RELIGION AND ALCOHOL

The Paths of Christianity and Islam

The relationship between alcohol and religion began thousands of years ago. As we have seen, much of the earliest evidence of alcohol, whether in China or the Middle East, has been found in contexts suggesting it was used in religious ceremonies of various kinds. In many ancient and classical cultures, gods were associated with various alcoholic beverages, especially beer, wine, and mead; Bacchus and Dionysus are only the best known. Alcohol was not the only commodity to have dedicated deities—in Greece, Demeter was the goddess of bread, fruit, and vegetables—yet wine and beer were more consistently linked to religion. Why that was so is a matter of speculation. According to one common argument, the feelings of relaxation, light-headedness, and disorientation that result from drinking increasing volumes of alcohol (a progression that is prosaically called mild to severe intoxication) were sensations so different from drinkers’ quotidian experience that they were thought of as “otherworldly.” Alcohol elevated the drinker to sensory dimensions that were understood as having spiritual or religious significance.

Positively or negatively, the association between alcohol and religion may be thought of as a historical constant, but Christianity and Islam—two religions that emerged in the same millennium—forged unique, divergent, and persistent relationships with alcohol. Christianity elevated one alcoholic beverage—wine—to a position of centrality in its symbolism and rituals, while Islam is the first major religion known to have rejected alcohol entirely and to have forbidden its followers to drink alcoholic beverages. There were precedents for both. On one hand, wine was central to the ceremonies of the cult centered on Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, and integral to Jewish doctrine and ceremonies; on the other hand, some pre-Christian Jewish sects and secular laws (such as Sparta’s) prohibited the consumption of alcohol. But these latter were marginal or short-lived bans. In contrast, Christian and Muslim doctrines on alcohol have had long-term meaning for their millions of followers and have endowed alcohol with much of the religious freight it carries to this day.

The direct background of the Christian position on alcohol was the Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), which contains many references to wine and the effects of drinking, as well as a reference to beer in a Greek version (but not in the Hebrew and later translations).1 In the New Testament, however, the grapevine is the most frequently mentioned plant, and there are many references to wine; but beer is not mentioned at all, even though it was widely consumed in the eastern Mediterranean in the first centuries of the Christian era.

There is a debate among some biblical scholars and commentators about the meaning of various terms and how biblical references to alcohol should be interpreted. Although some biblical texts can be read as treating the consumption of wine in a positive light, others are neutral, and yet others are indisputably negative. One text in Genesis treats wine in a matter-of-fact way, as integral to dining: “And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine.”2 Another text celebrates wine: “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.”3 The therapeutic uses of wine were also recognized. Timothy advises, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine other infirmities,”4 while Luke alludes to wine’s antiseptic qualities: “And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.”5

Yet other biblical texts appear to warn against any drinking, such as, “For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink.”6 Many of the biblical texts dealing with wine make a clear distinction between moderate and excessive drinking and condemn the latter: “Be not among winebibbers [drunkards]; among riotous eaters of flesh”7 and “Likewise must the deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre.”8 In these cases, excessive drinking was condemned alongside other forms of excess, such as gluttony and money-grubbing. It is likely that the abuse of wine, not wine itself, was the specific target of condemnation, just as food and money were not, in themselves, subjects of criticism.

These ambiguities were not a major issue for religious commentators until the nineteenth century. Until then, alcohol was widely consumed—not least because it was a safer alternative to the water then available for drinking—and the moderate consumption of beer and wine was viewed in a positive light. There was an assumption that any negative message about alcohol in the Bible was aimed at excessive consumption or some other form of misuse, not at consumption itself. When the Bible was quoted, it was almost always to warn against drunkenness and its associated sins. But in the 1800s, supplies of safe drinking water and other nonalcoholic beverages became much more widely available in Europe and North America, and alcohol ceased to be necessary as an alternative to the water many populations had access to. Put simply and briefly (the issues are explored in more detail in Chapter 9), the availability of alternatives to alcohol made total abstinence from alcohol the viable option it had not been until that time. One result was that much of the attention and criticism that had been directed at drunkenness and at the negative effects of habitual heavy drinking shifted to the consumption of any alcohol at all.

Nineteenth-century biblical scholars, working in a cultural climate increasingly receptive to temperance and prohibitionist ideas, began to reinterpret the treatment of alcohol in the Bible in light of the widespread acceptance of the notion that the consumption of even the smallest volume of alcohol led to sin and social disorder. If drinking alcohol led to immorality, they asked, why did Jesus turn water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana? Why did Jesus drink wine? And why would wine symbolize the blood of Christ in communion? Seizing on the existence and apparent ambiguity of many different Hebrew words used to refer to alcoholic beverages, they adopted a “two-wine” theory: that the positive, approving references to “wine” in the Bible referred not to wine—the beverage resulting from fermentation—but to unfermented grape juice, whereas the negative references referred to actual wine. For them, the miracle at the marriage at Cana was that Jesus turned water not into wine but into grape juice. (Cynics might see this as a more modest miracle.) In contrast, they argued that negative examples of wine involved the real thing, as when Noah drank so much wine that he stripped naked, and when Lot’s daughters so befuddled their father with wine that he was not aware he was having sex with them. In these and other cases, supporters of the two-wine theory argued, alcohol was clearly at work, erasing the line between moral and immoral behavior.

Many of the Christian denominations founded in the 1800s (such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Salvation Army) forbade their adherents to drink alcohol and rallied to the two-wine interpretation of the Bible. There was also a movement to celebrate communion in mainstream denominations with grape juice, or what they designated by the oxymoron “unfermented wine.” The place of alcohol in the Old and New Testaments is still a subject of lively debate. Some commentators have added up the positive, negative, and neutral references to beer and wine in the Bible and concluded that they are predominantly negative; whether that is true, and whether it means anything if it is, is a matter of interpretation and individual decision.

