The Instructor 2.2.28

life slides toward corruption. Rightly, then, the Instructor, caring for our salvation, forbids most strictly: “Do not drink wine to drunkenness.” Why, you will ask? “Because,” it says, “your mouth will then speak crooked things, and you will lie as in the heart of the sea, and like a pilot in a great storm.” Poetry, having benefited from this, says: “And wine, which has might equal to fire, when it comes upon men, surges as the north or south wind surges the Libyan sea, and reveals all hidden things, a speaker of wrong words; wine is a slip for the drunken, wine a deceiver of the soul,” and so on. Do you see the danger of shipwreck? The heart is flooded by much drinking; and he likened the mass of wine-bibbing to the threat of the sea, in which the body, sunk like a ship, has gone down into a deep of disorder, buried under the huge waves of wine; while the pilot, the human mind, is carried around by the surge as drunkenness prevails, and, tossing at sea, grows dizzy in the darkness of the storm, missing the harbor of truth, until, striking hidden rocks, it runs itself aground and is destroyed in pleasures.