The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Mahmut repeatedly (about thirteen times) expresses his ardent desire to become a vegetarian hermit too, but in practice his ‘Voracious Appetite’ always tempts him back into eating flesh. He is perpetually racked by a crisis of conscience, ‘self-condemn’d for living contrary to my Knowledge’.40 This is the subject of frequent lamentation:

  the Divine Providence has scatter’d up and down the Surface of this Globe, an Infinite Variety of Roots, Herbs, Fruits, Seeds … as in a most pleasant Garden or Paradise of Health. But alas, instead we break the Rules of Hospitality; and rushing violently on the Creatures under his Protection, we kill and slay at Pleasure, turning the Banquet to a Cruel Massacre: being transform’d into a Temper wholly Brutal and Voracious, we glut our selves with Flesh and Blood of Slaughter’d Animals. Oh! happy he that can content himself with Herbs and other Genuine Products of the Earth.41

  Even with the added incentive that meat in Paris is not halal, Mahmut’s resolution to ‘taste of Nothing, that has Breath’d the Common Air’ is almost certainly short-lived, like his miserable attempt to abstain from alcohol.42

  Mahmut also thinks that ascetic abstinence from flesh elevates the intellect and is the path to spiritual restoration.43 However, in moments of disillusionment, he sardonically reflects that his experiences of religious ecstasy while abstaining from flesh are really the physiological effect of fasting and hyperventilation induced by repeatedly saying prayers (a sceptical critique of asceticism that Bernier deployed in his comments on Indian yogis).44 But despite these scoffs at monasticism, Mahmut remains committed to the morality of vegetarianism and sees it as ‘the way of perfection’ and the route to Paradise.45

  His tumultuous wrestling between ethics and appetite is designed as a manual on how to become a vegetarian in real life. Addressing the social difficulties any aspiring vegetarian would have to contend with, Mahmut acknowledges that were his vegetarian sentiments publicly known, his neighbours ‘would censure me as a Heretick, a Fool, or a Madman’.46 Turning away from authorities and reasons, Mahmut ultimately appeals to his human instincts: ‘am I not obliged to obey the Inspirations of my Nature, or Better Genius, which tells me, ‘Tis a Butcherly and Inhuman Life, to feed on slaughtered Animals?’47 At the same time as being an emotional appeal, this also makes the subtle claim that the law of nature is inscribed in every human: this is the voice of nature speaking. There is no doubt that the Turkish Spy promoted the cause of vegetarianism across Europe; it opened the minds of its readers to the far-flung ethics of the Brahmins and recommended treating animals with high standards of justice. Unlike their mystical contemporary Thomas Tryon, the authors of the Turkish Spy advanced their case in a finely tuned voice which blended cool rationality with heartfelt human sympathy.

  The Turkish Spy showed what could happen when European norms were abandoned for a fresh examination of man’s relationship with nature, especially when they were held up against the moral example of Indian vegetarianism. But the Turkish Spy was not an isolated case. The scriptural sanction for killing animals was the mainstay for justifying meat-eating. Indeed, one of the principal functions of religion was to create a fundamental distinction between man and beast. Once faith in Scripture was shaken, and people started turning to other ways of codifying behaviour, the ethics of meat-eating became more problematic. Even the defenders of meat-eating in the past had acknowledged that without the express permission from God in Genesis, the idea of eating animals would be repellent and one would do it, as Calvin said, with a ‘doubtful and trembling conscience’.48 One critic of the deists, John Reynolds, realised that one of the worst aspects of dismissing Scripture was that it undermined man’s right to kill animals. He argued that everyone who denied revealed religion should logically be vegetarian. The intelligence of animals, our sympathy for them, the inferior nutritional quality of meat, and the practice of the Indian vegetarians, all suggested that it was wrong to eat flesh: if the Bible and with it God’s permission to kill animals was just a mythical invention, he said, then everyone would have to ‘let the Butcher’s Trade be cashier’d from off the Face of the Earth; let the Shambles be converted into Fruiterer’s Shops, and Herb-Markets …[and] have done with their Ragous, with their Fricassies, and Hashes, made of broken Limbs of dismember’d Brother-Animals.’49 The Bible was the meat-eaters’ greatest bulwark, and the foes of religion were also the biggest enemies of meat.