What is clear is that wine was of great importance to both Jews and Christians. The book of Genesis reports that when the Great Flood had receded and the earth needed to be replanted and repopulated, the first plant cultivated by Noah was not cereal for making bread but a grapevine to provide wine. Having cultivated his grapes, Noah proceeded to make wine, and this was apparently a good thing. But the narrative ended badly when Noah drank too much, stripped off all his clothes, and fell into an intoxicated stupor in his tent. His youngest son, Ham, came in and saw his father naked, and for this offense Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan.9 This is a complicated story (commentators suggest there was some form of sexual violation by Ham of his father), and there are several explanations why Canaan, rather than Ham, bore the punishment. But what is important, in this context, is that what appeared to start out as the unproblematic consumption of inherently good wine led to breaking God’s laws and a family tragedy that is emblematic of human life in the new world after the flood.10

The tragedy was prefigured in some Jewish commentaries on the story of Noah and wine that set out the problems of excessive alcohol consumption more explicitly. According to one, Noah was about to plant his vineyard on the slopes of Mount Ararat when Satan offered to help in exchange for a share of the produce. Noah agreed, and Satan promptly slaughtered, in turn, a sheep, a lion, an ape, and a hog (presumably taken from the ark’s passengers, which would have made the reproduction of these species problematic) and fertilized the vineyard with their blood. This was meant to demonstrate to Noah that after the first cup of wine, a drinker’s behavior is as mild as a sheep’s, but that after a second cup, the drinker becomes as courageous as a lion. The third cup of wine makes one behave like an ape, and after the fourth, the drinker acts like a hog that wallows in mud.11

Other Old Testament texts associated drunkenness not so much with bad, crude, or bestial behavior but explicitly with sin. In the case of Lot’s daughters, the offense was incest, when they plied their father with wine so that he would sleep with them in order “to preserve seed of our father.” They appear to have calibrated the amount of wine well so that Lot was not so drunk that he could not perform sexually yet was sufficiently intoxicated that when each daughter slept with him on consecutive nights, “he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.”12 We might add, “nor who she was.”

Coexisting with such examples of the abuse of wine are clearly positive statements. When Moses led the Hebrews from Egypt into Israel, he dispatched scouts, and they returned with a bunch of grapes so big and heavy that it took two men to carry it on a rod on their shoulders. While the Jews might well have valued eating juicy, fresh grapes after their trek, it is as likely that they relished the thought of drinking wine, the highly valued beverage of the Egyptian elite that had enslaved them. The Hebrews’ god enjoined them to enjoy wine (and bread, oil, and meat) at annual festivals13 and ordered priests to make offerings of bread and wine: “And the meat offering shall be two tenth deals of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savour: and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, the fourth part of an hin.”14 Perhaps the most positive statement about wine was the affirmation, “Wine maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.”15

The importance of wine to the Hebrews is also strongly suggested by the threats that God made to those who disobeyed his laws: they would not suffer eternal roasting in some far-off hell but the much more immediate penalty of having no wine. That, at least, seems to be implied in threats to make the vineyards barren: “The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh. . . . There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone,”16 and “I will surely consume them, saith the Lord: there shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade.”17

Beer was far from neglected, as we should expect from a society where beer was widely consumed.18 Yahweh is said to consume the equivalent of 2 liters a day (and more on the Sabbath), and there are other positive references to beer. There is one suggestion that beer should be given to “him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”19

In their overall positions on alcohol, the Old and New Testaments can be read as representing fairly conventional restatements of the attitudes adopted by ancient and classical writers: wine and beer had the potential for either good or evil, and their effects depended on how they were consumed; as beverages, they were to be judged on their effects, not on any quality intrinsic to the beverages themselves. This is not surprising, as alcohol consumption was common among Jews (including the authors of the New Testament). Wine was integrated into festivities such as Purim, it had a place at Passover seders (including the Last Supper), and like their Greek and Roman colleagues, Jewish physicians employed wine as both internal and external therapies for a wide range of physical and emotional ailments.20

While among Jews wine had banal, therapeutic, and symbolic presences, among Christians it took on a more intensely critical meaning. The doctrine of transubstantiation, which was articulated in the first centuries of Christianity, holds that at the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, even though they keep their outward appearances. In the fourth century, St. Augustine quoted Cyprian as saying, “For as Christ says ‘I am the true vine,’ it follows that the blood of Christ is wine, not water; and the cup cannot appear to contain His blood by which we are redeemed and quickened, if the wine be absent; for by the wine is the blood of Christ.”21 Although this referred only to wine blessed for the Eucharist, and not to the wine consumed on a daily basis, it would not be surprising to find Christian doctrine taking a more stern view than other religions of the abuse of wine. Excessive drinking not only had the common range of personal and social consequences, but for Christians it involved the misuse of a substance charged with religious meaning. Perhaps it is for this reason that, under Christianity, we see the emergence of more systematic regulations governing the drinking of wine and other alcoholic beverages.

Christianity introduced Christ as a figure who, in many respects, resembled a new wine god. Christianity adopted many of the symbols of existing beliefs, and there were many similarities between Christ and other wine gods who were still venerated in the first centuries of Christianity. Dionysus, for one, was born of a god and a human woman, and he, too, performed the miracle of turning water into wine—although Dionysus filled only three jars with wine, not six, as Christ did. In the early centuries of Christianity there was a complex interplay between Christ and wine gods. A fifth-century mosaic from Paphos, in Cyprus, depicts the infant Dionysus in a tableau that echoes representations of the adoration of the magi in Christian iconography.22

So important was wine to the image of Christ that the first miracle performed by Jesus was the transformation of water into wine at the celebration of a marriage. When Mary, his mother, observed that the wine had run out before the festivities were over, Jesus called servants to fill six jars with the water that would normally be used for washing and then instructed one servant to give a bowl of the water to the man leading the festivities. Miraculously (and apparently without any words or gestures on Jesus’s part) the water had become wine. There is a sense in which the miracle partially prefigured transubstantiation: when Jesus presented the bowl to the host, it appeared still to contain water, and he had to taste it before he recognized it as wine. (We might infer from this that it was white wine.) As with transubstantiation, the appearance had not changed, although its essential properties had.

