Читать книгу The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India - Tristram Stuart - Страница 15

Baron Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1618–98) had never been comfortable with the settled life of a manorial lord. He had been persecuted by the Inquisition in his Catholic homeland of Louvain, near Brussels, and had, at an early age, escaped to become a ‘wandering hermit’ in more liberal countries. Filled with philosophical ardour, in 1670 he set out on a quest to England, determined to propagate a great theological discovery: that reincarnation was a true doctrine, compatible with the fundaments of Christianity. He hoped to find support in England because there had been a resurgence of interest in reincarnation there. Although widely criticised, his controversial arguments won the ear of some leading philosophers. John Locke, though deeply sceptical, spent many hours in conversation with Helmont and carefully studied his many books.¹ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the leading natural philosopher in Hanover, adapted his notions into the influential theory of Preformation according to which organisms grew from pre-existent microscopic life-forms. Helmont carved another inroad through which exotic sources influenced European ideas about the moral status of animals.

One of Helmont’s first ports of call in England was Henry More (1614–87), the leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists. This band of academics had for decades sought to introduce into Christianity ideas drawn from the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras, such as the existence of a world-soul which infused all of creation. Like his contemporary Gerrard Winstanley, More abhorred cruelty to animals and he thought that their souls – effluxes of the world soul – might be immortal, though he did not believe that they reincarnated into humans or vice versa.² However, he did argue that human souls had existed in a former state and incarnated on earth to live a life or two of atonement for a sin they had committed in a pre-existent state.³ This doctrine of ‘pre-existence’ was similar enough to Helmont’s beliefs for Helmont to hope that he could convert More to his cause.

Helmont had adopted the belief in reincarnation after studying the Kabbala – mystical Jewish texts written down from the twelfth century AD onwards. In early kabbalist writings reincarnation (called gilgul in Hebrew) only applied to humans,⁴ but by the fourteenth century kabbalist texts such as the Zohar were claiming that human souls could descend into animals and even into inanimate objects for punishment and expiation until they were ready to return to God. In 1677 with the help of a team of Rabbis, Helmont and the Christian Hebrew scholar Knorr von Rosenroth published the first Latin translations of kabbalist texts. The title of their groundbreaking book was the Kabbala Denudata, or ‘The Kabbala Stripped Naked’ and it aimed to unite Christians, Jews and pagans into the one true faith. In it they included two texts on reincarnation by the sixteenth-century kabbalist cult-leader from the holy city of Zefat, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–72) and his follower Chaim Vital (1543–1620). Luria had taught that the earth was animated by sparks which had fallen from the primordial spiritual body of Adam and that in order to return from their fallen state these sparks, or souls, had to pass through an ascending cycle of reincarnations.⁵ As Henry More explained in an essay which was printed in the Kabbala Denudata: ‘Every spirit found in a bit of gravel is liable to be transformed into a plant, and from the plant into an animal, from the animal to a human being, and from the human being to an angel, and from the angel to God himself.’⁶

The belief that lower beings had souls did not necessarily mean it was wrong to kill animals. On the contrary, when an animal was ritually sacrificed its soul, or spark, was released from its bestial prison. But it did encourage the compassionate treatment of animals.⁷ The cult of compassion that grew up among the kabbalists led to legends that Isaac Luria was a vegetarian and considered unkindness to animals (tzaar baalei chaim) a sin and a hindrance to the achievement of perfection. Vital apparently claimed that the ascetic Luria loved God’s creatures so much that he never killed an insect, even an annoying one like a mosquito or fly.⁸

Helmont adapted Luria’s system of reincarnation to accord with Christian doctrines like the resurrection, and in several of his own works he tried to convince others to follow his lead.⁹ It may seem mystical and slightly mad, but this optimistic theodicy was dangerously seductive for liberal Christians who were tired of fire and brimstone. Fitting reincarnation into the Christian world view justified God by giving sinners another stab at salvation.¹⁰ According to orthodox Christian belief, souls born into tribes of cannibalistic savages had no chance of becoming Christian and no chance of getting to heaven. Instead of believing that such souls were plunged directly – and eternally – into hell, Helmont suggested that they would be progressively reincarnated until they were reborn as Christians.¹¹ Like Luria, Helmont believed that this held for all members of the creation, so that even the souls of wild animals, by ‘an advance and melioration’, would eventually incarnate in a Christian and be saved.¹² He even developed the kabbalists’ notion that God carefully balanced the birth and death rates of animals and humans in order to ensure a steady flow up the chain of being.¹³ Helmont was ashamed that Christians – who should have been the enlightened ones – were labouring under the mental tyranny of hell, while Jews (and even pagans!) were guided in their actions by the ‘wise and solid Notion’ of reincarnation.¹⁴

