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

⁷⁸ John Selden and Joannes Mercerus both agreed with St Clement of Alexandria that Pythagoras (and the Brahmins) derived their ‘mildness towards irrational creatures from the [Mosaic] law’, even though they maintained that Moses himself didn’t care about animals at all.⁷⁹ These ethnocentric speculations were provided with extra ballast when travellers suggested that Indian abstinence from flesh was basically the same as abstinence from blood. Sir Thomas Roe, for example, described Hindus ‘that will not eate any thing wherin ever there was any blood,’ and he strengthened the comparison to Judaism by referring to their temples as ‘synagoags’.⁸⁰

      But Newton reversed the tide: rather than interpreting pagan doctrine solely through the lens of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he allowed pagan religion to influence his interpretation of Judaeo-Christianity. It was pagan vegetarianism that helped to convince him that the Bible’s law against blood was really a law against cruelty to animals. Europeans projected Pythagorean notions onto Indian culture, but it is also the case that Newton projected Indian values back onto Christianity. Rather than just seeing pagan vegetarianism as a corruption of the law against blood, he saw them both as branches from one original root – the law of mercy to animals. Newton may have thought that being vegetarian was taking the commandment further than was necessary, but pagan vegetarianism was clearly preferable to the Christians’ total abandonment of any restraint on their consumption of blood, their methods of slaughter, and their cruel and neglectful treatment of animals. Europe was in universal breach of one of the most fundamental laws of God. Bizarre though it may seem, and heretical it would have appeared to his contemporaries, Newton considered that some pagan cultures were closer to the true religion in that respect than the Christian world he lived in.

      Newton’s attempts to reinstate a true understanding of the physical universe went hand in hand with his desire to re-establish the original laws of God.⁸¹ If Westfall is right that ‘he may even, in his innermost heart, have dreamed of himself as a prophet called to restore the true religion’, then we must include in his reforms the readjustment of man’s relationship with nature. For the sake of his peace and quiet, and for social conformity, Newton did not openly campaign for the restitution of the true religion. From his posthumous and unpublished legacy, however, it is clear that Newton passionately wanted his scientific revolution to be accompanied by a bloodless revolution.

      So was he a vegetarian, or wasn’t he? In practice, probably not – at least, not all the time – but there may have been periods in which he did adhere more strictly to his dietary principles. Along with the scientific and moral wisdom lost with the ancient world, Newton thought he could recover the forgotten art of alchemy. Closeted away in a special building in his garden, Newton often stayed up for several nights feverishly keeping his alchemical cauldron burning, sifting through ancient recipes, adding ingredients and trying to find real chemical processes in arcane formulae. This was Newton’s main pursuit until the mid-1690s, at which point he suffered a severe nervous breakdown – explained by biographers variously as the effects of chemical poisoning or his acute religious crisis.⁸²

      In the user’s guide to alchemy, Michael Maier told aspiring alchemists that the Egyptian priests, Orpheans, Samothracian Cabiri, Persian magi, Brahmins, Ethiopian gymnosophists, and Pythagoreans were all alchemists dedicated to the secrets of nature.⁸³ Maier had even read Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s recent Itinerario and enthusiastically alerted the alchemical and Rosicrucian brotherhoods to the fact that the renowned, frugal Brahmins had survived into the modern world, representing an unbroken chain of alchemical and natural wisdom at least as old as Abraham.⁸⁴ Newton had read and marked up his copies of Porphyry and Philostratus and owned a copy of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy; he knew that the ancient philosophers purified themselves by abstaining from meat.⁸⁵ Modern alchemists all agreed that adepts had to be pure and temperate or their efforts would be wasted.⁸⁶ Even Newton’s favourite prophet Daniel had, according to Josephus (AD 37–100 ), acquired the occult skill of the Chaldaeans by forbearing ‘to eat of all living creatures’.⁸⁷ Newton once told Conduitt that ‘They who search after the Philosopher’s Stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict & religious life,’ and Conduitt commented that ‘Sr I excelled in both.’⁸⁸ Perhaps when attempting alchemical feats, Newton followed in the footsteps of the ancient wise men, keeping himself pure by refusing to eat animals.⁸⁹

      Newton shared many opinions more usually associated with retrospectively marginalised characters like Thomas Tryon.⁹⁰ But although by Newton’s contemporaries’ standards such beliefs were far out, his religious opinions can be seen as pushing an Enlightenment agenda. His faith was founded on an empirical observation of the universe (the power of gravity alone was enough to prove the existence of God), and his religion was based on a comparative examination of world cultures. Not only did he challenge entrenched orthodoxies about man’s relationship with nature, he also threw aside the millennia-old detestation of ‘pagans’ and established that they had the same origins as European Christianity.

       NINE Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy

      By the end of the seventeenth century, a band of secretive philosophers were taking the inquisitive principles of the early Enlightenment to a logical extreme. Some proponents of the radical Enlightenment merely doubted a few biblical tenets; others rejected religion outright. At the heart of the movement were the deists, who accepted that the world had been divinely created but regarded all other religious doctrines as highly suspect human fabrications. Bundled together by contemporaries and invariably misrepresented in the press, the ‘deists and atheists’ were regarded as the epoch’s greatest threat. At the head of this supposedly demonic alliance stood the apostate Jew Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) whose philosophy spread across Europe in clandestine manuscripts and books, triggering a new wave of thinkers for whom it often seemed – shockingly to Christians – that ‘God’ meant little more than ‘nature’.¹ Because they rejected tradition as a basis for morality, they were commonly portrayed as amoral, Godless rakes. But many of these ‘libertines’ believed they were simply ringing the death knell for an outdated system of oppression.

      Under the scrutiny of their unflinching gaze, customary treatment of non-Europeans and the natural world came in for a dramatic reappraisal. This effort reached a pinnacle in the incredible eight volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, purportedly a cache of personal papers penned in Arabic by an Ottoman spy called Mahmut operating in Paris from 1637 to 1682. The letters unfold Mahmut’s story as he lives through this fraught period of Christian – Muslim relations preceding Europe’s final defeat of the Ottoman army in 1683 after narrowly escaping humiliation in the final siege of Vienna. Mahmut’s intelligence despatches to his political masters in Constantinople concerning the European courts’ military actions and political intrigues are interwoven with gripping stories about his escapes from assassination, his failed affair with a married Greek woman, his culture shock and psychological turmoil as a Muslim in Europe. The Turkish Spy is a deeply sympathetic political romance.

      The first volume was in fact written by the Francophile Genoan journalist Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93) after his release from an Italian jail for sedition, and the subsequent seven anonymous