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

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СКАЧАТЬ many things as man, they still do reason,’ Gassendi wrote to Descartes in 1641, ‘though they do not utter human expressions (as is natural seeing they are not man) yet they emit their own peculiar cries, and employ them just as we do our vocal sounds.’⁷

      By this time Gassendi’s dispute with Descartes on behalf of the animals was more than a decade old. In 1629, soon after leaving the company of Descartes’ friends in Paris, Gassendi travelled to northern Europe where he met another of the greatest intellectuals of the period, the chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644), father of Franciscus Mercurius the kabbalist. Of all subjects they could have chosen, Helmont and Gassendi engaged in a debate about vegetarianism which they later pursued in letters to each other, and which Gassendi finally built into one of the most influential philosophical works of the seventeenth century, the Syntagma Philosophicum (posthumously published in 1658).

      Like Tyson and Wallis decades later, Gassendi’s principal argument was based on comparative anatomy, a discipline as old as Aristotle. Gassendi adapted this part of his argument from Plutarch’s essay ‘On the Eating of Flesh’ (1st century AD). Man, Plutarch had argued, ‘has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh.’⁸ For Plutarch, the corporal design of the human body indicated that nature intended humans to be herbivorous.

      A millennium and a half later, Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’ He gave new precision to Plutarch’s anatomical argument by pointing out that carnivores had sharp, pointed, unevenly spaced teeth, whereas the teeth of herbivores were short, broad, blunt, and closely packed in jaws that joined perfectly for effective grinding. Human teeth, with their prominent molars and incisors, he said, were most like the herbivores. Gassendi concluded that ‘Nature intended [men] to follow, in the selection of their food, not the first, namely the carnivorous, but the latter, which graze on the simple gifts of the Earth.’ This observation, he said, was corroborated by the herbivorous diet instituted by God in Eden and by the myths of the classical Golden Age: ‘in this time of innocence,’ Gassendi speculated, ‘man did not want to drench his hands in the blood of animals.’ Because our teeth weren’t properly designed for chewing flesh, he said, they couldn’t cope with all the membranes, tendons and sticky fibres, leaving too much work for our stomachs, overcharging the system with succulent juices and clouding the spirits. Fruit and vegetables, on the other hand were easy to break down into pulp.

      Helmont’s interpretation of the facts was totally different. He insisted that man was a microcosmic combination of all the animals: he had the canine teeth of carnivores and the molar teeth of herbivores, and could be nourished by the flesh of them all. That flesh also tasted delicious and nourished the human body was clear proof that ‘it was permitted to man by his nature, to eat the flesh of animals’.⁹

      Gassendi retorted that the similarities between ourselves and animals – rather than being a mandate for eating them – should teach us to recognise our consanguinity. Taking a sideswipe at ‘a celebrated man’ (presumably Descartes), Gassendi argued that in terms of anatomy ‘monkeys can pride themselves on having the same as us’; ‘notwithstanding they are earthly, they are coeval with us, however much we are used to despising them.’

      ‘So how come you do not abstain from eating meat?’ Gassendi imagined his opponent asking, to which he replied that his nature had been depraved by being brought up a carnivore, and that it would be dangerous to change his diet all of a sudden (a pervasive assumption rooted in ancient medicine¹⁰). But nevertheless, he conceded, ‘I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts of the earth: I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health.’¹¹

      It was ironic that Gassendi framed some of his arguments in opposition to Descartes, for this was just the sort of conclusion that Descartes appears to have come to. Perhaps when Descartes and Gassendi had their famous reconciliatory meeting in 1647, this was one of the topics they agreed upon. If the opinion of Descartes’ disciple, Antoine le Grand, is anything to go by, the Gassendists and Cartesians both agreed that humans were naturally herbivorous. In the Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (1672), le Grand endorsed every point of Gassendi’s vegetarian argument. The fact that eating raw meat was instinctively repellent, he insisted, shows ‘that Flesh is not our Natural food, being only introduc’d by Lust, which hath quite changed our Nature from its Primigenial Inclination and Temper’. If a boy were raised on a natural fruitarian diet, le Grand speculated, he might ‘not be inferiour to Stags in running, nor to Apes in climbing of Trees’.¹²

      Gassendi’s medical arguments developed into a long-lasting scientific tradition. This received a massive boost in 1678 when his major works were abridged and translated from Latin into French by an ex-pupil who had just returned from travelling in India and was now at the medical faculty of Montpellier.¹³ This vital redactor of Gassendi’s theories was no other than François Bernier, the most influential interpreter of Indian vegetarianism in seventeenth-century Europe – who suggested that abstaining from meat had originally been a rational practice based on the preservation of health and the inculcation of good morals. Although Bernier never said so in his travel writing, he had probably been predisposed to the medical arguments for vegetarianism by Gassendi, his friend and mentor.

      In Bernier’s hands, Gassendi’s vegetarian arguments underwent a fascinating transformation. Gassendi had little empirical evidence that the vegetable diet really was as healthy as he hypothesised, but Bernier used his experience in India to show that vegetarians really were at least as healthy as meat-eaters. So, in Bernier’s Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, where Gassendi noted that ancient pagan philosophers and Christian ascetics lived on the vegetable diet, Bernier updated this information with the crucial contemporary fact that ‘even now many people of the East Indies still do’. Where Gassendi argued that the fortitude of herbivorous animals suggested that plants were very nourishing, Bernier inserted the comment that ‘the Indians who live on nothing else are just as strong, and at least as healthy as us’.¹⁴ And when Gassendi wrote that Diogenes, Seneca and Lucretius were exemplars of Epicurean frugality, Bernier appended an entire essay on the living ‘Indian Diogenes’, in order, he explained, ‘to shew that all these fine things we have spoken of, are not only bare Philosophical Speculations, but that there are whole Nations, who lead as sparing a Life’. The Brahmins, Banians and naked Indian fakirs eat hardly anything but lentils and rice, never eat flesh, and yet, said Bernier, ‘they live as contented, as quiet, and pleasant as we do, and far more Healthy, at least full as strong and lusty as we are.’¹⁵

      Most intriguing of all – given his professional status as an academic physician – is Bernier’s attention to Indian medicine. Although he did not think much of their anatomical knowledge – and ridiculed them for fleeing every time he cut open an animal alive to demonstrate the circulation of the blood – he did think their medical practice could teach Europeans something, even though it ‘differs essentially from ours’. In his travelogue, Bernier noted that for Indians ‘the sovereign remedy for sickness is abstinence; nothing is worse for a sick body than meat broth.’ This went against the prevailing practice in France where feeble patients were considered in need of ‘strengthening’ with rich meat broths. And yet, Bernier noted that the Indian practice of abstinence СКАЧАТЬ