  Man’s dominion and superiority over nature had for millennia been framed by theology. When deists and free-thinkers came to challenge this framework, the distinct boundary between man and nature, which the Judaeo-Christian tradition had reinforced, either vanished or had to be redrawn. Contemplating vegetarianism became a fashionable way of articulating a rejection of orthodox Christianity as a whole. This trend was often coupled with interest in Eastern culture and the use of that perspective in attacking European norms. At the time of the Turkish Spy’s publication, there was a coterie of free-thinkers in Britain who were clearly willing to scrutinise the practice of meat-eating from a radical perspective.

  Even before the Turkish Spy, those who questioned religious orthodoxy also often questioned dietary norms. The heretical sixteenth-century ex-Jesuit Guillaume Postel and his followers were among the first ever people to be accused of being ‘Deites’.50 The Inquisition imprisoned Postel for trying to prepare for the second coming by uniting all the world’s religions under his humanist banner and joining forces with the Family of Love. Postel influenced the heretic Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) whose challenge to Christian orthodoxy in turn inspired the Turkish Spy.51 Postel, like the Turkish Spy, was particularly interested in the vegetarian Indians. Poring over the travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ludovico de Varthema among others, Postel was overwhelmed by the virtue of the Indian Brahmins, who, he remarked, ‘abstain from everything that has life like the Pythagoreans’. The Buddhist holy men of Japan, he noted admiringly, also ‘never eat flesh, nor any animals, from fear that the flesh would make them unruly.’ This, he said, was a universal practice ‘approved of from all times’, in which, like the Pythagoreans, the Buddhists exceeded even the purest Christians. He concluded that the Buddhists had originally been Christians who had ‘bit by bit converted the truth of Jesus into the fable of Shiaca [Buddha]’; they and the Brahmins still held divine secrets that had been lost to the West and had constructed these into a perfectly adequate religion through their own superior reasoning faculties.52 Even though skewed by idealism, such syncretic impulses were like porous inlets through which Asian culture influenced the West’s construction of man’s relationship with nature. Renaissance Neoplatonists, India-loving deists and eighteenth-century Orientalists all contributed to changing European culture by importing the Indian perspective.

  Most people holding radical anti-Christian views concealed themselves in anonymity, circulating their ideas in clandestine manuscripts, or using ruses like the Turkish Spy to air their ideas in print. Foremost in the British network of deists were Charles Blount (1654–93) and Charles Gildon (1665–1724) and it may be that these two even had a hand in writing the Turkish Spy. (If Charles Blount was involved, his decision to escape government spies and the harangues of his detractors by stoically hanging himself in 1693 would help to explain the embarrassing two-year delay between the publication of the Turkish Spy’s fifth and sixth volumes.53)

  In 1680 Blount had used his study of paganism – particularly the writing on Hinduism by Rogerius, Bernier, Tavernier, Roth and Kircher – to assault Christian orthodoxy.54 Blount translated and copiously annotated Philostratus’ biography of the legendary vegetarian, Apollonius. But his critics quickly realised that his book was no simple reservoir of erudition, for beneath its placid surface lurked the serpent of sardonic scepticism.55 There was also a broadside critique of society’s bloodthirsty practices.

  In his notes on Apollonius’ attempts to abolish sacrifice, Blount propounded a popular conspiracy theory which blamed the superstitious practice of sacrificing animals on
the priesthood who ‘grew so covetous, that nothing but the Blood of Beasts could satiate them’. As well as ensuring a constant supply of ‘Rost-meat to the Priests’, Blount went on, ‘The other concern, viz. of the State in those great Sanguinary Sacrifices, was by innuring the People to such horrid and bloudy Sights … rendring them fitter for the Wars, and thereby more capable either of defending or enlarging their Empire.’ Meat-eating, Blount showed, was a sinister instrument that the state and its conspiratorial allies, the priesthood, had used to tax the people and make them submit to killing each other for the amelioration of their masters’ estates. The people were still suffering under the yoke of this legacy, said Blount, for ‘at the Battel of Edgehill it was generally observ’d, that one Foot-Regiment of Butchers, behaved themselves more stoutly than any other Regiment of either side.’56

