Sober Intoxication of the Spirit: Filled With the Fullness of God

By Raniero Cantalamessa O.F.M. Cap.

"These are not drunk, as you suppose" (Acts 2:15) ―Peter preaching to the crowd after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

We tend to overlook Peter's opening words to the crowd that first Pentecost morning, to our own peril. His denial of drunkenness in the wake of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit should stop us in our tracks. What was going on here? How did the apostles experience the Holy Spirit? What was he teaching them? How was he empowering them? What does this scene in the streets of Jerusalem mean for us today?

Father Raniero Cantalamessa offers pastoral advice and leads the reader through passages of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church to remind us of the incalculable power of the Spirit available to us. This spiritual "intoxication" is an infilling through the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and the action of God that purifies us of sin, renews the heart and enlightens the mind. As St. Augustine said of the Spirit, "He found you empty and he filled you. I like this kind of intoxication. The Spirit of God is both drink and light."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781635822861

Book preview

PREFACE

This book is a collection of teachings and meditations given at national and international meetings of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The only exception is the last chapter (We Were All Made to Drink of One Spirit) which was a meditation delivered to Pope John Paul II’s Pontifical Household and the Roman Curia.

The chapters relate to different phases of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal from its beginnings to the present, which explains the varying tones and some unavoidable repetitions of the same theme.

I dedicate this book first and foremost to my brothers and sisters in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal because much of it was born of their prayer and their inspiring love for the Word of God. The charismatic renewal, or, as we say in Italy, the renewal in the Spirit, describes the special grace diffused in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. More significantly, it also describes the path of salvation presented in Scripture to the whole Church and to every believer: He saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5).

Because of that, the reflections in this book are not intended for just one particular ecclesial group but for all those who feel a need to open their lives more fully to the powerful breath of the Spirit which is blowing through the Church today as in a new Pentecost.

I am grateful to St. Anthony Messenger Press and to Servant Books for the opportunity to share these reflections with my brothers and sisters in the United States and in other English-speaking countries with whom I have shared so many times of deep prayer and joyful proclamation of the gospel. I am also glad to share these reflections because I am indebted to them: it was in the United States—New Jersey, to be precise—that in 1977 I myself received the grace of the baptism of the Spirit.

CHAPTER ONE

"Let Us Drink the

Sober Intoxication of

the Spirit with Joy!"

In 1975, the day after Pentecost, at the close of the World Congress of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Pope Paul VI delivered an address to the ten thousand participants in St. Peter’s Basilica. After reading his official address, the Pope spontaneously added:

In the fourth-century hymn by St. Ambrose that we read this morning in the breviary, there is a simple phrase that is difficult to translate: Laeti, which means with joy, bibamus, which means, let us drink, sobriam, which means soberor temperate, profusionem Spiritus, which means the abundant outpouring of the Spirit. Laeti bibamus sobriam profusionem Spiritus. This could be the motto for your movement: its plan as well as a description of the movement itself.¹

The Church has thus outlined a plan for us through the words of her chief pastor. We cannot ignore one word of this text, and we should seek to deepen our understanding of its meaning as a whole, especially the meaning of the Latin words referring to the sober outpouring or intoxication of the Spirit.

Sober Intoxication in the Fathers of the Church

The Pope indicated where he had found this idea: in the writings of Saint Ambrose, one of the Fathers of the Church, that inexhaustible treasure house of the living tradition of the Church. I would like to lead you through that treasury of Tradition to discover what the Fathers of the Church meant when they spoke of the sober intoxication of the Spirit. Was this the idea of an isolated bishop or something more than that?

In looking for the answer to that question, I made a surprising discovery. There was a time in the life of the Church—for about a century—when all of Christendom was experiencing a spiritual intoxication, an inebriation of the Holy Spirit. Several voices from this chorus of Tradition can help us understand the kind of intoxication the Pope meant in his address.

In 348 the bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, commenting on the words of Peter at Pentecost—These are not drunk, as you suppose (Acts 2:15)—said to the catechumens:

They are not drunk in the way you might think. They are indeed drunk, but with the sober intoxication (nephalios methē) which kills sin and gives life to the heart and which is the opposite of physical drunkenness. Drunkenness makes a person forget what he knows; this kind, instead, brings understanding of things that were not formerly known. They are drunk insofar as they have drunk the wine of that mystical vine which affirms, I am the vine, you are the branches (John 15:5).²

The inebriation that comes from the Holy Spirit thus purifies of sin, renews the heart in fervor and enlightens the mind by a special knowledge of God—not a rational but an intuitive, experiential knowledge, accompanied by inner joy.

From Jerusalem let’s go to Milan. The Pope used a verse from a hymn of Saint Ambrose, but this is not the only time that this bishop of Milan spoke of a sober intoxication of the Spirit. Preaching to neophytes he said:

Every time you drink, you receive the remission of sins and you become intoxicated with the Spirit. It is in that sense that the Apostle said, Do not get drunk with wine... but be filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18). He who becomes intoxicated with wine staggers, but he who becomes intoxicated with the Holy Spirit is rooted in Christ. How truly excellent is this intoxication which produces the sobriety of the soul!³

The Christians in Milan had the same experience as did those in Jerusalem: The Holy Spirit, when received in the sacraments and especially in the Eucharist, gives the soul a kind of intoxication that has nothing disordered or superficial about it. Rather this intoxication takes the soul beyond its normal experience, beyond its poverty and powerlessness, into a state of grace where there is no room for doubts, regrets or self-absorption but only for joy and thanksgiving. The soul is rooted in Christ.

