ARAM, 17 (2005) 185-191 S.

BROCK 185

SOBRIA EBRIETAS ACCORDING TO SOME SYRIAC TEXTS

Dr. SEBASTIAN BROCK

(University of Oxford)

If you are someone who wants to preserve his youthfulness in the perfect purity of
the virgin state, do not have anything to do with wine! Keep away from wine lest
it set you on fire with its heat; for wine and youth – in the words of one of the
saints – is like a double fire: “Don’t add one fire to another”, he says, “and don’t
add to your lusts with wine; don’t stir up sin by means of wine, lest it drive away
your sleep through empty chatter”. For wine causes words to fumble and steps to
stumble. Wine has handed over a righteous person to mockery, and it was the
cause of Canaan’s curse (Gen. 9:25). For Noah was not to be blamed (for his
drunkenness) since he had not learnt about wine from experience, whereas we,
who have learnt about its savage nature, should be wary of ourselves. Even in the
case of the upright Lot, wine had a laugh at him, leaving his chaste person naked
(cp Gen. 19:31-36).
If wine can surreptitiously get the better of valiant men in this way, what shall we
wretches do? let us flee from wine lest it leaves us naked. … Do not make friends
with wine,… do not allow your enemy to get inside you, otherwise, when he gets
into your house he will destroy you.1

In view of passages such as this early seventh-century tirade by Sahdona

against wine and its effects, it might well be considered surprising that the im-
agery of drunkenness should nevertheless be employed by a number of Syriac
(and, of course, other) writers in order to describe elevated states of the spir-
itual life. Several reasons, however, can be found to explain this phenomenon,
perhaps the most important being the fact that wine and its effects are de-
scribed in a positive way in many places in the biblical text: besides such ob-
vious passages as Ps. 22(23):5 (“You [God] have spread a table for me…, my
cup makes drunk..”) and Ps. 103 (104):15 (Wine causes a person’s heart to
rejoice”), or, from the New Testament, the use of wine at the Marriage at Cana
and at the Last Supper, it will be found that Wisdom herself “makes drunk”
(Sir. 1:16), and examples of blameless drunkenness – as in the case of Noah2
and Lot, mentioned by Sahdona – are also to be found. Thus for Jewish and
Christian readers of the Bible there was a strong incentive to provide a mean-
1
 Sahdona, Book of Perfection II.7.18 (ed. de Halleux, A., Martyrius (Sahdona). Oeuvres
spirituelles, II, Le livre de la perfection, CSCO Scr. Syri 90; 1961), p. 79. For earlier texts of this
sort, see the paper by Sh. Abouzayd in the present volume.
2
 Sahdona, like Stephan Dähne’s Jesuit (see his contribution below), attributed his drunken-
ness to inexperience, claiming that he had never drunk wine before; Ephrem (Commentary on
Genesis, VII.1-2) provides an elaborate time schedule in order to show that Noah could not have
drunk wine for at least seven years, and so was not used to its effects.
186 SOBRIA EBRIETAS ACCORDING TO SOME SYRIAC TEXTS

ingful interpretation to such passages. One of the first to do so was Philo, and
it is to him that the paradoxical phrase “sober drunkenness” (nephalios methe)
goes back. Philo’s use of the theme was studied by Hans Lewy in a famous
monograph entitled Sobria Ebrietas. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der
antiken Mystik.3 Lewy also looked at the way that theme was taken up in cer-
tain early Christian writers, notably Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. The only
Syriac text that he included in his survey was Odes of Solomon 11, in which
verses 6-8 read:
Eloquent water touched my lips,
(issuing) from the fountain of the Lord without stint;
I drank, and I became drunk
with the living immortal water,
but my drunkenness was not that of ignorance;
rather, I had abandoned empty things
and turned to the Most High, my God,
growing rich through his gift.

Although the term “sober” is not specifically applied here, the Odes of So-
lomon provide an implicit contrast between the “drunkenness of ignorance”
(or, alogistia, “irrationality”, in the Greek text)4 and that caused by water
from the fountain of the Lord.
As will be seen, the specific phrase “sober drunkenness” is also absent from
later Syriac writers, who (if they provide an adjective) prefer to designate it as
“spiritual drunkenness”.5 The paradox, however, is brought out by Ephrem
when he uses nakpa, which has the overtones of “sober” as well as “chaste”,
of Noah in the following passage where he explains why Wine, as well as
Bread, is used in the Eucharist:
Wine instructs us, for it makes like itself
the one who is allied with it.
For wine greatly hates the person who likes it,
making him drunk and crazed, thus mocking him.
Light too teaches us, for it makes like itself
the eye, the daughter of light:
the eye, by means of light, saw (Noah’s) drunkenness
and ran to make sober that sober man.6
It was wine that effected that nakedness (of Noah),
for it does not know how to spare even the sober.