In addition to the basic miracle, Jesus had turned bad water (intended for washing, not drinking) into high-quality wine; the host observed that while the best wine was usually served first, before the guests became too intoxicated to appreciate its quality, the wine Jesus provided was better than the wine that had been served first and had run out.23 Was it wine? The word used might be open to several meanings, but the context—a marriage celebration—is the kind of occasion at which wine was typically served. It is worth noting that water, whether or not it was intended for washing, was not considered appropriate for the festivities.

For many centuries, until the 1800s, religious scholars and the clergy did not question that the wine referred to in the Bible was the alcoholic beverage made by fermenting grape juice. This is demonstrated by the use of wine in communion and by the way Christ was represented for hundreds of years. One genre of religious painting was “Christ in the wine-press,” in which he is shown standing in a vat where grapes are crushed and pressed for their juice. Christ is usually depicted bearing a cross and wearing a crown of thorns, with blood running from the wounds on his head and body into the grapes that he is pressing with his feet. The red liquid running from the vat is thus a blend of Christ’s blood and the grape juice, showing the essential convergence of the two. There can have been no doubt in the mind of the artist or of the audience of these works that what was in play here was what we know as wine.

Such was the centrality of wine to Christianity that it became associated with the religion. In fact, in the first few centuries of the Christian era, some Christian writers echoed the prejudices of the Greeks and Romans and portrayed beer as an inferior and harmful beverage. Eusebius, the fourth-century Christian historian, wrote that Egyptian beer “was both adulterated and cloudy. The Egyptians used it as a drink, before the Lord lived among them.” (There is a hint here of the common notion, contested by some historians, that converts to Christianity shifted their drinking preferences from beer to wine.) About the same time, St. Cyril wrote that beer was “a cold and cloudy drink of Egyptians which could cause incurable illnesses,” whereas wine “gladdened the heart.” In turn, the fifth-century Christian thinker Theodoret wrote that Egyptian beer “is an invented beverage, not a natural one. It is vinegary and foul-smelling and harmful, nor does it produce any enjoyment. Such are the lessons of impiety, not like wine which ‘gladdens man’s heart.’”24 Such characterizations of beer seem to have died away by the sixth century, and later Christian criticisms of beer referred to its consumption in pagan festivals or to simple excessive consumption. The way was clear for the Christians to embrace beer and for the church’s religious houses to produce beer as well as wine.

Over time, the importance of having wine for communion led the Christian church and its institutions, such as religious houses, to became significant sponsors of an extensive wine industry. Many vineyards were planted on monastic lands, and monasteries became important commercial producers of wine. Only small volumes of wine were needed for communion, and wine was an integral part of the diet in some religious orders and for the church hierarchy; but many monasteries also produced wine for sale to the better-off strata of secular society. By the time the Roman Empire had reached its farthest extent about AD 400, the church had helped extend viticulture and winemaking to many parts of France (including now-famous regions like Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhône Valley), as well as to present-day England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Poland.

Thanks largely to the church, viticulture and wine production were well established throughout much of the Romans’ western empire when Germanic populations (Franks, Burgundians, and others) from central and eastern Europe began to invade during the fifth century. By about AD 500, each major Germanic group had settled and established political control over parts of what had been the western Roman empire. It was the Romans who designated them “barbarians,” and the word was soon given its meaning of “culturally inferior.” The names of some individual populations—in particular the Vandals and Huns—later took on more specific but equally negative connotations. As we have seen, the Romans objected not only to their languages but also to their drinking customs: for the most part, the Germans (like every other group, apart from the Greeks and Romans) drank beer and were reputed to drink it to excess on a regular basis. Julius Caesar wrote that the Germans were suspicious of wine and that they initially opposed its importation into their regions because they feared it would make men effeminate.

If they were opposed to wine when they first encountered it, the Germans quickly overcame their qualms, and their elites were soon consuming wine as well as beer and mead. In the second century, the Greek philosopher Posidonius described their morning meal as consisting of roasted meat, milk, and undiluted wine.25 By the late ninth century, King Alfred the Great referred to beer as one of the basic necessities of life (along with weapons, meat, and clothes) in Britain, but in the following century, the English abbot Aelfric laid out the hierarchy of beverages: wine for the rich, ale for the poor, and water for the poorest.26 Among the Celts, who inhabited Gaul, the situation was similar, and beer was also widely consumed. In the sixth century, one physician wrote that “it is on the whole extremely suitable for all to drink beer or mead or spiced mead, since beer which has been well made is excellent in terms of benefits and is reasonable. . . . Similarly also mead made well, as long as the honey it has is good, helps a lot.”27

Although Germans and Celts drank a range of alcoholic beverages, Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian of the fall of the Roman Empire, echoed the worst Roman prejudices (and amplified them with his own) when he described the “barbarians.” They were, he wrote, “immoderately addicted” to “strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted . . . into a certain semblance of wine.” But, he added, some of the barbarians who had “tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterwards of Gaul, sighed for that one delicious species of intoxication.” He added that “the intemperate thirst for strong liquors often urged the barbarians into the provinces on which art or nature had bestowed those much envied presents.”28 In short, Gibbon thought the barbarians invaded some regions of western Europe primarily to get their hands on wine, not for its sensory pleasures, but purely for its ability to intoxicate more rapidly than beer.

Were Edward Gibbon’s views of these beer-guzzling, wine-hankering tribes shared by west Europeans as they faced the incursions by the peoples from the east? If so, they must have feared for the vineyards that had been initially planted under Roman sponsorship, then extended by Christian missionaries and religious houses, and for the wine that was increasingly regarded as a symbol of civilization and Christian piety. If it were true that the barbarians lived in crude disorder but loved wine, they could easily be imagined consuming the existing stocks in one drunken binge before letting the vineyards fall into ruin.

