The Bloodless Revolution Read online

  Most of the radicals of the mid-century period died in anonymity. After the Restoration in 1660 their politics became unpopular and dangerous to espouse. Roger Crab, exceptionally, sustained his local fame until he died in 1680. Secondary sources report a large concourse of people attending his funeral on 14 September at St Dunstan’s Church in the parish of Stepney. In the churchyard a large monument was erected in his memory with a versified tribute to his vegetarianism:

  Tread gently, Reader, near the Dust,

  Cometh to this Tomb-stone’s Trust.

  For while ‘twas Flesh, it held a Guest,

  With universal Love possest.

  A soul that stemm’d Opinion’s Tyde,

  Did over Sects in Triumph ride.

  Yet separate from the giddy Crowd,

  And Paths Tradition had allow’d.

  Through good and ill Reports he past; Oft censur’d, yet approv’d at last. Wouldest thou his Religion know? In brief ‘twas this: To all to do Just as he would be done unto. So in kind Nature’s Law he stood, A Temple undefil’d with Blood: A Friend to ev’ry Thing that’s good. The rest, Angels alone fitly can tell: Haste, then, to Them and Him; and so farewel.66

  The lines – written by a more proficient poet than Crab himself – represent vegetarianism as perfectly compatible with orthodox Christianity. To a large degree this agenda seems to have been achieved: he had been married in 1663 to a widow, Amy Markham, in St Bride’s church; he was buried in the yard of another Anglican church, and according to the parish register was considered a ‘Gentleman’.67 This elevated status betrays his former radical rejection of personal property and social distinction, but it shows that he kept his vegetarian message alive in the wholly altered political environment of the Restoration.

  Vegetarianism was a familiar expression of political and religious dissent in seventeenth-century England. It is unclear to what extent the Robins sect, the Diggers, the Family of Love, George Foster, Thomas Tany, Robert Norwood and Roger Crab were actively conspiring with each other. But diet was an integral part of a broadly cohesive radical agenda which they shared. Vegetarianism, for some, was an inherent part of the revolution. After their gory experience in the Civil War, veterans developed an aversion to blood so strong that they extended it to shedding animal blood. The rejection of violence, oppression and inequality went hand in hand with vegetarianism in a movement that aimed to achieve a bloodless revolution. Later, in the revolutionary 1780s and 1790s, vegetarianism re-emerged as part of a radical ideology. In the period between, vegetarianism survived by adapting to different cultural contexts, though often carrying with it traces of the old agenda. Roger Crab was the pioneer: lifting vegetarianism out of its Civil War context and refashioning it to new tastes laid the foundations for its continuation in Restoration England.

  FOUR

  Pythagoras and the Sages of India

  Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?

  Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

  Clown: What think’st thou of his opinion?

  Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

  Clown: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

  William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV. ii

  While meat-eating Christians fended off the vegetarian schism at home, another force was gathering strength that would assail them with even greater intensity. Having accustomed themselves to thinking of Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, travellers were shocked to find in India a thriving religion which had been sustained in a pristine form since well before – and virtually oblivious to – the invention of Christianity. The discovery of a people following an unbroken tradition of vegetarianism and exercising an extreme moral responsibility towards animals radically challenged European ideas about the relationship between man and nature. The stories of Indians living at peace with the animal kingdom were imaginatively merged with Christian traditions of prelapsarianism and Puritanism, and were a catalyst of Europe’s seventeenth-century vegetarian renaissance. This neglected movement in European history profoundly affected some of the period’s best-known figures and has had a lasting influence on Western concepts of nature.

  On arrival in India, European travellers were astonished when they noticed that the modern ‘Brahmins’ – the Hindu priest caste, custodians of the Sanskrit scriptures – were the direct descendants of the ancient ‘Brachmanes’ encountered by Alexander the Great 2,000 years earlier. When the erudite Italian aristocrat, Pietro della Valle, encountered naked, dreadlocked, ash-smothered ‘Yogis’ with painted foreheads on his travels to India in the 1620s, he affirmed with confidence that ‘There is no doubt but these are the ancient Gymnosophists so famous in the world … to whom Alexander the Great sent Onesicritus to consult with them’.1 For travellers and readers alike – brought up on the primordial antiquity of the Bible – this was a disorientating realisation.

