The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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 that the law against eating blood was ‘intended to prevent all Cruelty towards brute Creatures; and that … they should be put to the least Pain that is possible’.36

Newton no doubt felt supported in his beliefs by his favourite Jewish scholar, the twelfth-century Rabbi Moses ben Maimun (Maimonides), who had similarly tried to smash a conventional Jewish disregard for animals by insisting that some of Moses’ laws were for the protection of animals (though conversely the prohibition of blood, he believed, was instituted because Satanist pagans drank it to ‘fraternize with the djinns’).37 Claiming that Moses instituted mercy to animals was not unheard of in Christendom either. Francis Bacon said that laws like abstaining from blood were ‘not so meerely Ceremoniall, as Institutions of Mercy’ (though he was by no means calling for its restitution);38 and in a famous article against cruelty to animals in The Guardian (1713), referred to by Conduitt in his notes on Newton, Alexander Pope argued that Moses had instituted mercy to beasts.39 But the dominant Christian line, since St Thomas Aquinas and St Clement of Alexandria, was to deny animals any moral status by claiming that such laws were solely for the protection of humans.40 This was endorsed by both the Catholic commentators, such as Joannes Mercerus, and by Reformers like John Calvin who said ‘that God intends to accustom men to gentleness, by abstinence from the blood of animals …[because otherwise] they would at length not be sparing of even human blood’.41 Newton’s contemporary, the theologian John Edwards, agreed that eating blood made people cruel to each other: ‘God therefore commanded those of Noah’s Posterity to refrain wholly from Blood, that they might not proceed from cruelty to Beasts, to killing of Men. Besides,’ added Edwards, ‘this may seem partly to be a natural Law, Blood being a gross Meat, and not fit for nourishment.’42 Newton probably agreed that eating blood inflamed men to cruelty, but he stressed that the prohibition was also for the sake of the animals themselves.43

Most Anglicans in any case believed that since Christ sacrificed his own blood the law against eating blood had been dissolved.44 But Newton insisted that the Gospel did not have the power to abolish the prohibition of blood as it did the Mosaic food taboos because the blood law was a Noachic law and therefore universal and permanent. Furthermore, he argued, the Acts of the Apostles clearly stated that when the early Christians met at Antioch for a doctrinal convention they explicitly decreed that the Gentile converts could ignore all the Mosaic traditions except the prohibition of eating blood, strangled animals, meat sacrificed to idols, and fornication (Acts 15:24, 29; 21:25).45 This heavily disputed passage preyed on the conscience of many a Christian blood-eater. As one Protestant Reformer put it in 1596: ‘The Apostles commaunded to abstaine from bloud … What Christian observes that this day? and if some few do feare to touch such things, they are mocked of the rest.’46 A few seventeenth-century controversialists, like Newton, usually under the cover of anonymity, did brave the flak to warn fellow Christians of their peril. The author of A Bloudy Tenent confuted, Or, Bloud Forbidden (1646) argued that it was ‘A cruell thing to eat life itself’: eating the life-blood of an animal after it was dead was a token of more ‘extreame crueltie, and unmercifulnesse’ than killing the animal in the first place.47 This conscientious pamphleteer was immediately lambasted by the author of The Eating of Blood Vindicated, who mockingly retorted that ‘This mans charitie is more to the bloud of a dead beast, than it is either to the life itself of man or beast.’48 In 1652 the controversy was reignited by the comically titled, Triall Of A Black-Pudding. Or, The unlawfulness of Eating Blood, which argued that ‘God would not have Men eat the life and soul of Beasts, a thing barbarous and unnaturall.’49 In the 1660s William Roe repudiated the blood-abstaining ‘Hæmapesthites’, calling the error a ‘virulent Contagion’ based on a false reading of Acts.50 But the stain would not budge. In 1669 John Moore, a church minister on the Isle of Wight, attacked ‘Blood-eaters’ in Moses Revived … Wherein the Unlawfulness of Eating Blood is clearly proved, claiming that blood was the food of devils.51 John Evelyn, Newton’s colleague at the Royal Society, agreed that the prohibition had never been revoked – but recognised that trying to preach down the eating of hog’s pudding was in vain;52 and Thomas Tryon insisted that it was impossible to get a pound of flesh without a drop of blood, so even eating meat was a cardinal sin.53 Newton was more extreme even than these critics (save Tryon); they emphasised that eating blood fostered cruelty towards humans; Newton was concerned with the welfare of the animals having their blood shed.

