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Ares

Ares (Ἄρης, Árēs ) is the Greek god of war and courage. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. The Greeks were ambivalent towards him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister Athena, whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places, objects, and other deities with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality.

Although Ares' name shows his origins as Mycenaean, his reputation for savagery was thought by some to reflect his likely origins as a Thracian deity. Some cities in Greece and several in Asia Minor held annual festivals to bind and detain him as their protector. In parts of Asia Minor, he was an oracular deity. Still further away from Greece, the Scythians were said to ritually kill one in a hundred prisoners of war as an offering to their equivalent of Ares. The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and reputation than to reality.

Though there are many literary allusions to Ares' love affairs and children, he has a limited role in Greek mythology. When he does appear, he is often humiliated. In the Trojan War, Aphrodite, protector of Troy, persuades Ares to take the Trojans' side. The Trojans lose, while Ares' sister Athena helps the Greeks to victory. Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovers his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares, he traps the lovers in a net and exposes them to the ridicule of the other gods.

Ares' nearest counterpart in Roman religion is Mars, who was given a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion as ancestral protector of the Roman people and state. During the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars, and in later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures became virtually indistinguishable.

Names
The etymology of the name Ares is traditionally connected with the Greek word ἀρή (arē), the Ionic form of the Doric ἀρά (ara), "bane, ruin, curse, imprecation". Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war." R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name. The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek, a-re, written in the Linear B syllabic script.

The adjectival epithet, Areios ("warlike") was frequently appended to the names of other gods when they took on a warrior aspect or became involved in warfare: Zeus Areios, Athena Areia, even Aphrodite Areia ("Aphrodite within Ares" or "feminine Ares"), who was warlike, fully armoured and armed, partnered with Athena in Sparta, and represented at Kythira's temple to Aphrodite Urania. In the Iliad, the word ares is used as a common noun synonymous with "battle."

In the Classical period, Ares is given the epithet Enyalios, which seems to appear on the Mycenaean KN V 52 tablet as, e-nu-wa-ri-jo. Enyalios was sometimes identified with Ares and sometimes differentiated from him as another war god with separate cult, even in the same town; Burkert describes them as "doubles almost".

Cult
In mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, only a few places are known to have had a formal temple and cult of Ares. Pausanias (2nd century AD) notes an altar to Ares at Olympia, and the moving of a Temple of Ares to the Athenian agora during the reign of Augustus, essentially rededicating it (2 AD) as a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor. The Areopagus ("mount of Ares"), a natural rock outcrop in Athens, some distance from the Acropolis, was supposedly where Ares was tried and acquitted by the gods for his revenge-killing of Poseidon's son, Halirrhothius, who had raped Ares' daughter Alcippe. Its name was used for the court that met there, mostly to investigate and try potential cases of treason.

Numismatist M. Jessop Price states that Ares "typified the traditional Spartan character", but had no important cult in Sparta; and he never occurs on Spartan coins. Pausanias gives two examples of his cult, both of them conjointly with or "within" a warlike Aphrodite, on the Spartan acropolis. Gonzalez observes, in his 2005 survey of Ares' cults in Asia Minor, that cults to Ares on the Greek mainland may have been more common than some sources assert. Wars between Greek states were endemic; war and warriors provided Ares's tribute, and fed his insatiable appetite for battle.

Ares' attributes are instruments of war: a helmet, shield, and sword or spear. Libanius "makes the apple sacred to Ares", but "offers no further comment", nor connections to any aetiological myth. Apples are one of Aphrodites' sacred or symbolic fruits. Littlewood follows Artemidorus claim that to dream of sour apples presages conflict, and lists Ares alongside Eris and the mythological "Apples of Discord".

Chained statues
Gods were immortal but could be bound and restrained, both in mythic narrative and in cult practice. There was an archaic Spartan statue of Ares in chains in the temple of Enyalios (sometimes regarded as the son of Ares, sometimes as Ares himself), which Pausanias claimed meant that the spirit of war and victory was to be kept in the city. The Spartans are known to have ritually bound the images of other deities, including Aphrodite and Artemis (cf Ares and Aphrodite bound by Hephaestus), and in other places there were chained statues of Artemis and Dionysos.

Statues of Ares in chains are described in the instructions given by an oracle of the late Hellenistic era to various cities of Pamphylia (in Anatolia) including Syedra, Lycia and Cilicia, places almost perpetually under threat from pirates. Each was told to set up a statue of "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and provide it with an annual festival in which it was ritually bound with iron fetters ("by Dike and Hermes") as if a supplicant for justice, put on trial and offered sacrifice. The oracle promises that "thus will he become a peaceful deity for you, once he has driven the enemy horde far from your country, and he will give rise to prosperity much prayed for." This Ares karpodotes ("giver of Fruits") is well attested in Lycia and Pisidia.

Sacrifices
Like most Greek deities, Ares was given animal sacrifice; in Sparta, after battle, he was given an ox for a victory by stratagem, or a rooster for victory through onslaught. The usual recipient of sacrifice before battle was Athena. Reports of historic human sacrifice to Ares in an obscure rite known as the Hekatomphonia represent a very long-standing error, repeated through several centuries and well into the modern era. The hekatomphonia was an animal sacrifice to Zeus; it could be offered by any warrior who had personally slain one hundred of the enemy. Pausanias reports that in Sparta, each company of youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in a hand-to-hand "fight without rules" at the Phoebaeum. The chthonic night-time sacrifice of a dog to Enyalios became assimilated to the cult of Ares. Porphyry claims, without detail, that Apollodorus of Athens (circa second century BC) says the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, but this may be a reference to mythic pre-history.

Thrace and Scythia
A Thracian god identified by Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) as Ares, through interpretatio Graeca, was one of three otherwise unnamed deities that Thracian commoners were said to worship. Herodotus recognises and names the other two as "Dionysus" and "Artemis", and claims that the Thracian aristocracy exclusively worshiped "Hermes". In Herodotus' Histories, the Scythians worship an indigenous form of Greek Ares, who is otherwise unnamed, but ranked beneath Tabiti (whom Herodotus claims as a form of Hestia), Api and Papaios in Scythia's divine hierarchy. His cult object was an iron sword. The "Scythian Ares" was offered blood-sacrifices (or ritual killings) of cattle, horses and "one in every hundred human war-captives", whose blood was used to douse the sword. Statues, and complex platform-altars made of heaped brushwood were devoted to him. This sword-cult, or one very similar, is said to have persisted among the Alans. Some have posited that the "Sword of Mars" in later European history alludes to the Huns having adopted Ares.

Asia Minor
In some parts of Asia Minor, Ares was a prominent oracular deity, something not found in any Hellennic cult to Ares or Roman cult to Mars. Ares was linked in some regions or polities with a local god or cultic hero, and recognised as a higher, more prestigious deity than in mainland Greece. His cults in southern Asia Minor are attested from the 5th century BC and well into the later Roman Imperial era, at 29 different sites, and on over 70 local coin issues. He is sometimes represented on coinage of the region by the "Helmet of Ares" or carrying a spear and a shield, or as a fully armed warrior, sometimes accompanied by a female deity. In what is now western Turkey, the Hellenistic city of Metropolis built a monumental temple to Ares as the city's protector, not before the 3rd century BC. It is now lost, but the names of some of its priests and priestesses survive, along with the temple's likely depictions on coins of the province.

Crete
A sanctuary of Aphrodite was established at Sta Lenika, on Crete, between the cities of Lato and Olus, possibly during the Geometric period. It was rebuilt in the late 2nd century BC as a double-sanctuary to Ares and Aphrodite. Inscriptions record disputes over the ownership of the sanctuary. The names of Ares and Aphrodite appear as witness to sworn oaths, and there is a Victory thanks-offering to Aphrodite, whom Millington believes had capacity as a "warrior-protector acting in the realm of Ares". There were cultic links between the Sta Lenika sanctuary, Knossos and other Cretan states, and perhaps with Argos on the mainland. While the Greek literary and artistic record from both the Archaic and Classical eras connects Ares and Aphrodite as complementary companions and ideal though adulterous lovers, their cult pairing and Aphrodite as warrior-protector is localised to Crete.

Aksum
In Africa, Maḥrem, the principal god of the kings of Aksum prior to the 4th century AD, was invoked as Ares in Greek inscriptions. The anonymous king who commissioned the Monumentum Adulitanum in the late 2nd or early 3rd century refers to "my greatest god, Ares, who also begat me, through whom I brought under my sway [various peoples]". The monumental throne celebrating the king's conquests was itself dedicated to Ares. In the early 4th century, the last pagan king of Aksum, Ezana, referred to "the one who brought me forth, the invincible Ares".

Characterisation
Ares was one of the Twelve Olympians in the archaic tradition represented by the Iliad and Odyssey. In Greek literature, Ares often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality and bloodlust ("overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering", as Burkert puts it), in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena, whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places and objects with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality; but when Ares does appear in myths, he typically faces humiliation.

In the Iliad, Zeus expresses a recurring Greek revulsion toward the god when Ares returns wounded and complaining from the battlefield at Troy: "Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him: 'Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar. To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles. ... And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, since you are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you. But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.'"

This ambivalence is expressed also in the Greeks' association of Ares with the Thracians, whom they regarded as a barbarous and warlike people. Thrace was considered to be Ares's birthplace and his refuge after the affair with Aphrodite was exposed to the general mockery of the other gods.

A late-6th-century BC funerary inscription from Attica emphasizes the consequences of coming under Ares's sway:"Stay and mourn at the tomb of dead Kroisos Whom raging Ares destroyed one day, fighting in the foremost ranks."

