The Feast of Unleavened Bread : When Drinking Is a Sacrament

I’d chosen a small island with direct flights from Athens for a quiet week in the Aegean, imagining, I suppose, that it would be inaccessible to everyone in the world except me. Needless to say, the beaches were crowded by day, and by night the narrow white-washed alleys of the island’s one small town throbbed with disco.

An Athenian friend of a friend told me of a few remote beaches in coves difficult to reach by land. Local fishing boats called on them, but none had a jetty or quay to receive the harbor craft I saw listing out of port every morning, crammed with tourists and tape players. She gave me directions to one I could reach on foot. “There’s even a bar of sorts,” she said.

Next morning, with book and beach-mat, I climbed a high ridge a mile or so behind the town, passed a herd of goats making what they could of the scrubby pasture on the far side, and then followed a barely visible track as it twisted down through coarse grass and rushed toward the sea. The ridge, curving behind me, extended down into the water, isolating a beach of fine sand. It was deserted except for a fisherman beating his catch of octopus on a rock, slapping them down, rubbing them against the rough surface and dashing a crock of seawater over them from time to time. I had no urge to take a closer look and settled at a distance to read and to sun myself.

What appeared to be a collection of flotsam was arranged against the side of the hill to give shade. Rickety posts sunk into the sand supported a canopy of reeds over a few wooden chairs and tables, bleached and partly rotted by sun and sea-spray. It was the bar, and after a while I went over and sat down at one of the tables. By then the octopus beater had left and I could hear nothing but the ripple of tranquil water. A small sail grazed the horizon, far away where sea and sky melded together in a blue haze.

A boy brought me some wine, pale golden and mildly resinated. Without my asking he also brought a few olives and a hunk of dense, slightly sour bread. A ray of sunlight, piercing the reeds overhead, was shattered by the wine glass. It was hot; I was drowsy. The distant sail was now at hand, and, once close enough, a man jumped down to swim and wade ashore. It could have been Dionysus himself, stepping from his raft, or Noah, released from his ark and relishing again the feel of sand between his toes.

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I broke the bread and sipped my wine, thinking how richly they had sustained and shaped life around that sea. Most of us have been taught to show special respect for bread and wine; we shrink from throwing out bread even when it’s stale, and the respect we have for wine is clear from the whole fuss we make about choosing it, buying it, serving it. We receive guests with bread and wine--but then the role of bread and wine in our lives is older than history. The Eucharist itself is rooted in the far more ancient belief that to eat bread and drink wine was to partake of the body of the corn god and the blood of the vine god. “The drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus,” wrote Sir James Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” “is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament.”

Sacrament or not, joining one with another to break bread and drink wine is the most basic act of community. Athenaeus, a 3rd-Century Greek writers,uggests that civilization began when men came together to eat food rather than fight over who would possess it. Describing how an early king had received a group of traveling companions, Athenaeus says, “. . . wine seems to possess a power that draws to friendship by lightly warming and fusing the soul. Hence they did not even ask their guests too soon who they were, but postponed that until later, as though they honored the mere act of hospitality, and not the individual and the personal in us.”

As Greeks, they would have understood that the strangers moving among them could well have been gods. We are entertained by the ancients and their mythological gods, but the Greeks used myth and allegory, symbol and paradox to come to terms with truths too profound and too disturbing to be revealed, let alone understood, in any other way. They certainly grasped the meaning of their world better than we do ours.

Wine, in any case, was at the heart of their mythology and of their universe. It was symbolic of renewal, a metaphor for Dionysus and, therefore, for the cycle of death and rebirth, for the duality of being. Dionysus, born of a god and a mortal mother, drew heaven and earth together. Wine was man’s portion of the divine, promising him life at its most intense.

It often meant life in a more literal sense too. A liter of wine, with roughly 600 calories, replaced not only lost moisture but also the energy he burned in hard physical labor. In our mechanically fossil-fueled, calorie-conscious age we forget that most people once struggled to obtain all the calories needed to fire their bodies, their principal engines of physical power. Wine, as much as bread, was an important, a vital, food.

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And it could heal as well as nourish. The ancient Greek knew nothing of the bacterium and the bacillus, but he knew from experience how effective wine could be as an antiseptic. Hippocrates had little but wine to rely on for most of his remedies.