Kabbalæ Denudatæ (1684)

For most of Helmont’s contemporaries it seemed obvious that the kabbalists’ gilgul was just a rehashed version of the Pythagorean and Indian doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁵ This very accusation had always been levelled – perhaps correctly – at kabbalists within the Jewish community. Indeed, similar anxieties about importing pagan doctrines into Christianity can be traced back to the beginning of the Renaissance when the Byzantine theologian George Gemistos Pletho (1355–1450/ 52) first introduced Plato and Strabo’s account of India to the Italian humanists. It was from these texts, as well as some recent accounts of India (perhaps by Marco Polo), that Pletho discovered that all wise men, from Zoroaster to the Brahmins, believed in reincarnation. In favour of these venerable authorities, Pletho abandoned Christianity’s comparatively recent innovations, and converted to the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁶ In the ensuing uproar, Pletho’s books were burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the chapters in which he addressed the issue of meat-eating are lost. But his works on metempsychosis survived and were reprinted in 1689 and 1718, just when there was a renewed interest in reincarnation in Europe.¹⁷

Helmont insisted, like More and many of their Jewish predecessors, that in fact it was Pythagoras and the Hindus who had learnt the doctrine from the Jews, not vice versa.¹⁸ His aim, he explained, was to reinstate reincarnation ‘corrected, reformed, and stripped of that disguised and deformed shape … purged of those Mistakes, and reduced to the Primitive streightness and simplicity’, ‘and so accommodated to the Principles of Christian Religion’.¹⁹ Initially, Helmont met with considerable success. A splinter group of Helmontians emerged, defending his claim that gilgul was a scriptural doctrine not a Platonic incursion. In the 1690s Reincarnationists were identified by one Anglican critic as being among the worst three dissenting movements of the age. Christians warned that the belief in reincarnation dissolved the fundamental difference between animals and humans.²⁰

Surprisingly, Helmont converted the prominent Quaker George Keith, noted for his enthusiasm about the virtue of the Brahmins. Keith realised that Helmont’s doctrines could reconcile the orthodox tenet that one had to believe in Christ, with his passionate feeling that people who had never heard of Christ could still get to heaven (by being reincarnated as Christians).²¹ The entire Quaker community on both sides of the Atlantic was polarised by Keith’s controversial kabbalistic reforms. When he gave a sermon in Philadelphia the crowd rioted and the magistrates smashed down his podium with axes. Keith’s followers destroyed the podium of his opponents and he was eventually ejected from the Society of Friends because of his equivocation about transmigration.²²

Christian believers in reincarnation were predisposed to be sympathetic to the suffering of animals. But they kept a strong arm between themselves and heretical vegetarianism. This was articulated in 1661 when an anonymous author from More’s set (probably George Rust) championed the Platonic doctrines of the heretic Church father Origen in A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of his Opinions.²³ Origen was famous for being vegetarian, but Rust reiterated Origen’s categorical denial (against the accusations of St Jerome) that this had anything to do with Pythagorean superstition. Origen did believe that animals’ souls would be resurrected on the Day of Judgement, but Rust insisted that Origen never believed that humans could reincarnate into animals.²⁴ This ancient debate was resuscitated in a European-wide spate of Origenist works by several theologians, including the extraordinary Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721). Huet later went on to argue that Pythagoras and the Brahmins had taken their doctrines from the Jews,²⁵ and apparently commissioned the Jesuit missionary in India, Father Bouchet, to compose a detailed essay distinguishing Origen’s doctrines from Hindu and Pythagorean metempsychosis and vegetarianism.²⁶