Despite the differences between Newton and these controversialists, association with them and the Judaists opened Newton to ridicule. Catherine Conduitt felt this keenly and leapt to defend Newton against the accusations levelled by his successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston:

Whiston has spread about that Sr I[saac] abstained from eating rabbitts because strangled & from black puddings because made of blood, but he is mistaken Sr I. did not – he often mentioned & followed the rule of St Paul Take & eat what comes from the shambles without asking questions for conscience sake[.] he said meats strangled were forbid because that was a painfull death & the letting out the blood the easiest & that animals should be put to as little pain as possible, that the reason why eating blood was forbid was because it was thought the eating blood inclined men to be cruel.54

If Newton had followed his principles to the letter he would have had to abstain from all butcher’s meat – and this is what some contemporaries advocated.55 But Whiston, who shared Newton’s desire to revive Primitive Christianity and also believed that vegetarianism was suitable for lengthening life,56 suggested that Newton was primarily concerned with strangled animals like rabbits. Catherine Conduitt indicated that he overcame his conscience by adhering to St Paul’s instructions to put social conformity first (1 Corinthians 10:25–7). But even this reveals that Newton was in a constant state of moral conflict.57 In the solitude of his private rooms, perhaps Newton did avoid eating animals slaughtered in a manner contrary to God’s fundamental laws. (Interestingly, Descartes, who was a closet vegetarian, also preferred ‘to be served separately or to eat alone’.58)

It was an odd leap of imagination for Newton to insist so categorically that the biblical prohibition of blood was really against cruelty to animals. His aim had been to find fundamental principles that everyone could agree on – and yet he was willing to stake all on his contentious interpretation of the law against blood. How did he become so convinced of it? No doubt personal sentiments predisposed him to find in divine law something answering his own feelings of sympathy. But equally crucial to his argument was the evidence from foreign cultures.

Newton never said that the original religion banned eating animals, but he was fascinated by the wide spread of vegetarianism in cultures all over the world; he seems to have regarded such instances of superlative clemency as vestiges of the original law of mercy to beasts.59 He thought that ancient Egypt had preserved the original religion in a strikingly pristine form, and seems to have gone out of his way to show that they were vegetarian. He read the histories of the fourth-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho and the first-century BC Sicilian Diodorus, who had said that the primitive Egyptians ‘fed upon Herbs, and the natural Fruit of the Trees’. Newton manipulated this evidence to make it sound as if the Egyptians lived in a state of Golden-Age innocence and that this led seamlessly into their (much later) religious abhorrence of killing animals.60 Eliding various sources and stories into one pithy conclusion, Newton declared that ‘The Egyptians originally lived on the fruits of the earth, and fared hardly, and abstained from animals.’61

When a band of French scholars sneakily laid their hands on a manuscript copy of Newton’s work, they triggered a massive cross-Channel controversy by retorting that the real reason why the Egyptians abstained from eating meat was because they were abominable animal-worshippers. This, they argued, was obvious from the fact that when the Israelites went to live in Egypt, the Bible testifies that the Jewish custom of sacrificing bulls, sheep and goats was an affront to Egyptian zoolatry.62 Newton explained this away and insisted that at that time the Egyptian religion was not idolatrous paganism but a slightly corrupted version of the original religion inherited from Noah; indeed, the Egyptian King Ammon, he sometimes thought, was no other than Ham, Noah’s grandson.63

Why was Newton so eager to prove this? His most controversial argument was that Judaism was based on Egyptian religion. Moses had excised the errors that had crept into the original religion among the Egyptians but essentially, said Newton, ‘Moses retained all ye religion of ye Egyptians concerning ye worship of ye true God.’ Judaism, Newton concluded, was Moses’ resuscitation of the Noachic religion as it had been propagated in an imperfect form by the Egyptians.64 Nudging aside the Mosaic revelation in this way was an unspeakably radical move and turned the entire basis of the Judaeo-Christian belief system on its head.65

Though Newton did not specifically say it, he clearly thought that Egyptian vegetarianism was the counterpart – perhaps even the source – of Moses’ law of mercy to beasts. This put pagan vegetarianism into the limelight. Rather than seeing it as a sign of satanic zoolatry, Newton regarded it as evidence that the Egyptians were following the original laws of God. Moving to still more exotic pastures, the vegetarians in India, he set about studying all the ancient sources and several travel narratives including Manucci, Chardin, Tavernier, Purchas and the best of all Indological studies, Abraham Rogerius.66 He gleaned further information from Gerard Vossius, and from Eusebius who convinced him that the ancient Brahmins ‘abstained from ye worship of Idols & lived virtuously’.67 In his personal library, which survives in Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton folded the corner of the pages where Strabo, Philostratus and various humanist scholars described the similarity between Indian and Pythagorean vegetarianism.68

