# Oino-theology: Dionysus against the Crucified



## RamistThomist (May 24, 2008)

This is a parody of Nietszche by means of using a typology of wine.* This is from David Bentley Hart's magnificent book, _The Beauty of the Infinite_.


Oino-theology

Not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication, brute absorption into the turba, anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb.* The wine of Dionysus is no doubt the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness…the wine repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy, slaughter, warfare, and rapine.The wine of Scripture on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Gen. 27:28; Deut. 7:13) and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love for God (Ex. 29.40); it is the wine that cheers the hearts of men (Ps. 104.15); the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Is. 55:1-3); the drink of lovers (Song 5.1) and the very symbol of love (7.2, 9); it is moreover the wine of Agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana—a wine of the highest quality—when the kingdom showed itself “out of season.”* Of course Nietszche was a teetotaler and could judge the merit of neither vintage, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at oino-theology should betray a somewhat pedestrian palate.* David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 108-109.


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