Sober Cups of Friendship

“Use a little wine,” the apostle says to Timothy, who drank water, “for your stomach’s sake.” He is prescribing it quite properly, as a strengthening tonic suited to a sickly body weakened by watery humors; and he specifies “a little,” so that the remedy should not, by its sheer quantity, quietly create the need for a second cure. [a]

The natural drink for a thirsty person, then — the moderate one, the necessary one — is water. This was the plain drink of sobriety that the Lord supplied to the ancient Hebrews when it flowed from the struck rock. It was absolutely necessary that they be temperate while they wandered.

Afterward the sacred vine produced the prophetic cluster. That was a sign to them, when they were being trained out of their wandering toward their rest: it stood for the great cluster, the Word, crushed for us. For the blood of the grape — that is, the Word — wanted to be mixed with water, as his blood is mingled with salvation.

And the blood of the Lord is twofold. There is the blood of his flesh, by which we are redeemed from decay; and there is the spiritual blood, the blood we are anointed with. To drink the blood of Jesus is to share in the Lord’s immortality — the Spirit being the active power of the Word, as blood is of flesh.

So, as wine is blended with water, the Spirit is blended with a human being. The one blend, of wine and water, feeds us toward faith; the other, the Spirit, carries us to immortality.

And the mixture of the two — of the drink and of the Word — is called thanksgiving, a grace renowned and glorious; and those who share in it by faith are made holy in body and soul alike. For man, that divine mixture, the Father’s will has compounded in a mystery out of Spirit and Word. In truth, the spirit is joined to the soul it breathes into, and the flesh — the reason the Word became flesh — is joined to the Word.

I admire, then, those who have taken up a severe way of life, who are fond of water, the medicine of self-control, and who run as far from wine as they can, avoiding it the way they would avoid the danger of fire.

It is right, therefore, that boys and girls keep as far as possible from this medicine. It is not right to pour the hottest of all liquids, wine, into the burning season of life, adding, as it were, fire to fire. Out of it come wild impulses and burning lusts and fiery habits; young men, inflamed from the inside, turn readily to vicious indulgence, so that the damage begins to show in their bodies and the organs of lust ripen sooner than they should. The breasts and the genitals, inflamed with wine, expand and swell shamefully, exhibiting in advance the image of sexual immorality; and the body forces the wound of the soul to inflame, and shameless throbbing follows the excess, driving even a man of correct behavior into transgression. And so the pleasure-seeking of the young oversteps the bounds of modesty.

We must do everything we can to quench the impulses of youth: take away the Bacchic fuel of the danger that threatens, pour on the antidote to the inflammation, hold the burning soul down, keep the swelling organs in, and settle the agitation of lust once it is already stirring.

As for those in their prime: during the day, at the midday meal — those for whom a midday meal is suitable — let them taste bread only and abstain from drink altogether, so that the excess moisture in them may be soaked up and drunk down by the eating of dry food. Constant spitting, and blowing the nose, and hurrying off to relieve oneself, is the sign of excess — of too much liquid supplied to the body in too large a quantity. And if thirst comes on, let the appetite be satisfied with a little water. Water is not to be supplied too freely either: the food is not to be drowned but ground down for digestion, and that happens when the food is gathered into a mass and only a little of it is passed.

Besides, serious study of divine things does not go with being heavy with wine. “For unmixed wine is far from compelling a man to be wise, much less self-controlled,” as the comic poet says. But toward evening, around supper time, wine may be used, when we are no longer occupied with more serious reading. Then, too, the air grows colder than it is by day, so that the body’s failing natural warmth needs to be fed by adding heat. Even then it must be only a little wine, for we must not go on to intemperate drinking.

Those already advanced in years may take the cup more cheerfully, warming the chill of age, which the decay of time has produced, with the harmless medicine of the vine. Old men’s passions are not, for the most part, stirred to the point of driving them onto the rocks of drunkenness. Moored by reason and by time, as though by anchors, they stand up more easily to the storm of passions that comes rushing down out of intemperance. They may also be allowed to joke at feasts. But even for them let the limit of their drinking be the point at which they keep their reason steady, their memory working, and their body unmoved and unshaken by wine. People in that state are called, by those who know about such things, akrothōrakes. It is good, then, to leave off in time, for fear of a stumble.

