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

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СКАЧАТЬ story that the vegetarian diet starved Norwood to death would scarcely seem credible if we did not know that Norwood did indeed perish in 1654, two years after Crab retreated to his hermitage.¹⁸ This was not a good advertisement for the novel diet and it played into the hands of detractors who preferred their beefsteaks to the grass and turnip leaves proffered by Crab. Norwood’s death confirmed John Reeve’s accusations against John Robins, and one later commentator made the unfounded claim that Crab ‘destroyed himself by eating bran, grass, dockleaves, and such other trash’ – even though he actually lived to the impressive age of nearly seventy.¹⁹

      This connection with Norwood suggests that there was a loose association of vegetarian radicals. Crab may also have been connected with the Diggers whose membership was largely composed of disaffected Levellers. Both Crab and Winstanley had been Baptists,²⁰ they both said that private property was a curse,²¹ that the upper classes would wither if peasants lived off their own produce instead of labouring for landowners,²² and Crab wielded the digging metaphor, for example in his sequel pamphlet, The English Hermites Spade at the Ground and root of Idolatry (1657).²³ Like Winstanley also, Crab was said to have extended to animals the commandment to ‘do unto others as you would be done by’.²⁴

      Like the other vegetarian radicals, as well as some of the Quakers,²⁵ Crab accompanied his retreat into vegetarianism with a conversion to pacifism.²⁶ He pitted his harmless herbivorous lifestyle against his opponents who ‘prepare themselves by thirsting after flesh and blood’.²⁷ Crab even suggested that flesh-eating had triggered the violent passions that led to the war in the first place: ‘that humour that lusteth after flesh and blood,’ he said, ‘is made strong in us by feeding of it.’ Killing animals and eating their flesh was widely believed to inure men to cruelty.²⁸ Crab saw in this the workings of God’s Providence: all aggressive meat-eaters would succumb to their ferocious instincts until they ended up killing each other, thus wiping the carnivorous sinners off the earth.²⁹ Conflating the two meanings of ‘flesh’, Crab hoped that just as he gave up ‘flesh’, so England would give up the ‘fleshly’ cares that motivated violent conflict. This in turn he saw as an allegory of giving up Moses’ old ‘fleshly’ law for the new spiritual laws of Christ.³⁰

      According to Crab’s observations, nature unambiguously revealed that meat was bad for the body and the soul. Now Crab had to balance that with evidence from the Book of God. In doing so, Crab inaugurated the English school of vegetarian Bible exegesis, and he managed to manipulate just about any passage in the Scriptures to suit his purposes. Engaging in doctrinal disputes with theologians up and down the country, and apparently deriving some arguments from St Jerome, Crab developed a rigorous scriptural defence of vegetarianism.³¹

      For Crab, as for others, vegetarianism started in the beginning, with Adam and Eve. Crab even implied that the Fall itself was caused by Adam lapsing from his God-given diet into meat-eating: ‘if naturall Adam had kept to his single naturall fruits of Gods appointment, namely fruits and hearbs,’ he lamented, ‘we had not been corrupted.’ God permitted mankind to eat the animals after Noah’s Flood, he insisted, only because all the water had temporarily killed off the world’s vegetation.³² God intended mankind to return to the vegetable diet as soon as the earth recovered from the Flood. But having once tasted flesh, Crab complained, men were inflamed by a desire for more, and rejected natural vegetables as ‘trash in comparison of a Beast, or beastly flesh’. From that point on, man was bound on an inexorable decline into corruption and violence. Like other vegetarians on both sides of the political spectrum, Crab imagined his vegetarian hermitage was a route to ‘the Paradise of God from whence my Father Adam was cast forth’.³³

      Crab viewed the whole of biblical history as one long saga in God’s attempt to return men to their natural diet. Moses led the Israelites into the desert, Crab claimed, to bring them away from their carnivorous Egyptian masters (perhaps this was even latent in Robins and Garment’s ideas of themselves as Moses figures). When the recalcitrant Israelites ‘murmured, and rebelled against the Lord, lusting after the flesh pots of Egypt’, God punished them: the flock of quails God sent was poisoned and they died with the flesh in their teeth.³⁴ The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, and Christ’s apostles, had continued the message by either living on vegetable food or practising harsh asceticism for our emulation.³⁵ The prophet Daniel had confined himself to lentils and water, a diet on which he had achieved divine epiphanies.³⁶ Just as the saints were assisted by animals, so Crab was brought bread in prison by a spaniel, and he claimed that birds came to him from God to inform him of future events.³⁷ Even Christ himself, Crab wilfully suggested, was in favour of vegetarianism: we hear of Christ eating various comestibles, he said, ‘but we never finde that ever he was drunke, or eate a bit of flesh’.³⁸ In a rare example of Crab’s concern for animal welfare, he defended Christ’s feeding of fishes to the five thousand on the grounds that the meal was ‘innocent’ because it was made ‘without hurting any creature that breathed on earth’ (excluding aquatic animals from the category of flesh was a standard division of Catholic fasting laws).³⁹ Even the Passover feast, where Christ decidedly partook of the lamb, was an irregularity which he was obliged to undertake only to fulfil the Jewish prophecies.

      Crab’s presentation of the Bible as a monolithic vegetarian manifesto became more problematic when his adversaries threw back at him passages in the New Testament that were clearly designed to abolish old Jewish food taboos. Each of the New Testament passages that Crab and his contemporaries referenced in their disputes about vegetarianism had already been used by St Augustine and St Aquinas against vegetarians such as the heretic Manicheans. The doctrinal dispute was new in England, but it had a history that reached back more than a millennium, and the English clergy were happy to rely on such authoritative texts to prove the unorthodoxy of their adversary.⁴⁰ But Crab – a Houdini of biblical exegetes – found an answer to all his detractors.

      Christ had taught that all food should be accepted with thanksgiving and none of it should be rejected as unclean. Crab retorted that this was manifestly absurd since some things were poisonous, and even if meat wasn’t unlawful it was still undesirable. Deftly perverting the sense of St Paul’s famous edict, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth,’ and his allusion to one ‘who is weak, eateth herbs’, Crab appealed for people to ‘forbear Flesh for my conscience sake, as Paul did declare he would do concerning his weak Brother’.⁴¹ Crab even challenged the passage that John Reeve had used against John Robins’ vegetarianism which warned against devilish prophets ‘commanding to abstain from meats’.⁴² Crab insisted that he commanded no one: he just wanted everyone СКАЧАТЬ