So potently did wine already bind sustenance and healing to religion that the highly charged act of offering it was only further heightened when wine became the core of economic power. In the 6th Century BC, when trade had overtaken marauding and mutual raiding as the chief source of revenues of the Greek city-states, wine was the principal commodity of exchange. It brought to ancient Greece a wealth that made possible the great surge in the arts and sciences we know as the Classical Age.

But as one might expect, given the duality of Dionysus, there was a dark side to wine’s exuberant 6th-Century success. As vineyards expanded and flourished, subsistence farmers and their families were dispossessed. They migrated to the towns--as in all times since--where they yearned angrily for what they had lost. In desperation they sought comfort from their nature god--lending Dionysus’s cult a new and violently rebellious aspect. The ascendant landed aristocracy, fearful, instigated or at least willingly acquiesced in the tyrannies that sprang up in the Greek world at that time in response to this social ferment.

Dionysus, the healer and nourisher, provider of relief and comfort, inspiration to potters and poets alike, then revealed himself as a god of personal liberty too. Or that, at least, is the way the oppressed perceived him. It was an attribute so potent that Nietzsche, 2,500 years later, borrowed the same mythic vocabulary in making Dionysus his symbol of genius, of the force that encourages each one of us to respond to the world, freely, in his or her own way. Isn’t it clear why authority everywhere demeaned Dionysus, presented him as a god of foolish, drunken revelry and either subverted his cult in order to tame it or ruthlessly repressed it as obscene?

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The Jews meanwhile used wine for the blessing of God’s name, but did not see it as a metaphor for Him. Yet they too set bread and wine apart from other foods. While the obligatory blessing over bread extended to all other food to be eaten with it at the same meal (because bread is man’s mainstay) the blessing over wine is more than a form of grace. The family table, to a strictly observant Jew, is an altar at which wine is fundamental to the fulfillment of his religious obligations. It is at his table, silver wine cup in hand, that he welcomes the Sabbath into his house, greets every festival and sanctifies the celebration of all family occasions.

Such a controlled and formal role for wine seems at first far removed from the Greeks’ perception of it. But a closer look at the major festival of Passover, celebrated at the first full moon after the spring equinox, reveals what once can only have been an allusion to birth and to life’s origins in the sea--a baked egg is placed on the table prepared for the Seder, the Passover meal, which begins, for most Jews, with a hard-cooked egg served in a pool of salt water. The obligatory bitter green herbs, the kind of salad herbs usually picked wild in Mediterranean countries, are a reference to nature itself.

Passover, interestingly enough, is the only Jewish festival at which those present are obliged to drink wine copiously--at least four cups each. And like the Dionysiac rites, one might add, it is a festival that celebrates liberty: “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt,” runs one verse of the Haggada, the story of the Exodus read at every Seder, “but now we are free.”

It was at just such a Seder, celebrating birth, freedom and life’s renewal, that Jesus pointed to the wine and said “This is my blood.” His disciples would have understood, surely, the Judaic significance of those words--Jews believe blood is life, is sacred and belongs to God alone. But how would those words have reverberated, as they later did, in the ears of a Greco-Roman world with its own perception of wine and life and divinity? A world in which our division of the religious from the secular would have seemed artificial?

At the ancient religious rites, wine--man’s portion of the divine--had brought the celebrants into the presence of the god. Even when Christian, much of the Greco-Roman world continued to think of wine that way. In his book “Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100--400,” Ramsay MacMullen describes the many adherents to the new Christian creed who would take wine to the tombs of the martyrs on saints’ days and, to the great concern of Ambrose and Augustine, drink there till evening, believing that without wine their supplications would not, could not, be heard.

But for them, spiritual descendants at least of the men who had drunk from Athenaeus’s common bowl, of those who, as strangers, had received wine from the hands of a king, who had already known wine as a god, as life itself, Holy Communion through wine become sacred, through wine become the blood of God, through wine become life itself, needed no impossible new leap of faith.

I came out of a doze to find the man from the boat standing almost beside me, under the canopy of reeds. He had dried himself on a coarse cotton cloth already dangling from a string in the sun and was stepping into a pair of old pants he must have left at the bar. He was obviously at home there but looked around as if choosing a place to sit; so I invited him, with a gesture of my open hand, to join me and share my bottle. Another glass appeared, and when I had filled it he raised it to me.

” Yassas ,” he said, laughing. “Your health.”

” L’chayim ,” I replied. “To life.”