  In this context, the ancient vegetarians, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato, were elevated as heroic rebels against an oppressive priesthood. They had always rejected sacrifices, said Blount, considering it ‘a great crime to kill any harmless innocent Beasts, they being intercommoners with men on Earth’.57 As well as condemning the ‘detestable Recreation’ of hunting, which, as Agrippa had said, consisted in making ‘War against the poor Beasts; a Pastime cruel, and altogether tragical, chiefly delighting in bloud and death’, Blount showed that the Pythagoreans’ vegetarianism, far from being superstitious, was a rational decision based on the preservation of health and the political subversion of tyranny.58

  It would be jumping the gun to suggest on the basis of his sardonic writings that Blount really advocated vegetarianism. He knew that all creatures lived by ‘devouring and destroying one another’. ‘Nay,’ he conceded, ‘we cannot walk one step, but probably we crush many Insects creeping under our feet’.59 But his attack on gluttony was a sincere aspect of his social critique, and he did carry it into his personal life by claiming that ‘For my own part, I ever eat rather out of necessity, than pleasure’.60

  Radicals like Blount felt they had much in common with Pythagoras and the Brahmins. They even reinterpreted the doctrines of reincarnation and pantheism to suit their materialist agenda. Reincarnation, they explained, really referred to the recycling of matter in the universe. As Blount’s contemporary, John Toland (1670–1722) explained, ‘Vegetables and Animals become part of us, we become part of them, and both become parts of a thousand other things in the Universe.’61 If matter was perpetually recycling from one thing to another, then all living beings were basically made of the same stuff. There was no essential difference between a man and an oyster.62 The Turkish spy, who at times felt he was ‘a profess’d Pythagorean, a Disciple of the Indian Brachmans, Champion for the Transmigration of Souls’, even suggested that the sympathetic force of ‘Magnetick Transmigration’ ensured that ‘souls’ were attracted to locations that matched their nature.63

  These arguments provided a notion of eternal life through the perpetuity of matter and of cosmic justice which worked by natural laws without the need for divine intervention. They also provided a basis for ethical equity between all life forms, and a kind of karmic incentive to moral behaviour. Thus Pythagoras and the Indians, traditionally regarded as the arch-pedlars of superstition, were refashioned as the founding fathers of non-religious ethics, and this in turn encouraged the deists to espouse their vegetarian ideals.64 It was not long before critics claimed that ‘Pythagoras was a Deist’ and that Buddhism and Hinduism were ‘nothing but Pantheism or Spinozism’.65

  Charles Gildon, a shady figure in the literary world, used the oriental perspective to attack orthodoxy in his Golden Spy (1709).66 In The Oracles of Reason (1693), which he compiled with Charles Blount, he used the antiquity of Chinese and Indian culture, just as the Turkish Spy had done, to undermine faith in the absurdly dwarfish history in the Bible.67

  Gildon’s anonymously published The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail (1692), as the title suggests, is a miscellany of letters like the Turkish Spy, and one of the letters contains a rare account of Thomas Tryon’s followers. Gildon co-opted Tryon’s vegetarianism into an anti-Christian political statement by emphasising that Tryon derived his beliefs from the Hindus, not from Christian Scripture, and that he thought eating ‘our Brethren and Fellow-Creatures’ was ‘Opression’ and ‘qualifies Men to be sordid, surly, and Soldiers, Hunters, Pirates, Tories, and such as wou’d have the bestial Nature fortify’d; that they might act like Lions, and Devils, over their own kind as well as over all other Creatures’.68 So it seems that Gildon, Blount, and possibly the authors of the Turkish Spy, recognised some common ground between their own views and Tryon’s vegetarianism. Gildon may have been encouraged to do this by their mutual friend Aphra Behn. Perhaps the vegetarian ideas in the Turkish Spy were inspired by or even supposed to be a mockery of Tryon.69

