And it is no easy task to pull out the hook of flesh-eating from the
jaws of such as have gorged themselves with luxury and are (as it
were) nailed down with it. It would indeed be a good action, if as
the Egyptians draw out the stomach of a dead body, and cut it open
and expose it to the sun, as the only cause of all its evil actions,
so we could, by cutting out our gluttony and blood-shedding, purify
and cleanse the remainder of our lives. For the stomach itself is not
guilty of bloodshed, but is involuntarily polluted by our intemperance.
But if this may not be, and we are ashamed by reason of custom to live
unblamably, let us at least sin with discretion. Let us eat flesh; but
let it be for hunger and not for wantonness. Let us kill an animal; but
let us do it with sorrow and pity, and not abusing and tormenting it,
as many nowadays are used to do, while some run red-hot spits through
the bodies of swine, that by the tincture of the quenched iron the
blood may be to that degree mortified, that it may sweeten and soften
the flesh in its circulation; others jump and stamp upon the udders of
sows that are ready to pig, that so they may trample into one mass,
(O Piacular Jupiter!) in the very pangs of delivery, blood, milk, and
the corruption of the crushed and mangled young ones, and so eat the
most inflamed part of the animal; others sew up the eyes of cranes and
swans, and so shut them up in darkness to be fattened, and then souse
up their flesh with certain monstrous mixtures and pickles.
2. By all which it is most manifest, that it is not for nourishment,
or want, or any necessity, but for mere gluttony, wantonness, and
expensiveness, that they make a pleasure of villany. Just as it happens
in persons who cannot satiate their intemperance upon women, and having
made trial of every thing else and falling into vagaries, at last
attempt things not to be mentioned; even so inordinateness in feeding,
when it hath once passed the bounds of nature and necessity, studies at
last to diversify the lusts of its intemperate appetite by cruelty and
villany. For the senses, when they once quit their natural measures,
sympathize with each other in their distempers, and are enticed by each
other to the same consent and intemperance. Thus a distempered ear
first debauched music, the soft and effeminate notes of which provoke
immodest touches and lascivious tickling. These things first taught
the eye not to delight in Pyrrhic dances, gesticulations of hands, or
elegant pantomimes, nor in statues and fine paintings; but to reckon
the slaughtering and death of mankind and wounds and duels the most
sumptuous of shows and spectacles. Thus unlawful tables are accompanied
with intemperate copulations, with unmusician-like balls, and theatres
become monstrous through shameful songs and rehearsals; and barbarous
and brutish shows are again accompanied with an unrelenting temper and
savage cruelty towards mankind. Hence it was that the divine Lycurgus
in his Three Books of Laws gave orders that the doors and ridges of
men’s houses should be made with a saw and an axe, and that no other
instrument should so much as be brought to any house. Not that he
did hereby intend to declare war against augers and planes and other
instruments of finer work; but because he very well knew that with such
tools as these you will never bring into your house a gilded couch,
and that you will never attempt to bring into a slender cottage either
silver tables, purple carpets, or costly stones; but that a plain
supper and a homely dinner must accompany such a house, couch, table,
and cup. The beginning of a vicious diet is presently followed by all
sorts of luxury and expensiveness,
Ev’n as a mare is by her thirsty colt.
3. And what meal is not expensive? That for which no animal is put
to death. Shall we reckon a soul to be a small expense. I will not
say perhaps of a mother, or a father, or of some friend, or child,
as Empedocles did; but one participating of feeling, of seeing, of
hearing, of imagination, and of intellection; which each animal hath
received from Nature for the acquiring of what is agreeable to it, and
the avoiding what is disagreeable. Do but consider this with yourself
now, which sort of philosophers render us most tame and civil, they
who bid people to feed on their children, friends, fathers, and wives,
when they are dead; or Pythagoras and Empedocles, that accustom men to
be just towards even the other members of the creation. You laugh at a
man that will not eat a sheep: but we (they will say again)—when we see
you cutting off the parts of your dead father or mother, and sending
it to your absent friends, and calling upon and inviting your present
friends to eat the rest freely and heartily—shall we not smile? Nay,
peradventure we offend at this instant time while we touch these books,
without having first cleansed our hands, eyes, feet, and ears; if it
be not (by Jupiter) a sufficient purgation of them to have discoursed
of these matters in potable and fresh language (as Plato speaketh),
thereby washing off the brackishness of hearing. Now if a man should
set these books and discourses in opposition to each other, he will
find that the philosophy of the one sort suits with the Scythians,
Sogdians, and Melanchlaenians, of whom Herodotus’s relation is scarce
believed; but the sentiments of Pythagoras and Empedocles were the laws
and customs of the ancient Grecians.
4. Who then were the first authors of this opinion, that we owe no
justice to dumb animals?
Who first beat out accursed steel,
And made the lab’ring ox a knife to feel.
In the very same manner oppressors and tyrants begin first to shed
blood. For example, the first man that the Athenians ever put to death
was one of the basest of all knaves, whom all thought deserving of
death; after him they put to death a second and a third. After this,
being now accustomed to blood, they patiently saw Niceratus the son
of Nicias, and their own general Theramenes, and Polemarchus the
philosopher suffer death. Even so, in the beginning, some wild and
mischievous beast was killed and eaten, and then some little bird or
fish was entrapped. And the love of slaughter, being first experimented
and exercised in these, at last passed even to the laboring ox, and the
sheep that clothes us, and to the poor cock that keeps the house; until
by little and little, unsatiableness being strengthened by use, men
came to the slaughter of men, to bloodshed and wars. Now even if one
cannot demonstrate and make out, that souls in their regenerations make
a promiscuous use of all bodies, and that that which is now rational
will at another time be irrational, and that again tame which is now
wild,—for that Nature changes and transmutes every thing.