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{ 2006 04 22 }

Reveling and Revelation

The Symbolism of Wine in Ancient Christian Texts

Ah, the myriad tastes of wine. At once the drink of Bacchae and of Christians. Somehow the symbol of the blood of Jesus is also the source of so much debauchery. In ancient Christian texts, wine takes on roles both holy and unholy, fleshly and divine. This seeming contradiction is apparent in the Gnostic codices found at Nag Hammadi. Gnosticism is an early unorthodox Christian sect, with most of its scriptures dating from the first two centuries A.D. Gnostics believe that the way to salvation is through the attainment of hidden knowledge, or gnosis, which is often associated with fullness and “good” intoxication. At the same time the animal-like state of ignorance is also associated with intoxication, but of a different sort. Ancient Christian texts, including both Gnostic and more canonical works, differentiate between two kinds of wine: the mortal wine that causes a person to forget his divine nature, and the “true wine” that helps him shed the flesh and reunite with God the Father.

According to the Gnostics, the world we live in is essentially an illusion. It is the realm of the manifest, where the Father is revealed in a multiplicity of bodily forms. “The Holy Spirit is in the revealed: it is below. It is in the concealed: it is above” [Philip]. The Gnostic heaven, the Kingdom, is the true state of God in his completeness. He is hidden from us on the material plane, although our true selves, our souls, are actually part of the Father. “For who is it who exists if it is not the Father himself? All the spaces are his emanations. They knew that they stem from him as children from a perfect man” [Truth]. We relentlessly search for the true way to live, but many are misled by the revealed world, and “in their error, have committed sin.” [Truth]

There are actually three parts to every person in Gnostic metaphysics: the spirit, the soul, and the body. The spirit is the divine self, the part that is unified with the Father. The body is the bestial self, full of earthly desires and passions. The soul is the rational and psychological self that we most often identify as “ourselves,” and it is this part that connects the other two. “For without the soul, the body does not sin, just as the soul is not saved without the spirit” [James]. It is the soul that sins by choosing the flesh over the Father, and it is the soul that can be saved by looking inward and finding that spirit which is the little bit of God within him.

The trick, of course, is knowing how to find God in the first place. Christ solves this problem by learning the hidden knowledge of the Father and teaching it to others. He says, “I came to make the things below like the things above, and the things outside like those inside. I came to unite them in the place” [Philip]. Christ is sinless because his soul is united with the Father, and therefore he is the Father. What’s more, everyone who comes to fully understand his message will also become one and the same with the Father and with Christ. “He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him” [Thomas 108]. In Gnosticism, Christ represents the human capacity to understand and become reunited with the Father.

Drinking, wine, and intoxication are often portrayed in a positive light in ancient Christian texts. There is, for instance, the well-known symbolism of wine as the blood of Christ: “Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’” [Matthew 26:27-28]. In the Gnostic texts, however, the wine offered by Christ is meant to intoxicate and thereby reveal the hidden knowledge of the Father. “The cup of prayer contains wine and water, since it is appointed as the type of the blood for which thanks is given. And it is full of the Holy Spirit, and it belongs to the wholly perfect man. When we drink this, we shall receive for ourselves the perfect man” [Philip]. The wine that Christ gives his followers can lead them to transcend the manifest world.

The blood of Christ is not merely a drink, but a strong drink intended to intoxicate. Thomas, in the gospel attributed to him, is praised for being alone among the disciples to perceive the true nature of the Father revealed through Christ — that is, all-encompassing and therefore unutterable. “Thomas said to him, ‘Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like.’ Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out’” [13]. Christ cannot articulate God any better than Thomas, but he has given Thomas a substance that is able to remove the inhibitions placed on his soul by the manifest world. Forgetting his separate nature via wine, he is able to grasp the “secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke” [Thomas].

