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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them.’ The scientific evidence had obvious moral implications and he exclaimed against the unnatural consumption of ‘the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals’.³¹

      Ray’s taxonomical research provided the foundations for the definitive work of Carl Linnaeus, whose ‘binomial system’ of classification is still in use today. In the first edition of the Systema naturae (1735), Linnaeus placed humans and apes in the same order, Anthropomorpha (Ray’s term which Linnaeus later changed to ‘Primates’), partly on the basis that man shared the four (distinctly herbivorous) incisors of apes, monkeys and sloths.³² Even this shocking decision – which still cordoned humans off into a genus (Homo) and even a whole family of their own – was nothing like as radical as what Linnaeus privately entertained; he wrote to a zoological colleague with the challenge: ‘I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character … by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice-versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.’³³ This epoch-making recognition of human proximity to animals had a lesser-known corollary: in the same year Linnaeus – a physician by training – wrote his doctoral dissertation in which he argued that a comparison of the structure of the mouth, stomach and hands of the Homo sylvestris and other mammals demonstrated that fruit was the natural food for mankind and should therefore always be prescribed to patients whose bodies had been weakened by fever.³⁴ As royal physician and medical professor, Linnaeus kept Gassendi’s scientific vegetarian tradition alive in the Swedish university of Uppsala by encouraging his students to combine medical dietetics with anatomical analysis. For example, in 1757 the young Isaac Svensson submitted to Linnaeus a doctoral dissertation in which he argued that the most natural food for man was fruit, as was exhibited by children’s natural inclinations, the structure of the teeth, the Persians who fed on nothing but the fruit of palm trees and by the fruitarian ‘Gymnosophists, the wise men of India’.³⁵ By this time in European universities, the Indian vegetarians had taken on the mantle of the greatest adherers to the laws of human nature. While the Western world had long ago abandoned the vegetarian laws of nature, the Indians remained a constant reminder of what they had left behind.³⁶ These three sets of data – human anatomy, the Indian vegetarians, and the effects of the vegetable diet on ailing patients – were repeated time and time again by medical practitioners throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

      Enlightenment scientists were fixated on the concept of natural origins; in a divinely designed world, the narrative of ‘in the beginning’ held enormous sway. Even in the nineteenth century the radical Darwinist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), noted that the human appendix was a ‘relic of an organ that was much larger and was of great service in our vegetarian ancestors.’³⁷ Still today scientists employ calipers to determine whether human teeth betray a herbivorous or carnivorous evolutionary origin and archaeologists examine prehistoric remains to discover when Homo sapiens first started hunting. Despite the recognition that ‘nature’ consists in continual flux, there still remains in Western culture a paradigm of the ‘natural’ which is supposed to define the fixed essence of our being.

      At the same moment as Wallis and Tyson’s announcements in London, a similar gesture of turning to empirical evidence to shed light on the old vegetarian debate was made in the French academy by Louis Lémery (1677–1743) in his university textbook, the Traité des Aliments (1702), translated into English as A Treatise of Foods (1704). Lémery opened his entire discussion of food by addressing the formidable school of Gassendist vegetarians in the French academies who argued that because human anatomy was designed to be herbivorous, meat causes excessive fermentations and tends to ‘corrupt our Humours, and occasion divers Diseases’.³⁸ Rather than contradicting them in theory, Lémery acknowledged that man had lost touch with nature: ‘it looks as if the Food which the God of Nature designed for us, and what best agreed with us should be Plants, seeing that Mankind were never so hail and vigorous as in those first Ages, wherein they made use of them.’ But after a detailed discussion of all the issues, Lémery’s final conclusion, like that of Wallis and Tyson, was pragmatic:

      it may be, if [meat] had never been used, and that Men had been content to feed upon a certain number of Plants only, it would have been never the worse for them: But it’s no longer a question to be disputed, and if it be an abuse, it has so long obtained by Custom in the World, that it is become necessary.³⁹

      Though in practice few could imagine a world without chicken fricassée, on the theoretical front the vegetarians were making serious headway. So astonishingly widespread were views like these that one might reasonably see a coalescing intellectual orthodoxy. Scientists had ‘proved’ the old claim that man was originally a herbivore and meat-eating was an unnatural deviation from his intended diet. Academics across the board assented to Gassendi’s arguments – even those affiliated to rival schools of thought, including Cartesians such as Antoine le Grand and Hobbesians such as Pufendorf. That man was originally designed as a herbivore became a controversial medical fact accepted by scientists from all parts of Europe. But one question remained – was it feasible or desirable to bring man back from the path of corruption and return him to his natural diet? In the wake of the scientific case, a wave of practising doctors dedicated their careers to achieving just this. In the course of promoting vegetables as nutritious and meat as potentially damaging, this growing school of vegetarian medics laid the foundations for the modern understanding of diet and lifestyle.

       TWELVE The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet’s Catholic Fast Food

      At the beginning of the eighteenth century vegetarianism emerged as a powerful voice in France and other Catholic countries, by knitting scientific discoveries to the Church’s traditional teaching on abstinence. Many of the early Church fathers had been penitent ascetics, believing that luxury corrupted and abstinence was the key to purification. St Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and St John Cassian concurred that meat was a lust-inducing luxury.¹ Good Christians did not have ‘unpleasing smells of meat amongst them’, said St John Chrysostom: ‘The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of dung!’² St Peter, St Matthew and St James were said to have lived entirely upon vegetables, and even the anti-vegetarian St Augustine maintained that Christ ‘allowed no animal food to his own disciples’.³

      But while they agreed that abstinence was a virtue, the Church fathers equally insisted that it was not a sin to eat flesh.⁴ One of the principal purposes of religion was to show that the world had been made for man’s use. Even abstinence-endorsing texts like the Clementine Homilies assented to the orthodoxy that God made animals for man ‘to make fishes, birds, and beasts his prey’.⁵ Claiming otherwise was dangerously subversive and was indelibly associated with the pagan Pythagoreans and the heretic Manicheans and Cathars.⁶ ‘[Pythagoreans] abstain on account of the fable about the transmigration of souls,’ insisted Origen. ‘We, however, when we do abstain, СКАЧАТЬ