No one felt the tension between believing in reincarnation and maltreating animals more acutely than the ‘Oxford Platonist’, Joseph Glanvill. A cleric like More and Rust, Glanvill propounded an even more outspoken defence of transmigration, which he anonymously published in 1662 as Lux Orientalis, Or An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, Concerning the Præexistence of Souls. The doctrine of transmigration, announced Glanvill, was attested by ‘the Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, the Ægyptian Gymnosophists, the Jewish Rabbins, some of the Græcian Philosophers, and Christian Fathers’.²⁷ Taking his ideas from the Kabbala, Glanvill asserted that souls that had sinned before the creation of the earth were compressed into Adam’s loins in Eden. But instead of behaving like good children trying to recompense for their former sin, the souls egged Adam on to sin for a second time, thus condemning themselves (that is, us) to a life of suffering on earth.²⁸ It took more than just one lifetime to atone for such heinous criminality, so each soul had to reincarnate until they had purged themselves and were ready to return to God.²⁹ In Lux Orientalis, Glanvill restricted his discussion of pre-existence to humans alone, but in the same year wrote privately to a fellow Origenist that their beliefs logically led to fully blown Pythagorean metempsychosis, ‘for what account els can be given of the state of beasts who some of them are all their lives subject to the tyrannicall tastes of merciless man, except we suppose them to have deserv’d this severe discipline by some former delinquencyes.’ The question of justice to animals was integral to the issue of reincarnation and it racked Glanvill with consternation. If animals had not sinned in a former life, how could one possibly justify treating them the way we do? Faced with this appalling conundrum, Glanvill argued that since God could not be so unjust as to make innocent animals suffer, it was necessary to believe that animals had deserved their suffering by being extremely sinful in former lives. The only alternative, he painfully conceded, was the Cartesian belief that they didn’t suffer at all because they were just senseless machines.³⁰ But Glanvill’s philosophical loophole was not the end of the discussion. Both More and Helmont were intimate friends with Lady Anne Conway, one of the most advanced women philosophers of her generation. During their walks in the woods and groves of her estate, Lady Conway became a convert to Helmont’s creed and she realised that it had profound implications for the moral status of animals. Conway took ideas directly from Luria’s Kabbala and devised an elaborate system that, like Glanvill’s, argued that animals deserved the suffering to which they were fated, but that nevertheless humans ought to act responsibly towards them.³¹ In her philosophical Principles, published anonymously by Helmont after her death in 1690, Conway held that animals – like all matter in the creation – were continually trying to improve and would eventually improve enough to become human and thence return to their spiritual origins. Thus ‘a Horse may in length of Time be in some measure changed into a Man’. She seems to have been unclear whether this transformation happened by metamorphosis, metempsychosis or more prosaically by being eaten and raised up the food chain. Conversely, if a man led a brutish life, his spirit would ‘enter into the Body of a beast, and there for a certain time be punished’.³² Like Tryon (who may have heard of Conway through her friend George Keith), she maintained that ‘if a Man hath lived … a Brutish [life]… he … should be changed into that Species of Beasts, to whom he was inwardly most like, in Qualities and Conditions of Mind.’³³

Conway explained that it was in the interests of all creatures to unite in their effort to return to God. God created all species, explained Conway, to ‘stand in a mutual Sympathy, and love each other; so hath he implanted a certain Universal Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as being all Members of one Body, and (as I may so say), Brethren, having one common Father’.³⁴ If a man ‘kills any of them, only to fulfil his own pleasure, he acts unjustly, and the same measure will again be measured unto him’, she warned. Conway did not state whether she thought killing animals for food counted as unnecessary ‘pleasure’ and thus stopped short of advocating vegetarianism, but her philosophy provided a foundation for the ethical treatment of animals.³⁵

This inclusion of animals in the process of gilgul captured the imagination of others and a flurry of Reincarnationist books stimulated a widespread theological debate. The anonymous author(s) of a tract called Seder Olam: Or, The Order of Ages, described a monist system of ascension almost identical to Conway’s, explaining that ‘even the basest Creature … may be changed, either into the noblest, or at least into some part of the noblest Creature’.³⁶

Gilgul provided Christians with an alternative framework for understanding non-human life forms. Animals were striving in partnership with their fallen human brothers and sisters to improve and reclaim their lost divine status. It was everyone’s responsibility to lend a helping hand in the common cause of mutual improvement. This did not necessarily mean desisting from killing animals (though it could), but it did mean treating them with due consideration for their plight. Although it never gained a foothold in the established Christian Churches, the kabbalist gilgul joined forces with the beliefs of Origen, Pythagoras and the Hindus, and became a persuasive doctrine that continued to inspire European minds for centuries. Some of the most prominent vegetarians in later decades owed something to the accommodation of gilgul into Christianity.