  Merchants were excited by the trade in Indian diamonds, cotton and spices but thinkers all over Europe became obsessed with unlocking the jealously guarded secrets of India’s strange and wonderful religions.2 Missionaries were having a tough time getting Indians interested in Christianity, but Europeans at home were fascinated by Hinduism. Inevitably, Christian writing about India was distorted by religious bigotry and underwritten by Europe’s nascent political agenda, but some seventeenth-century travellers examined Indian culture with remarkably open minds and even downright admiration. Enthusiastic descriptions were full of fantasies and projections too, but some aspects of Indian culture managed to penetrate the barriers of inter-cultural communication.3 Readers at home developed such an insatiable craving for genuine Eastern knowledge that ideas taken from Indian philosophy were incorporated into debates about religion, science, history, human nature and ethics. At times, Hindu culture appeared so awesome that it shook Europe’s self-centredness to its core.

  The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of Indian vegetarianism was an astoundingly fertile cross-cultural encounter, but it was built upon an ancient history of passionate curiosity. Even before Alexander the Great reached India in 327 BC, its vegetarian philosophers were renowned in the ancient Greek world.4 According to the historians whom Alexander took on his military expedition, the moment the Greek army arrived in the ancient university town of Taxila (now in Pakistan), Alexander despatched his messenger Onesicritus to find the famous ‘gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’. In a legendary episode, which came to epitomise the meeting of East and West, Onesicritus came across a group of Brahmins sunning themselves on the outskirts of town. They burst into laughter at the sight of his hat and extravagant clothing, and derided his attempts to understand a translator’s rendition of their transcendent wisdom with the caustic comment that it was like ‘expecting water to flow through mud’.5 Eventually one of them was prevailed upon to deliver a potted summary of Indian philosophy. Onesicritus was immediately struck by the similarities between Indian and Greek thought. In amazement, he told the Brahmins that like them Plato had taught the immortality of the soul and that their key doctrine of vegetarianism had been advocated in Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Onesicritus’ own teacher, Diogenes.6

  Although there are significant differences in their respective moral systems, it is nevertheless an extraordinary coincidence that roughly contemporaneous seminal Indian and Greek philosophers, the Buddha and Pythagoras, both taught that a soul’s reincarnations depended on behaviour in previous lives, and that it was wrong for people to eat animals. Faced with this enthralling correlation, European matchmakers fantasised about possible explanations for centuries; even today it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of world religion.7 It was well known in ancient Greece and Rome that Pythagoras had travelled to Egypt and Persia in search of philosophical knowledge, and many
, then and later, found it irresistible to imagine that he must have reached India.8 Lucius Apuleius (AD 124–c.170), author of The Golden Ass, announced that the ‘pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists’ had indeed taught Pythagoras ‘the greater part of his philosophy’.9

  Pythagoras was believed to have launched Hellenistic philosophy, introducing the interlinked seminal concepts of the immortality of the soul through reincarnation or ‘metempsychosis’, the notion that all living things are kindred, and the corollary that it was wrong to cause suffering to animals.10 Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but his doctrines became the basis of Plato’s philosophy. It became a staple belief among Platonists that the Greek philosophical tradition owed its origins to India. Even those who thought the Egyptians were the first to invent philosophy could agree, since Egypt was widely believed to be an ancient Indian colony.11

  Tracing Greek philosophy back to the Brahmins was a theory of inestimable significance. Despite cavils from Aristotle, it put the ideal of vegetarianism near the heart of ancient philosophy and enticed generations of travelling philosophers to drink at the original fountain of knowledge in India. Philostratus (AD 170–245) wrote a semi-fictional biography of Christ’s first-century neo-Pythagorean rival, the legendary magical man-god and abolisher of sacrifices, Apollonius of Tyana.12 Following in Alexander’s footsteps to visit the Brahmins of Taxila, Apollonius defended vegetarianism, saying that the earth ‘grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing’, while carnivorous men, ‘deaf to the cries of mother-earth, whet their knife against her children’. ‘Here then,’ explained Apollonius, ‘is something which the Brahmins of India … taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life.’13 Joining the dots between similar ethical systems, Apollonius posited Indian vegetarianism as a mandate for re-establishing harmony with the natural world. He was unambiguous: the basis of Pythagorean vegetarianism was Indian and the Brahmins were the fount of all true philosophy.

