The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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 ‘ye 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 eat plenty of fruit?9 Or was there a more intimate connection between the apples he observed and those he ate?

The burgeoning vegetarian movement was quick to claim Newton as one of their own, triggering a debate that has raged ever since. Newton’s personal acquaintance, the vegetarian doctor George Cheyne, often used him as a shining example of the benefits of a flesh-free diet: ‘Sir Isaac Newton, when he studied or composed,’ claimed Cheyne, ‘had only a Loaf, a Bottle of Sack and Water, and took no Sustenance then but a Slice and a weak Draught as he found Failure of Spirits’.10 Albrecht von Haller inserted this exciting data into his highly respected Elementa Physiologiae, and from then on it was repeated time and time again by vegetarians trying to prove that their diet enhanced mental acuity.11 By 1860 the American vegetarians Sylvester Graham and Amos Bronson Alcott were making such capital out of this claim that their opponents, Andrew Combe and James Coxe, felt compelled to defend Newton from this slur on his character. With indignant bluster, they complained that ‘Allusion is sometimes made to Sir Isaac Newton, as another example of the beneficial effects of a vegetable diet’; but, they continued, it was obvious that Newton ate meat because he ‘occasionally suffered from gout’, the classic ailment of carnivores.12 Heedless of such remonstrances, scores of vegetarian societies around the world still list Newton among their favourite predecessors.

The denial that he was vegetarian seemed to have gained a sure footing when, in a bundle of household papers, a bill was found showing that one goose, two turkeys, two rabbits and one chicken were delivered to Newton’s household in the space of a single week. In addition, at the time of his death Newton owed £10 16s 4d to a butcher and a total of £2 8s 9d to a poulterer and a fishmonger. This surely shows that Newton indiscriminately gorged on animals at a rate scarcely imaginable to modern appetites. Or does it? Newton certainly served his guests meat (they said so), and the other members of his household no doubt did not expect to go without.13 But since Newton ate separately from his family, there is no guarantee that he ate these groceries himself, even if it seems probable.

Some saw a suspicious correlation between Newton’s dietary habits and his renowned sympathy for animals. ‘He had such a meekness & sweetness of temper,’ wrote John Conduitt, ‘that a melancholy story would often draw tears from him & he was exceedingly shocked at any sort of cruelty to man or beast, mercy to both being, the topick he loved to dwell upon’.14 In the notebook Conduitt kept about Newton, there is one barely legible page that records both that ‘He preferred’ (or ‘pursued’?) to ‘live on vegetables’ and that he could ‘not bear sports that kill beasts – as hunting & shooting’.15 Reading between the lines, it seems that Conduitt believed Newton preferred not to eat the objects of his pity.

It is to Voltaire – who did more than anyone to popularise Newton’s philosophy in the decades following his death – that we owe the story of the falling apples. (Voltaire himself learned it from Catherine Conduitt, and the inspirational apple tree was visited as a shrine until it blew down in 1820.) The universe was bound together by one physical law, and, according to Voltaire, Newton believed that people were bound together by the universal law to ‘do as you would be done unto’ – the Golden Rule which every person was able to deduce with the natural faculty of sense. Voltaire extrapolated that Newton even extended the universal disposition of compassion to beasts. ‘He acceded only with repugnance to the barbarous usage of feeding ourselves with the blood and flesh of beings similar to us,’ declared Voltaire. ‘He found it a truly awful contradiction to believe that animals feel, and to make them suffer. His morality accorded in this point with his philosophy.’16 Voltaire would have gone to almost any lengths to promote Newton as the hero of natural religion and opponent of Descartes’ ruthless theory about animals. But just how connected was Newton’s philosophy with his morality?

In his quest to discover God’s universal laws of morality, Newton undertook a massive project of biblical and historical scholarship, which he executed with the same intellectual rigour as he did his physical experiments.17 He believed that ‘in ye beginning’ God revealed to mankind the laws upon which they were to base their religion. Since that time, mankind had corrupted God’s original religion into all the idolatrous and superstitious cults that existed on earth. Even Moses, thought Newton, had introduced unnecessary and potentially schismatic doctrines. Christ himself had not revealed any new moral laws, and Christians had muffled the simple divine message with numerous elaborations and bodges.

Newton’s mission – as important to him as discovering the laws of gravity – was to scrape away all these accretions and reconstruct the pure original religion. He tried to do this by comparing the world’s different religious beliefs as they were recorded in ancient texts from Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece as well as in several modern travelogues.18 Anything he found to be common to all or most cultures he took to be a remnant of mankind’s shared heritage. (Claiming that universally held beliefs were ‘innate’ had become virtually untenable in the face of John Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Like Locke, Newton did think that some ideas – such as belief in God – were common all over the world because different peoples independently used their reason to come to the same conclusions, but Newton was more interested in showing that universal laws had been inherited from a shared cultural heritage.19)

For Newton, the history of mankind’s heritage hinged on the story of Noah. After the Flood was over, when the only surviving humans were those living in Shinar below Mount Ararat in Babylonia, God delivered to Noah a reiteration of the true religion. As Noah’s community grew and divided into numerous satellite states, this original code was spread across the world, only to be corrupted in most places beyond recognition.20 Newton’s passionate desire was to lead the world back to the true source: ‘tis not to be doubted but that ye religion wch Noah propagated down to his posterity was the true religion.’21

Newton completed most of his religious research in the 1680s and arranged it under the provisional title Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae, or The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. Daunted by the unorthodoxy of his own conclusions, Newton realised that it would be perilous to publish them. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689, his disbelief in the Holy Trinity would alone have been punishable by severe fines, loss of position and even death. When faced with compulsory ordination into the ‘corrupt’ Anglican Church in 1675, Newton chose disgrace and dismissal from his Trinity fellowship. His position was saved at the last minute by a special royal dispensation, but it was at the price of silence.22 Today, his theological work remains a confusion of Latin and English manuscripts scattered between the libraries of Jerusalem and Cambridge and is only now being gathered together and published online by the Newton Project. However, Newton did incorporate some of his findings into a subsequent book about his new technique of using astronomy to recalculate ancient historical events. This he left as a parting gift to the world and it was published as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended within months of his refusal to take the Anglican sacrament on his deathbed.

From a careful study of this book and his unpublished manuscripts, it is clear that Newton felt he had discovered the fundamentals of the original religion, both its ceremonial form and its moral base. The ceremonial form of the original religion was solar. A fire was placed in the centre of a sacred space surrounded by seven flames, symbolising the sun encircled by the seven (pre-Copernican) planets. This ceremony had been designed by God to teach the first people the heliocentric mechanics of the universe, while simultaneously encouraging the worship of God through the magnificence of His creation. Newton found evidence of this religious rite among the biblical Patriarchs, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, Numa Pompilius’ Pythagorean Romans, 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 ye first ages … I understand not how one & the same religion could so soon spread into them all had it not been propagated wth mankind in ye 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