1071. The fact that he drank wine means that they wanted to explore religious questions can be seen from the symbolism of wine. A vineyard or grapevine, as shown, is a spiritual religion, or the people of a spiritual church. Grapes, and clusters and bunches of grapes, are its fruit, and they symbolize charity and the effects of charity. Wine, though, symbolizes the faith that grows out of charity, and everything that goes to make up faith. So a grape is the heavenly side of that church, while wine is the spiritual side. The former — the heavenly part — belongs to the will, as noted so often before, while the latter — the spiritual part — belongs to the intellect. ¹

The fact that he drank some wine means that they wanted to explore religious questions, and do so by the use of false reasoning, can be seen from the circumstance that he became drunk, which is to say that they fell into error.

The people of this church did not have the perception that the people of the earliest church had. They needed instead to learn what was good and true by studying religious teachings that had been gathered from the perceptions of the earliest church and saved up — teachings that were their Word. Like the Word, these religious teachings in many areas were such that they could not be believed in the absence of perception, because spiritual and heavenly matters rise infinitely beyond human comprehension. That was the reason for their use of skewed reasoning. But people who refuse to believe a thing unless they grasp it [with the senses] are completely incapable of believing, as has been demonstrated many times already; see §§128, 129, 130, 195, 196, 215, 232, 233.

[2] The symbolism in the Word of grapes as charity and all it entails, and that of wine as the resulting faith and all it entails, can be seen from the following passages. In Isaiah:

My beloved had a vineyard, on a horn of the offspring of oil; he waited for it to produce grapes, and it produced wild grapes. (Isaiah 5:1-2, 4)

The grapes stand for charity and its fruits. In Jeremiah:

"I will utterly destroy them," says Jehovah. "There are no grapes on the grapevine and no figs on the fig tree." (Jeremiah 8:13)

The grapevine stands for a spiritual religion and the grapes for charity. In Hosea:

Israel was like grapes in the wilderness when I discovered him. Your ancestors were like first fruit on a young fig tree when I saw them. (Hosea 9:10)

Israel stands for the ancient church, a grape for the fact that its people possessed the gift of charity. The meaning is just the opposite when Israel refers to Jacob's children. ² In Micah:

There is no cluster of grapes to eat; an early [fig] is what my soul has desired. The godly person has perished off the earth, and an upright person does not exist among humankind. (Micah 7:1-2)

The cluster of grapes stands for charity, or a godly quality, while the early fruit stands for faith, or what is upright.

[3] In Isaiah:

This is what Jehovah has said: "Just as new wine is found in the cluster, and they say, ‘Do not spoil it, because there is a blessing in it' ..." (Isaiah 65:8)

The cluster stands for charity, the new wine for the good effects of charity and the truth that they lead to. In Moses:

He washed his clothing in wine and his robe in the blood of grapes. (Genesis 49:11)

This prophesies of the Lord. The wine stands for a spiritual element that comes from a heavenly one, and the blood of grapes, for that which plays a heavenly role in spiritual religions. So the grapes stand for charity itself and the wine for faith itself. In John:

The angel said, "Send in the sharp sickle and harvest the earth's clusters, because its grapes have ripened." (Revelation 14:18)

This is about the final days, when there is no faith — that is, no charity. After all, there is no faith other than the faith that belongs to charity; in its essence, faith is charity. So when the statement is made that there is no longer any faith (as is true in the final days), it means that there is no charity.

[4] Just as grapes symbolize charity, wine symbolizes the faith that develops out of charity, since wine comes from grapes. In addition to the passages speaking of vineyards and grapevines cited here and earlier, the following quotations will demonstrate this fact. In Isaiah:

Gladness and exultation have been taken away from Carmel, ³ and in the vineyards there is no singing, no jubilation. No treader treads the wine in the winepresses. I have put an end to the hedad. ⁴ (Isaiah 16:10)

This stands for the fact that the spiritual church (Carmel) has been devastated. "No one to tread the wine in the winepresses" stands for the fact that there is no longer anyone with faith. In the same author:

