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

it may be, if [meat] had never been used, and that Men had been content to feed upon a certain number of Plants only, it would have been never the worse for them: But it’s no longer a question to be disputed, and if it be an abuse, it has so long obtained by Custom in the World, that it is become necessary. 39

Though in practice few could imagine a world without chicken fricassée, on the theoretical front the vegetarians were making serious headway. So astonishingly widespread were views like these that one might reasonably see a coalescing intellectual orthodoxy. Scientists had ‘proved’ the old claim that man was originally a herbivore and meat-eating was an unnatural deviation from his intended diet. Academics across the board assented to Gassendi’s arguments – even those affiliated to rival schools of thought, including Cartesians such as Antoine le Grand and Hobbesians such as Pufendorf. That man was originally designed as a herbivore became a controversial medical fact accepted by scientists from all parts of Europe. But one question remained – was it feasible or desirable to bring man back from the path of corruption and return him to his natural diet? In the wake of the scientific case, a wave of practising doctors dedicated their careers to achieving just this. In the course of promoting vegetables as nutritious and meat as potentially damaging, this growing school of vegetarian medics laid the foundations for the modern understanding of diet and lifestyle.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century vegetarianism emerged as a powerful voice in France and other Catholic countries, by knitting scientific discoveries to the Church’s traditional teaching on abstinence. Many of the early Church fathers had been penitent ascetics, believing that luxury corrupted and abstinence was the key to purification. St Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and St John Cassian concurred that meat was a lust-inducing luxury. 1 Good Christians did not have ‘unpleasing smells of meat amongst them’, said St John Chrysostom: ‘The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of dung!’ 2 St Peter, St Matthew and St James were said to have lived entirely upon vegetables, and even the anti-vegetarian St Augustine maintained that Christ ‘allowed no animal food to his own disciples’. 3

But while they agreed that abstinence was a virtue, the Church fathers equally insisted that it was not a sin to eat flesh. 4 One of the principal purposes of religion was to show that the world had been made for man’s use. Even abstinence-endorsing texts like the Clementine Homilies assented to the orthodoxy that God made animals for man ‘to make fishes, birds, and beasts his prey’. 5 Claiming otherwise was dangerously subversive and was indelibly associated with the pagan Pythagoreans and the heretic Manicheans and Cathars. 6 ‘[Pythagoreans] abstain on account of the fable about the transmigration of souls,’ insisted Origen. ‘We, however, when we do abstain, do so because ‘‘we keep under our body, and bring it into subjection’’.’ 7 Animals had no rational soul, insisted St Augustine, and were a matter of indifference to humans. Hurling the Gadarene swine off a cliff, he said, twisting the meaning of the Gospels, was Christ’s way of showing ‘that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition’. 8

Keeping heretical vegetarianism at bay, the Catholic Church instituted its own laws on periodical fasting that emphasised the virtues of abstinence. Eating flesh inflamed fleshly passions and was a luxury, so it was forbidden on fast days. The medieval Church banned flesh and even dairy products on half the days of the year; even in the comparatively lax seventeenth century, flesh was forbidden for the forty days of Lent as well as every Friday and other holy days. Fish, a cold sexless animal, did not contain the sanguine humours that stirred desires, so it was a permitted accompaniment to Lenten bread and vegetables (an interesting source of modern ‘piscatarian vegetarianism’). For most people, who could not afford fish or substitutes such as almond milk, the Lent diet was a meagre affair. For members of the strictest monastic orders such as the Carthusians and Capuchins, the same restrictions applied all the year round. 9

It was partly this very institutionalisation of abstinence from flesh which meant that ‘vegetarianism’ as a separate religious position did not take hold as much in Catholic countries as it did in Protestant regions after the Reformation. Any Catholic who did branch out and make abstinence from flesh a doctrinal issue would be liable to immediate condemnation as a heretic. Contrariwise, during the Reformation, Protestants rejected Catholic fast laws, claiming that outlawing flesh constituted a blasphemous rejection of God’s gifts to man and was thus indistinguishable from heretical vegetarianism. John Calvin called the Catholic proscription of flesh a ‘sacrilegious opinion’. 10 The humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his Epystell concerning the forbedynge of eatynge of fleshe (1534), suggested that Catholic fast police were unwise for punishing peasants who dared nibble on a dry bacon rind while the rich supped on sturgeon and hot spicy rocket ‘and such other thynges which kyndleth the genitales’. 11 It was missing the point of the fast to focus so particularly on the issue of meat-eating.

In England, Henry Holland, vicar of St Bride’s in London, proclaimed the Catholic fast a ‘doctrine of devils’ passed down to them from the Satanically inspired vegetarian Egyptian priests, the Persian magi and the ‘wizards of India’. 12 In Lenten Stuffe (1599), the satirist Thomas Nashe dismissed the ichthyic diet as useless ‘flegmatique’ food and depicted abstinent monks as ‘Rhomish rotten Pithagoreans or Carthusian friers, that mump e on nothing but fishe’. He even implied that the continental temperance writers Luigi Cornaro and Leonard Lessius were part of a counter-Reformation conspiracy attempting to infiltrate Protestant countries with superstitious abstinence. 13 Even John Donne snidely equated salad-eating with madness and Papism, ‘Like Nebuchadnezar perchance with grass and flowers,/ A sallet worse than Spanish dieting’. 14 In the political arena, Queen Elizabeth trod the knife-edge of compromise. Though it remained illegal to eat flesh on fast days, the Acts of Parliament insisted that this was in order to alleviate the pressure on livestock, boost the fish trade, stimulate shipbuilding and thus support the navy – and ‘not for any superstition’. 15 Some Protestants thought that watering down the Lenten fast was a bad idea. Sir William Vaughan, the American colonist, felt that the Elizabethan Acts failed to bridle the appetites of libertines, and suggested that a healthy dose of vegetarianism would do them good. But like Bacon and Bushell, he was at pains to insist that his dietary convictions were not a sign of Catholic superstition. 16

While in England critics of meat-eating had to demarcate themselves from Catholicism, in France vegetarianism was often absorbed into the religious establishment. Whereas Bushell and Crab withdrew from society in order to pursue their vegetarian beliefs, across the Channel Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) used the monastic system as a means of publicly championing abstinence from flesh.

Rancé lived a worldly existence as a youth at the Parisian court until 1657 when the lady of scandalous reputation whom he adored and with whom he probably had a passionate affair, Marie, Duchess of Montbazon, died of scarlet fever. Renouncing his former life, Rancé turned to the revival of severe asceticism, bringing the Cistercian monastic order back to the rule of St Benedict which had forbidden ‘the eating of the flesh of quadrupeds’. 17