One Artorius, in his book On Long Life — that is the title, as I remember it — thinks that drink should be taken only until the food is moistened, so that we may reach a longer life. It is fitting, then, that some use wine as medicine, for the sake of health alone, and others for relaxation and enjoyment. Wine first makes the man who has drunk it kinder than he was before: more agreeable to his drinking companions, gentler with his household slaves, more pleasant to his friends. But once he is drunk he turns violent instead. For wine, being warm and having sweet juices when properly mixed, dissolves the foul waste matter by its warmth and blends the sharp and base humors with agreeable scents.

It has been well said, then: “Wine was created from the beginning to be a joy of the soul and heart, when it is drunk in moderate sufficiency.” And it is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible — not to resort to it as though it were water, and so get worn down into drunkenness, and not to pour it in like water out of love of wine. Both are works of God, and so the mixing of the two, of water and of wine, works together for health, because life is made up of what is necessary and what is useful. With water, then, which is life’s necessity and is to be used freely, the useful thing is also to be mixed.

Too much wine impedes the tongue and slackens the lips. The eyes roll wildly, the sight as it were swimming through so much moisture; and, forced into error, they think everything is turning around them and cannot count distant objects as single. “And truly I think I see two suns,” said the Theban in his cups. The sight, disturbed by the heat of the wine, often imagines the substance of one object to be many. There is no difference between moving the eye and moving the thing seen: both have the same effect on the sight, which, because of the wobbling, cannot get an accurate perception of the object. And the feet are carried out from under a man as if by a flood, and hiccuping and vomiting and drunken nonsense follow. “For every drunken man,” as the tragedy says —

And before tragedy, Wisdom cried out: “Much wine drunk abounds in irritation and every kind of error.” That is why most people say you ought to let yourself go over your cups and put serious business off till morning. I think the opposite: that is exactly when reason ought to be brought in to join the feast, to act as instructor to the drinking, so that conviviality does not slide unnoticed into drunkenness. Just as no sensible man thinks it necessary to shut his eyes before going to sleep, so no one can rightly wish reason absent from the dinner table, or set himself to lulling it asleep until business begins. But the Word can never leave those who belong to him, not even when we are asleep; he ought to be invited to our sleep as well. For perfect wisdom, which is the knowledge of things divine and human, and which takes in everything to do with the oversight of the human flock, becomes, where life is concerned, an art; and so, as long as we live, it is constantly with us, always doing its own proper work, and the product of that work is a good life.

But the miserable wretches who drive self-control out of their gatherings think that excess in drinking is the happiest life. Their life is nothing but revel, debauchery, baths, excess, chamber pots, idleness, drink. You can see some of them half-drunk, staggering, with garlands around their necks like wine jars, vomiting drink over one another in the name of good fellowship; and others, full of the effects of their carousing, filthy, pale in the face, livid, still, on top of yesterday’s drinking, pouring down another bout again in the morning. It is good, my friends, it is good to make our acquaintance with this picture from the greatest possible distance, and to shape ourselves into something better, afraid that we too may become the same spectacle and the same joke to other people.

It has been aptly said: “As the furnace tests the steel blade in the tempering, so wine tests the heart of the arrogant.” A debauch is the immoderate use of wine; intoxication is the disorder that results from it; and the hangover — kraipalē — is the discomfort and nausea that follow a debauch, so named from the shaking of the head, kara pallein.

Such a life as this — if it should be called a life at all, spent in idleness, in agitation over sensual indulgences, and in the hallucinations of debauchery — the divine Wisdom looks on with contempt, and gives her children this command: “Do not be a wine-drinker, and do not spend your money buying meat; for every drunkard and every man given to sexual immorality will come to beggary, and every sluggard will be dressed in tatters and rags.” For anyone who is not awake to wisdom but is steeped in wine is a sluggard. “And the drunkard,” he says, “will be clothed in rags, and will be ashamed of his drunkenness in front of onlookers.” For the sinner’s wounds are the tears in the garment of the flesh, the holes made by lusts, through which the shame of the soul inside can be seen — that is, sin, on account of which the garment will not easily be saved: torn away all round, rotted through in many lusts, and ripped clean away from salvation.

