and cutting up of flesh; no dainty cookery; no heaviness of head.
Nor are there horrible smells of flesh-meats among them, or
disagreeable fumes from the kitchen. No tumult and disturbance and
wearisome clamours, but bread and water--the latter from a pure
fountain, the former from honest labour. If, at any time, however,
they may wish to feast more sumptuously, the sumptuousness consists
in fruits, and their pleasure in these is greater than at royal
tables. With this repast [of fruits and vegetables], even angels
from Heaven, as they behold it, are delighted and pleased. For if
over one sinner who repents they rejoice, over so many just men
imitating them what will they not do? No master and servant are
there. All are servants--all free men. And think not this a mere
form of speech, for they are servants one of another and masters
one of another. Wherein, therefore, are we different from, or
superior to, Ants, if we compare ourselves with them? For as they
care for the things of the body only, so also do we. And would
it were for these alone! But, alas! it is for things far worse.
For not for necessary things only do we care, but also for things
superfluous. Those animals pursue an innocent life, while we follow
after all covetousness. Nay, we do not so much as imitate the ways
of Ants. _We follow the ways of Wolves, the habits of Tigers; or,
rather, we are worse even than they. To them Nature has assigned
that they should be thus_ [carnivorously] _fed, while God has
honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we
are become worse than the wild beasts._”[94]
Again he protests:--
“Neither am I leading you to the lofty peak of total renunciation
of possessions [ἀκτημοσύνη]; but for the present I require you to
cut off superfluities, and to desire a sufficiency alone. Now,
the boundary of sufficiency is the using those things which it
is impossible to live without. No one debars you from these, nor
forbids you your daily food. I say ‘food,’ not ‘luxury’ [τροφὴν οὐ
τρυφὴν λέγω]--‘raiment,’ not ‘ornament.’ Rather, this frugality--to
speak correctly--is, in the best sense, luxury. For consider who
should we say more truly feasted--he whose diet is herbs, and who
is in sound health and suffered no uneasiness, or he who has the
table of a Sybarite and is full of a thousand disorders? Clearly,
the former. Therefore let us seek nothing more than these, if we
would at once live luxuriously and healthfully. And let him who
can be satisfied with pulse, and can keep in good health, seek for
nothing more. But let him who is weaker, and needs to be [more
richly] dieted with other vegetables and fruits, not be debarred
from them.... We do not advise this for the harm and injury of men,
but to lop off what is superfluous--and that is superfluous which
is more than we need. When we are able to live without a thing,
healthfully and respectably, certainly the addition of that thing
is a superfluity.”--_Hom._ xix. 2 _Cor._
Denouncing the grossness of the ordinary mode of living, he eloquently
descants on the evil results, physical as well as mental:--
“A man who lives in pleasure [_i.e._, in selfish luxury] is dead
while he lives, for he lives only to his belly. In his other senses
he lives not. He sees not what he ought to see; he hears not what
he ought to hear; he speaks not what he ought to speak.... Look not
at the superficial countenance, but examine the interior, and you
will see it full of deep dejection. If it were possible to bring
the soul into view, and to behold it with our bodily eyes, that of
the luxurious would seem depressed, mournful, miserable, and wasted
with leanness, for the more the body grows sleek and gross, the
more lean and weakly is the soul. The more the one is pampered,
the more is the other hampered [θάλπεται--θάπτεται: the latter
meaning, literally, buried]. As when the pupil of the eye has the
external envelope too thick, it cannot put forth the power of
vision and look out, because the light is excluded by the dense
covering, and darkness ensues; so when the body is constantly full
fed, the soul must be invested with grossness. The dead, say you,
corrupt and rot, and a foul pestilential humour distils from them.
So in her who lives in pleasure may be seen rheums, and phlegm,
and catarrh, hiccough, vomiting, eructations, and the like, which,
as too unseemly, I forbear to name. For such is the despotism of
luxury, it makes us endure things which we do not think proper even
to mention....
“‘She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.’ Hear this,
ye women[95] who pass your time in revels and intemperance, and who
neglect the poor, pining and perishing with hunger, whilst you are
destroying yourselves with continual luxury. Thus you are the cause
of two deaths--of those who are dying of want and of your own, both
through ill-measure. If, out of your fulness, you tempered their
want, you would save two lives. Why do you thus gorge your own body
with excess, and waste that of the poor with want? Consider what
comes of food--into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at
its being named? Why, then, be eager for such accumulations? The
increase of luxury is but the multiplication of filth.[96] For
Nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment,
but injury and the increase of ordure.