  Plotinus (AD 205–70), the founder of Neoplatonism and principal Western proponent of metempsychosis, tried and failed to get to India to meet the Brahmins,14 but his vegetarian star-pupil Porphyry (AD c.234–305) did the next best thing. Porphyry read the now lost account by the pagan convert to Christianity Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154– c.222), who had interviewed a group of Indian ambassadors in Mesopotamia as they made their way to the court of the sun-worshipping homosexual-orgiast Emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.15 In his seminal vegetarian treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry championed the Brahmins for living on the natural products of the earth. ‘To eat other food, or even to touch animate food,’ explained Porphyry, ‘is thought equivalent to the utmost impurity and impiety.’ Eating meat was not technically against the law in India, Porphyry explained, but the Brahmins believed that abstinence from flesh was the purest diet (mirroring the arguments being made by ascetic flesh-abstaining Christians).16

  Porphyry’s vituperative detestation of the Christians, and Apollonius’ stalwart rivalry with them, did not help to ingratiate the Brahmins or vegetarianism to Jerusalem’s new religion. The Church fathers had much to say about abstinence from flesh, so the vegetarian Brahmins presented them with complex doctrinal questions. Was Indian vegetarianism a sign of prodigious spirituality, or was it blasphemous superstition? Worse still, could their diet give support to the contemporaneous vegetarian heresies breeding back home?

  The Athenian pagan convert, St Clement of Alexandria (AD 150– c.215), was keen on flesh-free diets, which no doubt gave him a special interest in the Indian gymnosophists who, he said, ‘feed on nuts, and drink water’. But the extremity of their abstinence, he insisted, made them dangerously similar to the heretical Gnostic Encratites, whom he called ‘blockheads and atheists’.17 St Hippolytus (fl. AD 234) also damned the Brahmins by suggesting in his Refutation of all Heresies, that it was from them that the Encratites originally derived their doctrines. Yet he grudgingly admitted that the Brahmins themselves appeared to live in a sort of Paradise, in which their food literally grew on trees. That the Brahmins did not have to cultivate the earth to get their bread implied that they somehow lived outside the remit of God’s curse on Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’18 The pagan Greeks thought of the Indians living like the inhabitants of the Golden Age, the earth yielding fruit and grain to them without any labour.19 Christians translated such fantasies into the belief that Eden had originally been situated in India.20 On the other hand, lacking cultivation was sometimes construed as a sign of lack of ‘culture’, making the Indians uncivilised savages.21

  But Bardesanes’ enthusiasm for India was infectious. Bishop Euse-bius of Caesarea, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History during the fourth-century Roman persecution, repeated Bardesanes’ comment that the Brahmins ‘neither commit murder, nor worship images, nor taste animal food, nor are ever intoxicated … but devote themselves to God’.22 That they did not worship idols (which was true of some Hindus) suggested that they were Christians in spirit, even though they had not heard of Christ. The even more enthusiastic hermit St Jerome (AD c.347–420), in his defence of abstinence from flesh, declared that the Brahmins exemplified the spiritual benefits of fasting and were worthy of imitation by any Christian. He cited them alongside Diogenes and the Essenes, and even the unimpeachable biblical examples of Daniel the Prophet, Moses, John the Baptist and all the antediluvians including Adam and Eve. The Brahmins, said Jerome with admiration, ‘are so rigidly self-restrained that they support themselves either with the fruit of trees which grow on the banks of the Ganges, or with common food of rice or flour’.23 This ringing endorsement by one of the most revered Church fathers inspired Christian vegetarians for centuries.