The Golden Age of the Church

Another voice from Tradition, Saint Augustine, counsels Christians newly baptized on Easter:

The Holy Spirit has come to abide in you; do not make him withdraw; do not exclude him from your heart in any way. He is a good guest; He found you empty and He filled you; He found you hungry and He satisfied you; He found you thirsty and He has intoxicated you. May He truly intoxicate you! The Apostle said, Do not be drunk with wine which leads to debauchery. Then, as if to clarify what we should be intoxicated with, he adds, But be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart (see Ephesians 5:18ff). Doesn’t a person who rejoices in the Lord and sings to Him exuberantly seem like a person who is drunk? I like this kind of intoxication. The Spirit of God is both drink and light.⁴

Saint Augustine asked himself why Scripture had used such a daring image as intoxication. He concluded that it is because only the state of a man who has drunk so much as to lose his mind can give us an idea—even though it is a negative one—of what happens to the human mind when it receives the ineffable joy of the Holy Spirit. The mind recedes and becomes divine, becoming intoxicated with the abundance in the house of God, i.e., tasting something of the goodness that is to come in the heavenly Jerusalem.⁵ When spiritually intoxicated, a person is out of his mind not because he is bereft of reason, as is the case with wine or drugs, but because he passes beyond reason into the light of God.

These quotations from Tradition are enough to give us an idea of the understanding of Christian life at that time. Notice that the remarks did not apply to the life of a privileged few, the mystics, but applied to all baptized believers. (The remarks were normally made to catechumens and neophytes!) We are clearly dealing with a charismatic Christianity in which people fervently believed, along with all of the New Testament, that grace is the beginning of glory and makes possible even now a kind of direct experience of God.

The pastors of the Church, far from being afraid of this enthusiasm and trying to rein it in, nourished it and became its promoters and its pastoral guides. Historians generally call this the golden age of Church history, but they do not seem to wonder where this extraordinary flowering of genius in the Church came from, that is, the magnificent doctrines in the writings of the Fathers, that incomparable ability to spiritually read the Scripture so as to draw out nourishing food for the life of the whole people of God.

All of that happened because the Holy Spirit flowed freely in the Church—like honey in a honeycomb, to use an image that was well known at the time. Required procedures (the channels of grace!) had not yet been rigidly institutionalized by human treatises, laws and canons. The confidence of the Church was not in the efficiency of its organization—in being a perfect society—but in the presence of the Holy Spirit in her midst. The Church was a spiritual society, a body animated by the Holy Spirit while visibly structured around the bishops.

The complete and definitive acknowledgement of the divinity of the Holy Spirit that occurred at this time gave the Church—almost as a reward—the experience of a new Pentecost. This was a time when a bishop (and not just a simple theologian!) like Gregory of Nazianzen could exclaim to his people:

How long are we going to keep our light hidden under a bushel? Now is the time to set the light [the Holy Spirit!] in the lampstand so that it can give light to the whole church, to souls, and to the whole world.⁶

Less than two years later, in the Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, the profession of faith in the full divinity of the Holy Spirit finally entered into the Apostles’ Creed; the great light was placed on the highest lampstand of the Church.

Troubles, however, were many at that time, and some were serious: heresies, conflicts between churches and minor schisms. These did not stop the work of God or cause the Church to retreat. In Saint Paul’s words, the Church was more than a conqueror, thanks to the One—the Holy Spirit—who comforted her, who gave her strength and consolation. It was as though there was a fiery volcano at the center of the Church, which purified and cleansed everything with its molten lava and did not allow the weeds created by the sins of human beings to grow on its slopes.

When Paul VI proposed the ideal of a sober intoxication, the highest leader of the Church was asking us—as well as all Christians—to revive an experience of spiritual enthusiasm in today’s Christianity similar to that which made the fourth century the golden age of Christian history.

Spiritual Sobriety in the New Testament

The Fathers of the Church spoke about intoxication, but they did not elaborate very much on what they meant by sober. Rather they referred to Scripture itself, which often speaks of the virtue of sobriety or temperance. It was clear to them what a sober intoxication meant because they were using the same language as the Bible; their words had the same meaning as they had for Paul.

This is not the case for us. We have lost the sense of that combination of attitudes that the Bible calls sobriety. The meaning of this word has been reduced to a vague kind of moderation in speaking or in drinking. We must therefore rediscover its meaning, examining the New Testament with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Sober(sōphrōn) simply means healthy, whole or prudent. In the Bible, however, the word signifies something more than simple common sense, balance or self-control. In Romans Paul says, "Do not be haughty [phronyntes], but associate with the lowly; never be conceited [phronimoi] (see Romans 12:16). In this text being sober is the equivalent of being humble, of not exalting oneself, of keeping a realistic sense of one’s limitations, of not forgetting that everything is a gift and that every good thing has been received (see 1 Corinthians 4:7). So, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:31).

Elsewhere Paul speaks about moderation when dealing with the pneumatics, that is, the charismatics who, in their enthusiasm for the Holy Spirit and for His powerful manifestations, have a tendency to let themselves drift into a certain kind of quietism or into superficiality, thus neglecting active participation in the community:

For if we are beside ourselves [thus, intoxication or spiritual ecstasy], it is for God; if we are in our right mind [sober], it is for you. For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (2 Corinthians 5:13–16)

What does the apostle mean here? He means that the spiritual intoxication from God, through prayer, should be translated into active, charitable commitment to the brothers and sisters. If it is not, it is suspect.

Paul himself understood the spiritual ecstasy of praying in tongues (he said he spoke in tongues more than all