“Nourish the body, but do not destroy it. Food is called
nourishment, to show that its purpose is not to hurt, but to
support us. For this reason, perhaps, food passes into excrement
that we may not be lovers of luxury. If it were not so--if it were
not useless and injurious to the body, we should hardly abstain
from devouring one another. If the belly received as much as it
pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see
battles and wars innumerable. Even as it is, when part of our food
passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless
phlegm, we are, nevertheless, so addicted to luxury that we spend,
perhaps, whole estates on a meal. The more richly we live, the more
noisome are the odours with which we are filled.”--_Hom._ xiii.
_Tim._ v.[97]
* * * * *
From this period--the fifth century A.D. down to the
sixteenth--Christian and Western literature contains little or
nothing which comes within the purpose of this work. The merits of
monastic asceticism were more or less preached during all those ages,
although constant abstinence from flesh was by no means the general
practice even with the inmates of the stricter monastic or conventual
establishments--at all events in the Latin Church. But we look in vain
for traces of anything like the humanitarian feeling of Plutarch or
Porphyry. The mental intelligence as well as capacities for physical
suffering of the non-human races--necessarily resulting from an
organisation in all essential points like to our own--was apparently
wholly ignored; their just rights and claims upon human justice were
disregarded and trampled under foot. Consistently with the universal
estimate, they were treated as beings destitute of all feeling--as
if, in fine, they are the “automatic machines” they are alleged to
be by the Cartesians of the present day. In those terrible ages of
gross ignorance, of superstition, of violence, and of injustice--in
which human rights were seldom regarded--it would have been surprising
indeed if any sort of regard had been displayed for the _non-human_
slaves. And yet an underlying and latent consciousness of the falseness
of the general estimate sometimes made itself apparent in certain
extraordinary and perverse fancies.[98] To Montaigne, the first to
revive the humanitarianism of Plutarch, belongs the great merit of
reasserting the natural rights of the helpless slaves of human tyranny.
While Chrysostom seems to have been one of the last of Christian
writers who manifested any sort of consciousness of the inhuman, as
well as unspiritual nature of the ordinary gross foods, Platonism
continued to bear aloft the flickering torch of a truer spiritualism;
and “the golden chain” of the prophets of the dietary reformation
reached down even so late as to the end of the sixth century.
Hierokles, author of the commentary on the _Golden Verses_ of
Pythagoras, to which reference has already been made, and who lectured
upon them with great success at Alexandria; Hypatia, the beautiful and
accomplished daughter of Theon the great mathematician, who publicly
taught the philosophy of Plato at the same great centre of Greek
science and learning, and was barbarously murdered by the jealousy
of her Christian rival Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria; Proklus,
surnamed the Successor, as having been considered the most illustrious
disciple of Plato in the latter times, who left several treatises
upon the Pythagorean system, and “whose sagacious mind explored the
deepest questions of morals and metaphysics”;[99] Olympiodorus, who
wrote a life of Plato and commentaries on several of his dialogues,
still extant, and lived in the reign of Justinian, by whose edict the
illustrious school of Athens was finally closed, and with it the last
vestiges of a sublime, if imperfect, attempt at the purification of
human life--such are some of the most illustrious names which adorned
the days of expiring Greek philosophy. Olympiodorus and six other
Pythagoreans determined, if possible, to maintain their doctrines
elsewhere; and they sought refuge with the Persian Magi, with whose
tenets, or, at least, manner of living, they believed themselves
to be most in accord. The Persian customs were distasteful to the
purer ideal of the Platonists, and, disappointed in other respects,
they reluctantly relinquished their fond hopes of transplanting the
doctrines of Plato into a foreign soil, and returned home. The Persian
prince, Chosroes, we may add, acquired honour by his stipulation with
the bigoted Justinian, that the seven sages should be allowed to
live unmolested during the rest of their days. “Simplicius and his
companions ended their lives in peace and obscurity; and, as they left
no disciples, they terminated the long list of Grecian philosophers who
may be justly praised, notwithstanding their defects, as the wisest and
most virtuous of their contemporaries. The writings of Simplicius are
now extant. His physical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle
have passed away with the fashion of the times, but his moral
interpretation of Epiktetus is preserved in the library of nations as
a classical book excellently adapted to direct the will, to purify the
heart, and to confirm the understanding, by a just confidence in the
nature both of God and Man.”[100]
XI.
CORNARO. 1465-1566.
After the extinction of Greek and Latin philosophy in the fifth
century, a mental torpor seized upon and, during some thousand years,
with rare exceptions, dominated the whole Western world. When this
torpor was dispelled by the influence of returning knowledge and
reason evoked by the various simultaneous discoveries in science and
literature--in particular by the achievements of Gutenberg, Vasco da
Gama, Christopher Colon, and, above all, Copernik--the moral sense
then first, too, began to show signs of life. The renascence of the
sixteenth century, however, with all the vigour of thought and action
which accompanied it, proved to be rather a revival of mere verbal
learning than of the higher moral feeling of the best minds of old
Greece and Italy. Men, fettered as they were in the trammels of
theological controversy and metaphysical subtleties, for the most part
expended their energies and their intellect in the vain pursuit of
phantoms. With the very few splendid exceptions of the more enlightened
and earnest thinkers, _Ethics_, in the real and comprehensive meaning
of the word, was an unknown science; and a long period of time was
yet to pass away before a perception of the universal obligations of
Justice and of Right dawned upon the minds of men. In truth, it could
not have been otherwise. Before the moral instincts can be developed,
reason and knowledge must have sufficiently prepared the way. When
attention to the importance of the neglected science of _Dietetics_ had
been in some degree aroused, the interest evoked was little connected
with the higher sentiments of humanity.
