“And in the end there remained the two of them - god and wine”: Béla Hamvas’s philosophy of wine as metaphysical anthropology

This paper explores the philosophical and metaphysical dimension of wine in the work of B?la Hamvas, with a particular focus on his book The Philosophy of Wine, in which wine is conceived not as an aesthetic or gastronomic phenomenon but as a sacramental substance and a hieratic mask of Being. In Hamvas?s thought, wine opens the space of ontological initiation - it is not consumed for the sake of forgetting but tasted as a liturgical act of remembrance, a recollection of the lost order of the world, as the surviving substance of the sacred in an age of technical rationality and spiritual disorientation. Drawing upon Heraclitus?s insight into the unity of opposites (?? ????? ?????) and H?lderlin?s conception of the ?time of dearth? (d?rftiger Zeit) as an epoch marked by the withdrawal of the gods, this paper interprets wine as a philosopheme of resistance - a resistance against the profanation of the sensual, against the reduction of the world to mere functional rationality, and against the abstract conceptualization of reality deprived of its sacred depth. In this sense, wine emerges as a sign of that primordial order which simultaneously encompasses the visible and the invisible, the sensuous and the divine, and thus constitutes an act of remembrance of the lost unity between Being and the world. In Hamvas?s vision, wine becomes a sign of the sanctity of everyday life, an aesthetic medium of metaphysical presence, a polyvalent symbol in a universe where ?all is one? - as suggested by Heraclitus?s intuition of unity, with which Hamvas establishes a deep intellectual correspondence. Through the analysis of the concepts of the mask, taste, mouth, archetypal order, and the time of Saturn, the study interprets Hamvas?s conception of a theology of everyday life, in which spirit is no longer sought beyond the world but recognized in the cup of wine, in the scent of woman, in the act of eating, and in the silence suffused with meaning. Hamvas?s Dionysian philosophical discourse - which does not contemplate the sacred from afar but tastes it and which does not prove Being but surrenders to it - emerges as a radical challenge to the rationalistic aridity and impersonal machinery that characterize (post)modernity, and as a profound longing for the restoration of a sensual metaphysics, in which knowledge unfolds not through conceptual deduction but through presence, taste, and rapture.