It is strange that wisdom and knowledge can come from drunkenness. It is downright contradictory when one considers how closely wine is associated with the bestial nature of the manifest world, and how detested that aspect of humanity is. “That one then will fall into drinking much wine in debauchery. For wine is the debaucher. Therefore she does not remember her brothers and her father, for pleasure and sweet profits deceive her. Having left knowledge behind, she fell into bestiality” [Authoritative Teaching]. Ancient Christian texts are constantly warning against giving in to the desires of the flesh, which inevitably lead to ignorance, error, and sin. “It is better not to live than to acquire an animal’s life” [Silvanus], “for none of those who have worn the flesh will be saved” [James]. The soul must recognize its divine spirit, and wine only detracts from that goal by causing the body to rule.

In its search for truth, the soul encounters chiefly the revealed things of the manifest world. These things are false because everything is actually the Father, and believing in and following these earthly constructions is due to the soul’s ignorance of God. “O soul, persistent one, be sober and shake off your drunkenness, which is the work of ignorance. If you persist and live in the body, you dwell in rusticity” [Silvanus]. Sobriety is praised because it allows for clear thought. In a metaphorical sense, all mankind is drunk, for if it were to sober up it would see at once how foolish it is to believe in the images of the manifest world and not the source of everything — that is, God. “I say to you, be sober; do not be deceived” [James]! Also consider the words of Isaiah: “the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, / they are confused with wine, / they stagger with strong drink; / they err in vision, / they stumble in giving judgement” [28:7]. Both the Gnostics and the authors of orthodox texts criticize wine for inspiring debauchery and distracting, even diverting, the soul from its ultimate goal of salvation.

Despite the contradictions apparent in these conflicting uses of wine as a Christian symbol, there is an easy way to reconcile them. Consider that there are two different wines being referred to. Silvanus the Gnostic gives the most weight to this idea: “Satisfy yourself with the true wine, in which there is no drunkenness nor error. For it (the true wine) marks the end of drinking, since there is usually in it what gives joy to the soul and the mind, through the Spirit of God.” This “true wine” is distinct from mundane wine: the former acts against the bestial nature of the soul and brings wisdom, the complete opposite of the latter. “Why do you drink stale water, though sweet wine is available for you? Wisdom summons you, yet you desire folly. Not by your own desire do you do these things, but it is the animal nature within you that does them” [Silvanus]. This concept of true wine proves useful in interpreting ancient Christian texts in their references to intoxication.

Just as mundane wine causes the soul to forget its spirit and leads it towards ignorance, true wine makes it forget its manifest form and leads it towards the Father. If intoxication means losing inhibitions, then the drunkenness brought about by the true wine is a state in which the false divisions between man and God are lost and the soul in uninhibited by the manifest world. “It as a person who, having become intoxicated, has turned from his drunkenness and having come to himself, has restored what is his own” [Truth]. The spirit is found and thereby the Father — unity and completeness are achieved. The Gnostic Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, no one will ever enter the kingdom of heaven at my bidding, but (only) because you yourselves are full” [James]. Just as with Thomas, Christ can only offer the true wine. It is the disciple himself who must drink of it.

The Father cannot be expressed in revealed things because he is everything. Any attempted manifestation is only an incomplete representation, incapable of fully imparting gnosis. “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way” [Philip]. The irrationality of intoxication grants some release from the constraints of rationality, perhaps aiding in the comprehension of something as foreign to the mind and senses as God. This solves the problem of Christ being himself a manifestation of God: he can teach the knowledge of the Father indirectly by simply providing the true wine. “The steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from [...] Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” [John 2:9-11]. What was once mere water is transformed into wine, and the primary symbol of debauchery is reappropriated as a symbol of salvation and wisdom. For the Gnostics, this new wine is a symbol of attaining gnosis, knowledge of God himself.

The fact that the Gnostic writings I have been referencing were found all together at Nag Hammadi suggests that their authors were part of a single community of practice. This community’s ideas, in addition bearing an understandable similarity to canonical works, is also heavily influenced by the Ancient Greeks. It is no coincidence that Gnostic metaphysics, with its distinction between a physical world of false images and a higher spiritual world from which everything else derives, bears a remarkable similarity to Plato’s cave allegory. In fact, a section of Plato’s Republic was found amongst the Nag Hammadi codices. Neo-Platonism was contemporary with Gnosticism, and many of their ideas feed into one another.

