Psalm 77[78] is a lengthy narrative of the relationship between God and Israel as it evolved from Egypt and the Exodus to the time of David. Several verses are devoted to Israel’s infidelity to and defiance of God and then to God’s wrath against his people. But then things could change: “But the Lord awoke like someone asleep” (v. 65), and he renewed his covenant with Israel.
The motif of God’s needing to be awakened recurs several times in the Psalms; “Wake up, rouse yourself for my cause” (Ps 34[35]:23; “Rouse yourself: why do you sleep, O Lord? Wake up, do not reject us forever!” (Ps 43[44]:24; “Look, rouse yourself on my behalf!” (Ps 58[59]:5); “When you are roused, you despise their image, as one does a dream after waking” (Ps 72[73]:20). And there is, of course, that moment in the Gospels where the Lord is asleep in the little fishing boat and a storm arises and the disciples have to wake him up: “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” (Mk 4:38) A cry that many of us may be making, given these stormy days in the Catholic Church….
Ps 77[78]:65 offers an especially vivid image–one might even call it a conceit–that attracted Augustine’s attention:
And the Lord was awakened as if he were asleep (Ps 77[78]:65). The Lord seems to be asleep when he gives his people into the hands of those who hate them and who say to them: Where is your God? (Ps 41[42]:11). He was awakened as if he were asleep, like a strong man drunk on wine. No one but the Holy Spirit would dare to say this about God! The meaning is that when the Lord does not come to the aid of people as quickly as they think he should, it appears to wicked mockers that he is sleeping too long, like a drunk. (Augustine, EnPs 77, 39; PL 36, 799)
At the beginning of Book 16 of the “City of God,” Augustine undertook to explain the prophetic significance of the story of Noah’s nakedness and the actions of his three sons (Gen 9:18-27). This story is one of several etiologies in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, narratives that explain the origins or causes of things, in this case of ethnic groups. Noah appears as the originator of agriculture, in particular of wine-growing, to which he falls victim, becoming drunk and lying naked. His son Ham, father of Canaan (that is, of Canaanites), sees his father’s nakedness and tells his brothers of it. They, however, out of respect for their father, will not look on his nakedness but cover him. The story ends with blessings on Shem and Hapheth and a curse on Ham.
Augustine was convinced that all such Old Testament stories had as their hidden meaning the prophetical anticipation of the mystery of Christ and the Church which he regarded as the key that unlocks the single mystery of all the Scriptures. So all the elements of this story “are laden with prophetical meanings and covered with prophetical veils.” It will no doubt be surprising that Augustine took Noah’s nakedness to be symbolic of Christ’s passion, a claim made in the City of God, 16, 2, but explained at much greater length in his Against Faustus the Manichean, a work written to defend the Old Testament against the Manichean repudiation of the Jewish Scriptures as too “carnal.” Augustine tries to rescue them by setting out the spiritual meanings that lie beneath the literal senses. Here is his typological interpretation of the story of Noah’s nakedness.
As for the vineyard that Noah planted, by which he became drunk, and that he was naked in his own tent, who does not see that this represents the passion of Christ suffering among his own nation? For the mortality of Christ’s flesh was laid bare, to Jews a stumbling-block, to Gentiles folly, but to those called, Jews and Gentiles alike, represented by Shem and Japheth, the power of God and the wisdom of God, because God’s folly is wiser than men and God’s weakness stronger than men (1 Cor 1:23-25)….
Go on, then, you servants of Ham, with your malicious objections to the Old Testament Scriptures! Go on, you who despise the naked flesh from which you were born! For you would not be able to call yourselves Christians unless, as foretold by the prophets, Christ had come into the world and had drunk from his own vineyard that cup that could not pass him by (see Mt 26:42), and unless he had slept in his passion in the drunkenness of the folly that is wiser than men, and unless, by God’s hidden counsel, there had been laid bare that weakness of mortal flesh that is stronger than men. For if the Word had not taken up that weak flesh, the Christian name, in which you too boast, would not exist on the earth. (Contra Faustum, Book XI, 23-24; PL 42, 267)
The stunning phrase, for which all that has been prelude, is “in ebrietate stultitiae”–in the drunkenness of folly, the drunken folly of the Cross.
Paul Murray, O.P., has written a book that shows the importance in early Dominican spirituality of the theme of spiritual drunkenness, and he wonders if this Augustinian phrase might have inspired St. Catherine of Siena when she wrote of Christ as drunk with love. “O priceless Love! You showed your inflamed desire when you ran like a blind and drunk man to the opprobrium of the cross. A blind man can’t see, and neither can a drunk man when he is fast drunk. And thus he [Christ], almost like someone dead, blind, and drunk, lost himself for our salvation.” She also said that when his critics said that Christ was a drunkard, they were right because he was drunk with love for sinners (Paul Murray, The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness [A&C Black, 2006], p. 164.)
Augustine cited many times this passage: “They shall be made drunk with the plenty of your house; and you shall make them drink from the torrent of your pleasure” (Ps 35[36]:9), and maybe I will have a chance to say more about that at another time. Suffice it here to say that he did not think this drunken pleasure had to wait until heaven.
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