The inhabitants of the land will be destroyed by fire, and the humanity left behind will be a pittance. The new wine will mourn; the grapevine will droop; they will not drink wine with a song. The strong drink will be bitter for those drinking it. A shouting over the wine in the streets! (Isaiah 24:6-7, 9, 11)

These verses deal with a spiritual church that has been devastated. The wine stands for religious truth held cheap. In Jeremiah: ⁵

To their mothers they will say, "Where is the grain and the wine?" when they swoon as if stabbed, in the city's streets. (Lamentations 2:12)

"Where are the grain and the wine?" means "Where are love and faith?" City streets symbolize truths here, as they do elsewhere in the Word. Lying stabbed in the streets means that they do not know what truth to believe in.

[5] In Amos:

I will bring my people Israel back from captivity and they will rebuild the ruined cities and settle down and plant vineyards and drink wine from them. (Amos 9:14)

This is about a spiritual religion, or Israel, which is said to plant vineyards and drink wine when it is the kind of religion whose faith is inspired by charity. In Zephaniah:

They will build houses but not live in them, and plant vineyards but not drink wine from them. (Zephaniah 1:13; Amos 5:11)

This stands for the opposite situation, in which a spiritual religion has been devastated. In Zechariah:

They will be like mighty Ephraim, and their heart will rejoice as if with wine, and their children will see and rejoice. (Zechariah 10:7)

This is about the house of Judah, which would be as described because of the goodness and truth that characterize faith. In John:

... that they should not hurt the oil or the wine. (Revelation 6:6)

This stands for not hurting anything heavenly or spiritual, which is to say, any attributes of love and faith.

[6] Since wine symbolizes faith in the Lord, in the sacrifices of the Jewish religion faith was also represented by a libation of wine, as described in Numbers 15:2-15; 28:11-15, 18-end; 29:7-end; Leviticus 23:12-13; Exodus 29:40. As a result, these words appear in Hosea:

Threshing floor and winepress will not feed them, and the new wine will prove false in that [land]. They will not live in Jehovah's land, and Ephraim will return to Egypt, and in Assyria they will eat what is unclean. They will not pour a libation of wine to Jehovah; [their libations] will not be pleasing to him. (Hosea 9:2-3, 4)

In this case the discussion concerns Israel, or a spiritual religion, and those in it who pervert and defile the sanctity and truth of faith through their desire to investigate such things by the use of secular knowledge and sophistry. Egypt is factual knowledge, Assyria is sophistry, and Ephraim is those who engage in it.

Footnotes:

215. The fact that our selfhood is nothing but evil and falsity has become clear to me from experience with spirits. Everything they have said to me on their own authority has been so consistently evil and false that I have only had to know they were speaking on their own in order to realize immediately that what they were saying was false. Yet the spirits themselves were so sure of the truth of their assertions that they never doubted them. People on earth who resemble them do the same.

Similarly there have been people who take to debating what constitutes spiritual and heavenly life, or faith, and they always succumb to doubt and even denial, as I have been allowed to see. To cavil about faith is to doubt and deny. Because such people reason from themselves or from a self-centered point of view, they stumble into undiluted falsity and so into an abyss of darkness — that is, of falsity. While they are in this abyss, the slightest objection overpowers a thousand truths, like a speck of dirt sitting on the pupil of the eye that prevents a viewer from seeing the universe and everything in it.

Of these people the Lord says in Isaiah:

Doom to those who are wise in their own eyes and discerning in their own sight! (Isaiah 5:21)

In the same author:

Your wisdom and your knowledge turned you away, and you said in your heart, "I am, and there is no one else besides me." But evil whose origin you do not know will come upon you; and a catastrophe that you will not be able to atone for will fall upon you; and a devastation that you do not know will come upon you speedily. (Isaiah 47:10-11)

In Jeremiah:

All people have been made stupid by their knowledge, all metalsmiths have been put to shame by their carved images, because their cast images are a lie and have no breath in them. (Jeremiah 51:17)

Carved images stand for the falsity we adopt as our own, and cast images, for the evil we adopt as our own.