Hymns

 * Homeric Hymn 8 to Ares (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic 7th to 4th centuries BC)

 * Ares, exceeding in strength, chariot-rider, golden-helmed, doughty in heart, shield-bearer, Saviour of cities, harnessed in bronze, strong of arm, unwearying, mighty with the spear, O defence of Olympus, father of warlike Victory, ally of Themis, stern governor of the rebellious, leader of righteous men, sceptred King of manliness, who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear you above the third firmament of heaven; hear me, helper of men, giver of dauntless youth! Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life, and strength of war, that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul. Restrain also the keen fury of my heart which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife. Rather, O blessed one, give you me boldness to abide within the harmless laws of peace, avoiding strife and hatred and the violent fiends of death.

 * Orphic Hymn 65 to Ares (trans. Taylor) (Greek hymns 3rd century BCE to 2nd century CE)

 * To Ares, Fumigation from Frankincense. Magnanimous, unconquered, boisterous Ares, in darts rejoicing, and in bloody wars; fierce and untamed, whose mighty power can make the strongest walls from their foundations shake: mortal-destroying king, defiled with gore, pleased with war's dreadful and tumultuous roar. Thee human blood, and swords, and spears delight, and the dire ruin of mad savage fight. Stay furious contests, and avenging strife, whose works with woe embitter human life; to lovely Kyrpis [Aphrodite] and to Lyaios [Dionysos] yield, for arms exchange the labours of the field; encourage peace, to gentle works inclined, and give abundance, with benignant mind.

Birth
He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera.

Argonautica
In the Argonautica, the Golden Fleece hangs in a grove sacred to Ares, until its theft by Jason. The Birds of Ares (Ornithes Areioi) drop feather darts in defense of the Amazons' shrine to Ares, as father of their queen, on a coastal island in the Black Sea.

Founding of Thebes
Ares plays a central role in the founding myth of Thebes, as the progenitor of the water-dragon slain by Cadmus. The dragon's teeth were sown into the ground as if a crop and sprang up as the fully armored autochthonic Spartoi. Cadmus placed himself in the god's service for eight years to atone for killing the dragon. To further propitiate Ares, Cadmus married Harmonia, a daughter of Ares's union with Aphrodite. In this way, Cadmus harmonized all strife and founded the city of Thebes. In reality, Thebes came to dominate Boeotia's great and fertile plain, which in both history and myth was a battleground for competing polities. According to Plutarch, the plain was anciently described as "The dancing-floor of Ares".

Aphrodite
In Homer's Odyssey, in the tale sung by the bard in the hall of Alcinous, the Sun-god Helios once spied Ares and Aphrodite having sex secretly in the hall of Hephaestus, her husband. Helios reported the incident to Hephaestus. Contriving to catch the illicit couple in the act, Hephaestus fashioned a finely-knitted and nearly invisible net with which to snare them. At the appropriate time, this net was sprung, and trapped Ares and Aphrodite locked in very private embrace.

But Hephaestus was not satisfied with his revenge, so he invited the Olympian gods and goddesses to view the unfortunate pair. For the sake of modesty, the goddesses demurred, but the male gods went to witness the sight. Some commented on the beauty of Aphrodite, others remarked that they would eagerly trade places with Ares, but all who were present mocked the two. Once the couple was released, the embarrassed Ares returned to his homeland, Thrace, and Aphrodite went to Paphos.

In a much later interpolated detail, Ares put the young soldier Alectryon, who was Ares companion in drinking and even love-making, by his door to warn them of Helios's arrival as Helios would tell Hephaestus of Aphrodite's infidelity if the two were discovered, but Alectryon fell asleep on guard duty. Helios discovered the two and alerted Hephaestus. The furious Ares turned the sleepy Alectryon into a rooster which now always announces the arrival of the sun in the morning, as a way of apologizing to Ares.

The Chorus of Aeschylus' Suppliants (written 463 BC) refers to Ares as Aphrodite's "mortal-destroying bedfellow". In the Illiad, Ares helps the Trojans because of his affection for their divine protector, Aphrodite; she thus redirects his innate destructive savagery to her own purposes.

Giants
In one archaic myth, related only in the Iliad by the goddess Dione to her daughter Aphrodite, two chthonic giants, the Aloadae, named Otus and Ephialtes, bound Ares in chains and imprisoned him in a bronze urn, where he remained for thirteen months, a lunar year. "And that would have been the end of Ares and his appetite for war, if the beautiful Eriboea, the young giants' stepmother, had not told Hermes what they had done," she related. In this, [Burkert] suspects "a festival of licence which is unleashed in the thirteenth month." Ares was held screaming and howling in the urn until Hermes rescued him, and Artemis tricked the Aloadae into slaying each other. In Nonnus's Dionysiaca, in the war between Cronus and Zeus, Ares killed an unnamed giant son of Echidna who was allied with Cronus, and described as spitting "horrible poison" and having "snaky" feet.

In the 2nd century AD Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, when the monstrous Typhon attacked Olympus the gods transformed into animals and fled to Egypt; Ares changed into a fish, the Lepidotus (sacred to the Egyptian war-god Anhur). Liberalis's koine Greek text is a "completely inartistic" epitome of Nicander's now lost Heteroeumena (2nd century BC).

Iliad
In Homer's Iliad, Ares has no fixed allegiance. He promises Athena and Hera that he will fight for the Achaeans but Aphrodite persuades him to side with the Trojans. During the war, Diomedes fights Hector and sees Ares fighting on the Trojans' side. Diomedes calls for his soldiers to withdraw. Zeus grants Athena permission to drive Ares from the battlefield. Encouraged by Hera and Athena, Diomedes thrusts with his spear at Ares. Athena drives the spear home, and all sides tremble at Ares's cries. Ares flees to Mount Olympus, forcing the Trojans to fall back. Ares overhears that his son Ascalaphus has been killed and wants to change sides again, rejoining the Achaeans for vengeance, disregarding Zeus's order that no Olympian should join the battle. Athena stops him. Later, when Zeus allows the gods to fight in the war again, Ares attacks Athena to avenge his previous injury. Athena overpowers him by striking him with a boulder.

Attendants
Deimos ("Terror" or "Dread") and Phobos ("Fear") are Ares' companions in war, and according to Hesiod, are also his children by Aphrodite. Eris, the goddess of discord, or Enyo, the goddess of war, bloodshed, and violence, was considered the sister and companion of the violent Ares. In at least one tradition, Enyalius, rather than another name for Ares, was his son by Enyo.

Ares may also be accompanied by Kydoimos, the daemon of the din of battle; the Makhai ("Battles"); the "Hysminai" ("Acts of manslaughter"); Polemos, a minor spirit of war, or only an epithet of Ares, since it has no specific dominion; and Polemos's daughter, Alala, the goddess or personification of the Greek war-cry, whose name Ares uses as his own war-cry. Ares's sister Hebe ("Youth") also draws baths for him.

According to Pausanias, local inhabitants of Therapne, Sparta, recognized Thero, "feral, savage," as a nurse of Ares.

Offspring and affairs
Though Ares plays a relatively limited role in Greek mythology as represented in literary narratives, his numerous love affairs and abundant offspring are often alluded to. The union of Ares and Aphrodite created the gods Eros, Anteros, Phobos, Deimos, and Harmonia. Other versions include Alcippe as one of his daughters.

Cycnus (Κύκνος) of Macedonia was a son of Ares who tried to build a temple to his father with the skulls and bones of guests and travellers. Heracles fought him and, in one account, killed him. In another account, Ares fought his son's killer but Zeus parted the combatants with a thunderbolt.

Ares had a romantic liaison with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Aphrodite discovered them, and in anger she cursed Eos with insatiable lust for men.

By a woman named Teirene he had a daughter named Thrassa, who in turn had a daughter named Polyphonte. Polyphonte was cursed by Aphrodite to love and mate with a bear, producing two sons, Agrius and Oreius, who were hubristic toward the gods and had a habit of eating their guests. Zeus sent Hermes to punish them, and he chose to chop off their hands and feet. Since Polyphonte was descended from him, Ares stopped Hermes, and the two brothers came into an agreement to turn Polyphonte's family into birds instead. Oreius became an eagle owl, Agrius a vulture, and Polyphonte a strix, possibly a small owl, certainly a portent of war; Polyphonte's servant prayed not to become a bird of evil omen and Ares and Hermes fulfilled her wish by choosing the woodpecker for her, a good omen for hunters.

List of offspring and their mothers
Sometimes poets and dramatists recounted ancient traditions, which varied, and sometimes they invented new details; later scholiasts might draw on either or simply guess. Thus while Phobos and Deimos were regularly described as offspring of Ares, others listed here such as Meleager, Sinope and Solymus were sometimes said to be children of Ares and sometimes given other fathers.

The following is a list of Ares' offspring, by various mothers. Beside each offspring, the earliest source to record the parentage is given, along with the century to which the source dates.

Mars

The nearest counterpart of Ares among the Roman gods is Mars, a son of Jupiter and Juno, pre-eminent among the Roman army's military gods but originally an agricultural deity. As a father of Romulus, Rome's legendary founder, Mars was given an important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion, as a guardian deity of the entire Roman state and its people. Under the influence of Greek culture, Mars was identified with Ares, but the character and dignity of the two deities differed fundamentally. Mars was represented as a means to secure peace, and he was a father (pater) of the Roman people. In one tradition, he fathered Romulus and Remus through his rape of Rhea Silvia. In another, his lover, the goddess Venus, gave birth to Aeneas, the Trojan prince and refugee who "founded" Rome several generations before Romulus.

