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

the Druids of Stonehenge and similar sacred circles in Denmark and Ireland; and in modern travel narratives he found the same among the Tartars and the Chinese; finally, he concluded that it had been the blueprint for the Second Temple in Jerusalem.²³ The universality of such formations convinced Newton that it must have been the form of the original religion revealed to Noah and spread by him to his descendants, ‘For in y^e first ages … I understand not how one & the same religion could so soon spread into them all had it not been propagated w^th mankind in y^e beginning.’²⁴

      This solar ceremony had been literally moved across the earth when Noah’s descendants each took a coal from the original sacred fire with them on their travels. The fire-worshipping Zoroastrian Persians and the Brahmins, Newton thought, were still burning the same fires today.²⁵

      Along with the glowing embers, Newton believed that Noah’s people carried with them the essential moral laws. Predictably, two of them were the key biblical commandments to love God and to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:36–40). But the third major law that Newton identified – much more controversially and unexpectedly – was the commandment of ‘mercy to animals’. Newton’s promotion of this notion as a cornerstone of religious morals has been overlooked by recent scholarship.

      In a tortuous explanation of various biblical passages, Newton argued that God instituted mercy to animals when he prohibited Noah from eating blood: ‘But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat’ (Genesis 9:4).²⁶ The prohibition of blood-eating was so important to Newton that he wrote a separate essay entirely on the subject. Sadly, when Viscount Lymington sold off Newton’s papers in the 1930s, this essay was purchased for £12 by an elusive Parisian called Emmanuel Fabius, and has never been seen since. However, Newton made the subject a central part of The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and his condensed manuscript essay ‘Irenicum’; he also worked it into his unfinished history of the Church and even envisaged making it the final conclusion of a new edition of Opticks, his groundbreaking work on the properties of light.²⁷

      The prohibition of blood is the basis of Jewish kosher and Islamic halal laws in use today, and of the Old Testament decree that blood was to be let out of sacrificial animals and offered to God. Unlike most Christians, Newton thought that the blood law was not a mere ceremonial taboo: it was a moral instruction of the most fundamental importance, designed to ensure that animals were killed in the least painful way, by slitting their throat and drawing out all their blood. This was, he believed, far preferable to the usual practice in Europe of throttling beasts or banging them on the head with a hammer before cutting their throats (indeed, seventeenth-century legislation stipulated that bulls should be baited by dogs before their meat was fit for sale in a butcher’s shop).²⁸ ‘Strangling’, wrote Newton in a draft manuscript, ‘is a painful death & therefore we are not to strangle things or eat them with their blood, but to let out their blood upon the earth. For we are to avoid all >unnecessary< acts of cruelty.’ (He added ‘unnecessary’ as a qualifying afterthought: if people were going to define eating animals as a ‘necessary cruelty’ then the blood law would at least force them to do it in the most humane manner possible.)²⁹

      In his enthusiasm for the original laws, Newton was inspired by the Jewish rabbis who had always revered the ‘seven laws of Noah’ – the sheva mizvoth b’ne Noah. But the prevailing view among theologians, as John Selden (1584–1654) had recently shown, was that abstinence from blood was not one of the seven, and there was no question of it being a law for the protection of animals.³⁰ Yet Newton went out on a limb to adjust the traditional Noachic laws to fit in with his overall scheme. Newton was so sure of his interpretation that he claimed the law God actually established was ‘mercy to animals’ and that the prohibition of blood was just one euphemistic way of getting the message across. In his triumphant conclusion to chapter one of The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended he summarised the essential laws of the original religion; in the final condensed form he did not even mention the blood, instead replacing it with what he saw as its intended meaning: ‘So then, the believing that the world was framed by one supreme god, and is governed by him; and the loving and worshipping him, and honouring our parents, and loving our neighbour as our selves, and being merciful even to beasts, is the oldest of all religions.’ These few laws, he explained, were the basis of ‘the primitive religion of both Jews and Christians, and ought to be the standing religion of all nations’.³¹

      Illustration of a slaughter-house (1751)

      The prominence Newton gives to the law of mercy to animals is extremely unusual. But he went still further. Astonishingly, it transpires that Newton considered mercy to animals an integral adjunct of the central commandment ‘love thy neighbour’, rendering it – in other drafts of the same manifesto – ‘all men should be friends to all men & even to bruit Beasts’. Newton’s expansion of the sense of ‘neighbour’ to include animals was an unorthodoxy nearly as extreme as that of his contemporaries Tryon, Crab and Winstanley, and was, of course, said to be the belief of the vegetarian Indians.³²

      Loving one’s neighbour was itself an extension of loving God (Matthew 22:36–40), so Newton appears to have deduced that in its purest form there was only one divine law which bound all beings together from God down to the smallest creature. This, it seems, was a moral analogy to the physical law of gravity which bound everything together from the sun to the smallest particle. The solar form of Noah’s original religion was an emblem of both the physical and the moral law.

      In the moral, physical and ceremonial dimensions, Newton saw that God had repeatedly employed the formula of ‘seven in one’. Just as the seven planets, represented by the seven flames around the sacred fire, were held around the sun by the one divine force of gravity, so Newton appears to have concluded that the seven Noachic laws were constituent parts of the one over-arching law of love and mutual respect. This septenary principle even applied to the laws of light, for Newton had analysed white light into the seven ‘homogeneal’ colours of the spectrum, just as the musical scale was composed of seven notes.³³ In its moral dimension, the law kept all God’s creatures bound together by the love that bound them to God. No wonder Newton ushered animals into the fold of the moral law. As Newton himself explained, God’s invisible presence was manifested in the workings of the universe and ‘particularly in that of the bodies of animals’.³⁴

      Given that mercy to beasts was the only contentious commandment in Newton’s universal religion, much of his work focused on proving its legitimacy. For Newton’s contemporaries, this emphasis was so surprising that to some extent it eclipsed the astronomical subject of the Chronology. When dedicating the Chronology to Queen Caroline, who had always been friendly to Newton, John Conduitt (who was responsible for posthumously publishing it) passed over Newton’s revolutionary chronological method, and instead called for her endorsement of Newton’s discovery that banning ‘cruelty, even to brute beasts’ ought to be part of ‘the standing Religion of all Nations’.³⁵ Newton’s voice, echoing resoundingly after his death, reached the royal ears which during life he had sworn not to offend. It was probably after hearing about Newton’s theory that John Clarke (the brother of Newton’s friend Samuel Clarke) argued in his Boyle Lecture of 1719