How did the ancient Brahmins manage to preserve the original religion in such a pure non-idolatrous state? Newton propounded the fantastic theory that the ‘Brahmans’ were descended from ‘the Abrahamans, or sons of Abraham, born of his second wife Keturah, instructed by their father in the worship of ONE GOD without images, and sent into the east’. Genesis said that after Isaac was born Abraham packed off his children by Keturah and other concubines ‘eastward, unto the east country’, and so it seemed plausible that they were the original Brahmins. This enthusiastic dot-joining had been indulged in by many others, including the sixteenth-century savant Guillaume Postel (1510–81), who tried to recover a pristine Noachic religion like Newton’s.69 In addition, the alchemist Michael Maier connected this genealogy of the Brahmins with the theory, posited by Agrippa and Newton’s favourite Jewish medieval astrological theologian Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) (who had himself read genuine Hindu texts), that Enoch, Abraham’s grandson by Keturah, was in fact the same person as the great Egyptian magus, Hermes Trismegistus.70 The door was open to seeing Hinduism as a relic of the original religion.

According to Newton, one of the greatest religious reformations in world history occurred in 521 BC when Hystaspes, father of King Darius of Persia, returned from a crash-course in pure religion with the Brahmins, joined forces with Zoroaster and led the Reformation of the Persian magi. Between them, they abolished idolatry and instituted monotheism by importing the Egyptian wisdom preserved in Babylon and fusing it with ‘the institutions of the ancient Brachmans’.71 In a pincer movement with the Egyptians carrying the original religion eastwards,72 and the Brahmins exporting it west, the whole of the ancient world enjoyed a restitution of some of the pristine elements of Noah’s original religion.

Finally Europe enjoyed the fruits of the reform, because, as Apuleius and others said, Pythagoras travelled through Egypt to the Eastern philosophers, and brought their philosophy back to Greece.73 Newton explained the ramifications of this in his sensational endorsement of pagan vegetarianism in the opening paragraph of his frequently redrafted manuscript essay, ‘Irenicum, or Ecclesiastical Polyty tending to Peace’:

All Nations were originally of the Religion comprehended in the Precepts of the sons of Noah, the chief of wch were to have one God, & not to alienate his worship, nor prophane his name; to abstain from murder, theft, fornication, & all injuries; not to feed on the flesh or drink the blood of a living animal, but to be mercifull even to bruit beasts … Pythagoras one of the oldest Philosophers in Europe, after he had travelled among the Eastern nations for the sake of knowledge & conversed with their Priests & Judges & seen their manners, taught his scholars that all men should be friends to all men & even to bruit Beasts … This was the religion of the sons of Noah established by Moses & Christ & is still in force.74

One of Isaac Newton’s manuscript versions of the essay Irenicum

Newton clearly regarded Eastern and Pythagorean vegetarianism as a remnant of God’s original law, and he made it a central pillar in the bridge between pagan religions and Judaeo-Christianity. It may look as if Newton just slipped his ideas into the old mould of the prisci theologi, but in fact he had gone much further. Unlike most contemporaries, Newton did not think that Pythagorean vegetarianism was based on the abhorrent belief in metempsychosis.75 On the contrary, he suggested that the vegetarianism of Pythagoras and of ‘the Eastern nations’ was an extension to animals of the law ‘love thy neighbour’ which they inherited from Noah. When Pythagoras returned to Europe from his travels, what he brought with him was a secularised version of Noah’s original religion, as well as all the heliocentric astronomic and mathematical knowledge the Eastern sages had preserved. Newton said that his own scientific work, like his religious research, was not so much discovery as recovery, for Pythagoras and the ancient inheritors of the original solar religion had known nearly everything that he had revealed in his magnum opus, the Principia of 1687.76 In terms of religious and scientific reform, this put Pythagoras, Newton’s fellow mathematician, scientist and moralist, in line with Moses, Christ and Newton himself.77

Interpreting pagan religions as corruptions of Judaeo-Christian theology was standard practice. The widely influential ‘universal histories’ of Newton’s contemporaries, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Gerard Vossius and Ralph Cudworth, had all made this case.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.