Yet when the German peoples invaded western Europe, they did not so much interfere with the production of wine as dislocate the established patterns of commerce. Trade declined as the Roman commercial system broke down and as the empire fragmented and was replaced by the smaller political units that were established throughout the region. The process did not affect ale, as it was consumed where it was made, but the wine trade was one of the casualties. We can only imagine the impact of political instability on Bordeaux’s young wine industry. In the fifth century alone, the Bordeaux region was invaded successively by Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and Franks. Then the Gascons from Spain arrived in the seventh century (giving the region the name Gascony), and in the eighth century the Franks were back. Such dramatic changes in political power and the shifting alliances that went with them were hardly conducive to the continuity of existing commercial links or the development of stable new ones.

This does not mean that the newcomers were hostile to wine. Even if they did not expand existing vineyards, and even if the wine trade was disrupted when the Roman Empire collapsed, the various German tribes maintained wine production more or less intact. Visigothic legal codes set out heavy penalties for damage to vineyards, and the Vikings, whose name has become a byword for theft and pillage and whom historians long treated as an early medieval chapter of the Hell’s Angels, became active participants in the wine trade of northern Europe. Many of the rulers of the new political entities transferred vineyards to monastic orders. Ordono, the Gothic king of Portugal, did so in the ninth century, and a hundred years later the English kings Eadwig and Edgar granted vineyards to the monks of several abbeys.29 Wine was clearly a valued commodity in the diets and medical preparations of these peoples, not simply something to be quaffed until the drinker fell into an intoxicated stupor, as Edward Gibbon suggested. Contemporary recipes called for wine in the preparation of stewed meat and fruit, and elite attitudes toward wine after the collapse of the empire were little different from the advice of Roman and Greek commentators. A seventh-century Anglo-Saxon text, for example, advised that “wine is not the drink for children or the foolish, but for the older and wiser.”30

The promotion of wine by the Christian church reinforced the cultural status of wine and its consumption by the German and Celtic elites. Most lived in northern Europe, where cereals were easily cultivated but where the climate made viticulture either marginal or impossible. Wine had to be imported, sometimes over short but sometimes over longer distances, and transportation costs made wine more expensive than beer. Even where wine could be made, producers of the middling classes likely did not drink it on a daily basis because of its value as an exchange commodity. Beer, then, remained the drink of the masses outside the major wine-producing regions. It was a nutritious beverage (a given amount of grain provided more nutrients as beer than as bread) and safer than much of the water available for drinking. Both these considerations help explain why there were no attempts to restrict the production of ale so as to conserve stocks of grain for bread. At various times, authorities tried to limit the area of land under viticulture in order to preserve land for cereals (and, later, to restrict distilling of cereal-based spirits so as to reserve grain for bread). But until the early twentieth century, when temperance ideas influenced government policy and beer no longer had the nutritional value of earlier styles, no one tried to restrict beer production so as to conserve cereals for baking.

At various times in the early Middle Ages, climatic and other factors led to poor grain harvests. Drought reduced crops across much of Europe in the 860s, and in the following decade, locusts devoured the ripening grain throughout much of Germany. For lack of grain reserves, poor harvests led to shortages and famines, local or regional, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Although it is unlikely that many deaths can be attributed solely to starvation, many people died of disease as malnutrition weakened their immune systems. Warfare, too, could result in grain shortages, often because outside armies deliberately destroyed crops in the field. In any period when grain was in short supply, ale production must have declined, and populations must have been forced to drink the only alternative: water. It is probable that polluted drinking water contributed to the diseases and mortality that attended periods of famine.

It is impossible to know how much ale Europeans drank on a daily basis in the early Middle Ages. Consumption must have varied broadly on a regional basis, as well as by class, gender, and age. One calculation suggests that, in the eighth and ninth centuries, monks drank 1.55 liters of ale, while nuns drank 1.38 liters. Among lay consumers, the volume of ale was calculated as varying between 0.6 and 2.3 liters of beer (and 0.6 to 1.45 liters of wine), a wide range.31 In all cases, the volume of alcohol would have increased during festivities, though perhaps it decreased during periods of penance and fasting, and it would certainly have decreased in years when grain harvests were poor.

In the early medieval period, ale was made to be consumed within days of being brewed, not to be kept for any extended length of time. It was generally brewed in small quantities in each household, usually by women as part of their responsibilities for baking bread and preparing food more generally. There are scattered references to brewing from all parts of Europe at this time—from England, Iceland, Spain, France, and elsewhere—but few provide much detail, probably because brewing was such a commonplace activity. In the eighth century, the emperor Charlemagne appointed a brewer to his court to maintain the quality of the ale, and he also enjoyed ale to celebrate military victories. Several English and Irish scholars complained about the poor quality of ale on the Continent, compared to what was available at home.32

The first large-scale brewing operations were set up in monasteries from the eighth century. Not only were monasteries wealthy enough to buy the equipment for commercial production, but they also owned the land that would provide the necessary supplies of grain. Beyond that, larger religious houses needed to produce more than a family household because they had to meet the dietary requirements of more people: the scores of monks in residence and the various travelers who might stay at a monastery. In contrast, a typical family household in much of western Europe comprised only four or five members, including women and children who did not drink as much ale as adult males.