  Although Tryon subscribed to all sorts of mystical inventions, he shared with the radical sceptics a desire to erode traditional orthodoxies. His ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ is a precursor of Mahmut as an Oriental vegetarian critic of Western society, and his Letters From Averroes (1695) combines this Oriental critique with the letter format which slyly uses a Muslim character to challenge Christian dogmatism.70

  At the end of the seventeenth century the vegetarian question was as prominent as it ever has been in Western intellectual debate. The parameters of culture were shifting radically. The exclusive powers of the Church were giving way to unorthodoxy, empiricism and relativism. Political turmoil and monarchy in Britain were replaced, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, by constitutional democracy which fostered open-minded debate. Enlightened intellectual movements combined with new access to information on foreign cultures to challenge traditional values. Fundamental assumptions were under constant review, and the right to eat meat was one of them. With the flood of information on the vegetarian Indians, more and more people were questioning their long-held belief that eating animals was a natural, necessary part of human life. There were so many prominent thinkers from widely different intellectual backgrounds who were challenging the practice of killing animals that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the late seventeenth century harboured a vegetarian renaissance. In many minds at least, there had been a bloodless revolution.

  PART TWO

  Meatless Medicine

  TEN

  Dieting with Dr Descartes

  René Descartes was born in La Haye in 1596, and when he was one his mother died of a lung disease which he inherited. He was a sickly baby and was not thought likely to survive, but survive he did, and in combating his own weak constitution he came to believe that he had found the secret to long life. His blend of solitary reflection and steadfast adherence to mathematical reasoning created a new climate in European philosophy which, by the end of the seventeenth century, had flourished into the Natural Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Rather than relying on second-hand religious doctrines, Descartes showed how to establish truth firmly on the principle of ‘Reason’. This breach with religious tradition created a need to reconstitute the mandate for man’s superiority over the rest of creation. But Descartes’ legacy was an enduring schism in European thought, the remnants of which can still be felt today.

  At the Jesuit school of La Flèche, he had been raised from the age of eight on the old school theories of Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology according to which the world was divided into matter, immaterial spirit and an ‘intermediate substance’. When Descartes came to scrutinise his education with his rigorous method of sceptical reasoning, he agreed with the Aristotelians that humans had an immaterial rational soul: as he explained in his Meditations (1641), the fact that he could say ‘I think, therefore I am’ proved this beyond doubt. He also agreed with the Aristotelians that animals lacked the rational soul – their inability to speak languages was proof enough of that. But he thought that the Aristotelians’ claim that animals were animated by an intermediate sensitive soul was meaningless mumbo-jumbo. If animals had no soul, they had to be made purely
of matter, and as Descartes believed that matter by itself could not think, he concluded that animals were just like soulless machines. All their actions were the result of automatic material cause and effect; they did not even have feelings or sensations as humans did. They were only alive in so far as the heat of their heart pumped blood around their bodies.1 As Descartes’ chief disciple, the Jesuit Father Nicolas Malebranche, explained in his Search after Truth (1674–5), ‘The Cartesians do not think that Beasts feel Pain or Pleasure, or that they love or hate any thing; because they admit nothing but what is material in Beasts, and they do not believe that Sensations or Passions are Properties of Matter’; ‘the Principal of a Dog’s Life,’ wrote Malebranche provocatively, ‘differs very little, if at all, from that of the Motion of a Watch.’2 This, rather than Scripture, was the rational justification for killing animals: they did not suffer; indeed, given the mechanical nature of their life, they hardly even ‘died’.

  Descartes’ ability to explain the operation of a body in mechanistic terms – as the great intricate clockwork of God – provided the foundation for a powerful school of physicians in the eighteenth century, and insofar as he showed how ‘life’ worked without the need for ‘soul’ he led the way to a modern scientific understanding of living things.3 But although he won many followers, his rigid dualism – dividing everything so starkly into matter and spirit – and particularly his relegation of animals to the status of insensible lumps of dirt, became the focus of widespread protest all over Europe, notably in England.

  People found it hard to accept his contention that animals had no sensation as it contradicted a common-sense view of animal behaviour and made a nonsense of their sentimental attachment to pet dogs. In the intellectual backlash, many philosophers preferred to think that animals had souls and reason rather than concede that they were mere machines.4