens?

The reader needs to be strongly warned that a good many of the statements in A.A. histories about the medical treatment which Bill W. was given when he was admitted to the hospital are still based on what is known about the bizarre early theories held by Charles B. Towns, the man who had founded the hospital in 1901, along with journal articles written in 1909 and 1912 by Dr. Alexander Lambert,²¹⁵ a physician whom Towns brought in to give medical credence to his strange ideas. The original Towns-Lambert treatment was quite appalling: every hour, day and night, for fifty hours (that is, for a little over two days) the patient was given a mixture of belladonna, henbane, and prickly ash. Every twelve hours, the patient was given carthartics (medicines that accelerate defecation), and after abundant stools were being produced, castor oil was administered to completely clean out the intestinal tract. The doctor gave the patient very small amounts of the belladonna mixture until the first symptoms of belladonna poisoning began to appear, that is, “when the face becomes flushed, the throat dry, and the pupils of the eye dilated.” The doctor then stopped the belladonna until the symptoms had disappeared, then began giving the belladonna again until the symptoms reappeared, in an endless cycle through the first fifty hours. It was quite literally a witches brew, because belladonna and henbane had been used for centuries by witches, sorcerers, and shamans to produce scary drug-induced mental states.²¹⁶

But it was now 1934, a whole generation later. Towns’ theories had fallen out of popularity, Lambert had broken his association with Towns, and a totally new figure, Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, was now the hospital’s medical director. Towns had insisted vociferously that the medical doctors were wrong, and that alcoholism was not a disease. Silkworth on the other hand insisted that alcoholism was an illness, “an obsession of the mind that condemns one to drink and an allergy of the body that condemns one to die,” and he had devised an entirely different method of treating incoming patients, which he described in 1937.

The first phase of the Silkworth treatment was as follows, and even this was used only for those who were at an acute crisis stage where delirium tremens was imminent, and was used only for as long as the patient seemed to still be in danger:²¹⁷

2. “To relieve the pressure in the brain and spinal cord (unless spinal puncture is contemplated), dehydration must be begun at once” by using a carthartic (a substance that accelerates defecation) and a purgative (a laxative to loosen the stool and ease defecation). If there is enlargement of the liver, high colonic irrigations of warm saline should be used instead. Dehydration is continued for from three to four days.

3. Sleep must be induced. Morphine should be avoided if at all possible. And what must be especially avoided is a combination of alcohol and sedative which results in a state of mental confusion leading to hallucinosis. Sedatives should be “given in moderation ... not enough to cause a sudden ‘knock-out.’”

4. “On about the fourth day the alcohol can be entirely withdrawn, as by this time the crisis has been avoided or safely passed through and, hence, the patient is in the second phase of the treatment.”

In my own reading of the literature from that period, the commonest sedatives used to calm down alcoholics were paraldehyde, barbiturates (colloquially called goofballs), bromides, chloral hydrate (colloquially called a Mickey or Mickey Finn), and codeine. Belladonna was normally spoken of as a “sedative” only in certain specialized cases (such as whooping cough and Parkinson’s disease). Nevertheless, at Knickerbocker Hospital in New York City (where Dr. Silkworth was also involved), even as late as 1952, we read of alcoholics who showed signs of going into delirium tremens being given “bromides and belladonna for [their] jagged nerves.”²¹⁸

But even if Dr. Silkworth was still giving some of his patients belladonna (those who showed symptoms of going into violent delirium tremens) the dosage could not have been very high. Belladonna was, quite literally, a standard ingredient in witch’s brews, and was not something that you gave people to make them gently and pleasantly drowsy, so they could drift off to sleep. Giving people belladonna could sometimes knock them out for a while, but the delirium it produced was even more apt to make them disruptive and uncontrollable. They would often compulsively repeat bizarre actions, and frequently could not even be made to sit still. This was what Dr. Silkworth was trying to prevent.

The object, as Silkworth explained in his 1937 article, was to normalize the alcoholics’ mind and mood, so you could then start to talk sense to them, and attempt to get them to make a rational decision (with full intellectual commitment) to stay away from alcohol permanently from that point on. Drug-crazed patients, hallucinating and imagining things, swearing mighty oaths that they were never going to drink again just to impress the doctor with how “sincere” they were, in Dr. Silkworth’s experience, just went back to drinking again the moment they left the hospital. Dr. Silkworth knew all these things. He refused to play the role of a snake oil salesman peddling a quack “cure” for alcoholism.