One of the first religious houses to embrace brewing was the monastery of St. Gall (in what is now Switzerland). The buildings included three breweries—one for making ale for the monks; another, for distinguished guests; and a third, for pilgrims and paupers—but it is not clear if there was a quality distinction among the three ales. In general, monks were free to choose to produce wine or ale, and many seem to have made both, as well as other alcoholic beverages. In 843, the abbot of a monastery near Paris wrote that produce of all kinds was in such short supply that beverage production was difficult. There was a scarcity of grapes for wine, pears for making perry were unavailable, and a shortage of grain all but ruled out ale, so all that was left for the monks to drink was water. It is as clear a statement of the hierarchy of beverages as we could wish for.33

Many religious orders and houses prescribed daily allotments of wine and/or beer, but despite some attempts to standardize rules in the eighth century, there were many variations in what and how much was permitted. For some orders, the higher alcohol content of wine was problematic, as a ninth-century account of the founding of the monastery at Fulda, in Germany, makes clear: “Whilst he was explaining the Holy Rule to the brethren [the abbot] read out the passage which states that the drinking of wine does not befit the vocation of a monk, and so they decided by common consent not to take any strong drink that might lead to drunkenness but only to drink weak beer. Much later this rule was relaxed at a council held in the name of King Pippin, when, owing to the increasing numbers in the community, there were many sick and ailing among them. Only a handful of the brethren abstained from wine and strong drink until the end of their lives.”34 The synod of Aachen in 816 decided that the daily ration of alcohol in religious houses should be about half a pint of wine and a pint of ale. Examples such as these show that ale was considered fit for the Christian clergy. This policy marked a significant departure from the anti-ale positions that Christianity inherited from the Greeks and Romans, and it is even more significant in light of the centrality of wine to Christian doctrine and rituals.

There is some debate as to who produced the wine that seems to have flowed through Europe in quite generous volumes during the Middle Ages up to about AD 1000. Many historians have argued that the church, for which wine was symbolically so important and which needed regular supplies for communion, had almost single-handedly protected vines from the ravages of the easterners who invaded Rome’s western empire. But a more nuanced and positive view of the Germans themselves has undermined the facile contrast between images of pious monks tending vines and harvesting the grapes for the glory of God, on one hand, and scenarios of brutish pagans carousing drunkenly until they exhausted the supply of wine, on the other.

But did monks and priests really contribute more than secular landowners to the survival of viticulture during the early Middle Ages? Records of landownership by the church were kept more systematically and have survived better than those of individual secular owners, because the clergy were more literate and there was more continuity in ecclesiastical establishments and archives. In fact, we often know about many secular holdings only from church records that record that lay proprietors gave or bequeathed vineyards to the church. In the sixth or seventh century, for example, Ementrud, a Paris aristocrat, left property including vineyards to her entourage and to several Paris churches.35 In 764, when the monastery of St. Nazarius of Lauresham, near Heidelberg, was founded, it was given vineyards by two secular landowners. In the next century it accumulated many more from secular donors, and by 864 it owned more than 100 vineyards near Deinheim alone.36 We do not know what percentage of vineyards was owned by the church and religious orders and what percentage was in secular hands, but it is clear that the church was far from solely responsible for viticulture and wine production in this period—and perhaps not nearly as responsible for innovations in winemaking as many commentaries suggest.

Yet while we can recognize the probable significance of secular vine owners in this period, we must give full credit to the church for its role in extending wine production up to and beyond the end of the first Christian millennium. The importance of wine to the church ensured that, among other things, viticulture spread wherever Christianity extended its influence. As missions were established throughout central Europe, each planted vines for the production of sacramental wine—a pattern that would be repeated when Catholic missionaries extended their faith throughout Latin America and California from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Some of the monastic vineyards were extensive. In the early ninth century the abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés, near Paris, owned a total of 20,000 hectares of land, of which 300 to 400 hectares were in vines. The vineyards were scattered throughout the total estate, but they were located close to the Rivers Marne and Seine so that the wine could be easily transported to Paris, the single most important market in France. Each year the abbey’s vineyards, mostly cultivated by peasants who leased the land, produced about 1.3 million liters of wine, equivalent to 1.7 million modern bottles.37 This was production on a substantial scale.

Most church vineyards were much smaller, though, and were cultivated to provide what was needed for ritual purposes, to supply a priest or religious house with a daily ration of wine and enough for special occasions, and perhaps to allow some extra for the market. The only churches that did not have vineyards were located in regions where grapes would not grow or perhaps where viticulture was extensive enough that there was no difficulty obtaining supplies of wine. In more isolated areas that could sustain vines, priests were not only encouraged but sometimes ordered to plant them. The Council of Aachen decreed in 814 that every cathedral should have a college of canons, one of whose obligations was to cultivate vines.38

Between about AD 500 and 1000, various monastic orders were responsible for planting vines, and the number of vineyards in Europe rose substantially. Because the volume of wine needed for communion was very small, most of the wine produced directly by the medieval church was consumed on nonreligious occasions and became an integral part of the diet of the clergy. As we have seen, monks might have had about a liter and a half of alcohol (ale and/or wine) each day, and nuns had a little less. The rule of St. Benedict, which became the most influential model in western Europe, allowed a daily measure of wine for each monk, but in contrast with the strong positive association of wine with monks, St. Benedict conceded the ration only reluctantly: “Wine is no drink for monks; but since nowadays monks cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree upon this, that we drink temperately and not to satiety. . . . We believe that a hemina [about half a liter] of wine a day is sufficient for each. But those upon whom God bestows the gift of abstinence, they should know that they have a special reward.” In recognition of the medicinal value of wine, however, the prior could allow a sick monk to have a larger ration. The Benedictines drank ale when they did not drink wine.39

It is clear that wine and ale were firmly entrenched in the culture and diets of Europeans in the first millennium of the Christian era. The collapse of the Roman Empire did not diminish the popularity of wine, and the spread of Christianity extended viticulture. Even the so-called barbarians turned out to be defenders, rather than the ravagers, of Europe’s nascent wine industry. But if these great changes were no threat to alcohol, Islam was. Beginning in what is now Saudi Arabia, Islam quickly gained support throughout the Middle East and then began a journey of spiritual and military conquest much farther afield. Moving westward, it took in much of the northern fringe of Africa along the Mediterranean and by the eighth century had expanded to Sicily, to the Iberian Peninsula, and for a brief time, into southwestern France—areas where wine and beer (depending on the region) were integral to the diet.

