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The Ethics of Diet. Howard Williams
Читать онлайн.Название The Ethics of Diet
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isbn 4057664648310
Автор произведения Howard Williams
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
“No streams of blood are among them [the ascetics]; no butchering 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