In the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars. Greek writers under Roman rule also recorded cult practices and beliefs pertaining to Mars under the name of Ares. Thus in the classical tradition of later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures later became virtually indistinguishable.

Renaissance and later depictions
In Renaissance and Neoclassical works of art, Ares's symbols are a spear and helmet, his animal is a dog, and his bird is the vulture. In literary works of these eras, Ares is replaced by the Roman Mars, a romantic emblem of manly valor rather than the cruel and blood-thirsty god of Greek mythology.

title: Ares


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Alexander Grothendieck

Alexander Grothendieck (28 March 1928 – 13 November 2014) was a German-born mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.

Grothendieck began his productive and public career as a mathematician in 1949. In 1958, he was appointed a research professor at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS) and remained there until 1970, when, driven by personal and political convictions, he left following a dispute over military funding. He received the Fields Medal in 1966 for advances in algebraic geometry, homological algebra, and K-theory. He later became professor at the University of Montpellier and, while still producing relevant mathematical work, he withdrew from the mathematical community and devoted himself to political and religious pursuits (first Buddhism and later, a more Catholic Christian vision). In 1991, he moved to the French village of Lasserre in the Pyrenees, where he lived in seclusion, still working on mathematics and his philosophical and religious thoughts until his death in 2014.

Family and childhood
Grothendieck was born in Berlin to anarchist parents. His father, Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro (also known as Alexander Tanaroff), had Hasidic Jewish roots and had been imprisoned in Russia before moving to Germany in 1922, while his mother, Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck, came from a Protestant German family in Hamburg and worked as a journalist. As teenagers, both of his parents had broken away from their early backgrounds. At the time of his birth, Grothendieck's mother was married to the journalist Johannes Raddatz and initially, his birth name was recorded as "Alexander Raddatz." That marriage was dissolved in 1929 and Schapiro acknowledged his paternity, but never married Hanka Grothendieck. Grothendieck had a maternal sibling, his half sister Maidi.

Grothendieck lived with his parents in Berlin until the end of 1933, when his father moved to Paris to evade Nazism. His mother followed soon thereafter. Grothendieck was left in the care of Wilhelm Heydorn, a Lutheran pastor and teacher in Hamburg. According to Winfried Scharlau, during this time, his parents took part in the Spanish Civil War as non-combatant auxiliaries. However, others state that Schapiro fought in the anarchist militia.

World War II
In May 1939, Grothendieck was put on a train in Hamburg for France. Shortly afterward his father was interned in Le Vernet. He and his mother were then interned in various camps from 1940 to 1942 as "undesirable dangerous foreigners." The first camp was the Rieucros Camp, where his mother contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually cause her death in 1957. While there, Grothendieck managed to attend the local school, at Mendel. Once, he managed to escape from the camp, intending to assassinate Hitler. Later, his mother Hanka was transferred to the Gurs internment camp for the remainder of World War II. Grothendieck was permitted to live separated from his mother.

In the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding houses or pensions, although he occasionally had to seek refuge in the woods during Nazi raids, surviving at times without food or water for several days.

His father was arrested under the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation, and sent to the Drancy internment camp, and then handed over by the French Vichy government to the Germans to be sent to be murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.

In Le Chambon, Grothendieck attended the Collège Cévenol (now known as the Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International), a unique secondary school founded in 1938 by local Protestant pacifists and anti-war activists. Many of the refugee children hidden in Le Chambon attended Collège Cévenol, and it was at this school that Grothendieck apparently first became fascinated with mathematics.

In 1990, for risking their lives to rescue Jews, the entire village was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations".

Studies and contact with research mathematics
After the war, the young Grothendieck studied mathematics in France, initially at the University of Montpellier where at first he did not perform well, failing such classes as astronomy. Working on his own, he rediscovered the Lebesgue measure. After three years of increasingly independent studies there, he went to continue his studies in Paris in 1948.

Initially, Grothendieck attended Henri Cartan's Seminar at École Normale Supérieure, but he lacked the necessary background to follow the high-powered seminar. On the advice of Cartan and André Weil, he moved to the University of Nancy where two leading experts were working on Grothendieck's area of interest, topological vector spaces: Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz. The latter had recently won a Fields Medal. He showed his new student his latest paper; it ended with a list of 14 open questions, relevant for locally convex spaces. Grothendieck introduced new mathematical methods that enabled him to solve all of these problems within a few months.

In Nancy, he wrote his dissertation under those two professors on functional analysis, from 1950 to 1953. At this time he was a leading expert in the theory of topological vector spaces. In 1953 he moved to the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where he immigrated by means of a Nansen passport, given that he had refused to take French nationality (as that would have entailed military service against his convictions). He stayed in São Paulo (apart from a lengthy visit in France from October 1953 - March 1954) until the end of 1954. His published work from the time spent in Brazil is still in the theory of topological vector spaces; it is there that he completed his last major work on that topic (on "metric" theory of Banach spaces).

Grothendieck moved to Lawrence, Kansas at the beginning of 1955, and there he set his old subject aside in order to work in algebraic topology and homological algebra, and increasingly in algebraic geometry. It was in Lawrence that Grothendieck developed his theory of abelian categories and the reformulation of sheaf cohomology based on them, leading to the very influential "Tôhoku paper".

In 1957 he was invited to visit Harvard University by Oscar Zariski, but the offer fell through when he refused to sign a pledge promising not to work to overthrow the United States government—a refusal which, he was warned, threatened to land him in prison. The prospect of prison did not worry him, so long as he could have access to books.

Comparing Grothendieck during his Nancy years to the École Normale Supérieure-trained students at that time (Pierre Samuel, Roger Godement, René Thom, Jacques Dixmier, Jean Cerf, Yvonne Bruhat, Jean-Pierre Serre, and Bernard Malgrange), Leila Schneps said:

"He was so completely unknown to this group and to their professors, came from such a deprived and chaotic background, and was, compared to them, so ignorant at the start of his research career, that his fulgurating ascent to sudden stardom is all the more incredible; quite unique in the history of mathematics." His first works on topological vector spaces in 1953 have been successfully applied to physics and computer science, culminating in a relation between Grothendieck inequality and the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox in quantum physics.

IHÉS years
In 1958, Grothendieck was installed at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS), a new privately funded research institute that, in effect, had been created for Jean Dieudonné and Grothendieck. Grothendieck attracted attention by an intense and highly productive activity of seminars there (de facto working groups drafting into foundational work some of the ablest French and other mathematicians of the younger generation). Grothendieck practically ceased publication of papers through the conventional, learned journal route. However, he was able to play a dominant role in mathematics for approximately a decade, gathering a strong school.

Officially during this time, he had as students Michel Demazure (who worked on SGA3, on group schemes), Luc Illusie (cotangent complex), Michel Raynaud, Jean-Louis Verdier (co-founder of the derived category theory), and Pierre Deligne. Collaborators on the SGA projects also included Michael Artin (étale cohomology), Nick Katz (monodromy theory, and Lefschetz pencils). Jean Giraud worked out torsor theory extensions of nonabelian cohomology there as well. Many others such as David Mumford, Robin Hartshorne, Barry Mazur and C.P. Ramanujam were also involved.

"Golden Age"
Alexander Grothendieck's work during what is described as the "Golden Age" period at the IHÉS established several unifying themes in algebraic geometry, number theory, topology, category theory, and complex analysis. His first (pre-IHÉS) discovery in algebraic geometry was the Grothendieck–Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem, a generalisation of the Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem proved algebraically; in this context he also introduced K-theory. Then, following the programme he outlined in his talk at the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians, he introduced the theory of schemes, developing it in detail in his Éléments de géométrie algébrique (EGA) and providing the new more flexible and general foundations for algebraic geometry that has been adopted in the field since that time. He went on to introduce the étale cohomology theory of schemes, providing the key tools for proving the Weil conjectures, as well as crystalline cohomology and algebraic de Rham cohomology to complement it. Closely linked to these cohomology theories, he originated topos theory as a generalisation of topology (relevant also in categorical logic). He also provided, by means of a categorical Galois theory, an algebraic definition of fundamental groups of schemes giving birth to the now famous étale fundamental group and he then conjectured the existence a further generalization of it, which is now known as the fundamental group scheme. As a framework for his coherent duality theory, he also introduced derived categories, which were further developed by Verdier.

The results of his work on these and other topics were published in the EGA and in less polished form in the notes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique (SGA) that he directed at the IHÉS.

Political activism
Grothendieck's political views were radical and pacifistic. He strongly opposed both United States intervention in Vietnam and Soviet military expansionism. To protest against the Vietnam War, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In 1966, he had declined to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Moscow, where he was to receive the Fields Medal. He retired from scientific life around 1970 after he had found out that IHÉS was partly funded by the military. He returned to academia a few years later as a professor at the University of Montpellier.

While the issue of military funding was perhaps the most obvious explanation for Grothendieck's departure from the IHÉS, those who knew him say that the causes of the rupture ran more deeply. Pierre Cartier, a visiteur de longue durée ("long-term guest") at the IHÉS, wrote a piece about Grothendieck for a special volume published on the occasion of the IHÉS's fortieth anniversary. In that publication, Cartier notes that as the son of an antimilitary anarchist and one who grew up among the disenfranchised, Grothendieck always had a deep compassion for the poor and the downtrodden. As Cartier puts it, Grothendieck came to find Bures-sur-Yvette as "une cage dorée" ("a gilded cage"). While Grothendieck was at the IHÉS, opposition to the Vietnam War was heating up, and Cartier suggests that this also reinforced Grothendieck's distaste at having become a mandarin of the scientific world. In addition, after several years at the IHÉS, Grothendieck seemed to cast about for new intellectual interests. By the late 1960s, he had started to become interested in scientific areas outside mathematics. David Ruelle, a physicist who joined the IHÉS faculty in 1964, said that Grothendieck came to talk to him a few times about physics. Biology interested Grothendieck much more than physics, and he organized some seminars on biological topics.

