Free Drink by Iain Gately Page A

who produced a comprehensive Christian etiquette on drinking in his Pedagogia . Clement was Greek by origin and Alexandria, where he taught in the early 200s, was an important center of learning, with schools of classical, Judaic, and Christian philosophy. His work shows the particular influence of Plato, and illustrates how much the author of the Symposium contributed to Christian thinking about alcohol.
    The Pedagogia commenced with a brief history of what the Christian canon permitted the faithful to drink. In the beginning, Clement argued, the natural, temperate, and healthy beverage for the thirsty was water, because water was supplied by the Lord to the Hebrews on their journey to the promised land. However, once they had reached their destination, indicated by the presence of the giant grapes, it became a sacred duty to drink wine, a duty confirmed by Jesus, who compared wine to his own blood, and “to drink the blood of Jesus is to become partaker of the Lord’s immortality.” Having established a Christian obligation to drink, Clement proceeded to examine how this obligation should be met. He was of the opinion that the duty to consume (with the exception of sacramental wine) varied with age. Young Christians should be kept away from recreational drinking altogether, for it caused their “members of lust” to come to maturity sooner than they ought. “The breasts and organs of generation,” he explained, “inflamed with wine, expand and swell in a shameful way, already exhibiting beforehand the image of fornication.” Such tumescence was inevitably accompanied by “shameless pulsations.” Ergo youth plus alcohol equaled un-Christian behavior. Proceeding from adolescents to adults, Clement recommended that the latter steer clear of wine during meals and while at work, but that they might take a cup to ward off the cold evening air. The elderly, however, and Clement was of advanced years at the time of writing, were advised that wine was the “milk of old age” and that they should drink every day for the sake of their health, in order to “warm by the harmless medicine of the vine the chill of age, which the decay of time has produced.”
    Lest Christians were tempted to disregard his guidelines, Clement provided a portrait of the damage drink could wreak. Heavy topers who ignored the rules were distinguished by their red demonic eyes, like those of corpses, which signified that they were dead to both the Word and the Lord. They made an ugly, if instructive, spectacle: “You may see some of them, half-drunk, staggering, . . . vomiting drink on one another in the name of good fellowship.” Their red eyes rolling and seeing double, these monsters found it impossible to stay upright or speak anything but “maudlin nonsense.” “It is well, my friends,” Clement concluded, “to make our acquaintance with this picture at the greatest possible distance from it, and to frame ourselves to what is better, dreading lest we also become a spectacle and laughingstock to others.”
    Clement also addressed the matter of women drinking, on which he also followed Plato. While female Christians must, of course, drink sacramental wine, they should otherwise be kept away from the fluid: “An intoxicated woman is great wrath.” Sexual discrimination in terms of access to wine was a retrograde step. Women had played a prominent part in the early church, enjoying an equality they were denied by other faiths. This freedom, however, was eroded as the Christian church grew in power and sophistication, and shaped its doctrines to Hellenic models, which accorded a diminished status to the fairer sex. Clement did, however, differ from his Greek authorities on the matter of fine wines. He warned good Christians not to fret if they could not get their hands on “the fragrant Thasian wine, and the pleasant-breathing Lesbian, and a sweet Cretan wine, . . . and Mendusian, an Egyptian wine, and the insular Naxian, the ‘highly