When written history begins, all civilized and semi-civilized people, and many savages besides, are found drinking some sort of fermented liquor, wine, cider, or one of the many kinds of beer. Back of written history, tradition has it that the practice was from immemorial time. No people had handed down a story of an early past when such liquor was not an integral and familiar part of each day’s diet, usually with meals. It is true that the Greeks said that Bacchus-Dionysus came from Asia, bringing the Vine, the youngest of the Gods, and that some scholars have held that this indicated the memory of a time when the primitive Greeks were wineless wretches. The argument, however, will not hold water. For, in the first place, even if we imagine an early time before the Greeks drank wine, there is nothing to prove that they did not know some other sort of fermented stuff, as the Gauls did before Rome conquered them. And, furthermore, people in the Iliad and Odyssey drink wine but seem to know nothing of its God; it was familiar but it was not yet holy.
Besides being everywhere, fermented liquor was everywhere used in much the same way. It was an article of daily diet, so much so that no meal was complete without it. At feasts and festivals it was drunk more freely. Drunkenness was extremely rare. The Old Testament assumes that people had to “rise up early in the morning” and “continue until night” before wine would “inflame them,”[37] and denounces those persistent enough to do so. It was the Greek custom to mix their wine with water, several parts of water to one of wine. Schliemann speaks of an inscription recording a law of one of the Ionian cities which prescribes penalties for drinking neat wine. One of the early Babylonian codes of law prescribes severe penalties against the keeper of any wine shop (an Englishman would call him a “publican,” an American a “saloon keeper”) in which a disturbance occurs. The reader should be warned, however, that the danger of disturbance was no doubt quite as much due at that early time to the presence of numbers of men not known to one another, as it was to the drinking that went on there. At all events, the Hebrew and the Greek examples are enough to prove the attitude of the earliest historical time toward the instances of drunkenness (apparently rare) which they saw. No sooner had the keen Greek mind developed itself and begun to analyse than it laid down the general principle of temperance as one of the chief virtues. In the particular case of fermented drinks which we are now considering, Belloc has neatly remarked that “It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined.”[38] So much for the historical background.
Given the ancient use everywhere of fermented drinks, given also the recognition of the rare evil of habitual drunkenness, it is instructive to note that before the sixteenth century there is (with one exception) no record of the habitual use of distilled liquors in Europe and the Near East, and (again with one exception) no record of the idea of the sinfulness of drink.
First as to distilled liquors. Distillation of beverages was known in ancient China. The earliest European navigators to visit Tahiti found it practised by the savages there, which would indicate the probability of its great antiquity in that stagnant, primitive society. The word alcohol itself is of Arabic origin, like many similar words, such as alembic, algebra, &c. The sweet, aromatic, liqueurs made by mediæval monks (Benedictine by the Benedictines, Chartreuse by the Carthusians, &c.), are hardly exceptions to the rule inasmuch as they are essentially cordials rather than beverages. Brandy (burnt-wine, brant wine, brandevin, brandy wine) was known in France from the fourteenth century but seems to have been drunk chiefly as a cordial, as it still is in that country to-day. At all events, the scanty references to it indicate that it was little used. The one considerable exception is the use of whisky (usquebaugh, pronounced whiskybaw) among the highland Scotch and the Irish. With these people whisky was traditional. The ancient Irish epics of Cuchulain and Finn are full of references to it, as the Homeric poems of references to wine. While the debate over the date of the Irish epics may cheerfully be left to specialists, it is certainly clear that they long antedate the sixteenth century. Like wine, beer, and cider among the other nations of Europe, whisky among the Irish certainly dates from before the commencement of written history. But, in Europe, before the sixteenth century, to Ireland and the Scotch highlands its use was confined.
That the use of fermented liquors was sinful was an unknown idea, quite as unknown as we have seen the use of distilled liquors to have been. Previous to the sixteenth century, we find ascetic individuals or select orders renouncing wine, but always, like true ascetics, either with the idea of making their abstention a distinguishing mark, or with that of renouncing pleasures lawful or even necessary to the community at large for the sake of special practice in self-control. Thus among the ancient Hebrews certain men would dedicate themselves to be “Nazarites to the Lord,” and as such would vow never to drink wine or to cut the hair or beard. The wine cup was no more evil than the scissors, abstention from both was merely the distinctive sign of a peculiar dedication. Just so, ascetic Christians would renounce wine except in the sacrament; St. Dominic is an instance. He was teetotal for years, although he finally gave up the practice. Here the idea was that of complete devotion to the service of God. Even entirely lawful and proper pleasures were to be freely laid aside by an individual in order that all fleshy desires, as such, might be “mortified,” and that the soul should not risk being swerved even by a hair’s breadth (through an instant’s delight in “creatures”) from complete and utter devotion to the Creator. Ascetic Christians were even more apt to give up eating meat than drinking wine. And, of course, none but the most frantically heretical Christians ever maintained that there was anything sinful about eating meat as such. Such renunciations were merely two among many forms of self-imposed “discipline.” In the same spirit a devout layman, like St. Louis, might abstain from marital intercourse during Lent. Apart from the practice of a general asceticism, the ancient and the mediæval worlds knew of but one great example of fear and hatred for wine. That appalling exception was the doctrine of Mohammed.