In 1970, Grothendieck, with two other mathematicians, Claude Chevalley and Pierre Samuel, created a political group entitled Survivre—the name later changed to Survivre et vivre. The group published a bulletin and was dedicated to antimilitary and ecological issues. It also developed strong criticism of the indiscriminate use of science and technology. Grothendieck devoted the next three years to this group and served as the main editor of its bulletin.

Although Grothendieck continued with mathematical enquiries, his standard mathematical career mostly ended when he left the IHÉS. After leaving the IHÉS, Grothendieck became a temporary professor at Collège de France for two years. He then became a professor at the University of Montpellier, where he became increasingly estranged from the mathematical community. He formally retired in 1988, a few years after having accepted a research position at the CNRS.

Manuscripts written in the 1980s
While not publishing mathematical research in conventional ways during the 1980s, he produced several influential manuscripts with limited distribution, with both mathematical and biographical content.

Produced during 1980 and 1981, La Longue Marche à travers la théorie de Galois (The Long March Through Galois Theory) is a 1600-page handwritten manuscript containing many of the ideas that led to the Esquisse d'un programme. It also includes a study of Teichmüller theory.

In 1983, stimulated by correspondence with Ronald Brown and Tim Porter at Bangor University, Grothendieck wrote a 600-page manuscript entitled Pursuing Stacks. It began with a letter addressed to Daniel Quillen. This letter and successive parts were distributed from Bangor (see External links below). Within these, in an informal, diary-like manner, Grothendieck explained and developed his ideas on the relationship between algebraic homotopy theory and algebraic geometry and prospects for a noncommutative theory of stacks. The manuscript, which is being edited for publication by G. Maltsiniotis, later led to another of his monumental works, Les Dérivateurs. Written in 1991, this latter opus of approximately 2000 pages, further developed the homotopical ideas begun in Pursuing Stacks. Much of this work anticipated the subsequent development during the mid-1990s of the motivic homotopy theory of Fabien Morel and Vladimir Voevodsky.

In 1984, Grothendieck wrote the proposal Esquisse d'un Programme ("Sketch of a Programme") for a position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). It describes new ideas for studying the moduli space of complex curves. Although Grothendieck never published his work in this area, the proposal inspired other mathematicians to work in the area by becoming the source of dessin d'enfant theory and anabelian geometry. Later, it was published in two-volumes and entitled Geometric Galois Actions (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

During this period, Grothendieck also gave his consent to publishing some of his drafts for EGA on Bertini-type theorems (EGA V, published in Ulam Quarterly in 1992–1993 and later made available on the Grothendieck Circle web site in 2004).

In the 1,000-page autobiographical manuscript, Récoltes et semailles (1986), Grothendieck describes his approach to mathematics and his experiences in the mathematical community, a community that initially accepted him in an open and welcoming manner, but which he progressively perceived to be governed by competition and status. He complains about what he saw as the "burial" of his work and betrayal by his former students and colleagues after he had left the community. The Récoltes et semailles work is now available on the internet in the French original, and an English translation is underway. A Japanese translation of the whole book in four volumes was completed by Tsuji Yuichi (1938–2002), a friend of Grothendieck from the Survivre period. The first three volumes (corresponding to Parts 0 to III of the book) were published between 1989 and 1993, while the fourth volume (Part IV) was completed and, although unpublished, copies of it as a typed manuscript are circulated. Grothendieck helped with the translation and wrote a preface for it, in which he called Tsuji his "first true collaborator". Parts of Récoltes et semailles have been translated into Spanish, as well as into a Russian translation that was published in Moscow. The French original was finally published in two volumes in January 2022, with additional texts by people of various professions who discuss certain aspects of the book.

In 1988, Grothendieck declined the Crafoord Prize with an open letter to the media. He wrote that he and other established mathematicians had no need for additional financial support and criticized what he saw as the declining ethics of the scientific community that was characterized by outright scientific theft that he believed had become commonplace and tolerated. The letter also expressed his belief that totally unforeseen events before the end of the century would lead to an unprecedented collapse of civilization. Grothendieck added however that his views were "in no way meant as a criticism of the Royal Academy's aims in the administration of its funds" and he added, "I regret the inconvenience that my refusal to accept the Crafoord prize may have caused you and the Royal Academy."

La Clef des Songes, a 315-page manuscript written in 1987, is Grothendieck's account of how his consideration of the source of dreams led him to conclude that a deity exists. As part of the notes to this manuscript, Grothendieck described the life and the work of 18 "mutants", people whom he admired as visionaries far ahead of their time and heralding a new age. The only mathematician on his list was Bernhard Riemann. Influenced by the Catholic mystic Marthe Robin who was claimed to have survived on the Holy Eucharist alone, Grothendieck almost starved himself to death in 1988. His growing preoccupation with spiritual matters was also evident in a letter entitled Lettre de la Bonne Nouvelle sent to 250 friends in January 1990. In it, he described his encounters with a deity and announced that a "New Age" would commence on 14 October 1996.

The Grothendieck Festschrift, published in 1990, was a three-volume collection of research papers to mark his sixtieth birthday in 1988.

More than 20,000 pages of Grothendieck's mathematical and other writings are held at the University of Montpellier and remain unpublished. They have been digitized for preservation and are freely available in open access through the Institut Montpelliérain Alexander Grothendieck portal.

Retirement into reclusion and death
In 1991, Grothendieck moved to a new address that he did not share with his previous contacts in the mathematical community. Very few people visited him afterward. Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup. At some point, Leila Schneps and Pierre Lochak located him, then carried on a brief correspondence. Thus they became among "the last members of the mathematical establishment to come into contact with him". After his death, it was revealed that he lived alone in a house in Lasserre, Ariège, a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees.

In January 2010, Grothendieck wrote the letter entitled "Déclaration d'intention de non-publication" to Luc Illusie, claiming that all materials published in his absence had been published without his permission. He asked that none of his work be reproduced in whole or in part and that copies of this work be removed from libraries. He characterized a website devoted to his work as "an abomination". His dictate may have been reversed in 2010.

On 13 November 2014, aged 86, Grothendieck died in the hospital of Saint-Girons, Ariège.

Citizenship
Grothendieck was born in Weimar Germany. In 1938, aged ten, he moved to France as a refugee. Records of his nationality were destroyed in the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945 and he did not apply for French citizenship after the war. Thus, he became a stateless person for at least the majority of his working life and he traveled on a Nansen passport. Part of his reluctance to hold French nationality is attributed to not wishing to serve in the French military, particularly due to the Algerian War (1954–62). He eventually applied for French citizenship in the early 1980s, after he was well past the age that exempted him from military service.

Family
Grothendieck was very close to his mother to whom he dedicated his dissertation. She died in 1957 from the tuberculosis that she contracted in camps for displaced persons.

He had five children: a son with his landlady during his time in Nancy; three children, Johanna (1959), Alexander (1961), and Mathieu (1965) with his wife Mireille Dufour; and one child with Justine Skalba, with whom he lived in a commune in the early 1970s.

Mathematical work
Grothendieck's early mathematical work was in functional analysis. Between 1949 and 1953 he worked on his doctoral thesis in this subject at Nancy, supervised by Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz. His key contributions include topological tensor products of topological vector spaces, the theory of nuclear spaces as foundational for Schwartz distributions, and the application of Lp spaces in studying linear maps between topological vector spaces. In a few years, he had become a leading authority on this area of functional analysis—to the extent that Dieudonné compares his impact in this field to that of Banach.

It is, however, in algebraic geometry and related fields where Grothendieck did his most important and influential work. From approximately 1955 he started to work on sheaf theory and homological algebra, producing the influential "Tôhoku paper" (Sur quelques points d'algèbre homologique, published in the Tohoku Mathematical Journal in 1957) where he introduced abelian categories and applied their theory to show that sheaf cohomology may be defined as certain derived functors in this context.

Homological methods and sheaf theory had already been introduced in algebraic geometry by Jean-Pierre Serre and others, after sheaves had been defined by Jean Leray. Grothendieck took them to a higher level of abstraction and turned them into a key organising principle of his theory. He shifted attention from the study of individual varieties to his relative point of view (pairs of varieties related by a morphism), allowing a broad generalization of many classical theorems. The first major application was the relative version of Serre's theorem showing that the cohomology of a coherent sheaf on a complete variety is finite-dimensional; Grothendieck's theorem shows that the higher direct images of coherent sheaves under a proper map are coherent; this reduces to Serre's theorem over a one-point space.

In 1956, he applied the same thinking to the Riemann–Roch theorem, which recently had been generalized to any dimension by Hirzebruch. The Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem was announced by Grothendieck at the initial Mathematische Arbeitstagung in Bonn, in 1957. It appeared in print in a paper written by Armand Borel with Serre. This result was his first work in algebraic geometry. Grothendieck went on to plan and execute a programme for rebuilding the foundations of algebraic geometry, which at the time were in a state of flux and under discussion in Claude Chevalley's seminar. He outlined his programme in his talk at the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians.

His foundational work on algebraic geometry is at a higher level of abstraction than all prior versions. He adapted the use of non-closed generic points, which led to the theory of schemes. Grothendieck also pioneered the systematic use of nilpotents. As 'functions' these can take only the value 0, but they carry infinitesimal information, in purely algebraic settings. His theory of schemes has become established as the best universal foundation for this field, because of its expressiveness as well as its technical depth. In that setting one can use birational geometry, techniques from number theory, Galois theory, commutative algebra, and close analogues of the methods of algebraic topology, all in an integrated way.