At any rate, on December 11, 1934, Bill W. went to Towns Hospital for the fourth and last time. As he says in the Big Book, “treatment seemed wise, for I showed signs of delirium tremens.”²¹⁹ But his condition was apparently not all that serious, because once he had been checked into the hospital, Dr. Silkworth seems to have done little more than give him enough of some sort of sedative to make him drowsy. As Bill reported later, the diagnosis was that “I was not in too awful a condition. In three or four days I was free of what little sedative they gave me, but I was very depressed.”²²⁰ This was from Bill W.’s own account of what happened, as given by him in 1955, which has to serve as the standard for judging later secondary accounts.

Was he then given belladonna? As we have seen, he may have been, or he may not have been. We just do not know for sure. But if he was given belladonna, it would not have been very much, because Dr. Silkworth (as opposed to Charles Towns and Dr. Alexander Lambert a generation earlier) was simply trying to relax and calm his patients.

Bill Wilson spoke of this extraordinary experience only briefly in the Big Book:

Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.” ²²²

Bill Wilson had just had his 39th birthday, and he still had half his life ahead of him. He always said that after that experience, he never again doubted the existence of God. He never took another drink.

Bill’s paternal grandfather, William C. ("Willie") Wilson, had had a serious drinking problem. But he climbed to the top of Vermont’s Mount Aeolus one Sunday morning, and while praying to God, “saw the light” in some sort of life-changing way. He walked the mile back to East Dorset, and

The real divine and supernatural light which saves our souls and remakes our character, in its real essence, is nevertheless not seen in itself. Jonathan Edwards also says that it does not impart new information in the ordinary sense, or point out things in the Bible which we had never noticed before, or anything else of that sort. Instead it is a sense that suddenly comes upon us, that all the important things that good religious leaders had been trying to teach us all our lives, are not only absolutely true, but the most important things in the whole universe. Before we always ultimately brushed these things off. We might be emotionally titillated by them when we heard a particularly moving preacher talk about them, but their importance never sunk home in such a way as to actually change our continuing long term behavior in the real world.

A true conversion, however, had to pass the “Jonathan Edwards test.” In the small New England communities where he preached his revivals, Edwards was able to observe all the details of how people who claimed to have been saved at his revivals were actually acting in everyday life. People who claimed to have found God, but who continued to be completely dominated by all their old anger, fear, resentment, arrogance, dishonesty, violence, and so on, were simply deluded. But those who had undergone a genuine conversion received ...
A true sense of the divine and superlative excellency of the things of religion; a real sense of the excellency of God and Jesus Christ, and of the work of redemption, and the ways and works of God revealed in the gospel. There is a divine and superlative glory in these things; an excellency that is of a vastly higher kind, and more sublime nature, than in other things; a glory greatly distinguishing them from all that is earthly and temporal. He that is spiritually enlightened truly apprehends and sees it, or has a sense of it. He does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart. There is not only a rational belief that God is holy, and that holiness is a good thing, but there is a sense of the loveliness of God’s holiness. There is not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense how amiable God is on account of the beauty of this divine attribute.²²⁷
What makes Jonathan Edwards’ theory so important, is that first, he and John Wesley were the cofounders during the 1730’s of the modern Protestant evangelical movement, along with the kind of frontier revivalism derived from it, which swept America in the nineteenth century.²²⁸ And second, he is the only American-born philosophical theologian whom we have had in this country so far, who can be placed in the company of the truly great Europeans. There is furthermore a direct line of development between Edwards’ understanding of preaching for conversion and the Oxford Group’s idea of conversion as a “life-changing” experience, and from there to the early A.A. concept of total surrender to our higher power as the only way to produce a true psychic change.

The Vision of Light which Bill W. experienced in Towns Hospital on December 14, 1934 passed the “Jonathan Edwards test.” Bill Wilson not only never drank again, he made a decision to spend the rest of his life helping other alcoholics, and stuck by that decision to his life’s end. At one level, there was nothing new that he learned in that experience. At some level, he had known everything he really needed to know about spirituality since he was a small child, listening to the preacher’s voice from outside the church, and knowing at some level that he really should start acting the way the preacher was telling him, but not yet being deeply enough impressed by it for it to actually have any major effect on his long-term continuing behavior in the world. Now in December 1934 he finally “saw the light” and realized that this was the most important thing in the world. The proof that his change of heart was genuine was that he changed his whole life, and that the change it produced was not temporary but permanent.