Chapter 20 Two Kinds of Catholicism

It has been said that there are two different kinds of Roman Catholicism: the Catholicism of the parish church and the Catholicism of the monastic tradition. To give an oversimplified account of the difference, the first kind tends to concentrate on teaching a fairly mechanical set of religious rules to ordinary lay people, and leading them in the performance of certain appointed religious rituals. The second kind however encourages people to delve deeply into their inner thoughts and feelings, spend time each day in high quality prayer and meditation, become sensitive to matters of the heart, and develop an awareness of the divine transcendent world which will enable them to sense God’s presence all around them and — in the case of those who are spiritually adept — experience visions, hear heavenly voices, and feel God’s spirit flowing through them in thrilling and overwhelming fashion.

This is an oversimplification — the more devout Catholic laypeople might do the Stations of the Cross, meditate on the Mysteries of the Rosary, make a long trip to pray at a famous pilgrimage site, or engage in some other practice to develop their higher spiritual feelings — but there are still strong differences between the life of the normal everyday parish church and the life of the cloistered monastery and convent.

In rather paradoxical fashion, St. Gregory of Nyssa, whom we are using as one of our prime examples of the Catholicism of the early monastic tradition, was himself a married man and never lived in a monastery. But he was part of that tradition nevertheless, and was looked upon for centuries following as one of the greatest Orthodox and Catholic teachers of the inner spiritual life.

We can make a long list of great spiritual authors from later centuries who belonged to that particular monastic tradition. There was Gregory of Nyssa’s disciple Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), followed by another even more famous figure who was also deeply influenced by Gregory: a theologian and philosopher called St. Denis (an anonymous author who wrote under the symbolic pseudonym of “Dionysius the Areopagite” c. 500). This theologian in turn was one of the three most often quoted authors in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.

Other famous monastic theologians in this particular tradition included Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547), John Climacus (c. 600), John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815 – c. 877), Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). Roughly contemporary with St. Bernard we also have Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096-1141) and Richard of Saint Victor (died 1173), whom the twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich regarded as the real sources of his fundamental ideas — Tillich put the Victorine teaching of God as the ground of being into modern existentialist language and showed that it was just as relevant in the modern period as it was in the middle ages. Later on in the medieval period we had Meister Eckhard (1260-1327), Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416), St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), the Theologia Germanica (anonymous mid-14th century) and The Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous latter 14th century). In the early modern period we had Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) continuing this tradition of monastic spirituality, extending down into modern times with authors like Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who we remember was a monk at Gethsemani Abbey — a quiet and peaceful place built among the woods and rolling meadows of the Kentucky Bluegrass, just an hour’s drive south from where I lived as a teenager.³⁶⁴

And Jean Daniélou’s work on St. Gregory was also given as one example of an important kind of twentieth century Jesuit theological interest. As we mentioned before, there were a large group of notable Catholic theologians involved in this twentieth-century movement, which eventually came to be referred to as the Nouvelle Théologie or “New Theology.” Four of its principal leaders were Jesuits — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and Jean Daniélou — and Hans Urs von Balthasar started off as a Jesuit. Other prominent Catholic theologians and philosophers who were part of this group were Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, Étienne Gilson, and Jean Mouroux, who between them, made up what was probably the most important single block of twentieth century Roman Catholic theologians.

But again, I do not believe that most Catholic laypeople in the United States and Canada are very aware of this kind of Catholic spirituality. For them, the Catholic religion has meant mostly the rules, sermons, and rituals of the local parish church. And I do not believe that most ordinary American parish priests — the kind who were trained in local diocesan seminaries — have any very deep knowledge of the theologians in this long and distinguished tradition. Father Ralph Pfau, the first Roman Catholic priest to get sober in A.A., went to a seminary run by the Benedictine monks of St. Meinrad Archabbey, but it was designed to function (in those days at least) as a diocesan seminary to train parish priests for the Catholic churches of southern Indiana. As a result, although Father Ralph knew some interesting things about St. Augustine (things the normal parish priest would not know about), and somewhere along the way developed a good grasp of the spiritual teachings of the cloistered Carmelite nun St. Thérèse of Lisieux, I have found nothing beyond that in his writings which would indicate any familiarity with the great monastic spiritual tradition as a whole.