Of all dietary reformers who have treated the subject from an
exclusively sanitarian point of view, the most widely known and most
popular name, perhaps, has been that of Luigi Cornaro; and it is as
a vehement protester against the follies, rather than against the
barbarism, of the prevailing dietetic habits that he claims a place
in this work. He belonged to one of the leading families of Venice,
then at the height of its political power. Even in an age and in a
city noted for luxuriousness and grossness of living of the rich and
dominant classes, he had in his youth distinguished himself by his
licentious habits in eating and drinking, as well as by other excesses.
His constitution had been so impaired, and he had brought upon himself
so many disorders by this course of living, that existence became a
burden to him. He informs us that from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth
year he passed his nights and days in continuous suffering. Every sort
of known remedy was exhausted before his new medical adviser, superior
to the prejudices of his profession and of the public, had the courage
and the good sense to prescribe a total change of diet. At first
Cornaro found his enforced regimen almost intolerable, and, as he tells
us, he occasionally relapsed.
These relapses brought back his old sufferings, and, to save his life,
he was driven at length to practise entire and uniform abstinence, the
yolk of an egg often furnishing him the whole of his meal. In this way
he assures us that he came to relish dry bread more than formerly he
had enjoyed the most exquisite dishes of the ordinary table. At the
end of the first year he found himself entirely freed from all his
multiform maladies. In his eighty-third year he wrote and published his
first exhortation to a radical change of diet under the title of _A
Treatise on a Sober Life_,[101] in which he eloquently narrates his own
case, and exhorts all who value health and immunity from physical or
mental sufferings to follow his example. And his _exordium_, in which
he takes occasion to denounce the waste and gluttony of the dinners of
the rich, might be applied with little, or without any, modification of
its language to the public and private tables of the present day:--
“It is very certain,” he begins, “that Custom, with time, becomes
a second nature, forcing men to use that, whether good or bad, to
which they have been habituated; and we see custom or habit get
the better of reason in many things.... Though all are agreed that
intemperance (_la crapula_) is the offspring of gluttony, and sober
living of abstemiousness, the former nevertheless is considered a
virtue and a mark of distinction, and the latter as dishonourable
and the badge of avarice. Such mistaken notions are entirely owing
to the power of Custom, established by our senses and irregular
appetites. These have blinded and besotted men to such a degree
that, leaving the paths of virtue, they have followed those of
vice, which lead them imperceptibly to an old age burdened with
strange and mortal diseases....
“O wretched and unhappy Italy! [thus he apostrophises his own
country] can you not see that gluttony murders every year more of
your inhabitants than you could lose by the most cruel plague or
by fire and sword in many battles? Those truly shameful feasts (_i
tuoi veramente disonesti banchetti_), now so much in fashion and
so intolerably profuse that no tables are large enough to hold
the infinite number of the dishes--those feasts, I say, are so
many battles.[102] And how is it possible _to live_ amongst such a
multitude of jarring foods and disorders? Put an end to this abuse,
in heaven’s name, for there is not--I am certain of it--a vice more
abominable than this in the eyes of the divine Majesty. Drive away
this plague, the worst you were ever afflicted with--this new [?]
kind of death--as you have banished that disease which, though it
formerly used to make such havoc, now does little or no mischief,
owing to the laudable practice of attending more to the goodness
of the provisions brought to our markets. Consider that there are
means still left to banish intemperance, and such means, too, that
every man may have recourse to them without any external assistance.
“Nothing more is requisite for this purpose than to live up to the
simplicity, dictated by nature, which teaches us to be content with
little, to pursue the practice of holy abstemiousness and divine
reason, and _accustom ourselves to eat no more than is absolutely
necessary to support life_; considering that what exceeds this
is disease and death, and done merely to give the palate a
satisfaction which, though but momentary, brings on the body a long
and lasting train of disagreeable diseases, and at length kills it
along with the soul. How many friends of mine--men of the finest
understanding and most amiable disposition--have I seen carried off
by this plague in the flower of their youth! who, were they now
living, would be an ornament to the public, and whose company I
should enjoy with as much pleasure as I am now deprived of it with
concern.”