The rise and spread of Islam is important for the history of alcohol because Islam represented the first example of a comprehensive prohibition policy that banned the production, distribution, and even consumption of alcohol. (More recent prohibition policies, such as the well-known national prohibition in the United States from 1920 to 1933, criminalized the production and sale of alcohol, but not its consumption.) Moreover, Islam’s prohibition policies proved to be remarkably successful, having lasted in many parts of the Muslim world for nearly 1,500 years. While it is true that alcohol is explicitly or implicitly permitted in some modern countries that are officially or predominantly Islamic, such as Turkey, there is very little alcohol consumption in many others, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. For their populations, drinking alcohol is simply out of the question, as it is for adherents of other religions that ban alcohol, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) in the United States. A key difference between Mormons in the United States and Muslims in countries that prohibit the consumption of alcohol is that Mormons choose to abstain from alcohol, whereas Muslims in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia are forbidden by law to drink alcohol and can be punished if they do so.

Islam was first implanted in regions of the Middle East where alcoholic beverages were widely consumed in pre-Islamic times and where some of the earliest evidence of wine and beer has been found. Initially, the Prophet Muhammad was no more hostile to alcohol than Jews and Christians were, but after a short time he forbade his followers to drink wine and any other fermented beverages. The reason was not because these drinks were evil in themselves—a position adopted by later advocates of abstinence—but because the weakness of humans led to excessive drinking and then to blasphemy, sin, immorality, and antisocial behavior.

The Qur’an contains a number of references, both positive and negative, to wine, and one scholar notes that a critical analysis of all references reveals that the Qur’an treats wine “with great ambivalence; the potent liquid that constitutes an abomination in one verse becomes a source of ‘good food’ in another.”40 But it is important to note that the texts of the Qur’an were “revealed” gradually over time, not as a completed corpus, and that later texts could abrogate earlier ones. Read in this way, the references to the Qur’an are less contradictory than when read in an achronological manner, and they are more consistent in their condemnation of alcohol than they might at first appear. Wine might be described as both an intoxicant and a wholesome food, but one text in particular has been understood as representing the final Muslim doctrine on wine: “Believers, wine and games of chance, idols and divining arrows are abominations, devised by Satan. Avoid them so you may prosper. Satan seeks to stir up enmity and hatred among you by means of wine and gambling, and to keep you from the remembrance of Allah and from your prayers.”41

This verse is thought to have been a response to conflicts within the Muslim community that were exacerbated by alcohol. One account explains Muhammad’s ban on alcohol as the result of his experience at a wedding. When he saw the guests drinking wine and joyfully celebrating the marriage, Muhammad praised wine as a gift from God. But when he returned to the house the next day, he saw that the guests had drunk too much, that their joy had turned to anger, and that the celebration had turned violent. Surveying the wreckage and the injuries, Muhammad cursed wine and thenceforth advised Muslims against drinking alcohol in any form. Such a narrative accords with a developmental model of the alcohol doctrine of the Qur’an, with one position being abrogated by another in the light of new information, insights, or guidance. Muslims who abstained from intoxicating beverages on earth would, however, have access to them in Paradise, which is depicted as flowing with rivers of delicious wine. But nowhere in the Qur’an are these two wines, the earthly and the heavenly, or the implications of consuming them, actually brought into a direct relationship.

The Qu’ran did not expressly forbid the consumption of alcohol, although it strongly advised against it. Later commentaries and the hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad) promoted the prohibition of wine consumption perhaps, according to some scholars, to strengthen Muslim identity and to allow Muslim leaders to control their populations more easily.42 Even so, there are two major lines of thought about alcohol in Islam. The dominant one is that any intoxicating drink, known as khamr, is forbidden to the faithful. They are liable to be punished if they drink it in any quantity or buy, sell, or serve it, but no one who spoiled or destroyed alcohol would suffer any punishment. In contrast, a minority school holds that khamr is made only from grapes, and only it is banned absolutely; other fermented beverages, made from ingredients such as honey and dates, are permissible, but intoxication from drinking these beverages is prohibited and punishable.43 There is a similar division over whether alcohol may be used for medical purposes. Most Islamic scholars agree that it may not, but others believe that it may be used under certain circumstances, notably when a patient’s life is endangered if he or she does not take alcohol in some form, such as in a medicine.44

Muhammad appears to have deterred wine production by limiting the kinds of vessels in which fruit juice could be made or stored. Only vessels made from skin were permitted, and gourds, glazed jars, and earthenware vessels coated with pitch were forbidden, although it is hard to see how any fruit or grape juice, whatever it was contained in, could be prevented from fermenting into wine, given the warm temperatures of late summer when fruit and berries were ripe, and the ambient yeasts that must have been present if there had been alcohol production before the ban was imposed. Muhammad’s wives made a potentially alcoholic drink called nabidh (traditionally made from raisins or dates and which may be alcoholic or nonalcoholic) for him in a vessel made of skin. “We prepared the Nabidh in the morning and he drank it in the evening and we prepared the Nabidh in the night and he drank it in the morning.”45

The twelve hours between preparation and consumption might or might not have been long enough for fermentation to begin, but it is unlikely that the resulting beverage would have enough alcohol in it to be classified as alcoholic today. The Qur’an not only forbade the consumption of fermented beverages but dealt with the situation where a Muslim did not know whether or not a liquid had fermented. Faced with nabidh on one occasion, Muhammad diluted it three times before he believed he was able to consume it.46 The implication might be that the Qur’an did not insist on absolutely alcohol-free beverages—perhaps a recognition of the likelihood that any fruit-based beverage would begin to ferment in a short period—but that, sufficiently diluted, an alcohol-bearing beverage could be consumed, as long as the drinker was sincerely uncertain whether any fermentation had taken place.

