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

But Glanvill’s philosophical loophole was not the end of the discussion. Both More and Helmont were intimate friends with Lady Anne Conway, one of the most advanced women philosophers of her generation. During their walks in the woods and groves of her estate, Lady Conway became a convert to Helmont’s creed and she realised that it had profound implications for the moral status of animals. Conway took ideas directly from Luria’s Kabbala and devised an elaborate system that, like Glanvill’s, argued that animals deserved the suffering to which they were fated, but that nevertheless humans ought to act responsibly towards them.³¹ In her philosophical Principles, published anonymously by Helmont after her death in 1690, Conway held that animals – like all matter in the creation – were continually trying to improve and would eventually improve enough to become human and thence return to their spiritual origins. Thus ‘a Horse may in length of Time be in some measure changed into a Man’. She seems to have been unclear whether this transformation happened by metamorphosis, metempsychosis or more prosaically by being eaten and raised up the food chain. Conversely, if a man led a brutish life, his spirit would ‘enter into the Body of a beast, and there for a certain time be punished’.³² Like Tryon (who may have heard of Conway through her friend George Keith), she maintained that ‘if a Man hath lived … a Brutish [life]… he … should be changed into that Species of Beasts, to whom he was inwardly most like, in Qualities and Conditions of Mind.’³³

      Conway explained that it was in the interests of all creatures to unite in their effort to return to God. God created all species, explained Conway, to ‘stand in a mutual Sympathy, and love each other; so hath he implanted a certain Universal Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as being all Members of one Body, and (as I may so say), Brethren, having one common Father’.³⁴ If a man ‘kills any of them, only to fulfil his own pleasure, he acts unjustly, and the same measure will again be measured unto him’, she warned. Conway did not state whether she thought killing animals for food counted as unnecessary ‘pleasure’ and thus stopped short of advocating vegetarianism, but her philosophy provided a foundation for the ethical treatment of animals.³⁵

      This inclusion of animals in the process of gilgul captured the imagination of others and a flurry of Reincarnationist books stimulated a widespread theological debate. The anonymous author(s) of a tract called Seder Olam: Or, The Order of Ages, described a monist system of ascension almost identical to Conway’s, explaining that ‘even the basest Creature … may be changed, either into the noblest, or at least into some part of the noblest Creature’.³⁶

      Gilgul provided Christians with an alternative framework for understanding non-human life forms. Animals were striving in partnership with their fallen human brothers and sisters to improve and reclaim their lost divine status. It was everyone’s responsibility to lend a helping hand in the common cause of mutual improvement. This did not necessarily mean desisting from killing animals (though it could), but it did mean treating them with due consideration for their plight. Although it never gained a foothold in the established Christian Churches, the kabbalist gilgul joined forces with the beliefs of Origen, Pythagoras and the Hindus, and became a persuasive doctrine that continued to inspire European minds for centuries. Some of the most prominent vegetarians in later decades owed something to the accommodation of gilgul into Christianity.

       EIGHT Men Should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology

      One autumn day in 1665, while sheltering from plague-stricken Cambridge at his home in Woolsthorpe, the twenty-two-year-old Isaac Newton (1642–1727) sat pondering the fall of apples to the ground. He had always had a speculative turn of mind. His family had put him to work on the farm at the age of seventeen, but he was forever to be found reclining beneath a tree with a book instead of watching the cattle, and in the end they sent him back to grammar school. At the age of eighteen Newton became an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where he swiftly made his first major discovery simply by closing the curtains of his room to direct a shaft of sunlight onto a prism. Watching the familiar spectacle of white light refracting into all the colours of the spectrum, he hit upon an explanation which resolved a fundamental principle of light and colour. After graduating in the spring of 1665, and spending the autumn amongst the orchards at home, he extended his speculations in another direction. Since gravity exerted its power on objects such as apples even when they were high up in the air, he reflected, why should not this invisible power extend as far as the moon? By 1687, when Newton had established himself as a formidable scientist at the Royal Society, his calculations finally proved that the pull from the earth kept the moon in orbit, and ultimately that universal gravitation synchronised everything from the cycles of the largest planets to the tiniest particles bound together in matter. This single glorious manifestation of God’s omnipotence was what kept the entire universe in harmonious motion.¹

      Newton is famous for his scientific discoveries with which, from his cloister in Trinity College, he revolutionised Europe’s understanding of the physical laws of nature. But Newton did not limit his curiosity to physics: he was equally interested in discovering the moral laws of God’s creation. Only by studying both the moral and physical laws could he come to understand God in His entirety. If God used the simple power of gravity to unite all things in the universe, might He not have used one moral law to bind together all His creatures, including animals?

      

      Newton was renowned among his Cambridge colleagues for his extremely peculiar dietary habits. He rarely allowed his experiments to be interrupted by convivial eating hours and his friends noted that even those meals that were brought privately to his room he pushed around the plate in absent-minded disinterest.² His step-niece Catherine Conduitt, who lived with him when he moved to London to become Master of the Royal Mint, complained that ‘his gruel or milk & eggs that was carried to him warm for his supper he would often eat cold for his breakfast.’ Her husband John confirmed that ‘His cat grew fat on the food he left standing,’ and others joked that in Cambridge his meals were finished off by ‘y^e old Woman, his Bedmaker’. After Newton’s death there was a flurry of anxious attempts to make sense of these prandial oddities and his modern biographer, Richard S. Westfall, wrote that ‘No peculiarity of Newton’s amazed his contemporaries more consistently.’³ Newton’s amanuensis, William Stukeley, tried to defuse gossip by explaining that Newton’s temperate breakfasts of bread, butter and orange-peel infusion were the key to his self-control and long life.⁴ So Newton, with his head in the skies, was remiss about meals, and the meals we do hear about were meagre, mainly fleshless – but not explicitly vegetarian.

      Sir Isaac was ‘a Lover of Apples, and sometimes at Night would eat a smal roasted Quince’, reminisced his assistant and relative Humphrey Newton.⁵ So passionate about apples was Newton that he applied his genius to encouraging the plantation of orchards in Cambridgeshire.⁶ More than anything else, agreed John Conduitt, it was ‘vegetables & fruit which he always eat very heartily of’. Did he choose to eat ‘little flesh’, as John Conduitt reported, to combat the chronic bladder condition of which he eventually died?⁷ Was he dieting according to the rules for scholars set out in Luigi Cornaro’s Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life?⁸ Was he following the advice of his alchemical adviser, Michael Maier, that practitioners should