3
 BZNW 9; 1929.
4
 Not, of course, yet known to Lewy, who suggests agnosia as underlying the Syriac, thus
giving the passage an essentially Gnostic interpretation. For the passage, see now Lattke, M.,
Oden Salomos. Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar (Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus 41/1;
1999), pp. 185-223, esp. 200-202.
5
 The Macarian Homilies combine the two, speaking of a “sober and spiritual drunkenness”:
ed. Berthold, H., Makarios/Symeon. Reden und Briefe (Berlin, 1973), II, p. 218.
6
 The sense here is clarified by H. de Nativitate I.23: “Two brothers covered up Noah: they
had seen the Only-Begotten of God who would come to cover up the nakedness of Adam who
had become drunk with pride”.
 S. BROCK 187

The Firstborn clothed himself in crafty (Satan’s) own weapon,

so that, by means of the weapon that slew, He might turn the tables and give life.
By the (same) wood by means of which (Satan) slew us we have been saved,
by the (same) wine that crazes us, we are made sober.7

A different biblical starting point for the theme of “spiritual drunkenness”

is provided by the narrative concerning the gift of tongues at Pentecost, as a
result of which the apostles are accused of drunkenness (Acts 2:13). The re-
sponse of Peter, in his ensuing speech in Acts (2:15), is to deny this, but many
later writers take the opportunity to bring together the new “wisdom” granted
to the apostles with Sir 1:16, where “Wisdom makes drunk”. Thus in the litur-
gical texts for Pentecost in both the East and the West Syriac traditions we find
this motif developed. According to a verse text in the East Syriac Hudra,
they were indeed drunk – but with the wine that had been trodden out by the lance
which is none other than the precious Blood.8

The Eucharistic connotation provided by the allusion to the pierced side of

Christ on the Cross (John 19:34) also features in the West Syriac Fenqitho:
The living Cross, with its wine, inebriated them so that they spoke;
from it they received, in amazement, a new book that required no learning:
the strong drink that the lance had trodden out taught them every tongue.9

Another text for Pentecost in the East Syriac Hudra indicates that the cause
of the apostles’ drunkenness was nothing else than love of Christ:
It was with the love of Christ that the upright apostles were drunk,
and so they endured all kinds of tortures.10

Drunk with love

When the anonymous author of the passage just quoted spoke of the apos-
tles being drunk with love of Christ, they were drawing on much earlier phra-
seology, already found in Ephrem. In one of his madrashe on the Pearl,
Ephrem addresses the pearl (here a symbol of Christ) as follows:
O Pearl, you are not rebuked
in your being stripped (naked);
the merchant, too, is drunk with love for you!11

Elsewhere, after introducing the sacrifice of Jephtha’s daughter as a type of

that of Christ,12 Ephrem comments on what lay behind Jephtha’s seemingly
horrific action:
7
 H. de Nativitate IV.104-110.
8
 Hudra (ed. Darmo, T.), III, p.124 = Breviarium Chaldaeorum (ed. Bedjan, P.), III, pp. 55-6.
9
 Fenqitho (Mosul edition), VI, pp.215-6.
10
 Hudra, III, p.127 = Breviarium Chaldaeorum, III, p. 58.
11
 H. de Fide LXXXIII.1.
12
 At Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, on pilasters to the right and left of the apse,
Jephtha’s daughter and Isaac both feature as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ; see the illustra-
188 SOBRIA EBRIETAS ACCORDING TO SOME SYRIAC TEXTS

Everyone who is drunk with love

and who conquers by means of passionate desire for truth
sees the death of a dear one as though in a dream.13

That is, physical death is seen as a dream when compared with the reality of
the future life.
Perhaps with this passage of Ephrem in mind, the anonymous author of a
memra on another sacrificial type of Christ, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22) has
Sarah say to Isaac as he takes off her son:
You are drunk with the love of God – who is your God and my God;
if He so bids you concerning the child, you would kill him without hesitation.14

Jacob of Serugh, in his memra on the same episode, likewise speaks of

Abraham being “drunk with wine from Golgotha” – in that he had prolepticly
seen Christ’s day “and rejoiced” (John 8:56).15
It is, however, among the East Syriac monastic writers of the seventh and
eighth centuries that the theme of being drunk with the love of God is espe-
cially prominent.
In a text attributed to Abraham of Nathpar we find the following instruc-
tion:
Instead of others who become drunk at night with wine, do you become drunk
with the love of God.16