The Islamic prohibition of alcohol affected broad swaths of the Middle East, northern Africa, and southwestern Europe, regions where ale, wine, and other alcoholic beverages (such as date and pomegranate wine) were commonly consumed. Early Islam did not extend the ban on alcohol consumption to non-Muslims of Muslim-governed territory, and wine presses and other evidence of wine production have been found in many parts of the early Muslim world.47 Over time, the prohibition was enforced with varying degrees of rigor in different regions of the Muslim empire. It was probably more rigidly enforced in areas closest to the origins of the religion, but less so at the fringes of the Muslim world. In Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Sardinia, and Crete, for example, a number of policies succeeded one another or even coexisted, as some caliphs prohibited wine production in law but allowed it to continue in practice, even to the point of acknowledging the fact by taxing wine. Arab sources suggest that vineyards for wine production were widespread in southern Spain (especially in Andalusia) and in Portugal under Muslim rule. Islamic horticulture was so advanced that the number of recognized grape varieties increased, and some Muslim texts on agriculture included instructions on taking care of fermentation vats. Yet for all that some caliphs tolerated or turned a blind eye to drinking in parts of the Muslim world in the first centuries, others did not. In the tenth century, Caliph Ozman ordered the destruction of two-thirds of the vineyards of Valencia, in Spain; presumably the grapes of the surviving vines were to be eaten fresh or as raisins.

It was also in Spain, however, that Muslim legal scholars interpreted the prohibition on alcohol consumption in such a way as to permit it. They argued that the beverage referred to in the Qur’an was wine made from grapes and that it referred exclusively to that kind of wine. (The vineyards closest to Mecca were a thousand miles away, but wine from Syria and other places had been imported for consumption there before the ban on alcohol.) Therefore, they argued, wine made from dates was permitted. But if date wine was permitted, so was any wine (including grape wine) as long as it was no more intoxicating than (that is, had an alcohol level no higher than) date wine.48 Needless to say, this interpretation, which effectively undermined what seems like an unambiguous prohibition on alcohol, was not accepted by all Muslim scholars. It failed to answer the objection that even if drinking did not lead to drunkenness, it was certainly a distraction from pious thoughts.

Over the long term, there are many examples of Muslims accommodating the production and consumption of alcohol. In sixteenth-century Ottoman Crimea, for example, wine production was extensive, and vineyards were owned by members of both the majority Christian and minority Muslim populations. The Muslim state benefited from the taxes it imposed on these activities, but in order to maintain the fiction that Muslims had nothing to do with intoxicants, the tax was imposed on wine produced by Christians and on the grape juice produced by Muslims.49

Later experiences of prohibition—in twentieth-century Russia and the United States, for example—would lead us to think that the initial ban on alcohol in Muslim societies generated some resistance. Only the most determined efforts, combined with the adoption of the new faith, could have curtailed private, domestic production and brought about such a dramatic change in drinking habits. Yet some Muslim writers assert that whole populations rapidly gave up drinking: “In a matter of hours a whole city-state [Madina] had become abstinent and the most successful campaign that had ever been launched by man against alcohol dependence was miraculously achieved.”50

Within decades of the birth of Islam, the poet Abu Jilda al-Yaskuri wrote of his repentance of the old ways:

"I was once made rich by a choice wine,
[I was] noble, one of the illustrious men of Yaskur.
That [was] a Time whose pleasures have passed—
I have exchanged this now for a lasting respectability".51

The possibility of drinking seems to have been embraced by some Muslims in Spain, although it is thought that wine consumption was lower among them than among Christians.52 Muslims drank on occasions reminiscent of Greek symposiums: men gathered after the evening meal to drink wine, diluted with water, while relaxing on cushions. Wine was poured by serving boys, and the participants talked, recited poetry, and were entertained by female singers and dancers. Similar occasions were common among Jews in Muslim Spain, and they gave rise to a particular genre of poetry that celebrated the ability of wine to banish cares and bring joy.53 Later poems in the genre included Omar Khayyam’s Ruba’iyat, a long poem in praise of wine and love that included sentiments such as “I cannot live without the sparkling vintage / Cannot bear the body’s burden without wine.” More to the point, he cynically implied that illegal drinking (and sexual relationships) were common:

"They say lovers and drunkards go to hell,
A controversial dictum not easy to accept;
If the lover and drunkard are for hell,
Tomorrow Paradise will be empty."54

Compliance with the Muslim prohibition on alcohol must often have fallen short. As easy as it was to decree an end to production and consumption of alcoholic beverages, the raw materials needed to make them were in plentiful supply. Cereals that could be used for brewing ale were needed for baking bread, and grapes cultivated to be eaten fresh or as raisins could be crushed and fermented. If table grapes are not ideal for wine, they can still be fermented, and grapes that have begun to shrivel to raisins make wine with a higher alcohol content than grapes that are merely ripe. It is certain that alcoholic beverages were made and consumed clandestinely in the Muslim world despite the prohibition on them, although we cannot know how extensive resistance to the policy was.

However successful it was—and it seems to have been remarkably successful over the longer term—the Islamic ban on alcohol represented a radical break with historic and prevailing attitudes toward drinking. Although a few marginal Christian and Jewish sects had required abstinence from alcohol, the mainstream Jewish and Christian faiths not only tolerated but even encouraged drinking for reasons of nutrition, health, and conviviality. They were at one in condemning excessive consumption and drunkenness and in arguing that humans should resist the temptation to drink too much, and they provided penalties for those who proved too weak. But they did not consider the option of removing the temptation from the table, as Muslim doctrine did so effectively.