In Plato’s cave, there are people imprisoned and forced to watch shadows cast on the wall. Because this is all they know, they take the images to be the real things, and live their lives in ignorance. When one captive is taken outside, he sees the truth that lies behind the images, and the source of all images, the sun. “Finally, I suppose, he’d be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it” [Plato VII:516b]. He returns to the cave, but is killed for trying to teach others what they cannot possibly comprehend. The parallels are clear: the cave is like the manifest world, the upper world the Kingdom, the sun God, and the freed prisoner Jesus. These connections were also apparent to the Gnostics:

“Woe to you, captives, for you are bound in caverns! You laugh! In mad laughter you rejoice! You neither realize your perdition, nor do you reflect on your circumstances, nor have you understood that you dwell in darkness and death! On the contrary, you are drunk with the fire and full of bitterness. … And the darkness rose for you like the light, for you surrendered your freedom for servitude!” [Contender]

The captives here, almost certainly a reference to Plato, are drunk with wine of the lesser sort and so fall into bestiality.

Wine is an important symbol for the Greeks as well. It is the drink of the symposium, an institution central to Socratic philosophy, as well as the trademark of Bacchus, god of wine and revelry. In the Euripedes’ play, The Bacchae, wine is simultaneously exalted, for “apart from wine, / there is no cure for human hardship” [356-357], and denounced, for from those who deny its powers Bacchus “removes intelligence, / their knowledge of true wisdom” [535-536]. It turns people into beasts, as it does Agave when she tears apart her son. Yet in the Bacchic rites, it also has the power of divine revelation. The Gnostics from Nag Hammadi were well versed in the Greeks — they were well aware of these traditional conceptions of wine and adapted them to their own purposes.

Jesus says, “I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; I found none of them thirsty” [Thomas 28]. The mundane wine can seem to fill the soul, temporary blinding it to the false life of ignorance and error it leads. “Empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent” [ibid]. The only thing that can actually fill the soul is the true wine offered by Christ, which leads the soul to truth and knowledge. “Ignorance will result in death, because those who come from ignorance neither were nor are nor shall be. … Ignorance is a slave. Knowledge is freedom” [Philip]. Gnosis means freedom for the soul from the false images of the cave that is our material world.

Wine is a powerful symbol in Ancient Christianity. It can represent both the debauchery of the flesh and the transcendence of the soul. It is recognized in Ancient Greece for its transformative powers, creating animals out of men by blinding them to truth. Adapting Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Gnostics liken the manifest world to the world of false images, populated by drunkards who, in searching for the truth are deluded into thinking that what is false is real. These images are the revelations of God, a single completeness from which all souls arise. Souls must recognize their own divine nature, become sober from the blinding intoxication and drink from the true wine of Jesus until they are full. To be full is to reunite with the Father and attain the knowledge of truth, finding rest at last from that weary search and finally understanding how to live.

After all this talk of using a special wine from Jesus to escape this world, I wonder if abandoning the hedonistic bodily self for the divine and transcendent self is just as foolish as abandoning God for the flesh. Either path involves the intoxication of the soul and the loss of the one part of ourselves or another. It is God who chooses to reveal himself in the physical realm, so this world of the senses cannot be truly worthless. The divine nature is not disconnected from bestial nature, and drawing a line down the middle of the soul would seem to divide God’s utter unity. If wine for the Greeks could be both revelry and revelation, there do not need to be two different wines at all. The body and the spirit, the concealed and the revealed, must be embraced in order to embrace one’s true self, for surely completeness can only come when both realms are recognized as part of the divine whole.

Works Cited

Posted by Sarah on Saturday, April 22, 2006, at 6:51 pm. Filed under Essays, Writing. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment, but trackbacks are closed.

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