Sahdona, despite being the author of the polemic against the drinking of
wine cited at the outset, was nevertheless perfectly happy to describe St Paul,
together with the apostles and martyrs, as all being “drunk with divine love”.17
This wine of love has to be actually drunk in order to experience its inebriating
effects. As Isaac of Nineveh explains,
tions in Forsyth, G. and Weitzmann, K., The Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai. The
Church and Fortress of Justinian (Ann Arbor, 1965-73), plates CLXXXIX and CXCI (sacrifice
of Jephtha’s daughter), CLXXXVIII (sacrifice of Isaac).
13
 Carmina Nisibena LXX.13.
14
 Lines 37-38 of the first of two anonymous memre on Gen. 22, published in Le Muséon 99
(1986), pp.61-129; compare also lines 23-24 of the second poem.
15
 Bedjan, P. (ed.), Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis Homiliae Selectae, IV, (Paris/Leipzig, 1908),
p. 79, line 19.
16
 British Library Or. 6714, f. 110b. The passage is attributed to John the Solitary in a medi-
eval Syrian Orthodox collection published by Çiçek, Mor Julius, Martyonuto d-abohoto d-‘idto
(St Ephrem the Syrian Monastery, 1985), for which see my “A monastic anthology from twelfth-
century Edessa”, in Lavenant, R. (ed.), Symposium Syriacum VII (OCA 256; 1998), p. 227; it
also features, this time anonymously, in Bedjan, P. (ed.), Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum VII (Paris/
Leipzig, 1897), p. 894.
17
 Ed. de Halleux, I, pp. 151-3: “Thus it is with the person drunk with divine love, enflamed
by desire for his Lord….It was with this love that Paul, who lived in Christ, was drunk; … the
apostles and all the martyrs were enflamed by this fire”. Isaac makes the same point concerning
martyrs, Homily 33 (tr. Wensinck, A., Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (Amsterdam, 1923;
repr. Wiesbaden, 1968), p.149): “By this passionate love of God the martyrs were inebriated”.
Appropriately enough Methe Christou is the title given to a Modern Greek translation of the Acts
of the Persian Martyrs (ed. Christaphakopoulos, D.; Thessaloniki, 1989).
 S. BROCK 189

Someone who has not actually drunk wine will not become inebriated as a result
of being told about it; and someone who has not been held worthy of a knowledge
of the lofty things of God cannot become drunk with love for Him.18

Isaac’s contemporary, Shem‘on of the Book of Grace, discusses the experi-

ence of being inebriated with divine love in the context of the various stages of
spiritual growth:
If they are in a state of wonder and drunk with divine love, swallowed up by the
living mystery, meditating on the contemplation of the holy Trinity,… then they
realize that they have reached the Vale of Peace.19

The wine of forgetfulness

In one of the madrashe of the cycle on Virginity Ephrem discusses the epi-
sode of Gen. 19:32-33 where, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
Lot’s daughters make their father drunk so that they can lie with him and so
preserve the human race: whereas his daughters gave Lot wine for the purpose
of intercourse with him, he drank it for consolation:
Lot drank to assuage his sorrow,
and by the wine to forget his terror;
by the wine he summoned sleep,
since sleep had fled away from fear.20

Isaac of Nineveh boldly uses the analogy of drinking at funerals as a means

of forgetting sorrow:
As someone who drinks wine at the time of mourning and gets drunk, thus forget-
ting all the suffering of his sorrow, so it is with the person who, having got drunk
with the love of God in this world, which is a place of lamentation, forgets his
sorrow and all his distress; through his drunkenness he becomes impassible to all
the affections of sin.21

Elsewhere Isaac prays,

Through Your love may my life become inebriated, so as to forget the world and
its affairs.22
18
 Ch. XVIII.2 of the “Second Part” (ed. Brock, S.P., CSCO Scr. Syri 224-5 (1995); compare
X.35, “Without wine no one will get drunk, nor will the heart leap with joy; and without inebria-
tion in God, no one will obtain, by a natural course of events, a virtue that does not belong to
him”; see also XIV.30: “The true vision of Jesus Christ our Lord consists in realizing the mean-
ing of His dispensation for our sakes, and becoming inebriated with love of Him as a result of the
insights into the many wondrous elements contained in that vision”. (There is a whole section on
inebriation with the love of God in Alfeyev, H., The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian
(Kalamazoo, 2000), pp. 248-256).
19
 Mingana, A. (ed.), Early Christian Mystics (Woodbrooke Studies VII; Cambridge, 1934 ),
p.54 (f.310b). Elsewhere (p.51, f.309a) Shem‘on states that “the sum of all perfection for all who
are subject to mutability is for a person to become inebriated by converse with God, his mind
taken away captive out of the world, so that he is no longer aware of himself”.
20
 H. de Virginitate 38:2.
21
 Homily 79 (tr. Wensinck, p. 364).
22
 The Second Part, ch. X.41.
190 SOBRIA EBRIETAS ACCORDING TO SOME SYRIAC TEXTS