In 1940, when Bill Wilson first met Father Dowling, he had had a little bit of contact with that kind of spiritual teaching in the most general sense, through the New England Transcendentalists and English Romantic poets whom he had read in his schoolboy days, as well as Emmet Fox’s books and sermons, and Richard Maurice Bucke’s book on Cosmic Consciousness. But meeting Father Dowling put Bill W. in much more direct contact with a two-thousand-year-old tradition of great Christian spiritual authors, as well as with contemporary Christian theologians who were still studying those great classics and teaching their principles. This has to have been like a breath of fresh air to a small town New England Protestant like Bill Wilson. It was not so much that this new set of Catholic authors taught him anything brand new, as it was that it made him realize that he was not alone in trying to find God in the way he had been striving.

Gerald Heard’s book, The Ascent of Humanity (1929), was similar in ways to Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1901 book on Cosmic Consciousness. In his 1929 book, Heard portrayed human consciousness as evolving through five evolutionary stages during the centuries since the first human beings had appeared on this earth. In the fifth stage, which was just now beginning to appear, some human beings had evolved a kind of super-consciousness in which they could identify themselves with the Life Force which pervades and contains the universe.

Heard, who had been educated at Cambridge University, came over from England to the United States in 1937 along with his friend Aldous Huxley, to give some lectures at Duke University, and both of them eventually decided to stay in America rather than go back to the British Isles. Heard and Huxley eventually moved to Hollywood, where in 1939 Heard met Swami Prabhavananda, the founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Vedanta is a kind of Hindu religious philosophy based on three of the great classical works of ancient India: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. It teaches us how to contact Brahman (the eternal, ultimate ground of the universe) by quieting the mind and the ego.

Heard, who was a great popularizer, played a major role in spreading knowledge of this kind of Hindu religious philosophy in the English-speaking world. In 1942, he founded Trabuco College, in the Santa Ana Mountains about forty miles southeast of Los Angeles, California, as a place to study comparative world religions, including Asian religions, with a special emphasis, of course, on Vedanta.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob had both been reading Gerald Heard’s books, which they found fascinating, so when Bill made a trip to California and found that an A.A. member from Palo Alto named Dave D. had been to Trabuco and knew Heard, he got him to arrange an introduction. In January 1944, Bill W. and Gerald Heard met for the first time, there at Trabuco, and began “a personal friendship and collaboration that would continue over the next two decades.”³⁶⁵ In all, Bill made three visits to Trabuco College between 1944 and 1947. Tom Powers is reported to have said that Heard became in effect one of Bill’s sponsors.

There were numerous links between Heard and the people who traveled in A.A. circles. Gene Exman, the religion editor at Harper & Brothers, may have been the one who first got Bill Wilson reading Heard’s books. One of these, A Preface to Prayer, was part of Dr. Bob’s library. Gerald Heard even wrote an article for the A.A. Grapevine, called “The Search for Ecstasy.”

There is a fascinating recent book by Don Lattin, called Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk (2012), which describes in great detail the close relationship between Gerald Heard (the philosopher), Aldous Huxley (the writer), and Bill Wilson (the man who was once a drunk but who quit when he became the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous).³⁶⁶ Lattin, who still lives in the San Francisco Bay area, was a religion reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and himself traveled in many of the same circles as Heard and Huxley.

Aldous Huxley: It was Gerald Heard who introduced Bill Wilson to Aldous Huxley. The latter’s grandfather had been Thomas Henry Huxley, the English biologist whose famous 1860 debate at Oxford University with Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce played a key role in gaining wider public acceptance for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) had done a degree in English literature at Balliol College, Oxford University, and had first gained fame with a novel called Brave New World (1932), which portrayed a nightmarish future world created by the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, the factory system, and the government’s use of behaviorist psychology to control everyone caught in the system. As mentioned, he came to the United States with Gerald Heard in 1937, and the two of them eventually drifted to Hollywood, California. There Huxley, like his friend Heard, became involved with Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society’s form of Hindu religious philosophy. At the same time Gerald Heard was building his college in Trabuco Canyon, forty miles southeast of Los Angeles, Aldous Huxley began renovating a farmhouse at Llano del Rio, forty miles northeast of Los Angeles, on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