So he adds these very solemn words: “Who has woes? Who has shouting? Who has quarrels? Who has disgusting babble? Who has wounds for no reason?” You see the wine-lover in all his raggedness — the man who despises the Word himself, who has abandoned himself and given himself over to drunkenness. You see what threat Scripture has pronounced against him. And to its threat it adds again: “Whose eyes are red? Is it not those who linger long over their wine and go hunting out the places where drinking goes on?” Here he shows that the lover of drink is already dead to the Word, by mentioning the bloodshot eyes — a mark that appears on corpses, announcing to him death in the Lord. For forgetting the things that make for true life tips the scale toward destruction. With good reason, then, the Instructor, in his concern for our salvation, forbids us: “Do not drink wine to drunkenness.” Why? Because, he says, “your mouth will then speak twisted things, and you will lie down as though in the heart of the sea, and like a helmsman in the middle of huge waves.” Here poetry, too, comes to our help and says:

And again:

And so on.

You see the danger of shipwreck. The heart is drowned in heavy drinking. The extremity of drunkenness is compared to the danger of the sea: once the body has been sunk in it like a ship, it goes down to the depths of foulness, swamped under the mighty billows of wine; and the helmsman, the human mind, is tossed on the swell of drunkenness as it rises; and, buried in the trough of the sea, blinded by the darkness of the storm, it has drifted away from the harbor of truth until at last it strikes the rocks below the water and is destroyed, driven by its own self onto its own pleasures.

With good reason, then, the apostle gives the order: “Do not get drunk with wine, in which there is much excess.” By the word he uses for excess — asōtia — he hints that drunkenness is asōston, past saving. For if he made water into wine at the wedding, he did not give permission to get drunk. He gave life to the watery element of the law’s meaning, filling with his blood the man who does the law, the man who is of Adam — that is, the whole world; supplying reverence for God with drink from the vine of truth, the mixture of the old law and the new word, so that the appointed time might be fulfilled. Scripture, accordingly, has named wine the symbol of the sacred blood; but rebuking the cheap tippling that goes down to the dregs, it says: “Wine is intemperate, and drunkenness is insolent.”

It agrees with right reason, then, to drink on account of the cold of winter, until the numbness is driven off from those liable to feel it; and on other occasions as a medicine for the bowels. Just as we are to use food to satisfy hunger, so we are to use drink to satisfy thirst, taking the most careful precautions against a slip, “for the pouring in of wine is dangerous.” And so our soul will be pure and dry and full of light; and the soul itself is wisest and best when it is dry. It is fit for contemplation then, too, and is not made damp by the vapors that rise off wine and gather like a cloud.

So we must not put ourselves out to procure Chian wine when there is none, or Ariousian when it is not at hand. Thirst is a sensation of want, and it craves what is suited to filling the want, not expensive liquor. Wines imported from overseas are for an appetite worn out by excess, in a soul that is insane in its desires before it is even drunk. For there is the fragrant Thasian wine, and the sweet-breathing Lesbian, and a sweet Cretan wine, and sweet Syracusan, and Mendesian, an Egyptian wine, and Naxian from the island, and the “highly perfumed and flavored,” another wine from the land of Italy. These are a great many names. For the moderate drinker, one wine is enough — the produce of the cultivation of the one God.

Why should men not be satisfied with the wine of their own country, unless they mean to import their water as well, like the foolish Persian kings? They bring the Choaspian water along with them, the way they bring their friends. (The Choaspes — a river of India, as it is called here — was the one the best drinking water came from.) The Holy Spirit, uttering his voice through Amos, pronounces the rich wretched on account of their luxury: “those who drink strained wine and lie on ivory couches,” he says; and he adds whatever else is like it, by way of rebuke.

Special attention is to be paid to decency — as the myth has it that Athena, whoever she was, gave up the pleasure of the flute out of regard for it, because of how unseemly the sight was. So we are to drink without contorting the face, not grasping greedily at the cup, not rolling the eyes with unseemly motion before we drink; we are not to drain the cup at one draught out of intemperance, or sprinkle the chin, or splash our clothes while gulping the whole drink down at once, with our face all but filling the bowl and drowned in it. For the gurgling made by the drink rushing down violently, and by its being drawn in with a great deal of breath, as if it were being poured into an earthenware jar, while the throat makes a noise from the speed of the swallowing, is a shameful and unseemly spectacle of intemperance.

