Spirits and the Spirit: a Brief Theology of Drinking

Rev. Douglas Olds

2/24/22

God’s gift of wine to Noah (Gen. 9:20) and Christ’s offer of wine at Cana (John 2:7-12) and in the Eucharist endows the ordinary with enhanced and experienced meaning and elation that connects and teaches us about the extraordinary God-givenness of spiritual and material realties. It follows there are relational virtues in the consumption of wine: gratitude, patience rather than gluttonous haste, self-control of temper, tongue, and appetite, and reverence for the giver of all good gifts. These virtues can be opposed by viciousness: drunkeness's anger, depression, and repressed shame.

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In his exploration of dipsomania, Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (1962, I.5, p. 65) notes drinking’s dichotomous compulsions:

I began to realize that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape. As we together grew older and more serious I drank less, he more.

For Waugh, drinking has its centripetal lure to be in the moment--to “prolong and enhance” it. Alcohol flushes the skin with blood when it buoys comradery. On the other hand, drunkenness has a bane centrifugal character in the desire to escape the moment—to escape the anxieties, shame, and griefs of not-belonging by belonging instead to the delusory substance and sensation of escape.

This substance-dominated escape from human and divine relationality makes the skin pale and drained of blood. In the centripetal society of drinking the blood flush signals relationality, while in drunkenness’s centrifugal intent, the blood drains as its signal of relational and existential rejection and flight. Drinking has an effect on the circulation of blood which, as discussed, is the material process of spirit-created (and thus other-directed and gracious) relationality. The centrifugal dissipation of relationality drains one of blood, and vice versa.

Waugh (Ibid., 73) considers that drunkenness seeks an escape from relationality’s scrutiny into the chimera of unscrutinized freedom. Addiction seeks invisibility to God and others but paradoxically promotes a narcissistic outlook. The addict is beguiled by a dreamlike personal and grand uniqueness free from shame’s limitations. The flight from scrutiny and relationality is addiction’s dream, but an impossible reality in God’s creation. The pursuits of addiction are revealed as chimeric, characterizing a state “hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.”

The delusion of addiction goes beyond the paradox of the self’s putative realization of desires for freedom and grandeur inside isolation. Addiction is an ouroboros: a serpent swallowing its tail, the sinuosity of the dragon’s deceits. The recurrence of the ouroboros in addiction is fostered by the material substance rather than by spirit. Belonging to the material bottle or any chemically-processed compulsion that attempts to escape human and divine attachments is circular and never arrives. Addiction is thus a bottomless pit, a snake chasing its tail in seeking belonging in escape from belonging, especially when belonging is only conceived in terms of escaping-from-shame inside the material world. Escaping the scrutiny of shame by belonging to the substance is an entrapping mobius strip in which one wakes up entrapped in what one wanted to escape: shame or grief (or its admixture) (see esp. Romans 7). 

Addiction attempts a free floating isolation by means of a tethering substance. Finding himself in the Schrödinger’s Cat chamber of inebriation, the addict enters a ghostly society of his self-creation by means of a blood-draining substance--what Waugh (Ibid., 87) describes as living as a “hollow candle…[outside of] three dimensions and…[one’s] five senses.” Attempting to stave off the expanding hollow shadows of shame the addict strives to stoke the ebbing ember of illusion, in the process diverting the channels of the senses from a relational to a self-recursive, self-amplifying, solipsistic intercourse. In addition to substance abuse, addiction may take the shape of obsessive viewing of pornography or compulsive violent gaming. In any case, the addict’s cocktail hours self-regard is inverted by the morning after of self-loathing. 

Prolonging the experience of escape by a tether to death-dealing substance is a paramount irrationality—confused as to both ends and means. It is the imprisonment of sin. The addicting substance is both the means of a psychic escape attempt and an alchemical effort of mixology to neutralize the compound contagion of sin which we all bear from the moment of our individuation. Sin infects God’s creation with a de-creating force. What the Bible understands as sinful carnal inclinations, secularism tends instead to characterize as liberating realizations of human nature:

To break free from the chemical bonds of this incessant seeking to escape the bonds of creation requires acceptance of the need for a savior (Rom. 7:24-25) that restores the addict to the reality and appreciation of life’s scrutiny and expectation of uprightness and duty (Prov. 11:24). Whereas the addict has resisted knowing love as chronicler by engaging in futile philosophies, with redemption by God he is accepted into love’s eternity.

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