Grothendieck is noted for his mastery of abstract approaches to mathematics and his perfectionism in matters of formulation and presentation. Relatively little of his work after 1960 was published by the conventional route of the learned journal, circulating initially in duplicated volumes of seminar notes; his influence was to a considerable extent personal. His influence spilled over into many other branches of mathematics, for example the contemporary theory of D-modules. Although lauded as "the Einstein of mathematics", his work also provoked adverse reactions, with many mathematicians seeking out more concrete areas and problems.

EGA, SGA, FGA
The bulk of Grothendieck's published work is collected in the monumental, yet incomplete, Éléments de géométrie algébrique (EGA) and Séminaire de géométrie algébrique (SGA). The collection Fondements de la Géometrie Algébrique (FGA), which gathers together talks given in the Séminaire Bourbaki, also contains important material.

Grothendieck's work includes the invention of the étale and l-adic cohomology theories, which explain an observation made by André Weil that argued for a connection between the topological characteristics of a variety and its diophantine (number theoretic) properties. For example, the number of solutions of an equation over a finite field reflects the topological nature of its solutions over the complex numbers. Weil had realized that to prove such a connection, one needed a new cohomology theory, but neither he nor any other expert saw how to accomplish this until such a theory was expressed by Grothendieck.

This program culminated in the proofs of the Weil conjectures, the last of which was settled by Grothendieck's student Pierre Deligne in the early 1970s after Grothendieck had largely withdrawn from mathematics.

Major mathematical contributions
In Grothendieck's retrospective Récoltes et Semailles, he identified twelve of his contributions that he believed qualified as "great ideas". In chronological order, they are:
 * 1) Topological tensor products and nuclear spaces
 * 2) "Continuous" and "discrete" duality (derived categories, "six operations")
 * 3) Yoga of the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem K-theory relation with intersection theory
 * 4) Schemes
 * 5) Topoi
 * 6) Étale cohomology and l-adic cohomology
 * 7) Motives and the motivic Galois group (Grothendieck ⊗-categories)
 * 8) Crystals and crystalline cohomology, yoga of "de Rham coefficients", "Hodge coefficients"...
 * 9) "Topological algebra": ∞-stacks, derivators; cohomological formalism of topoi as inspiration for a new homotopical algebra
 * 10) Tame topology
 * 11) Yoga of anabelian algebraic geometry, Galois–Teichmüller theory
 * 12) "Schematic" or "arithmetic" point of view for regular polyhedra and regular configurations of all kinds

Here the term yoga denotes a kind of "meta-theory" that may be used heuristically; Michel Raynaud writes the other terms "Ariadne's thread" and "philosophy" as effective equivalents.

Grothendieck wrote that, of these themes, the largest in scope was topoi, as they synthesized algebraic geometry, topology, and arithmetic. The theme that had been most extensively developed was schemes, which were the framework "par excellence" for eight of the other themes (all but 1, 5, and 12). Grothendieck wrote that the first and last themes, topological tensor products and regular configurations, were of more modest size than the others. Topological tensor products had played the role of a tool rather than of a source of inspiration for further developments; but he expected that regular configurations could not be exhausted within the lifetime of a mathematician who devoted oneself to it. He believed that the deepest themes were motives, anabelian geometry, and Galois–Teichmüller theory.

Influence
Grothendieck is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. In an obituary David Mumford and John Tate wrote: "Although mathematics became more and more abstract and general throughout the 20th century, it was Alexander Grothendieck who was the greatest master of this trend. His unique skill was to eliminate all unnecessary hypotheses and burrow into an area so deeply that its inner patterns on the most abstract level revealed themselves–and then, like a magician, show how the solution of old problems fell out in straightforward ways now that their real nature had been revealed."

By the 1970s, Grothendieck's work was seen as influential, not only in algebraic geometry and the allied fields of sheaf theory and homological algebra, but influenced logic, in the field of categorical logic.

Geometry
Grothendieck approached algebraic geometry by clarifying the foundations of the field, and by developing mathematical tools intended to prove a number of notable conjectures. Algebraic geometry has traditionally meant the understanding of geometric objects, such as algebraic curves and surfaces, through the study of the algebraic equations for those objects. Properties of algebraic equations are in turn studied using the techniques of ring theory. In this approach, the properties of a geometric object are related to the properties of an associated ring. The space (e.g., real, complex, or projective) in which the object is defined, is extrinsic to the object, while the ring is intrinsic.

Grothendieck laid a new foundation for algebraic geometry by making intrinsic spaces ("spectra") and associated rings the primary objects of study. To that end, he developed the theory of schemes that informally can be thought of as topological spaces on which a commutative ring is associated to every open subset of the space. Schemes have become the basic objects of study for practitioners of modern algebraic geometry. Their use as a foundation allowed geometry to absorb technical advances from other fields.

His generalization of the classical Riemann–Roch theorem related topological properties of complex algebraic curves to their algebraic structure and now bears his name, being called "the Grothendieck–Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem". The tools he developed to prove this theorem started the study of algebraic and topological K-theory, which explores the topological properties of objects by associating them with rings. After direct contact with Grothendieck's ideas at the Bonn Arbeitstagung, topological K-theory was founded by Michael Atiyah and Friedrich Hirzebruch.

Cohomology theories
Grothendieck's construction of new cohomology theories, which use algebraic techniques to study topological objects, has influenced the development of algebraic number theory, algebraic topology, and representation theory. As part of this project, his creation of topos theory, a category-theoretic generalization of point-set topology, has influenced the fields of set theory and mathematical logic.

The Weil conjectures were formulated in the later 1940s as a set of mathematical problems in arithmetic geometry. They describe properties of analytic invariants, called local zeta functions, of the number of points on an algebraic curve or variety of higher dimension. Grothendieck's discovery of the ℓ-adic étale cohomology, the first example of a Weil cohomology theory, opened the way for a proof of the Weil conjectures, ultimately completed in the 1970s by his student Pierre Deligne. Grothendieck's large-scale approach has been called a "visionary program". The ℓ-adic cohomology then became a fundamental tool for number theorists, with applications to the Langlands program.

Grothendieck's conjectural theory of motives was intended to be the "ℓ-adic" theory but without the choice of "ℓ", a prime number. It did not provide the intended route to the Weil conjectures, but has been behind modern developments in algebraic K-theory, motivic homotopy theory, and motivic integration. This theory, Daniel Quillen's work, and Grothendieck's theory of Chern classes, are considered the background to the theory of algebraic cobordism, another algebraic analogue of topological ideas.

Category theory
Grothendieck's emphasis on the role of universal properties across varied mathematical structures brought category theory into the mainstream as an organizing principle for mathematics in general. Among its uses, category theory creates a common language for describing similar structures and techniques seen in many different mathematical systems. His notion of abelian category is now the basic object of study in homological algebra. The emergence of a separate mathematical discipline of category theory has been attributed to Grothendieck's influence, although unintentional.

In popular culture
The novel Colonel Lágrimas (Colonel Tears in English, available by Restless Books) by Puerto Rican–Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca is a semibiographic novel about Grothendieck.

The band Stone Hill All Stars have a song named after Alexander Grothendieck.

In the novel When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut dedicates one chapter to the story of Grothendieck.

In the novel The Passenger and its sequel Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, one of the main characters is a student of Grothendieck.

Sources and further reading

 * English translation of.
 * English translation:
 * First part of planned four-volume biography.
 * English version.
 * A review of the German edition
 * Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
 * First part of planned four-volume biography.
 * English version.
 * A review of the German edition
 * Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
 * First part of planned four-volume biography.
 * English version.
 * A review of the German edition
 * Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
 * First part of planned four-volume biography.
 * English version.
 * A review of the German edition
 * Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
 * A review of the German edition
 * Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
 * First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Alexander Grothendieck


text:
Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a global peer-led mutual aid fellowship begun in the United States dedicated to abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism through its spiritually inclined twelve-step program. AA's twelve traditions, besides stressing anonymity, establish it as free to all, non-professional, unaffiliated, and non-denominational as well as apolitical with a public relations policy of attraction rather than promotion. In 2020, AA estimated a worldwide membership of over two million, with 75% of those in the US and Canada.

AA dates its founding to 1935 with Bill Wilson's (Bill W.) and Bob Smith's (Dr. Bob) first commiseration alcoholic-to-alcoholic. Meeting through AA's immediate precursor the Christian revivalist Oxford Group, they and other alcoholics there helped each other until forming in 1937 what became AA. At first only white and male, though neither intentionally or for long, in 1939 they published Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. Known as "the Big Book", it is the origin of AA's name.

The Big Book debuted AA's suggested—but not required—twelve steps as a continuing sobriety program of prayer, reflection, admission, better conduct and atonement, all to produce a "spiritual awakening" followed by taking others—usually sponsees—through the steps. Integral to the steps is divining and following the will of an undefined God—"as we understood Him" or a "higher power”, but differing practices and beliefs, or any lack of, as is the case with  atheists, are accommodated.

To keep sobriety as its primary purpose, and to remain what Wilson called a "benign anarchy", AA instituted its twelve traditions in 1950 to ensure membership to all wishing to stop drinking with no dues or fees required. Members are advised not to use AA for material gain or to increase public prestige. All memberships are to be kept anonymous, especially in public media, but for broken anonymity, no consequences are prescribed. The traditions have AA steering clear of hierarchies, dogma, public controversies, while other outside entanglements or acquisition of property are to be avoided. To stay independent and self-supporting, the traditions would have AA groups accepting outside contributions from no one.

