Sobriety and intoxication

Sobriety (ṣaḥw) and intoxication (sukr) are terms Sufi writers used for two conditions of the mystic, and for two styles of mysticism. Intoxication is the ecstatic state in which the self is overwhelmed by the presence of God and loses its ordinary awareness; in it the mystic may utter sayings that seem to claim divinity. Sobriety is the condition of one who has passed through that state and returned to clear awareness, living in the world while remaining with God.

Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī and his followers were associated with intoxication, Junayd of Baghdad and his school with sobriety. Junayd held that sobriety was the higher state, since it follows intoxication and completes it: passing away (fanāʾ) leads to remaining (baqāʾ). Others, especially among the Persian poets, praised intoxication as the truer expression of love. The eleventh-century writer al-Hujwīrī set out the debate in his Revelation of the Veiled, and himself preferred sobriety.

Christian writers developed a similar paradox. Philo of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose of Milan spoke of a “sober drunkenness” (sobria ebrietas), the ecstasy of the soul in God that is at the same time the soberest clarity.