The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

NOTES ON CHAPTER 1. UNDENIABLE FACTSThe God of power, energy, creativity and noveltyIn the Middle Ages, there was a tendency to turn God into a static entity calledthe Unmoved Mover, which attracted all of reality towards it as a distant ideal goal.We see this kind of concept of God coming out above all in St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) and his First Proof for the existence of God, the Proof from Motion. 4The very fact that Aquinas’ God was referred to there as the Unmoved Mover gavethe basic picture better than any other words one could conjure up. This medievalGod of the philosophers was regarded as an almost completely impersonal absolute,perfect and unchanging, which was so completely transcendent that it wasfar removed from all the things of this universe, where we human beings lived ourlives.Philip Leon was part of a rebellion against that kind of concept of God whichcame to a peak during the first half of the twentieth century, and involved a numberof other excellent philosophers. This rebellion began with the Boston Personalists:Borden Parker Bowne’s The Immanence of God came out in 1905, and his successorat Boston University, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, published The Problem of God in1930. The process philosophers then took up the same crusade, with Alfred NorthWhitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) and Adventures of Ideas (1933), followed by astring of books by the prolific author Charles Hartshorne: Beyond Humanism: Essaysin the New Philosophy of Nature (1937), The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God(1948), Philosophers Speak of God (edited with William L. Reese, 1953), and many others.Just like the Boston Personalists and the process philosophers, Leon insisted thatGod was not some rigid, impersonal, and static reality. That was certainly not thebiblical notion of God, he argued, nor the experience of the Oxford Group. TheGod of the Bible (and the Oxford Group) was above all a God of power and energy(in Greek, dynamis and energeia), exploding into the world and working miracleswithin the human spirit. God was the power of creativity and novelty, by which(Leon said) he meant “positive or constructive power or efficiency and not negativeor destructive and obstructive power.” Forces that were purely negative anddestructive came from a different kind of power, one which was opposed to God.[Chapter 1, section I]For Leon, this was not just a philosophical theory. It was something which couldbe felt and experienced at a meeting of the Oxford Group (A.A. people called it thespirit of the tables, while traditional Christianity called it the presence of the HolySpirit). When Leon went to his first house party at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford,he experienced an atmosphere which was electrically charged, magnetized, and dynamic.It was filled with the spirit of the new, the uninhibited, and the fearless. Everyonehad stripped off their masks and disguises, so that you could see who people4