The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

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СКАЧАТЬ The dietary means to returning to antediluvian health was also a route to spiritual restoration. In Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’, the spiritual and the ‘scientific’ marched side by side.

      Bacon did not challenge the universally accepted doctrine that man had rightful dominion over nature; indeed, he held this as his philosophical paradigm. But Bacon did argue that man’s power over creation carried an important caveat: ‘There is implanted in man by nature,’ he wrote in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1605), ‘a noble and excellent Affection of Piety [pity] and compassion, which extends it selfe even to bruit creatures’. God had given man dominion, but He had also encoded him with a sentiment of compassion which moderated his behaviour to animals. Only ‘contracted & degenerate minds’, said Bacon, failed to heed the edict encapsulated in the biblical book of Proverbs, ‘A Just man is mercifull to the life of his Beast’ (Proverbs 12:10).

      Bacon’s translation of this Proverb took the compassionate treatment of animals further than most Christians were comfortable with. The 1611 King James version rendered it ambiguously, ‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast’, and the Latin Vulgate simply says novit (‘recognises’), while in the original Hebrew the righteous man’s concern for his domestic animals may well be purely self-interested. Bacon was partaking in the pervasive, though often frowned-upon, tradition of seeking in the Bible laws that endorsed kindness to animals.

      His motive for doing so was partly fuelled by the desire to find an equivalent in Judaeo-Christianity of the laws of humanity that he identified in other cultures. In doing this, he pushed forward one final major philosophical development which was to transform thinking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that Western and Eastern cultures shared close moral affinities regardless of their religious differences. This had roots in the medieval and Renaissance idea of the ‘virtuous gentile’, but it took on greater prominence and complexity as travellers had increasing opportunities to observe foreign cultures first hand. Bacon dubiously claimed that the Mosaic law against eating blood, found in Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, was Moses’ counterpart of laws found all over the world that enforced mercy to animals: ‘even in the sect of the Esseans and Pythagoreans, they altogither abstain’d from eating Flesh; which to this day is observed by an inviolate superstition, by many of the Easterne people under the Mogol.’ The law of pity, Bacon concluded, was not just a Jewish law, it was embedded in human nature, so it was little surprise to find that diverse religions enforced it. When other cultures could provide such useful comparisons that helped to prove his views on the properties of human nature, no wonder Bacon regarded the voyages of discovery as an important aspect of restoring man’s universal understanding. The Indians and the Pythagoreans took their opinions to superstitious extremes, but their vegetarianism, Bacon said, was the realisation of a true and noble principle. Misguided as they perhaps were, they nevertheless exemplified natural human mercy more than the ‘contracted & degenerate minds’ of his own society. This was a daring valorisation of a foreign ethical code, and Bacon later moderated it by comparing their superstitions with the Muslim taboos on pork and bacon.²³ This idea of instinctive sympathy added still more force to the scientific dietary reasons for becoming vegetarian. Richard Baxter (1615–91), one of the chief Puritan ministers in the Civil War, clearly exemplified how the medical and the moral motives propelled each other. When he was told to give up meat to save his ailing health, he consoled himself by reflecting that God had ‘put into all good men that tender compassion to the bruites as will keep them from a senseless royoting in their blood’; ‘all my daies’, he wrote, eating meat ‘hath gone, as against my nature, with some regret; which hath made me the more contented that God hath made me long renounce it’.²⁴

      Bacon’s cultural analysis found a common cause in Christian and Indian teaching; as usual Bushell went a step further and cultivated the comparison in himself. In 1664 – more than forty years after Bushell first adopted the vegetable diet – the like-minded advocate of Indian vegetarianism and fellow Royalist John Evelyn called on Bushell in his cave. He was mightily impressed by the hermit’s way of life as well as the Edenic garden layout: ‘It is an extraordinary solitude,’ Evelyn wrote. ‘There he had two mummies; [and] a grott where he lay in a hammock like an Indian.’ Although he was probably thinking of American Indians not East Indians, in Evelyn’s eyes Bushell had taken on the identity of another culture, removed from the turbulent society around him.

      Bacon and his assistant Bushell glimpsed many of the philosophical and spiritual developments of the ensuing two centuries – with regard to vegetarianism as much as any other field. Their combination of religion, science and morality forecast the religious debates of the seventeenth century, the medical enquiries of the Enlightenment, and even the Eastern philosophy that forced itself on the conscience of Europe. Bacon and Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’ would be recast, retested and reformed time and time again.

       TWO John Robins: The Shakers’ God

      In the middle 1600s Adam – father of mankind – rose from the dead, brushed away over 5,000 years of subterranean dust, and came to deliver his descendants from the sin he had brought into the world. Quickly acquiring himself a new Eve – whom he also called ‘Virgin Mary’ – and impregnating her with a child called Abel who was also Jesus reincarnated, Adam set about accumulating disciples. He entranced all who happened to hear him by raising the dead and speaking in the original language of mankind, and convinced witnesses that they had seen visions of him miraculously riding on the wind like a flame, flanked by dragons and heavenly beasts. Before long, Adam’s biblical coterie accompanied him everywhere he went. His faithful associates included Judas the betrayer, the prophet Jeremiah, and the ill-fated Cain. To all these, Adam promised that he would reinstate Paradise on earth as it was before the Fall. Records show that a sizeable number of Londoners believed him.¹

      Adam – otherwise known as John Robins, the radical seventeenth-century prophet – was a classic product of the English Civil War. Were it not for the political, religious and social mayhem the Civil War brought in its wake, Robins would never have gained such a following nor such fame. Seven years of bloodshed had shaken even the strongest nerves. From 1642 to 1649, the nation had turned on itself with such violence that hardly a family escaped unscathed, and in that unsettling environment Robins’ fervent preaching appealed to many confused and disillusioned minds.

      The worst of war had ended with the execution of Charles I and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s republic, but in the early days of Cromwell’s rule lack of religious state control and the first ever free press combined to foment a plethora of extreme religious and political movements. Royalists all over Europe looked on aghast as God’s deputy on earth was overcome by a furious rabble. Parliamentarians, on the other hand, saw the world opening into a new era of justice and purity. But radicals soon became frustrated by the comparative moderation of Cromwell’s parliamentary settlement. They had been fighting for liberty against what they saw as monarchical and episcopal tyranny, and had pinned their hopes on a new era of equality in which justice would no longer be stifled and corrupted by a callous and indiscriminate elite. They had staked their lives, belongings and loved ones against a system in which the blood and sweat of the poor paid for the excesses of a frivolous court life – against the right of one man to treat millions as the objects of whim and fancy. To their horror, Cromwell’s republic began to look like the same tyranny all over again.

      Disillusioned radicals turned for solace to the Bible. The Church had always promised that the Messiah would come again to establish a new heavenly kingdom after a period of violence and turmoil. Millenarian groups began to predict that Jesus’ second coming was nigh. Even most ministers of the established Church instructed their parishioners to prepare for Judgement СКАЧАТЬ