  Such willingness to identify points of contact between Hinduism and Christianity found its apotheosis in the monastic Bishop of Helenopolis, Palladius (AD c.363–431), who dramatised a dialogue between Alexander and Dandamis the Brahmin. Dandamis shuns Alexander’s splendid gifts, outsmarting the ‘conqueror of many nations’ with the rebuttal that, ‘The earth supplies me with everything, even as a mother her child with milk,’ and quips that it is better to be fed to beasts than to make oneself ‘a grave for other creatures’.24 Paraphrasing arguments from Palladius’ own teacher, St John Chrysostom (AD 347–407), the Archbishop of Constantinople, and echoing Cynic philosophy, Dandamis says that even wolves were better than humans for at least they only ate meat because their nature compelled them to.

  Palladius’ account was incorporated into later versions of the hugely popular medieval Alexander Romance which spread throughout Europe, and possibly reached India in time to influence the sacred Buddhist text, the Milindapanha, a dialogue in which the vegetarian sage Nagasena converts Menander, the Greek King of Alexander’s Bactrian kingdom. In the Alexander Romance the Brahmins claim to live in blissful harmony: ‘When we are hungry, we go to the trees whose branches hang down here and eat the fruit they produce.’ These Brahmins explicitly combine their vegetarianism with anti-monarchical sentiments; their role as entrenched critics of Western consumerism, tyranny and carnivorousness was growing apace.25

  The extent to which medieval Christendom was ready for a new encounter with India was illustrated by Marco Polo’s literary success on his arrival in Europe in the 1290s. After growing up at the court of Kublai Khan at Shang-tu (Xanadu) and travelling in Asia for more than twenty years, Marco Polo was captured by the Genoese and clapped in jail. Fortuitously, he was made to share a cell with the romance writer Rustichello. Polo whiled away the hours of imprisonment by dictating what he had seen in the East, and, between them, the two prisoners produced one of the most extraordinary travel adventures of all time, written like a medieval romance – except that this time nearly everything they said was true.26

  Rather than simply ridiculing the outlandish cultures he had encountered, Polo made a striking leap towards cultural relativism. He recognised that by their
own standards and even his own, the Brahmins were exceedingly virtuous. They were scrupulously honest, they bathed regularly (unlike Europeans), and they lived extraordinarily long and healthy lives during which, Polo explained, they would not eat or ‘kill any creature or any living thing in the world, neither fly nor flea nor louse nor any other vermin, because they say that they have souls’.27 With such eye-witness reports, Europeans were quick to hold up the Brahmins as a quintessential embodiment of the ‘virtuous pagan’.

  Marco Polo in Tartar attire

  Among the many other wonders Polo described was Adam’s Peak on Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which was said by local Muslims to contain Adam’s grave, and by ‘idolaters’ to hold a footprint of the Buddha.28 Decades later, in 1338 the Pope’s ambassador, John of Marignolli, was sent off to the East to examine the new Christian missions. He visited Ceylon to check up on Polo’s fantastic reports about Adam’s grave and was utterly astonished to discover that, as Polo had suggested, ‘Paradise is a place that (really) exists upon the earth’.29

  Back home, Marignolli wrote up his experiences for Emperor Charles IV whom he served as chaplain. He described how he had strolled through the garden that was once Adam’s home, tasting mangoes, jackfruit, coconuts and bananas which, like the local spices, Marignolli surmised, were descended from the luscious trees of Paradise. On this mountain he found the remains of Adam’s marble house, an imprint of Adam’s foot, and – most amazing of all – a monastery populated by holy men (clearly Buddhists) who, he said, ‘never eat flesh, because Adam and his successors till the flood did not do so’. These extremely holy, half-naked monks were as virtuous as any people on earth – despite not being Christians. They confounded Marignolli by arguing ‘that they are not descended either from Cain or from Seth, but from other sons of Adam’. They claimed that the hill they lived on had protected them – and the original artefacts of Paradise – from the ravages of Noah’s Flood. ‘But as this is contrary to Holy Scripture’, Marignolli added nervously, ‘I will say no more, about it.’ He could not resist the temptation of saying more, however, for he had found something that fulfilled Christians’ wildest dreams: ‘Our first parents,’ he concluded, ‘lived in Seyllan upon the fruits I have mentioned, and for drink had the milk of animals. They used no meat till after the deluge, nor to this day do those men use it who call themselves the children of Adam.’