He tells us that he had undertaken his arduous task of proselytising
with the more anxiety and zeal that he had been encouraged to it by
many of his friends, men of “the finest intellect” (_di bellissimo
intelletto_), who lamented the premature deaths of parents and
relatives, and who observed so manifest a proof of the advantages of
abstinence in the robust and vigorous frame of the dietetic missionary
at the age of eighty. Cornaro was a thorough-going hygeist, and he
followed a reformed _diet_ in the widest meaning of the term, attending
to the various requirements of a healthy condition of mind and body:--
“I likewise,” he says with much candour, “did all that lay in my
power to avoid those evils which we do not find it so easy to
remove--melancholy, hatred, and other violent passions which appear
to have the greatest influence over our bodies. However, I have not
been able to guard so well against either one or the other kind of
these disorders [passions] as not to suffer myself now and then to
be hurried away by many, not to say all, of them; but I reaped one
great benefit from my weakness--that of knowing by experience that
these passions have, in the main, no great influence over bodies
governed by the two foregoing rules of eating and drinking, and
therefore can do them but very little harm, so that it may, with
great truth, be affirmed that whoever observes these two capital
rules is liable to very little inconvenience from any other excess.
This Galen, who was an eminent physician, observed before me.
He affirms that so long as he followed these two rules relative
to eating and drinking (_perchè si guardava da quelli due della
bocca_) he suffered but little from other disorders--so little that
they never gave him above a day’s uneasiness. That what he says is
true I am a living witness; and so are many others who know me, and
have seen how often I have been exposed to heats and colds and such
other disagreeable changes of weather, and have likewise seen me
(owing to various misfortunes which have more than once befallen
me) greatly disturbed in mind. For not only can they say of me that
such mental disturbance has affected me little, but they can aver
of many others who did not lead a frugal and regular life that such
failure proved very prejudicial to them, among whom was a brother
of my own and others of my family who, trusting to the goodness of
their constitution, did not follow my way of living.”
At the age of seventy a serious accident befel him, which to the vast
majority of men so far advanced in life would probably have been fatal.
His coach was overturned, and he was dragged a considerable distance
along the road before the horses could be stopped. He was taken up
insensible, covered with severe wounds and bruises and with an arm and
leg dislocated, and altogether he was in so dangerous a state that his
physicians gave him only three days to live. As a matter of course
they prescribed bleeding and purging as the only proper and effectual
remedies:--
“But I, on the contrary, who knew that the sober life I had led
for many years past had so well united, harmonised, and dispersed
my humours as not to leave it in their power to ferment to such
a degree [as to induce the expected high fever], refused to be
either bled or purged. I simply caused my leg and arm to be set,
and suffered myself to be rubbed with some oils, which they said
were proper on the occasion. Thus, without using any other kind
of remedy, I recovered, as I thought I should, without feeling
the least alteration in myself or any other bad effects from the
accident, a thing which appeared no less than miraculous in the
eyes of the physicians.”
It is, perhaps, hardly to be expected that “The Faculty” will endorse
the opinions of Cornaro, that any person by attending strictly to
his regimen “could never be sick again, as it removes every cause of
illness; and so, for the future, would never want either physician or
physic”:--
“Nay, by attending duly to what I have said he would become his own
physician, and, indeed, the best he could have, since, in fact, no
man can be a perfect physician to anyone but himself. The reason of
which is that any man may, by repeated trials, acquire a perfect
knowledge of his own constitution and the most hidden qualities of
his body, and what food best agrees with his stomach. Now, it is
so far from being an easy matter to know these things perfectly
of another that we cannot, without much trouble, discover them
in ourselves, since a great deal of time and repeated trials are
required for that purpose.”
Cornaro’s second publication appeared three years later than his
first, under the title of _A Compendium of a Sober Life_ and the
third, _An Earnest Exhortation to a Sober and Regular Life_,[103] in
the ninety-third year of his age. In these little treatises he repeats
and enforces in the most earnest manner his previous exhortations
and warnings. He also takes the opportunity of exposing some of the
plausible sophisms employed in defence of luxurious living:--
“Some allege that many, without leading such a life, have lived
to a hundred, and that in constant health, although they ate a
great deal and used indiscriminately every kind of viands and
wine, and therefore flatter themselves that they shall be equally
fortunate. But in this they are guilty of two mistakes. The first
is, that it is not one in one hundred thousand that ever attains
that happiness; the other mistake is, that such persons, in the
end, most assuredly contract some illness which carries them off,
nor can they ever be sure of ending their days otherwise, so that
the safest way to obtain a long and healthy life is, at least after
forty, to embrace abstinence. This is no difficult matter, since
history informs us of very many who, in former times, lived with
the greatest temperance, and I know that the present Age furnishes
us with many such instances, reckoning myself one of the number.
Now let us remember that we are human beings, and that man, being a
rational animal, is himself master of his actions.”
Amongst others:--