Within Christendom itself, however, the theological and moral influence of Islam was slight. The only one of the various Mohammedan innovations in morals which had even a brief and partial echo among Christian men was the Prophet’s prohibition of images. With regard to the point under discussion, the use of wine, Mohammed’s teaching failed to commend itself to our ancestors. Instructed in Christian tradition, with the marriage in Cana and with the sacrament continually before them, the teetotaller fanaticism took no hold upon them. The chroniclers speak of it merely as an oddity, like the Jewish taboo against pork—which the Mohammedans also copied.
So matters stood until the great sixteenth century break with tradition. When the convulsions of the religious wars had ceased, Scandinavia, the Northern Germanies including Holland, and especially England, were seen in definite opposition to what was left of the moral unity of Europe. The break was different in degree, for England preserved the essential catholicity of her national Church, although well-nigh smothered under a mass of Protestant innovations, whereas the Northern Germanies lapsed altogether. Nevertheless at the time the break seemed final in England as well. There had been no such sharp change of direction, no such conscious rejection of the immediate past, since Constantine accepted the Faith. It might even be said that the sixteenth century break was the greater of the two, for the sixteenth century innovators despised their ancestors as the early Christians had never despised the pagans. With the theological debates which determined this capital change we are not here concerned for their own sake, but only for the effect which the acceptance of the Protestant dogmas produced upon the morals and therefore, in the end, upon the social structure of Christendom.
The Catholic possessed and, of course, still possesses an inclusive, reasoned, scheme of ethical teaching. This ethical scheme had been taken over by the Church from the ancient Greeks, and especially from Aristotle. To the Aristotelian ethic had been added (like a superstructure which enlarges rather than disturbs the original design of a building) the Christian theological virtues and their attendant vices. Under this broad scheme, serious moral offences were classified under one or another of the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust.
This ethical structure, composed jointly by the Greek genius and the Christian revelation, Protestantism has so destroyed that the average Protestant of to-day, even when educated, cannot so much as tell what the seven deadly sins may be. Few Protestants, if forced to think by Socratic questions, will fail to agree as to the reality of all seven. Nevertheless, in practice, Protestants have ceased to consider most of them as sins at all. Let the reader who may be inclined to doubt so sweeping a pronouncement merely take the trouble to question a few of his friends. If he prefers to approach the matter through general rather than particular instances, let him consider for a moment the industrial society of to-day, together with the universal and bitter quarrel between “capital” and “labor” which has arisen in that society. Then let him remember that modern industrialism had its birth in England—a country Protestant in manners and morals where the essentially Catholic character of the national Church itself has been so much ignored and misunderstood. Let him further remember that, outside of England, the industrial system has taken deepest root in the Protestant Northern Germanies and in the Protestant United States. In spite of its material success, it has been but partially imitated in Catholic countries from these Protestant models. After reviewing these obvious and indisputable facts, let him recall that for centuries not one out of a hundred Protestants, even among the educated, has ever been clearly told that such things as avarice, sloth, and envy are sins. Then let him deny, if he can, the ruin that Protestantism has made in what was once the symmetric structure of Christian morals.
In place of inclusive, reasoned, ethical principles, the Protestant set up fragmentary taboos. On account of his rejection of Christian tradition, he was driven to build upon the Scriptures alone. In none of the canonical books could he find the ethical principles of the New Testament, with their implications, built up into a coordinated manual of ethics. Moreover, the early, formative Protestants vastly preferred the Old Testament which showed the ancient Jews in the taboo stage of morals, to the specifically Christian traditions of the historic Church. Taboo is the stage in which morals are not a matter of reasoned general principles of conduct, but consist merely of disconnected prohibitions of specific acts. Of course, Catholicism has its taboos, such as abstinence from meat on Fridays, but these are marks of distinctive religious observance rather than general rules of conduct. In his Bible, which he had stripped naked of tradition, the Protestant found the ancient Jewish taboos impressively codified, by contrast with the Christian principles scattered through the New Testament. With his profession of Christianity, his rejection of Christian tradition, and his intimate admiration for the ancient Jews, his ethical course was clear. That part of Catholic morals which was not capable of expression in hard and fast taboos he would not actually disown but would gradually allow to be forgotten. So it has been with reference to avarice and envy, for example. Accordingly we see the great prizes of power and social distinction awarded as the result of successful avarice in the pursuit of wealth; envy rampant, and sloth unashamed both in the “ca-canny” labourer who restricts his output, and in the rich who are no longer held by custom to perform any service or duty in return for the economic power lodged in them. On the other hand Protestantism concentrates its moral fervour upon the element in traditional Christian morals which can be even approximated through taboos. Hence illicit sexual intercourse and excess in eating and drinking are particularly condemned. As time went on, since the ill effects of over-eating were less immediately obvious than those of drunkenness, this last has come to stand alone with adultery and fornication as the targets for Protestant moral attack. To-day educated Protestants will sometimes tell you that a Christian life consists chiefly in refraining from women other than one’s wife and from drink!