“Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!’ Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. ‘The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!’
…
“There’s the saucepan that the gruel was in!” cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace. “There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat! There’s the window where I saw the wandering Spirits! It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!”
…
‘What’s to-day, my fine fellow?’ said Scrooge.
‘To-day!’ replied the boy. ‘Why, Christmas Day.’
‘It’s Christmas Day!’ said Scrooge to himself. ‘I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!’” (A Christmas Carol)
When one first reads the above line about the bedpost, it appears that Scrooge has woken up from a dream: the visitation by Jacob Marley was indeed indigestion; the spirits were conjured by his own unconscious. That’s certainly a modern view, in fact the reductive materialist’s view, the atheist’s view. Everything boils down to the human brain, and the human brain is just neurons, electricity, chemicals. That’s certainly Scrooge’s view, too, before his transformation.
Here’s his former view:
“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
In other words: spirits cannot exist, Marley cannot really be there, so, being the good reductive materialist he is, he must explain what he sees by reducing the phenomenon to a purely physiological one.
Oh, how different after his transformation: he has acquired a belief in the transcendent: “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me … it’s all true, it all happened.” Whatever we might believe, Scrooge believed in an intervention from a metaphysical realm, in the intrusion of beings from that realm into this realm, apparent to our senses in this realm. Capital letters for Spirits and Three: originating in the Divine. And what’s more: the beings from that realm are capable of anything (in contrast to mortal folk; as Scrooge says earlier: “‘I am a mortal,” Scrooge remonstrated, ‘and liable to fall.’”)
This echoes the basic principle of AA, an interventionist God:
“But for the grace of God, there would have been thousands more convincing demonstrations.” (Chapter 2, Big Book)
This presence of God, necessarily from beyond, this intrusion of God via grace into this realm, is the presence, furthermore, of an omnipotent God.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “God ought to be able to do anything.” Then he added, “He sure didn’t do much for me when I was trying to fight this booze racket alone.” (Chapter 11, ibid.)
Another key element of AA’s philosophy is that, whilst mortal, like Scrooge, we are not merely mortal. We are quite literally children of God:
“[A]ll of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try.” (Chapter 2, ibid.)
This is echoed by Bill Wilson’s letter to Carl Jung:
“Very many thoughtful AAs are students of your writings. Because of your conviction that man is something more than intellect, emotion, and two dollars worth of chemicals, you have especially endeared yourself to us.” (Bill Wilson, The Language of the Heart)
Bill Wilson, Jung, and the philosophy of AA do not subscribe to reductive materialism. All three, as did Scrooge, transcended that view to arrive at something more expansive.
Finally, the intervention, as with Scrooge, first acts on us, then acts through us:
“The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves.” (Chapter 2, ibid.)
The above ideas represent the absolute core of AA’s solution for me. Materialism is simply not a satisfactory explanation, not to me at any rate, and is profoundly depressing, to boot. Chesterton puts it very well:
“Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance … and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.” (Orthodoxy)
AA opened the gateway to another realm, through which Reality gushes like an unstoppable cataract.
“We found the Great Reality deep down within us.” (Chapter 4, Big Book)
When I’m gloomy, depressed, or cynical, I have forgotten this. The answer is Step Twelve: wake up and serve, and that Reality heaves into view once more:
“Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.” (Chapter 1, Big Book)