In 1945, based on the new things he had learned about the ancient religions of India and China, Huxley published a book called The Perennial Philosophy.³⁶⁷ In this book, he argued that the great authors of the western Catholic monastic tradition and the teachers of the religions of Asia had all been teaching the same basic thing. We live normally in a mental world which is locked inside a closed box created by the limitations of our five physical senses. But by cultivating the proper kinds of meditational and spiritual practices, we can learn how to contact and experience the transcendent spiritual reality which lies outside that box. On the Christian side, the important fourteenth century Catholic theologian Meister Eckhart was the most quoted figure in Huxley’s book, but he also had numerous quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross, and the Theologia Germanica.

With the exception of St. Augustine, these were basically fairly late figures, who lived in the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. But these particular spiritual teachers, even though they came later in Christian history, were all basically continuators of the great teachers of the first through fourth centuries A.D. — the Jewish philosopher Philo, the Christian theologians Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and so on — who had fascinated Jean Daniélou and the other members of the Nouvelle Théologie movement.

Alan Watts, another Englishman who came to the United States in 1937, should also be regarded as at least a peripheral member of this movement. While living and working in the San Francisco Bay area, he wrote The Way of Zen in 1957, and became an important interpreter of Buddhism to the American world until his death in 1973.

Heard attracted Bill Wilson’s attention because he taught a theory of spiritual evolution similar to the one found in Richard Maurice Bucke’s book on Cosmic Consciousness. And Aldous Huxley had written on the kind of ancient Catholic authors who had attracted the attention of the radical wing of the Jesuits, which must have struck a responsive chord in Father Dowling. These convergences and parallelisms undoubtedly formed some of the reasons why Wilson initially decided to become involved in their circle. During these years Bill began increasingly to use Gerald Heard and Father Dowling as sort of “co-sponsors” in one important portion of his own personal spiritual quest.

Humphrey Osmond had performed experiments in which he initially seemed to have had considerable success in treating alcoholics by administering LSD to them. He originally thought that the hallucinogen was producing symptoms which were enough like delirium tremens to frighten the alcoholics into wanting to quit. But then between 1954 and 1960, when he and his colleagues gave the drug to two thousand alcoholics and still consistently achieved a very high success rate in getting them into recovery, they began to realize that it was not a fear reaction which the drug was causing. The new theory they devised was that it was the spiritual insights which the LSD experience produced which were enabling the alcoholics to stop drinking.³⁶⁹

On August 29, 1956 Bill Wilson took LSD for the first time, joining Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley in California and taking the psychedelic drug under the supervision of Dr. Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. A.A. member Tom Powers was also there.³⁷⁰ According to Don Lattin, “Wilson was blown away by the drug and said the experience was a dead ringer for the famous night in the 1930s when he fell down on his knees and had an epiphany about founding his twelve-step program.”³⁷¹

Bill Wilson wanted to check his own perceptions, however, against those of a person who knew much more than he did about the world of traditional Catholic monastic spirituality: someone who had had his own spiritual experiences of a higher order in a manner unaided by drugs, and who was a genuine “insider” within the living Catholic spiritual tradition, rather than just being an outside observer (like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard essentially were). So he got Father Ed Dowling to visit, and as Pass It On describes it, “the result was a most magnificent, positive spiritual experience. Father Ed declared himself utterly convinced of its validity.”³⁷²

The four key people, it should be noted, were not crazed young hippies in their teens and twenties, with long hair and headbands and flowers in their hair, wearing love beads and riding around in old VW minibuses painted with psychedelic designs. In August 1956, Father Dowling was almost 58 years old, Bill Wilson was 60, Aldous Huxley was 62, and Gerald Heard was 66.

