Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess

To a certain Egyptian hermit the devil promised that he would trouble him no more, if only he would commit one of three sins. The choice was this: murder, adultery and drunkenness. “Commit some sin: either kill a man, or commit adultery, or get drunk, and after that live in peace. I shall not trouble thee.”

The hermit thought: shall I kill a man? — I am afraid, for this is of itself a great sin, which by the divine law is punished with death, and by the civil law also. Shall I commit adultery? — it is shameful to destroy the purity of the body and to defile it with a filth hitherto unknown. But to get drunk would seem not to be a great sin, for a drunken man sleeps it off and becomes sober again. I shall get drunk, so that the devil trouble me no more, and then I shall live in peace in the desert.

And so he carried his handiwork to the city, sold it, and went into a tavern. There he became drunk. By the devil's working the drunken man fell into talk with a shameless harlot; he was enticed and fell with her, and in the very act of the sin her husband came upon them and began to beat the man who had dishonoured his wife; and he answered with blows, overcame him and killed him.

So that hermit began with drunkenness, then committed adultery, and at the last committed murder also. Sober, he feared these sins and shunned them; drunk, he committed them and destroyed the ascetic labour of many years. Only by true repentance was he able to regain what he had lost, for by God's mercy there is restored to the man who turns in repentance the former worthiness that was lost through sin.

See how drunkenness drives a man to sins and, by destroying the virtues, robs him of salvation. “Drunkenness, if it find anything in a man — virginity, shame, reason, meekness, humility — will cast it all into the abyss of lawlessness.” Shall not a man lose salvation and the heavenly inheritance, when drunkenness cuts him off from every virtue? The apostle speaks truth: “...nor drunkards... shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:10).

The abbess Taisia remembers: “Once Father John of Kronstadt and I were driving in a carriage over the Nikolaevsky bridge, from which the driver had been told to turn to the left. When our carriage came level with the chapel, along the embankment, on the left side, a funeral procession appeared. The coffin was drawn by one horse, and those accompanying it were no more than seventeen or nineteen people; each of them was plainly to be seen, so that it was not hard to make them out. Father John's face suddenly changed, and he began to gaze intently at the funeral procession. Since it went along the embankment beside our carriage on my left side, Father John, the better to see the procession, leaned towards me, so that I could not but notice the changes that showed in his face. At last the procession turned another way, and Father John, as soon as he had grown calm, crossed himself and said to me: ‘Truly, how heavy is the death of one held by the passion of drunkenness.’ Thinking that he was speaking of the dead man and that he had recognised those accompanying him, I said: ‘You must have known him, Father.’ No, he answered, like thee I see him for the first time, nor do I know those accompanying him; but I see the demons rejoicing at the death of one held by the passion of drunkenness.”