To make it clear that Christians should not consume alcohol to excess or to the point of intoxication, penitentials (guides to the penances that Christians should do if they acted immorally) included drunkenness among the various sins and offenses against God. Penances for this offense were generally light, such as spending three days without consuming wine or meat. This is a mild enough penalty when we think that wine or ale might be easily forgone for a couple of days after a bout of drunkenness, especially when it took the form described in one penitential: “It changes the state of the mind and the tongue babbles and the eyes are wild and there is dizziness and distention of the stomach and pain follows.” Yet if the penitentials treated ordinary drunkenness with relative lenience, they came down hard in some circumstances. Following a general pattern, the same penitential prescribed much more severe penances for the clergy than for laypeople, because priests were held to a higher standard of behavior. If a layperson spent three days without wine or bread, a priest spent seven days, a monk spent two weeks, a deacon spent three weeks, a presbyter four weeks, and a bishop five weeks.55

A Spanish penitential made further distinctions. A cleric who got drunk was to perform a penance of 20 days, but if he vomited, his penance was extended to 40 days; if he aggravated the offense by vomiting up the Eucharist (the communion bread), an additional 20 days were added. The penance for a layperson in these circumstances was less severe and set at 10, 20, and 40 days, respectively.56

The frequent references to drunkenness in the penitentials do not necessarily mean that drunkenness was common in the early Middle Ages, but they do show us that the church frowned on it, no doubt because intoxication was frequently associated with other proscribed activities, such as illicit sexual activity and blasphemy. From this point of view, it is easy to see why the writers of the penitentials regarded drunkenness by the clergy as especially horrifying. Perhaps, too, that is why the clergy figure so prominently in contemporary accounts of drunkenness. The bishop of Tours was said to be “often so completely fuddled with wine that it would take four men to carry him from the table.” The bishop of Soissons was said to have been “out of his mind . . . for nearly four years, through drinking to excess,” to the point that he had to be locked behind bars whenever royalty visited his city. Gregory of Tours complained that monks regularly spent more time drinking in taverns than praying in their cells.57 In 847, perhaps because of perceptions of widespread clerical drunkenness, the Council of Prelates ordered that any person in religious orders who habitually drank to the point of drunkenness should abstain from fat, beer, and wine for forty days. The council signaled its seriousness by including both beer and wine in the ban, effectively forcing an offending monk to drink nothing but water for more than a month.

Such penalties were part of the continuing battle that the authorities, religious and secular, continued to wage against excessive alcohol consumption. But it is notable that until the brief period from about 1914 to 1935, when several national governments experimented with prohibition policies, no non-Muslim authorities took the radical step of banning alcohol altogether. If anything, the rise of Christianity elevated one form of alcohol, wine, to unprecedented status, and it might be argued that in doing so, the church implicitly gave a nod to alcohol consumption more generally. Europeans did not need the blessing of the church before they drank, of course, and ale and wine became increasingly integral to their diets as the second Christian millennium opened.

NOTES

1. Max Nelson, The Barbarian’s Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe (London: Routledge, 2005), 75.
2. Genesis 14:18.
3. Ecclesiastes 9:7.
4. 1 Timothy 5:23.
5. Luke 10:34.
6. Luke 1:15.
7. Proverbs 23:20.
8. 1 Timothy 3:8.
9. Genesis 9:20–27.
10. Devora Steinmetz, “Vineyard, Farm, and Garden: The Drunkenness of Noah in the Context of Primeval History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994): 194–95.
11. Midrash Agadah on Genesis 9:21.
12. Genesis 19:32–35.
13. Deuteronomy 14:26.
14. Leviticus 23:13.
15. Psalms 104:15.
16. Isaiah 24:7, 11.
17. Jeremiah 8:13.
18. Michael D. Horman, “Did the Ancient Israelites Drink Beer?,” Biblical Archaeological Review, September–October 2010, 23.
19. Proverbs 31:6–7.
20. Randall Heskett and Joel Butler, Divine Vintage: Following the Wine Trail from Genesis to the Modern Age (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 88–97.
21. Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, bk. 4, chap. 21.
22. The mosaic is reproduced in Hugh Johnson, The Story of Wine (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1989), 58.
23. John 2:1–11.
24. Nelson, Barbarian’s Beverage, 75–76.
25. Ibid., 79.
26. Ibid., 87.
27. Ibid., 89.
28. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1994), 238.
29. Tim Unwin, “Continuity in Early Medieval Viticulture: Secular or Ecclesiastical Influences?,” in Viticulture in Geographical Perspective, ed. Harm de Blij (Miami: Miami Geographical Society, 1992), 37.
30. Ann Hagen, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food (Pinner, U.K.: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1992), 94.
31. Kathy L. Pearson, “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet,” Speculum 72 (1997): 15.
32. Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 26. See pp. 15–36 generally on the early Middle Ages.
33. Nelson, Barbarian’s Beverage, 104.
34. Eigil, Life of Sturm, www.Fordham.edu/halsall/basis/sturm.html (accessed June 13, 2012).
35. Marcel Lachiver, Vins, Vignes et Vignerons: Histoire du Vignoble Français (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 46.
36. Desmond Seward, Monks and Wine (New York: Crown Books, 1979), 25–35.
37. Lachiver, Vins, Vignes et Vignerons, 45–46.
38. Rod Phillips, A Short History of Wine (London: Penguin, 2000), 71.
39. See Seward, Monks and Wine, 25–35.
40. Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 1.
41. Qur’an 5:92.
42. Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, 43.
43. Nurdeen Deuraseh, “Is Imbibing Al-Khamr (Intoxicating Drink) for Medical Purposes Permissible by Islamic Law?,” Arab Law Quarterly 18 (2003): 356–60.
44. Ibid., 360–64.
45. Kitab Al-Ashriba (The Book of Drinks), no. 4977, http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/muslim/023-smt.php (accessed April 7, 2013).
46. Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, 35–36.
47. Lufti A. Khalil and Fatimi Mayyada al-Nammari, “Two Large Wine Presses at Khirbet Yajuz, Jordan,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 318 (2000): 41–57.
48. Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986), 28–29. It is not clear how alcohol content would have been measured at this time.
49. Oleksander Halenko, “Wine Production, Marketing and Consumption in the Ottoman Crimea, 1520–1542,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47 (2004): 507–47.
50. M. B. Badri, Islam and Alcoholism (Plainfield, Ind.: American Trust Publications, 1976), 6.
51. Philip F. Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 105.
52. Thomas A. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 80.
53. Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death, 19–25.
54. Omar Khayyam, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 68.
55. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 230.
56. Ibid., 286.
57. Itzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, AD 481–751 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 240.

Written by Rod Phillips in "Alcohol, A History", The University of North Carolina Press, USA, 2014, excerpts chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.