Drunk Without Wine

The belly, when filled with all kinds of food, gives birth to the seeds of lewdness, and the mind, choked by the weight of food, cannot keep the guidance and government of the thoughts. For it is not only drunkenness with wine that usually intoxicates the mind. Excess of every kind of food makes it weak and unsteady, and robs it of all its power of pure and clear contemplation. The cause of Sodom’s overthrow and lewdness was not drunkenness with wine but fullness of bread. Hear the Lord rebuking Jerusalem through the prophet: “For how did your sister Sodom sin, except that she ate her bread in fullness and abundance?” And because through fullness of bread they were inflamed with uncontrollable lust of the flesh, they were burned up by the judgment of God with fire and sulfur from heaven. But if excess of bread alone drove them into so headlong a fall into sin through the vice of being overfull, what are we to think of those who, with a vigorous body, dare to eat meat and drink wine without any restraint, taking not just what their bodily frailty requires, but what the eager craving of the mind suggests? [a]