In the summer of 1945, Béla Hamvas (1897-1968), one of the greatest metaphysical thinkers of the 20th century, writes, practically in one breath The Philosophy of Wine. It „expresses the first quiver of a people who, harrowed and starved, sorely tried by front lines, concentration camps, and bomb shelters, have just reached the sunlight; curiously, it expresses not despair over the ruins, but an exuberant joy of life.”
A non-conformist, whose works were attacked and banned under the communist regime and were mostly published posthumously beginning in the early 1980s, Hamvas embodies in an immediately glib extended essay the tragedy of mankind, and how much better he’d be if he would just sit and share a glass or two of fiery Szekszárdi or green-golden Somlói.
Only tangentially an inventory of Hungarian wines, which are likely better today than at the time of writing, in this book Hamvas „prepares the reader to worship the Presence.” Boldly beginning by stating that he is writing a prayer book for atheists, it soon becomes clear that the terminology of religion (and likewise, that of wine) is a framework for describing the „sickness of abstract life.” For what is atheism but a religion of skepticism and materialism?
„People tend to believe that the cause of all troubles is sin. To them sin means that someone lies, steals, cheats, robs, kills, and fornicates. Their ignorance goes so far that they issue immensely grandiloquent laws, in which they even evoke the threat of the gallows. Although these laws are many thousands of years old, until now they have failed to yield any result.”
To Hamvas, „the infallible sign of bad religion is ‘existence without intoxication.’ The cause is a stiff fear of life, penetrated deeply into the soul.” By contrast, „Good religion (the vita illuminativa) means higher sobriety. The first sign of healing: seeing God is stones, trees, fruit, or stars: in love, food, and wine.”
As stated on the jacket, „The Philosophy of Wine is an apology for the rare, solemn instants of life, of ease, play, and self-forgetting serenity.” Set in any context, whether locked inside a crumbling post-war empire or skipping along our global culture of mistrust, it is an answer – at times humorous, at others playfully baiting – to the questions that dog us by day and night. When life seems wildly beyond our control, vast and unreasonable and even pointless, Hamvas smiles and invites us for a drink.
Available at:
Libri-Studium Foreign Language Bookstore
1052 Budapest, Váci u. 22.
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Publishing House:
EDITIO M Kiadó