The reason why this state of spiritual drunkenness has the effect of bringing
about forgetfulness of this world’s sorrows is, however, because it induces a
profound sense of wonder, joy and faith:
The soul is lifted up on the wings of faith, high above the circle of the entire vis-
ible world; as though drunk, it is constantly in ecstatic contemplation of God.23

and
When the soul is drunk with gladness because of its hope and with its joy in God,
the body will be without apperception of troubles, even if it should be brought
low.24

In a passage already quoted, Sahdona had pointed out that it was inebriation
with the love of Christ that had kept St Paul going through all his many tribu-
lations. Isaac of Nineveh actually puts a long prayer into the mouth of St Paul
himself to this effect:
I rejoice if it is Your will (sc. to leave the “thorn” of 2 Cor. 12:7 in his flesh), (for
I realize that) our childish state is in such need of a pedagogue to chastise and
arouse it – even if someone is so smitten with love of You as I am, and is drawn
after what is good, the world not being seen by him at all because of his inebria-
tion with You.25

The Cup that inebriates

Several of the biblical passages which mention wine were interpreted by the
Church Fathers as containing a eucharistic reference. Thus, for example,
Evagrius, commenting on Ps. 22(23): 5, states that Christ is the “table”
(Kephalaia Gnostica II.60); on this “table” is the cup which ( according to the
LXX and Peshitta) “inebriates”. A Syriac monastic writer who is especially
fond of using the imagery of spiritual drunkenness in the context of the Eucha-
rist is John of Dalyatha. Thus in one of his Letters he writes:
In the case of those who consume God with exultation of heart, because they have
despised foetid lust through the inebriation of desire for Him, the beauty of His
utterly desirable vision shines out in them and evil lust soon fades away.26

or again,
Those who eat the Bread of Life do not die, and because of the inebriation in it,
those who drink it do not recall any longer their condition: in their inebriation
they have forgotten all that pertains to them; they are struck, but do not suffer
anything; they do not eat, yet they do not become hungry; they do not drink, yet
they do not get thirsty.27

23
 Isaac, Homily 52 (tr. Wensinck, p. 253).
24
 Isaac, Homily 46 (tr. Wensinck, p. 223).
25
 Homily 73 (tr. Wensinck, p. 338-339).
26
 Letter 11.4 (ed. Beulay, R., Patrologia Orientalis 39; 1978),
27
 Letter 37:4.
 S. BROCK 191

The wonderful and paradoxical effects of this inebriation brought about by

the Eucharistic wine of love are described in a famous passage by Isaac of
Nineveh:
When we have found love, we eat the heavenly Bread, and we are sustained with-
out labour and without weariness. Heavenly Bread is that which has descended
from heaven and which gives the world life; this is the food of angels. Whoever
has found love consumes Christ at all times and becomes immortal from thence
onwards. For whoever eats of this bread shall not taste death in eternity. Blessed
is the person who has eaten from the bread of love, which is Jesus. Whoever is
fed with love, is fed with Christ, who is the all-governing God. Witness is John,
who says “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Thus whoever lives with love in this crea-
tion smells life from God and breathes here the air of the resurrection. Love is the
Kingdom of which our Lord spoke when symbolically he promised his disciples
that they would eat in his kingdom, “You shall eat and drink at the table of my
Kingdom” (Luke 22:30). What should they eat, if not love? Love is sufficient to
feed instead of food and drink. This is the wine that gladdens the heart (Ps.
103(104):15): blessed is the person who has drunk from this wine. This is the
wine from which the debauched have drunk – and they became sober; the sinners,
and they forgot the paths of stumbling; the drunk, and they became fasters; the
rich, and they became desirous of poverty; the poor, and they became rich in
hope; the sick, and they regained strength; the fools, and they became wise.28

The fondness of the seventh- and eighth-century East Syriac monastic au-
thors, such as Sahdona, Isaac of Nineveh and John of Dalyatha, for the theme
of spiritual inebriation is quite striking, and it would be instructive to compare
their usage of the theme with that to be found in early Muslim Sufi writings.
Here, indeed, a good beginning has been made in a remarkable Finnish doc-
toral dissertation by Serafim Seppälä, that has recently been published.29 What
makes this work of particular interest is the fact that it is written by someone
who, as an Orthodox monk, is living in a monastic tradition that has been con-
siderably influenced by the writings of Isaac of Nineveh, better known in that
tradition as Isaac the Syrian.

28
 Homily 43 (tr. Wensinck, pp. 211-2).
29
 In Speechless Ecstasy. Expression and Interpretation of Mystical Experience in Classical
Syriac and Sufi Literature (Helsinki, 2002).