On top of that, eagerness in drinking is a practice that harms the drinker. Do not hurry toward harm, my friend. Your drink is not being taken away from you. It is given to you, and it is waiting for you. Do not be so eager that you burst, draining it down with your throat wide open. Your thirst is satisfied even if you drink more slowly, observing decorum, taking the beverage in small portions and in an orderly way. What intemperance greedily grabs at is not taken away by taking time over it.

“Do not be a strong man at wine,” he says, “for wine has overcome many.” The Scythians, the Celts, the Iberians, and the Thracians, all of them warlike peoples, are heavily given to drunkenness, and think it an honorable and happy pursuit to engage in. But we, the people of peace, feasting for lawful enjoyment and not for wantonness, drink sober cups of friendship, so that our friendships may be shown in a way that truly answers to the name.

In what way do you think the Lord drank, when he became man for our sake? As shamelessly as we do? Was it not with decorum and propriety? Was it not deliberately? You may be sure that he too partook of wine, for he too was a man. And he blessed the wine, saying, “Take, drink: this is my blood” — the blood of the vine. He is calling the Word, “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” by a figure: the holy stream of gladness. And that the one who drinks ought to observe moderation he showed clearly by what he taught at feasts, for he did not teach while affected by wine. And that it was wine that was the thing blessed he showed again when he said to his disciples, “I will not drink of the fruit of this vine until I drink it with you in my Father’s kingdom.” And that it was wine the Lord drank he tells us again when he spoke about himself, reproaching the Jews for their hardness of heart: “For the Son of Man came, and they say, Look — a glutton and a wine-drinker, a friend of tax collectors.” Let this be held fast by us against those who are called Encratites.

But women, professing, if you please, to aim at the graceful — so that their lips may not be pulled apart by stretching them over broad drinking cups, and the mouth widened that way — drink in an unseemly manner out of alabaster flasks whose mouths are far too narrow. They throw back their heads and bare their necks indecently, as I think; and stretching the throat as they swallow, they gulp the liquor down as though to make bare everything they can to their drinking companions; and drawing up hiccups like men, or rather like slaves, they revel in luxurious riot. For no such noise is proper for a man, who is endowed with reason — much less for a woman, whom even reflecting on what she is by nature brings to modesty.

“A drunken woman is great wrath,” it is said, as if a drunken woman were the wrath of God. Why? “Because she will not conceal her shame.” For a woman is quickly dragged down into licentiousness if she once sets her choice on pleasures. And we have not forbidden drinking from alabaster flasks; but we do forbid making a study of drinking from those alone, as arrogant, counseling women to use whatever comes to hand without fussing, and to cut up by the roots the dangerous appetites that are in them. So let the rush of air that comes back up and makes a hiccup be let out silently.

But by no means whatever are women to be allowed to uncover and display any part of their bodies, or both will fall — the men by being excited to look, the women by drawing the eyes of the men onto themselves.

We must always conduct ourselves as in the Lord’s presence, so that he does not say to us what the apostle in his indignation said to the Corinthians: “When you come together, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper.”

To me, the star the mathematicians call Acephalus, the Headless, which is counted before the wandering star, with its head resting on its breast, seems to be a figure of the gluttonous, of the pleasure-loving, and of those who are prone to drunkenness. For in such people the faculty of reasoning is not seated in the head but among the appetites of the gut, enslaved to lust and to anger. Just as Elpenor broke his neck through drunkenness, so the brain, made dizzy by drunkenness, falls from above down to the liver and the heart — that is, down to pleasure and to anger — a greater fall than the one the sons of the poets say Hephaestus took when Zeus hurled him from heaven to earth. “The trouble of sleeplessness, and bile, and gripes in the gut are with an insatiable man,” it is said.

That is also why Noah’s drunkenness was recorded in writing: so that, with a clear written account of his transgression in front of us, we might guard against drunkenness with all our might. And that is why those who covered the shame of his drunkenness are blessed by the Lord. Scripture, accordingly, giving a most comprehensive summary, has expressed the whole of it in one sentence: “Wine is enough for a well-instructed man, and he will rest quietly in his bed.”