A 2020 scientific review found with all demographics that clinical treatments increasing AA participation via AA twelve step facilitation (AA/TSF) had sustained remission rates 20-60% above well-established treatments. Additionally, 4 of the 5 economic studies in the review found that AA/TSF lowered healthcare costs considerably. Regarding the disease model of alcoholism, despite scattered allusions in AA literature an otherwise receptive AA has not endorsed it. Its association with AA, as well as a good deal of its broader acceptance, stems from many members propagating it.

With AA's permission other recovery fellowships such as Narcotics Anonymous and Al-Anon have adopted and adapted the twelve steps and traditions.

History

AA was founded on 10 June 1935 but AA's origins are said to have begun when the renowned psychotherapist Carl Jung inspired Rowland H., an otherwise hopeless drunk, to seek a spiritual solution by sending him to the Oxford Group— a non-denominational, altruistic Christian movement modeled after first-century Christianity. Ebby Thacher got sober in that same Oxford Group and reached out to help his drinking buddy Bill Wilson. Thacher approached Wilson saying that he had "got religion", was sober, and that Wilson could do the same if he set aside objections and instead formed a personal idea of God, "another power" or "higher power". Feeling a "kinship of common suffering", Wilson attended his first group gathering, although he was drunk. Within days, Wilson admitted himself to the Charles B. Towns Hospital after drinking four beers on the way—the last alcohol he ever drank. Under the care of Dr. William Duncan Silkworth (an early benefactor of AA), Wilson's detox included the deliriant belladonna. At the hospital, a despairing Wilson experienced a bright flash of light, which he felt to be God revealing himself. This "spiritual awakening" may have been brought on by belladonna hallucinations and delirium tremens. Following his hospital discharge, Wilson joined the Oxford Group and tried to recruit other alcoholics to the group. These early efforts to help others kept him sober, but were ineffective in getting anyone else to join the group and get sober. Dr. Silkworth suggested that Wilson place less stress on religion (as required by The Oxford Group) and more on the science of treating alcoholism. Wilson's first success came during a business trip to Akron, Ohio, where he was introduced to Robert Smith, a surgeon and Oxford Group member who was unable to stay sober. After thirty days of working with Wilson, Smith drank his last drink on 10 June 1935, the date marked by AA for its anniversaries.

The first female member, Florence Rankin, joined AA in March 1937, and the first non-Protestant member, a Roman Catholic, joined in 1939. The first black AA group commenced in 1945 in Washington D.C., and was founded by Jim S., an African-American physician from Virginia.

While writing the Big Book in the several years after 1935, Wilson developed the Twelve Steps, which were influenced by the Oxford Group's 6 steps and various readings, including William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The Big Book, the Twelve Steps, and the Twelve Traditions
To share their method, Wilson and other members wrote the book initially titled Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, from which AA drew its name. Informally known as "The Big Book" (with its first 164 pages virtually unchanged since the 1939 edition), it suggests a twelve-step program in which members admit that they are powerless over alcohol and need help from a "higher power". They seek guidance and strength through prayer and meditation from God or a higher power of their own understanding; take a moral inventory with care to include resentments; list and become ready to remove character defects; list and make amends to those harmed; continue to take a moral inventory, pray, meditate, and try to help other alcoholics recover. The second half of the book, "Personal Stories" (subject to additions, removal, and retitling in subsequent editions), is made of AA members' redemptive autobiographical sketches.

In 1941, interviews on American radio and favorable articles in US magazines, including a piece by Jack Alexander in The Saturday Evening Post, led to increased book sales and membership. By 1946, as the growing fellowship quarreled over structure, purpose, authority, finances and publicity, Wilson began to form and promote what became known as AA's "Twelve Traditions", which are guidelines for an altruistic, unaffiliated, non-coercive, and non-hierarchical structure that limited AA's purpose to only helping alcoholics on a non-professional level while shunning publicity. Eventually, he gained formal adoption and inclusion of the Twelve Traditions in all future editions of the Big Book. At the 1955 conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Wilson relinquished stewardship of AA to the General Service Conference, as AA had grown to millions of members internationally.

In May 2017, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc. filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York seeking the return of the original manuscript of the Big Book from its then-owner. AAWS claimed that the manuscript had been given to them as a gift in 1979. This action was criticized by many members of Alcoholics Anonymous since they didn't want their parent organization engaged in lawsuits. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc. asked the court to voluntarily discontinue the action in November 2017.

Organization and finances

AA says it is "not organized in the formal or political sense", and Wilson, borrowing the phrase from anarchy theorist Peter Kropotkin, called it a "benign anarchy". In Ireland, Shane Butler said that AA "looks like it couldn't survive as there's no leadership or top-level telling local cumanns what to do, but it has worked and proved itself extremely robust". Butler explained that "AA's 'inverted pyramid' style of governance has helped it to avoid many of the pitfalls that political and religious institutions have encountered since it was established here in 1946."

In 2018, AA had 2,087,840 members and 120,300 AA groups worldwide. The Twelve Traditions informally guide how individual AA groups function, and the Twelve Concepts for World Service guide how the organization is structured globally.

A member who accepts a service position or an organizing role is a "trusted servant" with terms rotating and limited, typically lasting three months to two years and determined by group vote and the nature of the position. Each group is a self-governing entity, with AA World Services acting only in an advisory capacity. AA is served entirely by alcoholics, except for seven "nonalcoholic friends of the fellowship" of the 21-member AA Board of Trustees.

AA groups are self-supporting, relying on voluntary contributions from members to cover expenses. The AA General Service Office (GSO) limits contributions to US$5,000 a year. "Below" the group level, AA may hire outside professionals for services that require specialized expertise or full-time responsibilities.

Like individual groups, the GSO is self-supporting. AA receives proceeds from books and literature that constitute more than 50% of the income for its GSO. In keeping with AA's Seventh Tradition, the Central Office is fully self-supporting through the sale of literature and related products, and the voluntary contributions of AA members and groups. It does not accept donations from people or organizations outside of AA.

In keeping with AA's Eighth Tradition, the Central Office employs special workers who are compensated financially for their services, but their services do not include working with alcoholics in need (the "12th Step"). (AA's 12th step is: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.") All 12th Step calls that come to the Central Office are handed to sober AA members who have volunteered to handle these calls. It also maintains service centers, which coordinate activities such as printing literature, responding to public inquiries, and organizing conferences. Other International General Service Offices (Australia, Costa Rica, Russia, etc.) are independent of AA World Services in New York.

Program
AA's program extends beyond abstaining from alcohol. Its goal is to effect enough change in the alcoholic's thinking "to bring about recovery from alcoholism" through "an entire psychic change," or spiritual awakening. A spiritual awakening is meant to be achieved by taking the Twelve Steps, and sobriety is furthered by volunteering for AA and regular AA meeting attendance or contact with AA members. Members are encouraged to find an experienced fellow alcoholic, called a sponsor, to help them understand and follow the AA program. The sponsor should preferably have experienced all twelve of the steps, be the same sex as the sponsored person, and refrain from imposing personal views on the sponsored person. Following the helper therapy principle, sponsors in AA may benefit from their relationship with their charges, as "helping behaviors" correlate with increased abstinence and lower probabilities of binge drinking.

AA shares the view that acceptance of one's inherent limitations is critical to finding one's proper place among other humans and God. Such ideas are described as "Counter-Enlightenment" because they are contrary to the Enlightenment's ideal that humans have the capacity to make their lives and societies a heaven on Earth using their own power and reason. After evaluating AA's literature and observing AA meetings for sixteen months, sociologists David R. Rudy and Arthur L. Greil found that for an AA member to remain sober, a high level of commitment is necessary. This commitment is facilitated by a change in the member's worldview. They argue that to help members stay sober, AA must provide an all-encompassing worldview while creating and sustaining an atmosphere of transcendence in the organization. To be all-encompassing, AA's ideology emphasizes tolerance rather than a narrow religious worldview that may make the organization unpalatable to potential members and thereby limit its effectiveness. AA's emphasis on the spiritual nature of its program, however, is necessary to institutionalize a feeling of transcendence. A tension results from the risk that the necessity of transcendence, if taken too literally, would compromise AA's efforts to maintain a broad appeal. As this tension is an integral part of AA, Rudy and Greil argue that AA is best described as a quasi-religious organization.

Meetings
AA meetings are gatherings where recovery from alcoholism is discussed. One perspective sees them as "quasi-ritualized therapeutic sessions run by and for, alcoholics". There are a variety of meeting types some of which are listed below. At some point during the meeting a basket is passed around for voluntary donations. AA's 7th tradition requires that groups be self-supporting, "declining outside contributions". Weekly meetings are listed in local AA directories in print, online and in apps.

Open vs Closed meetings
"Open" meetings welcome anyone—nonalcoholics can attend as observers. Meetings listed as "closed" welcome those with a self-professed "desire to stop drinking," which cannot be challenged by another member on any grounds.

Speaker meetings
At speaker meetings one or more members come to tell their stories.

Big Book meetings
At Big Book meetings, attendees read from the AA Big Book and discuss it.

Discussion meetings
There are also meetings with or without a topic that allow participants to speak up or "share".

Online vs. offline meetings
Online meetings are digital meetings held on platforms such as Zoom. Offline meetings, also called "face to face", "brick and mortar", or "in-person" meetings, are held in a shared physical real-world location. Some meetings are hybrid meetings, where people can meet in a specified physical location, but people can also join the meeting virtually.

Specialized meetings
AA meetings do not exclude other alcoholics, though some meetings cater to specific demographics such as gender, profession, age, sexual orientation, or culture. Meetings in the United States are held in a variety of languages including Armenian, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.

