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

doctrines like the resurrection, and in several of his own works he tried to convince others to follow his lead.⁹ It may seem mystical and slightly mad, but this optimistic theodicy was dangerously seductive for liberal Christians who were tired of fire and brimstone. Fitting reincarnation into the Christian world view justified God by giving sinners another stab at salvation.¹⁰ According to orthodox Christian belief, souls born into tribes of cannibalistic savages had no chance of becoming Christian and no chance of getting to heaven. Instead of believing that such souls were plunged directly – and eternally – into hell, Helmont suggested that they would be progressively reincarnated until they were reborn as Christians.¹¹ Like Luria, Helmont believed that this held for all members of the creation, so that even the souls of wild animals, by ‘an advance and melioration’, would eventually incarnate in a Christian and be saved.¹² He even developed the kabbalists’ notion that God carefully balanced the birth and death rates of animals and humans in order to ensure a steady flow up the chain of being.¹³ Helmont was ashamed that Christians – who should have been the enlightened ones – were labouring under the mental tyranny of hell, while Jews (and even pagans!) were guided in their actions by the ‘wise and solid Notion’ of reincarnation.¹⁴

      Kabbalæ Denudatæ (1684)

      For most of Helmont’s contemporaries it seemed obvious that the kabbalists’ gilgul was just a rehashed version of the Pythagorean and Indian doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁵ This very accusation had always been levelled – perhaps correctly – at kabbalists within the Jewish community. Indeed, similar anxieties about importing pagan doctrines into Christianity can be traced back to the beginning of the Renaissance when the Byzantine theologian George Gemistos Pletho (1355–1450/ 52) first introduced Plato and Strabo’s account of India to the Italian humanists. It was from these texts, as well as some recent accounts of India (perhaps by Marco Polo), that Pletho discovered that all wise men, from Zoroaster to the Brahmins, believed in reincarnation. In favour of these venerable authorities, Pletho abandoned Christianity’s comparatively recent innovations, and converted to the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁶ In the ensuing uproar, Pletho’s books were burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the chapters in which he addressed the issue of meat-eating are lost. But his works on metempsychosis survived and were reprinted in 1689 and 1718, just when there was a renewed interest in reincarnation in Europe.¹⁷

      Helmont insisted, like More and many of their Jewish predecessors, that in fact it was Pythagoras and the Hindus who had learnt the doctrine from the Jews, not vice versa.¹⁸ His aim, he explained, was to reinstate reincarnation ‘corrected, reformed, and stripped of that disguised and deformed shape … purged of those Mistakes, and reduced to the Primitive streightness and simplicity’, ‘and so accommodated to the Principles of Christian Religion’.¹⁹ Initially, Helmont met with considerable success. A splinter group of Helmontians emerged, defending his claim that gilgul was a scriptural doctrine not a Platonic incursion. In the 1690s Reincarnationists were identified by one Anglican critic as being among the worst three dissenting movements of the age. Christians warned that the belief in reincarnation dissolved the fundamental difference between animals and humans.²⁰

      Surprisingly, Helmont converted the prominent Quaker George Keith, noted for his enthusiasm about the virtue of the Brahmins. Keith realised that Helmont’s doctrines could reconcile the orthodox tenet that one had to believe in Christ, with his passionate feeling that people who had never heard of Christ could still get to heaven (by being reincarnated as Christians).²¹ The entire Quaker community on both sides of the Atlantic was polarised by Keith’s controversial kabbalistic reforms. When he gave a sermon in Philadelphia the crowd rioted and the magistrates smashed down his podium with axes. Keith’s followers destroyed the podium of his opponents and he was eventually ejected from the Society of Friends because of his equivocation about transmigration.²²

      Christian believers in reincarnation were predisposed to be sympathetic to the suffering of animals. But they kept a strong arm between themselves and heretical vegetarianism. This was articulated in 1661 when an anonymous author from More’s set (probably George Rust) championed the Platonic doctrines of the heretic Church father Origen in A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of his Opinions.²³ Origen was famous for being vegetarian, but Rust reiterated Origen’s categorical denial (against the accusations of St Jerome) that this had anything to do with Pythagorean superstition. Origen did believe that animals’ souls would be resurrected on the Day of Judgement, but Rust insisted that Origen never believed that humans could reincarnate into animals.²⁴ This ancient debate was resuscitated in a European-wide spate of Origenist works by several theologians, including the extraordinary Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721). Huet later went on to argue that Pythagoras and the Brahmins had taken their doctrines from the Jews,²⁵ and apparently commissioned the Jesuit missionary in India, Father Bouchet, to compose a detailed essay distinguishing Origen’s doctrines from Hindu and Pythagorean metempsychosis and vegetarianism.²⁶

      No one felt the tension between believing in reincarnation and maltreating animals more acutely than the ‘Oxford Platonist’, Joseph Glanvill. A cleric like More and Rust, Glanvill propounded an even more outspoken defence of transmigration, which he anonymously published in 1662 as Lux Orientalis, Or An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, Concerning the Præexistence of Souls. The doctrine of transmigration, announced Glanvill, was attested by ‘the Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, the Ægyptian Gymnosophists, the Jewish Rabbins, some of the Græcian Philosophers, and Christian Fathers’.²⁷ Taking his ideas from the Kabbala, Glanvill asserted that souls that had sinned before the creation of the earth were compressed into Adam’s loins in Eden. But instead of behaving like good children trying to recompense for their former sin, the souls egged Adam on to sin for a second time, thus condemning themselves (that is, us) to a life of suffering on earth.²⁸ It took more than just one lifetime to atone for such heinous criminality, so each soul had to reincarnate until they had purged themselves and were ready to return to God.²⁹ In Lux Orientalis, Glanvill restricted his discussion of pre-existence to humans alone, but in the same year wrote privately to a fellow Origenist that their beliefs logically led to fully blown Pythagorean metempsychosis, ‘for what account els can be given of the state of beasts who some of them are all their lives subject to the tyrannicall tastes of merciless man, except we suppose them to have deserv’d this severe discipline by some former delinquencyes.’ The question of justice to animals was integral to the issue of reincarnation and it racked Glanvill with consternation. If animals had not sinned in a former life, how could one possibly justify treating them the way we do? Faced with this appalling conundrum, Glanvill argued that since God could not be so unjust as to make innocent animals suffer, it was necessary to believe that animals had deserved their suffering by being extremely sinful in former lives. The only alternative, he painfully conceded, was the Cartesian belief that they didn’t suffer