Aldous Huxley also gave LSD to Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967), another figure from the more radical wing of the Jesuit order.³⁷³ Murray was editor of the Jesuit journal Theological Studies and taught at the Jesuit theologate in Woodstock, Maryland, and was, like Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J., one of the formative influences on the declarations of the Second Vatican Council. Murray and Dowling would have shared many basic political principles, since Murray was someone who was devoted to bringing real democracy into both government and the church. He and Reinhold Niebuhr were considered the two most influential American theologians at that time, in the area of the application of Christian ethics to politics.

Nell Wing, Mrs. Marty Mann, and Lois Wilson also tried LSD at Bill Wilson’s urging.³⁷⁴ These were not crazed young hippies.

The impact of modern chemistry on medicine: We need to remember the great defining currents of that period of history, that is, the revolutionary era that ran from the 1840’s down to the 1950’s. The discovery of mind-altering chemicals which could be used medically to enormously improve human life was a radical new development. In fact the modern science of chemistry really began only a century and a half ago — it is one of the newest of our sciences — but some of the medical advances of that period rapidly began producing almost miraculous benefits for the human race. We need to look at some dates, to realize what an explosion of discoveries was going on. Dr. Bob was born in 1879. Mendeleev had developed the Periodic Table, the basis of modern chemistry, only ten years previously. The first major applications of modern chemical discoveries in medicine had begun only a generation before Dr. Bob’s birth: the first surgery using ether as an anesthetic, for example, was not carried out until 1842, and chloroform was not discovered until 1847. The first time nitrous oxide was used for an anesthetic was for a dental extraction in 1844, but it did not come into general use until after 1863. What an incredible boon to the human race these discoveries were!

Between 1910 and 1941, it was discovered that a whole series of chemicals called “vitamins” could have an enormous effect on human health and mental states, and cure a long list of illnesses. Every year, newspapers and magazines seemed to be trumpeting yet another new vitamin which could be used to successfully treat some disease (like pellagra, beriberi, or rickets) which had long afflicted the human race: Vitamins A, C, D, K, and a long list of B vitamins (in order of discovery Thiamine, Riboflavin, Vitamin B₁₂, Pantothenic acid, Biotin, Pyridoxine, Niacin, and Folic acid).

Antibiotics were another early twentieth-century discovery. The first sulfonamide drug was developed in 1932-1935, that is, about the same time the A.A. movement began. Sulfa drugs, as the first and only effective antibiotic available in the years before penicillin, were literally lifesavers for wounded soldiers and sailors during the early years of World War II. Penicillin was discovered by Scottish scientist and Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming in 1928, but it did not begin to receive serious attention until the later World War II period: on March 14, 1942, John Bumstead and Orvan Hess saved a dying patient’s life using penicillin, and later that year it was used to treat victims of the famous November 28, 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston.

Then science began to discover medications which could be used to treat mental problems: chlorpromazine (Thorazine) was given its first clinical tests in 1951-1952 and was soon being used all over the United States to treat schizophrenia, mania, psychomotor excitement, and other psychotic disorders. Its use finally brought to an end to the practice of using electroconvulsive therapy (shock treatment) and psychosurgery (prefrontal lobotomy) to treat mental patients, and was one of the driving forces behind the deinstitutionalization movement which allowed thousands of people to be released from insane asylums and live in the outside world once again. Bill Swegan (the most important A.A. author from the atheistic and agnostic wing of early A.A.) began using tranquillizers quite effectively in the treatment of alcoholics during the middle 1950’s, and published a widely read journal article on it in 1958.³⁷⁵ Then in 1958, haloperidol (Haldol) was discovered by a Belgian pharmaceutical company and quickly proved in clinical trials to also be quite successful in treating schizophrenia.

The tranquillizer chlordiazepoxide was first sold in 1959 under the brand name Librium, and then in 1963 diazepam came on the market under the brand name Valium. By 2003 in the United States, an estimated 3.21 million patients were receiving antipsychotics.

