On Sobriety 1

¹Having in the foregoing pages dealt fully with the words of the lawgiver on drunkenness and the nakedness which followed it, let us proceed to carry on the thread of our discussion by treating of the topic which comes next in order, “And Noah returned to soberness from the wine and knew what his younger son had done to him” (Gen. 9:24). ²We are all agreed that soberness is most profitable not only to souls but to bodies. For it repels the diseases which arise from excessive self-indulgence; it sharpens the senses to their utmost acuteness and acts indeed upon the whole of our bodies by engendering readiness in every part and thus prevents them from succumbing in weariness, and lifts them up and relieves them and recalls them to their proper activities. In fact, every evil which has drunkenness for its author has its counterpart in some good which is produced by soberness. ³Since then sobriety is a source of the greatest profit to our bodies, to which the use of wine is a natural practice, how much more is it profitable to our souls, which have no relation to any perishable food? What human gift or possession is greater than a sober understanding? What form of glory—or of wealth or of political power—or bodily strength—or what among all the objects of human admiration, if only we may assume that the soul’s eye is nowhere suffused as by rheum or closed, but is able to open itself fully and completely? For at such times when with clarity of vision it gazes upon good sense and prudence in their true selves, it will have within its ken those ideal forms which are intelligible only to the mind, and in the contemplation of these will find a spell which will not suffer it to turn aside any more to aught of the objects of sense. ⁴And why should we wonder that sobriety and clear-sightedness in the soul is of higher worth than anything whose lot is cast among things created, for the bodily eyes and the light which our senses perceive are valued above measure by us all? We know indeed that many who have lost their eyes have lost their lives as well by their own free action, because they judged that death was a lighter evil to them than blindness. ⁵Well then, the mind has the same superiority to the eyes, as the soul has to the body. And if the mind be safe and unimpaired, free from the oppression of the iniquities or passions which produce the frenzy of drunkenness, it will renounce the slumber which makes us forget and shrink from the call of duty and welcoming wakefulness will gaze clear-eyed on all that is worthy of contemplation. The suggestions of memory will arouse it to decision and the actions to which these decisions lead will become its employment.