From Ritual Excess to Existential Compulsion
Alcohol has been present in Western societies for millennia, and excessive drinking is neither new nor uniquely modern. Yet alcoholism, as it is now understood, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. The difference lies not in physiology or access to alcohol, but in the symbolic, theological, and cultural worlds in which drinking occurs. What changes in modernity is not the substance, but the structure of meaning that once contained it. Alcoholism emerges when transcendence collapses but the human demand for consolation, communion, and release remains.
In pre-modern Western societies, heavy drinking existed within a sacred and communal world. Wine and ale were integrated into religious ritual, agricultural cycles, and communal feasting. Intoxication occurred publicly and episodically, tied to festivals, holy days, and social bonds. Excess was morally condemned, but it was not ontological. Drunkenness was understood as sin, temptation, or weakness of the flesh—conditions that presupposed repentance, confession, and reintegration. One fell, one sinned, one repented; one did not become an “alcoholic.” There was no stable identity organized around addiction, because the culture possessed mechanisms—ritual, sacrament, moral narrative—that allowed excess to be named, judged, and resolved.
This containment depended on a theological cosmos in which suffering and failure retained meaning. The Old Testament assumes human weakness without making it absolute. Figures such as Noah or Lot drink to excess, yet their intoxication does not define their being. The New Testament deepens the call to sobriety by contrasting drunkenness with watchfulness and life in the Spirit, but redemption remains possible. Intoxication is opposed, not because it destroys productivity or health, but because it substitutes for spiritual vigilance. Crucially, both Testaments assume a world in which transcendence remains operative. Sin presupposes return.
The conditions necessary for alcoholism as a structure emerge only with modernity. The Reformation collapses sacramental mediation and intensifies interior guilt, while the Enlightenment dismantles cosmic meaning and elevates the autonomous individual. Capitalism introduces time-discipline, productivity norms, and private leisure, displacing communal ritual. Drinking moves from feast to habit, from public ritual to private coping. Excess becomes continuous rather than episodic. The drinker no longer steps outside ordinary time into festival; instead, alcohol becomes a means of surviving ordinary time itself.
Modern alcoholism thus arises after the death of God, in Nietzsche’s sense: meaning collapses, but longing does not. Alcohol becomes compensatory rather than celebratory, offering temporary transcendence in a world stripped of metaphysical depth. Intoxication replaces prayer, communion, and Sabbath. Nietzsche foresaw this displacement when he argued that intoxication would replace faith once transcendence dissolved. Alcohol becomes a poor substitute for metaphysics, providing momentary relief from the weight of meaninglessness.
This shift produces a new kind of subject: the alcoholic as identity. Modernity invents a permanent condition—“I am an alcoholic”—that has no pre-modern analogue. Where pre-modern cultures offered confession, penance, and return, modernity offers diagnosis, management, and endless recovery. The alcoholic is no longer someone who sins or falls, but someone who is structurally broken. Redemption gives way to maintenance. The temporal horizon flattens: there is no feast and no fast, only repetition.
Wolfgang Giegerich’s account of modern soul life clarifies why alcoholism takes this form. Modernity forces meaning inward; contradictions that were once held symbolically must now be borne internally. Alcoholism arises when the soul refuses this inward burden and seeks chemical relief. Alcohol becomes externalized grace, a bodily solution to metaphysical weight. This is why modern alcoholism is compulsive rather than excessive, chronic rather than episodic. It is not Dionysian ecstasy but post-Dionysian exhaustion. The drink no longer opens the world; it numbs it.
Greg Mogenson’s courtroom metaphor further illuminates the modern condition. Modern psychology and culture subject the individual to perpetual judgment without absolution. Guilt is everywhere, forgiveness nowhere. Alcohol functions as an evasion of allocution—the speaking of one’s truth before judgment. Rather than confessing, enduring contradiction, or bearing responsibility without guarantee, the alcoholic drinks the verdict away. Alcohol suspends judgment, time, and self-recognition. Recovery culture oscillates between moral condemnation and medicalization, but both miss the deeper logic: alcoholism is not the refusal of rules, but the refusal of truth in a world without grace.
In this sense, modern alcoholism is not simply sin, illness, or excess. It is heretical. It represents a false soteriology—a misplaced faith in chemical transcendence after spiritual transcendence has withdrawn. Where the Spirit once consoled, alcohol now anesthetizes. Where ritual once structured excess, repetition now dominates. Where return was possible, only management remains.
Alcoholism in modernity is therefore categorically different from pre-modern drinking. Pre-modern societies knew excess without addiction, sin without identity, and suffering within meaning. Modernity produces addiction without ritual, identity without redemption, and suffering without transcendence. Alcoholism becomes the last sacrament in a disenchanted world, offering relief without salvation.
Brenton L. Delp