Meeting formats
While AA has pamphlets that suggest meeting formats, groups have the autonomy to hold and conduct meetings as they wish "except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole". Different cultures affect ritual aspects of meetings, but around the world "many particularities of the AA meeting format can be observed at almost any AA gathering".

Confidentiality
In the Fifth Step, AA members typically reveal their own past misconduct to their sponsors. US courts have not extended the status of privileged communication, such as physician-patient privilege or clergy–penitent privilege, to communications between an AA member and their sponsor.

Spirituality
Some have criticized 12-step programs as "a cult that relies on God as the mechanism of action" and as "overly theistic and outdated". Others have cited the necessity of a "higher power" in formal AA as creating dependence on outside factors rather than internal efficacy. A 2010 study found increased attendance at AA meetings was associated with increased spirituality and decreased frequency and intensity of alcohol use. Since the mid-1970s, several 'agnostic' or 'no-prayer' AA groups have begun across the US, Canada, and other parts of the world, which hold meetings that adhere to a tradition allowing alcoholics to freely express their doubts or disbelief that spirituality will help their recovery, and these meetings forgo the use of opening or closing prayers.

Disease concept of alcoholism
More informally than not, AA's membership has helped popularize the disease concept of alcoholism which had appeared in the eighteenth century. Though AA usually avoids the term disease, 1973 conference-approved literature said "we had the disease of alcoholism." Regardless of official positions, since AA's inception, most members have believed alcoholism to be a disease.

AA's Big Book calls alcoholism "an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer." Ernest Kurtz says this is "The closest the book Alcoholics Anonymous comes to a definition of alcoholism." Somewhat divergently in his introduction to The Big Book, non-member and early benefactor William Silkworth said those unable to moderate their drinking suffer from an allergy. In presenting the doctor's postulate, AA said "The doctor's theory that we have an allergy to alcohol interests us. As laymen, our opinion as to its soundness may, of course, mean little. But as ex-problem drinkers, we can say that his explanation makes good sense. It explains many things for which we cannot otherwise account." AA later acknowledged that "alcoholism is not a true allergy, the experts now inform us." Wilson explained in 1960 why AA had refrained from using the term disease: "We AAs have never called alcoholism a disease because, technically speaking, it is not a disease entity. For example, there is no such thing as heart disease. Instead, there are many separate heart ailments or combinations of them. It is something like that with alcoholism. Therefore, we did not wish to get in wrong with the medical profession by pronouncing alcoholism a disease entity. Hence, we have always called it an illness or a malady—a far safer term for us to use."

Since then medical and scientific communities have defined alcoholism as an "addictive disease" (aka Alcohol Use Disorder, Severe, Moderate, or Mild). The ten criteria are: alcoholism is a Primary Illness not caused by other illnesses nor by personality or character defects; second, an addiction gene is part of its etiology; third, alcoholism has predictable symptoms; fourth, it is progressive, becoming more severe even after long periods of abstinence; fifth, it is chronic and incurable; sixth, alcoholic drinking or other drug use persists in spite of negative consequences and efforts to quit; seventh, brain chemistry and neural functions change so alcohol is perceived as necessary for survival; eighth, it produces physical dependence and life-threatening withdrawal; ninth, it is a terminal illness; tenth, alcoholism can be treated and can be kept in remission.

Canadian and United States demographics
AA's New York General Service Office regularly surveys AA members in North America. Its 2014 survey of over 6,000 members in Canada and the United States concluded that, in North America, AA members who responded to the survey were 62% male and 38% female. The survey found that 89% of AA members were white.

Average member sobriety is slightly under 10 years with 36% sober more than ten years, 13% sober from five to ten years, 24% sober from one to five years, and 27% sober less than one year. Before coming to AA, 63% of members received some type of treatment or counseling, such as medical, psychological, or spiritual. After coming to AA, 59% received outside treatment or counseling. Of those members, 84% said that outside help played an important part in their recovery.

The same survey showed that AA received 32% of its membership from other members, another 32% from treatment facilities, 30% were self-motivated to attend AA, 12% of its membership from court-ordered attendance, and only 1% of AA members decided to join based on information obtained from the Internet. People taking the survey were allowed to select multiple answers for what motivated them to join AA.

Hospitals
Many AA meetings take place in treatment facilities. Carrying the message of AA into hospitals was how the co-founders of AA first remained sober. They discovered great value in working with alcoholics who are still suffering, and that even if the alcoholic they were working with did not stay sober, they did. Bill Wilson wrote, "Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics". Bill Wilson visited Towns Hospital in New York City in an attempt to help the alcoholics who were patients there in 1934. At St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Smith worked with still more alcoholics. In 1939, a New York mental institution, Rockland State Hospital, was one of the first institutions to allow AA hospital groups. Service to corrections and treatment facilities used to be combined until the General Service Conference, in 1977, voted to dissolve its Institutions Committee and form two separate committees, one for treatment facilities, and one for correctional facilities.

Prisons
In the United States and Canada, AA meetings are held in hundreds of correctional facilities. The AA General Service Office has published a workbook with detailed recommendations for methods of approaching correctional-facility officials with the intent of developing an in-prison AA program. In addition, AA publishes a variety of pamphlets specifically for the incarcerated alcoholic. Additionally, the AA General Service Office provides a pamphlet with guidelines for members working with incarcerated alcoholics.

United States court rulings
United States courts have ruled that inmates, parolees, and probationers cannot be ordered to attend AA. Though AA itself was not deemed a religion, it was ruled that it contained enough religious components (variously described in Griffin v. Coughlin below as, inter alia, "religion", "religious activity", "religious exercise") to make coerced attendance at AA meetings a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution. In 2007, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals stated that a parolee who was ordered to attend AA had standing to sue his parole office.

United States treatment industry
In 1939, High Watch Recovery Center in Kent, Connecticut, was founded by Bill Wilson and Marty Mann. Sister Francis who owned the farm tried to gift the spiritual retreat for alcoholics to Alcoholics Anonymous, however citing the sixth tradition Bill W. turned down the gift but agreed to have a separate non-profit board run the facility composed of AA members. Bill Wilson and Marty Mann served on the High Watch board of directors for many years. High Watch was the first and therefore the oldest 12-step-based treatment center in the world still operating today.

In 1949, the Hazelden treatment center was founded and staffed by AA members, and since then many alcoholic rehabilitation clinics have incorporated AA's precepts into their treatment programs. 32% of AA's membership was introduced to it through a treatment facility.

Effectiveness
There are several ways one can determine whether AA works and numerous ways of measuring if AA is successful, such as looking at abstinence, reduced drinking intensity, reduced alcohol-related consequences, alcohol addiction severity, and healthcare cost.

The effectiveness of AA (compared to other methods and treatments) has been challenged throughout the years, but recent high quality clinical meta-studies using quasi-experiment studies show that AA costs less than other treatments and results in increased abstinence. In longitudinal studies, AA appears to be about as effective as other abstinence-based support groups.

Because of the anonymous and voluntary nature of AA meetings, it has been difficult to perform random trials with them. Environmental and quasi-experiment studies suggest that AA can help alcoholics make positive changes.

In the past, some critics have criticized 12-step programs as pseudoscientific and "a cult that relies on God as the mechanism of action". Until recently, ethical and operational issues had prevented robust randomized controlled trials from being conducted comparing 12-step programs directly to other approaches. More recent studies employing randomized and blinded trials have shown 12-step programs provide similar benefit compared to motivational enhancement therapy (MET) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and were more effective in producing continuous abstinence and remission compared to these approaches.

Cochrane 2020 review
A 2020 Cochrane review concluded that "compared to other well-established treatments, clinical linkage using well-articulated Twelve-Step Facilitation (TSF) manualized interventions intended to increase Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) participation" are more effective than other established treatments, such as motivational enhancement therapy (MET) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), as measured by abstinence rates. Manualized TSF probably achieves additional desirable outcomes—such as fewer drinks per drinking day and less severe alcohol-related problems—at equivalent rates as other treatments, although evidence for such a conclusion comes from low to moderate certainty evidence "so should be regarded with caution".

In the same year, Nick Heather, an addiction researcher, expressed concerns about the review. He argued that as it did not measure outcomes such as quality of life or reduction in alcohol dependence it could not replace the findings of an earlier review, which were largely inconclusive. He also said that only measuring abstinence as an outcome may not reflect the reality of recovery for many people, and noted a possible sample bias in the review: much of the data considered high-quality included participants receiving individualized treatment. Heather stated this biased the sample towards individuals who were more socially stable and likely to receive such treatment, and stated that these conditions would not be replicated in "typical AA groups".

The authors of the review responded to this critique, reiterating the findings of their review, that AA "proved at least as effective and in some cases more effective than comparison conditions on all reported outcomes and was also substantially more cost-effective". They stated that the lack of quality-of-life measures was due to the studies they reviewed lacking such measures and was not a choice on their part, but clarified that their study did take into account more outcomes than just abstinence. In response to the concern expressed by Heather that "those more strongly committed to total abstinence after receiving AA/TSF were likely to experience more protracted 'slips' if they did for any reason drink", the Cochrane review authors stated that subjects who did not achieve abstinence did not have worse drinking outcomes overall. Finally, they stated that their study was clearly an advance compared to the 2006 review as it considered data from "more than triple the number of research participants and trials".

Older studies
A 2006 study by Rudolf H. Moos and Bernice S. Moos saw a 67% success rate 16 years later for the 24.9% of alcoholics who ended up, on their own, undergoing a lot of AA treatment. The study's results may be skewed by self-selection bias.

