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The fact is Arthur Guinness was indeed a great man of faith. Born on the estate of an archbishop and raised a loyal son of the Irish church, Arthur lived by the words that were his family motto: Spes mea in deo (My hope is in God).
What Arthur Guinness founded was a venture propelled by faith, yes—but by a kind of faith that inspires men to make their work in this world an offering to God, to understand craft and discipline, love of labor and skills transferred from father to son as sacred things. It was a venture of faith that took the fruit of the earth and, through study and strain, made of it something of greater value. Indeed, much of the great 250-year history of Guinness beer is a story in which wealth is gained through faith-inspired excellence and then used to serve others for the glory of God.
I was wearied by the emptiness of politics misplaced, politics as the meaning of life rather than as the art of protecting genuine life.
I knew I had found it: that earthy, human, holy tale of a people honing a craft over time and of a family seeking to do good in the world as an offering to God.
“You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you.”
Accordingly, the Guinness brewery routinely paid wages that were 10 to 20 percent higher than average, had a reputation as the best place to work in Ireland, and, as important to many employees, allowed workers two pints a day of their famous dark stout.
Concerts and lectures were provided for the wives of workers, in the belief that the moral and intellectual level of a home would rise only to that of the mother or wife who lived there.
To immerse myself in this culture of generosity was a welcome respite from my own times, where greed and unwarranted privilege daily destroyed lives. It was not hard to see that the Guinness story might provide some balance, some tempering and grace, for our own hardened age.
and all of this was associated with the beer. Somehow I knew early on that the presence of beer changes human interaction, that it gentles the soul and brings about a less guarded state. My father was a different man when he drank a beer and not because he consumed very much of it—he never did—but rather because the beer seemed to give him permission to relax, to stand down and find a human connection to those nearby.
world. But now I know something I did not before. Beer is not simply a means of drunkenness nor is it merely a lubricant to grease the skids to sin. Beer, well respected and rightly consumed, can be a gift of God. It is one of his mysteries, which it was his delight to conceal and the glory of kings to search out. And men enjoy it to mark their days and celebrate their moments and stand with their brothers in the face of what life brings.
seventeenth-century Europeans came to believe that most all water was unsafe. Beer, though, was seen as healthy and pure. We now know what people of that time did not: the boiling, which is part of brewing beer, and the alcohol that results kills the germs that sometimes contaminate water.
It was fear of running out of beer, then, that partially forced the Pilgrims to leave the Mayflower and get busy building their new lives on shore.
And of all the hardships the settlers endured, the lack of beer caused them the most displeasure.”
when the Puritans sailed to New England a decade later in 1630, they made sure that beer was in plentiful supply. Just one of their five ships, the Arbella, carried 42 tuns of beer. Since a tun was 252 gallons, this meant that at least 10,000 gallons of beer refreshed the Puritans on their journey to the New World. And, again, a brewhouse proved a priority when they began building their new city called Boston.
He told me he felt closer to God brewing beer than he did in church, because when he is brewing he feels like he is participating in the secret ways of the Creator.
For the early Christians, drunkenness was the sin—as their apostles had repeatedly taught—and not the consumption of alcohol. After all, their Lord had miraculously created wine at a wedding feast, the fledgling church drank wine at its sacred meals, and Christian leaders even instructed their disciples to take wine as a cure for ailments. Clearly, beer and wine used in moderation were welcomed by the early Christians and were taken as a matter of course. It was excess and drunkenness and the immorality that came from both that the Christians opposed.
Many historians have noted that this positive Christian perspective on alcohol probably even encouraged brewing, because it both sanctioned a temperate love of beer and welcomed beer as an alternative to more high-alcohol drinks. This theory is supported by the fact that beer is so intertwined with the history of the Christian faith that it is tempting to believe that Christians discovered it. Perhaps in its holy and moderate use, they did.
Some sense of the importance of beer to medieval Christians is indicated by the many patron saints of beer celebrated by the Catholic church. Chief of these is St. Arnou, or Arnold, who once said, “From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world.”
Charlemagne’s reforms—and the eager work of monasteries throughout the Christian world—gradually made the church the primary brewer and wholesaler of beer in society.
Men quickly learned that being in right relationship with the local religious leaders guaranteed access to beer.
An example comes to us from a letter that Pope Gregory wrote to Archbishop Nidrosiensi of Iceland. In it, Gregory describes how some children in the medieval period were baptized not with holy water but with beer. This was likely because beer was cleaner than water and for the baptizing priest it was also in more convenient supply.
In the years following the plague, a dramatically smaller population shared the wealth of Europe, which still thrived much as it had prior to the years of death. By 1400, the average worker made twice the wages he might have made for the same work only one hundred years before.
when the English barons met King John at Runnymede to insist on the Magna Carta, one of their demands was for uniform brewing standards.
Hops, Reformation, Bays, and Beer Came to England in one bad year.
The Reinheitsgebot helped make German beer among the best in the world. Unfortunately, it did so just prior to the Reformation, which had the twin effect of both celebrating beer more than any movement in church history and serving to close the very monasteries that brewed most of the world’s beer at the time.
While this decline in brewing would not have deterred Martin Luther from his reforming work, he certainly would have grieved the loss of any fine brew, for he was among the great beer lovers of Christian history.
Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed
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Having wrestled his soul out of its harsh theological constraints, Luther tried to understand the world afresh in a consistently biblical light. He reexamined, reapplied, and, where necessary, reformed according to a fiery biblical worldview. And he spared no one, from the pope to nuns and priests, from extremist Protestants to those who wouldn’t live life fully in the love and grandeur of God.
“Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused,” he once wrote. “Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?”
Luther spent much of his life in the taverns of Wittenberg and not just because he loved to drink beer. He often mentored his students there, studied there, met important visitors there, and, upon occasion, even taught classes there. The time he spent in taverns and inns gave him a chance to look out onto the world as it was in his day, to experience and to observe.
The tavern was where Luther learned of the world he was called to reform with the gospel of Christ.
Luther, though, for he is never described as drinking to excess. Instead, he viewed drink as good for the body, an aid to social life, and a gift of God.
In his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin wrote, “We are nowhere forbidden to laugh, or to be satisfied with food . . . or to be delighted with music, or to drink wine.” The great Genevan reformer also wrote, “It is permissible to use wine not only for necessity, but also to make us merry.”
Like Luther, Calvin worked hard to hammer out a consistently biblical worldview. He wanted all of his life to be submitted to the rulership of Jesus Christ and yet he did not want to miss some grace or provision of God because of flawed theology or religious excess. He and Luther had seen too much of that in their pre-Protestant lives. “The use of gifts of God cannot be wrong, if they are directed to the same purpose for which the Creator himself has created and destined them,” he insisted.
This likely comes as a surprise to those who confuse biblical Christianity with the antisaloon leagues and prohibitionism of later history. The truth is that most post-Reformation Christians believed as their first-century fathers did—that drunkenness is sin but that alcohol in moderation is one of the great gifts of God.
John Wesley drank wine, was something of an ale expert, and often made sure that his Methodist preachers were paid in one of the vital currencies of the day—rum. His brother, Charles Wesley, was known for the fine port, Madeira, and sherry he often served in his home; the journals of George Whitefield are filled with references to his enjoyment of alcohol.
Though he was not known to drink much at a time, Edwards was famous among his friends for nursing a glass of punch throughout an evening with family or while preparing his sermons at night.
Clearly, then, though the Reformation diminished the production of beer temporarily by closing many of the European monasteries where beer was brewed, it also served the cause of beer and alcohol well by declaring them gifts of God and calling for their use in moderation.
I might never have guessed that Christians would have loved beer as they did through the centuries or that they would have mastered the brewer’s art with such conviction.
he made that gift even more valuable by investing it and adding to it his own skill and mastery of his trade.
Yet what distinguishes the Arthur Guinness story is not just that he brewed good beer and sold great amounts of it. What distinguishes his story is that he understood his success as forming a kind of mandate, a kind of calling to a purpose of God beyond just himself and his family to the broader good he could do in the world.
Whitefield had received permission to speak on a green near the Dublin barracks and as he did he felt his message “go forth in power.” There was the usual opposition—a few stones or dirt clods thrown for effect while he spoke—but this was nothing new. Whitefield had learned to preach while people banged drums or drove cattle through his crowds. Once he spoke while a man urinated on him from a tree. He knew what it was to have his message opposed.
In Dublin, though, the raging torrent against him was worse than any he had known. As he made his way from his pulpit, “vollies of hard stones came from all quarters, and every step I took a fresh stone struck, and made me reel backwards and forwards.” These missiles came from “hundreds and hundreds of papists,” he recalled. Soon he was “almost breathless, and all over a gore of blood . . . I received many blows and wounds; one was particularly large and near my temples . . . for a while I continued speechless, panting for and expecting every breath to be my last.” Finally, Whitefield was
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“We must exhort all Christians to gain all they can and to save all they can; that is, in effect to grow rich,” Wesley insisted. Yet the corollary was that this gaining of wealth was to allow the Christian man to “give all he can to those in need.”
Arthur Guinness became a champion of the Sunday school cause. In 1786, he extended Raikes’s work to Ireland by organizing the first Sunday school in Dublin. The slim records we have show that Arthur funded the effort nearly by himself in the early days, did much of the organizing work alone at first, and spoke often to gatherings of his merchant friends to solicit their help. Given that he risked offending Roman Catholics, grumbling conservatives, the comfortable, and even Sabbatarians by his efforts, Arthur’s courageous devotion to this movement says much about what he was willing to brave to
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In his history with the brew that he would be associated with for generations to come, he is confirmation that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong. He was not the first or the best or the only brewer to produce dark porter at this time. But he was, perhaps, the most consistent, the most willing to ride the currents of his age, and he was blessed with good timing.
If history favors the bold over the most gifted, then Arthur is certainly encouragement to those who are willing to be the former in recognition that they are incapable of being the latter.
the cause of caring for the less fortunate to the greater glory of God would also live on in the Guinness generations to come.
You see, the yeast that is used to brew beer is unique. It is not like the yeast used for bread, which dies at high temperatures, never to be used again. Instead, the yeast used for brewing beer grows in the process and can be skimmed off and used again and again. This was such a miraculous discovery to early brewers that they gave this reusable yeast the nickname “God-is-good.”
It seems that the best anyone can do, famous or not, is to love and embed values and then offer to God what cannot be controlled in a child’s life. Perhaps this is the lesson: each generation stands on its own and there is only so much that those who come before them can do to assure a pleasing outcome.