In 1929, just two weeks before the stock market crash, an American soft drink company came out with a lemon-lime flavored “Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” which eventually came to be called “7 Up.” It is still a very popular soft drink in America today. In 1950, they finally stopped putting lithium citrate in their beverage, under pressure from the U.S. government, because of the dangers of getting an overdose of lithium if taken without fairly continuous medical supervision, but also because of government fears that lithium was only “quack medicine” that actually helped no one. Ironically however, at almost the same time, an Australian psychiatrist named John Cade demonstrated in 1949 that lithium salts were in fact quite excellent for treating mania — the first thing that psychiatrists had been able to devise in fact, that was a truly successful and workable treatment. By the 1970’s lithium was regularly being used for mental patients who were bipolar, that is, who suffered from manic depression cycles, and was for many of them the only thing that really worked well.

So it was not surprising that sensible and thoughtful people might believe, in the 1950’s, that LSD could possibly be another of the new wonder drugs which could revolutionize the practice of medicine and restore countless suffering men and women to full health. At the very least, experiments needed to be performed to test it on human subjects.

When did Father Dowling have these spiritual experiences, and what was their nature? His decision to enter the Jesuit seminary in 1919 when he was twenty-one showed signs of having been the product of some kind of extraordinary spiritual experience. Something at least has usually gone on when young men and women make that kind of abrupt decision to give themselves to the church — Protestants will often speak of “receiving the call to preach,” for example. And c. 1920, after he was in the seminary, young Ed began to suffer through two years of doubt and flirting with atheism before he experienced something that put him back on the road of faith. We can only guess at the nature of these spiritual experiences, but it should be noted that Father Dowling never showed any great astonishment at Bill Wilson’s accounts of having seen the great white light, or having held long conversations with dead saints. In the history of the Jesuit order over the centuries, there were many who had experienced encounters with the divine light, heavenly voices, visitations of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and so on.

And after his initial encounter with LSD, Dowling concluded (just like Bill Wilson) that this chemical did in fact put the human mind in genuine contact with the transcendent realm that the great spiritual teachers of the past had spoken about. In order to make such a statement, Dowling must have had extraordinary spiritual experiences earlier in his life which he could now say that the LSD psychedelic trip at times mimicked or duplicated. Father Ed, going back long before he and Bill Wilson met, must have been something far more than an ordinary Catholic priest with an ordinary cleric’s simple piety.

So Dowling and Wilson both began by praising LSD, and certifying that it could in fact produce a vital spiritual experience. The problem is that numerous experiments over the years that followed have taken some of the glow out of the enthusiastic evaluations of those who first tried the drug during the 1950’s. It would surely be safe to say that today, over fifty years later, the overwhelming majority of the people in A.A. and N.A. — although still not one hundred percent of them — do not believe that the LSD experience leads to permanent, long-term spiritual growth. But on the other hand, there are still today some A.A. and N.A. members who continue to insist that LSD produced a vital and genuine spiritual experience when they took it.

Timothy Leary (1920-1996) had begun teaching as a lecturer at Harvard University in 1959. On August 9, 1960, he ate some psilocybin mushrooms at Cuernavaca in Mexico, and went on his first psychedelic trip. Returning to Harvard, he and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project, using a synthesized form of the psychedelic drug. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, after hearing about the Harvard research project, asked to join the experiments. In the Spring of 1963, Harvard fired both Leary and Alpert. In 1964, Leary coauthored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, using the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide to that kind of drug trip.³⁷⁶

And past that point, psychedelic drugs became principally identified as a part of the world of hippies, college dropouts, drug-addicted American military personnel returning from the Vietnam war, and a whole host of well-known rock musicians. When people heard the term LSD, they thought of Beatles songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (which came out in 1967, the title being an anagram for LSD) and their film “Yellow Submarine” (1968), along with Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Looking Out My Back Door” (1970), and the music of a large number of other groups like the Grateful Dead (formed in 1965), and so on. That is, psychedelic drugs seemed part of a package of addictive behaviors that was leading more and more people into A.A. and N.A. with hopelessly unmanageable lives.

Father Ed Dowling died in April 1960, before any of the hippie and rock-and-roll drug cult involvement had begun. Bill Wilson lasted down to 1971, but in those last years he was an elderly man gravely weakened by emphysema, and was not in any shape to be involved in any way with people like Timothy Leary, and Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.