Project MATCH was a 1990s 8-year, multi-site, $27-million investigation that studied which types of alcoholics respond best to which forms of treatment.

Brandsma 1980 showed that Alcoholics Anonymous is more effective than no treatment whatsoever.

Membership retention
In 2001–2002, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) conducted the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcoholism and Related Conditions (NESARC). Similarly structured to the NLAES, the survey conducted in-person interviews with 43,093 individuals. Respondents were asked if they had ever attended a twelve-step meeting for an alcohol problem in their lifetime (the question was not AA-specific). 1441 (3.4%) of respondents answered the question affirmatively. Answers were further broken down into three categories: disengaged, those who started attending at some point in the past but had ceased attending at some point in the past year (988); continued engagement, those who started attending at some point in the past and continued to attend during the past year (348); and newcomers, those who started attending during the past year (105). In their discussion of the findings, Kaskautas et al. (2008) state that to study disengagement, only the disengaged and continued engagement should be utilized (pg. 270).

The Sober Truth
American psychiatrist Lance Dodes, in The Sober Truth, says that research indicates that only five to eight percent of the people who go to one or more AA meetings achieve sobriety.

The 5–8% figure put forward by Dodes is controversial; other doctors say that the book uses "three separate, questionable, calculations that arrive at the 5–8% figure." Addiction specialists state that the book's conclusion that "[12-step] approaches are almost completely ineffective and even harmful in treating substance use disorders" is wrong. One review by Dr. Jeffrey Roth Khantzian called Dodes' reasoning against AA success a "pseudostatistical polemic"; he further noted that two of Dodes' colleagues, Dr. John F Kelly and Dr. Gene Beresin, wrote in their own review for NPR Boston's website, that the book was "so far off the track of scientific research that he doesn’t realize that for the past several years, the addiction research field has moved beyond asking whether AA and 12-step treatment works, to investigating how and why they work.”

Dodes has not, as of March 2020, read the 2020 Cochrane review showing AA efficacy, but opposes the idea that a social network is needed to overcome substance abuse.

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
In a 2015 article for The Atlantic, Gabrielle Glaser criticized the dominance of AA in the treatment of addiction in the United States. Her article uses Lance Dodes's figures and a 2006 Cochrane report to state AA had a low success rate, but those figures were subsequently criticized by experts as outdated. The Glaser article incorrectly conflates the efficacy of treatment centers with the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous. The Glaser article says that "nothing about the 12-step approach draws on modern science", but a large amount of scientific research has been done with AA, showing that AA increases abstinence rates. The Glaser article criticizes 12-step programs for being "faith-based", but 12-step programs allow for a very wide diversity of spiritual beliefs, and there are a growing number of secular 12-step meetings.

Sexual advances ("thirteenth-stepping")
"Thirteenth-stepping" is a pejorative term for AA members approaching new members for dates. In 2003, a study in the Journal of Addiction Nursing sampled 55 women in AA and found that 35% of these women had experienced a "pass" and 29% had felt seduced at least once in AA settings. This has also happened with new male members who received guidance from older female AA members pursuing sexual company. The authors suggest that both men and women must be prepared for this behavior or find male or female-only groups. As of 2010, women-only meetings are a very prevalent part of AA culture, and AA has become more welcoming for women. AA's pamphlet on sponsorship suggests that men be sponsored by men and women be sponsored by women. AA also has a safety flier which states that "Unwanted sexual advances and predatory behaviors are in conflict with carrying the A.A. message of recovery."

The family of Karla Mendez, who was murdered in 2011 by a man she met at an AA meeting, filed a civil lawsuit in 2012 against AA asserting AA had a "reckless disregard for, and deliberate indifference…to the safety and security of victims attending AA meetings who are repeatedly preyed upon at those meetings by financial, violent, and sexual predators...". The lawsuit against AA was dismissed in 2016.

Criticism of culture
Stanton Peele argued that some AA groups apply the disease model to all problem drinkers, whether or not they are "full-blown" alcoholics. Along with Nancy Shute, Peele has advocated that besides AA, other options should be readily available to those problem drinkers who can manage their drinking with the right treatment. The Big Book says "moderate drinkers" and "a certain type of hard drinker" can stop or moderate their drinking. The Big Book suggests no program for these drinkers, but instead seeks to help drinkers without "power of choice in drink."

In 1983, a review stated that the AA program's focus on admission of having a problem increases deviant stigma and strips members of their previous cultural identity, replacing it with the deviant identity. A 1985 study based on observations of AA meetings warned of detrimental iatrogenic effects of the twelve-step philosophy and concluded that AA uses many methods that are also used by cults. A later review disagreed, stating that AA's program bore little resemblance to religious cult practices. In 2014, Vaillant published a paper making the case that Alcoholics Anonymous is not a cult.

Literature
Alcoholics Anonymous publishes several books, reports, pamphlets, and other media, including a periodical known as the AA Grapevine. Two books are used primarily: Alcoholics Anonymous (the "Big Book") and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the latter explaining AA's fundamental principles in depth. The full text of each of these two books is available on the AA website at no charge.
 * 575 pages.
 * 192 pages.

Film and television

 * Bloody Mary - A 2005 episode of the animated TV series South Park where Randy Marsh must attend AA meetings after getting a DUI.
 * My Name Is Bill W. – dramatized biography of co-founder Bill Wilson.
 * When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story – a 2010 film about the wife of founder Bill Wilson, and the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.
 * Bill W. – a 2011 biographical documentary film that tells the story of Bill Wilson using interviews, recreations, and rare archival material.
 * A Walk Among the Tombstones (2015), a mystery/suspense film based on Lawrence Block's books featuring Matthew Scudder, a recovering alcoholic detective whose AA membership is a central element of the plot.
 * When a Man Loves a Woman – a school counselor attends AA meetings in a residential treatment facility.
 * Clean and Sober – an addict (alcohol, cocaine) visits an AA meeting to get a sponsor.
 * Days of Wine and Roses – a 1962 film about a married couple struggling with alcoholism. Jack Lemmon's character attends an AA meeting in the film.
 * Drunks – a 1995 film starring Richard Lewis as an alcoholic who leaves an AA meeting and relapses. The film cuts back and forth between his eventual relapse and the other meeting attendees.
 * Come Back, Little Sheba – A 1952 film based on a play of the same title about a loveless marriage where the husband played by Burt Lancaster is an alcoholic who gets help from two members of the local AA chapter. A 1977 TV drama was also based on the play.
 * I'll Cry Tomorrow – A 1955 film about singer Lillian Roth played by Susan Hayward who goes to AA to help her stop drinking. The film was based on Roth's autobiography of the same name detailing her alcoholism and sobriety through AA.
 * You Kill Me – a 2007 crime-comedy film starring Ben Kingsley as a mob hit man with a drinking problem who is forced to accept a job at a mortuary and go to AA meetings.
 * Smashed – a 2012 drama film starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead. An elementary school teacher's drinking begins to interfere with her job, so she attempts to get sober in AA.
 * Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot – a 2018 biography/comedy/drama by Gus Van Sant, based on the life of cartoonist John Callahan.
 * In CBS' Elementary, Jonny Lee Miller plays an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes who is a recovering drug addict. Several episodes are centered around AA meetings and the process of recovery.
 * Doctor Sleep – Released in 2019, Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, directed by Mike Flanagan and based on Stephen King's work. Ewan McGregor stars as a man who, after overcoming his own demons through AA, helps others do the same.

title: Alcoholics Anonymous


text:
Talk:Augustine of Hippo

'Confessions' Quote
The formatting of the Confessions quote is a little messed up due to the placement it's adjacent images ("Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica", "The earliest known portrait of Saint Augustine", and "The Conversion of St. Augustine"). Monsoon Bowline (talk) 23:10, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Neoplatonism is not an Hellenistic Philosophy
Hello! I’d like to point out that while I think it’s absolutely correct to attribute to the young Augustine an adherence to Neoplatonism, it is not correct to identify the latter as an “Hellenistic Philosophy” both as a chronological remark (it starts in III century AD, well after the conventional date that marks end of Hellenistic Age, 32 BC), and as a remark about philosophical content (actually, as the Neoplatonism entry correctly shows, it is a philosophy that comes out in contrast of Hellenistic doctrines such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism). 93.44.82.73 (talk) 21:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Misleading statement about a historically falsely-attributed quote under "Jews"
Hello! I have a very minor criticism about the "Jews" subsection (3.3.3). Currently, the last sentence reads: The sentiment sometimes attributed to Augustine that Christians should let the Jews "survive but not thrive" (it is repeated by author James Carroll in his book Constantine's Sword, for example) is apocryphal and is not found in any of his writings." Firstly, the citation is incorrect, as it refers to page 218 as well, not just 219. Secondly, it is true that the "survive but not thrive" idea does not directly occur in Augustine's writings, but James Carroll does not attribute this to Augustine either. He prefaces the "survive but not thrive" quote by calling it part of a "trail of pseudo-Augustinian anti-Jewish writings." (Constantine's Sword 218).

I think the reference to Carroll is simply uneccessary here. The TIME article cited (flawed as it is for mincing Carroll's words but that's a different discussion) does not really add to the page other than provide a recent example of supposed false attribution. I think the article would be better served by a different source, such as Fredriksen. "Paul." (1999). In Fitzgerald, Allan D (ed.). Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Wm B Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-3843-8.

Anyway, this is my first Wikipedia thread, so if this is the wrong way to suggest this change, I do apologize, and I would also love to hear feedback on my comments! CaramichaelD (talk) 03:02, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Research skills
Welcome to Gboard clipboard, any text that you copy will be saved here. 102.164.0.138 (talk) 11:18, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Augustine of Hippo