The Ethics of Diet - Howard Williams

Скачать книгу

and consecrating him to the work of revealing the divine mysteries by the gift of a laurel-branch—and the following verses, describing their return to the celestial mansions, where they hymn the omnipotent Father, are very charming. To the long description of the tremendous struggle of the warring gods and Titans, fighting for the possession of heaven, Milton was indebted for his famous delineation of a similar conflict.

      The Works and Days, in striking contrast with the military spirit of the Homeric epic, deals in plain and simple verse with questions ethical, political, and economic. The ethical portion exhibits much true feeling, and a conviction of the evils brought upon the earth by the triumph of injustice and of violence. The well-known passages in which the poet figures the gradual declension and degeneracy of men from the golden to the present iron race, are the remote original of all the later pleasing poetic fictions of golden ages and times of innocence.

      According to Hesiod, there are two everlastingly antagonistic agents at work on the Earth; the spirit of war and fighting, and the peaceful spirit of agriculture and mechanical industry. And in the apostrophe in which he bitterly reproaches his unrighteous judges—

      “O fools! they know not, in their selfish soul,

      How far the half is better than the whole:

      The good which Asphodel and Mallows yield,

      The feast of herbs, the dainties of the field”—

      he seems to have a profound conviction of the truth taught by Vegetarianism—that luxurious living is the fruitful parent of selfishness in its manifold forms.[3]

      That Hesiod regarded that diet which depends mainly or entirely upon agriculture and upon fruits as the highest and best mode of life is sufficiently evident in the following verses descriptive of the “Golden Age” life:—

      

      “Like gods, they lived with calm, untroubled mind,

      Free from the toil and anguish of our kind,

      Nor did decrepid age mis-shape their frame.

      * * * * * * * *

      Pleased with earth’s unbought feasts: all ills removed,

      Wealthy in flocks,[4] and of the Blest beloved,

      Death, as a slumber, pressed their eyelids down:

      All Nature’s common blessings were their own.

      The life-bestowing tilth its fruitage bore,

      A full, spontaneous, and ungrudging store.

      They with abundant goods, ’midst quiet lands,

      All willing, shared the gatherings of their hands.

      When Earth’s dark breast had closed this race around,

      Great Zeus, as demons,[5] raised them from the ground;

      Earth-hovering spirits, they their charge began—

      The ministers of good, and guards of men.

      Mantled with mist of darkling air they glide,

      And compass Earth, and pass on every side;

      And mark, with earnest vigilance of eyes,

      Where just deeds live, or crooked ways arise,

      And shower the wealth of seasons from above.”[6]

      The second race—the “Silver Age”—inferior to the first and wholly innocent people, were, nevertheless, guiltless of bloodshed in the preparation of their food; nor did they offer sacrifices—in the poet’s judgment, it appears, a damnable error. For the third—the “Brazen Age”—it was reserved to inaugurate the feast of blood:—

      “Strong with the ashen spear, and fierce and bold,

      Their thoughts were bent on violence alone,

      The deed of battle, and the dying groan.

      Bloody their feasts, with wheaten food unblessed.”

      According to Hesiod, who is followed by the later poets, the “immortals inhabiting the Olympian mansions” feast ever on the pure and bloodless food of Ambrosia, and their drink is Nectar, which may be taken to be a sort of refined dew. He represents the divine Muses of Helicon, who inspire his song, as reproaching the shepherds, his neighbours, “that tend the flocks,” with the possession of “mere fleshly appetites.”

      Ovid, amongst the Latins, is the most charming painter of the innocence of the “Golden Age.” Amongst our own poets, Pope, Thomson, and Shelley—the last as a prophet of the future and actual rather than the poet of a past and fictitious age of innocence—have contributed to embellish the fable of the Past and the hope of the Future.

       PYTHAGORAS. 570–470 B.C.

       Table of Contents

      “A GREATER good never came, nor ever will come, to mankind, than that which was imparted by the gods through Pythagoras.” Such is the expression of enthusiastic admiration of one of his biographers. To those who are unacquainted with the historical development of Greek thought and Greek philosophy it may seem to be merely the utterance of the partiality of hero-worship. Those, on the other hand, who know anything of that most important history, and of the influence, direct or indirect, of Pythagoras upon the most intellectual and earnest minds of his countrymen—in particular upon Plato and his followers, and through them upon the later Jewish and upon very early Christian ideas—will acknowledge, at least, that the name of the prophet of Samos is that of one of the most important and influential factors in the production and progress of higher human thought.

      There is a true and there is a false hero-worship. The latter, whatever it may have done to preserve the blind and unreasoning subservience of mankind, has not tended to accelerate the progress of the world towards the attainment of truth. The old-world occupants of the popular Pantheon—“the patrons of mankind, gods and sons of gods, destroyers rightlier called and plagues of men”—are indeed fast losing, if they have not entirely lost, their ancient credit, but their vacant places have yet to be filled by the representatives of the most exalted ideals of humanity. Whenever, in the place of the representatives of mere physical and mental force, the true heroes shall be enthroned, amongst the moral luminaries and pioneers who have contributed to lessen the thick darkness of ignorance, barbarism, and selfishness, the name of the first western apostle of humanitarianism and of spiritualism must assume a prominent position.

      It is a natural and legitimate curiosity which leads us to wish to know, with something of certainty and fulness, the outer and inner life of the master spirits of our race. Unfortunately, the personality of many of the most interesting and illustrious of them is of a vague and shadowy kind. But when we reflect that little more is known of the personal life of Shakspere than of that of Pythagoras or Plato—not to mention other eminent names—our surprise is lessened that, in an age long preceding the discovery of printing, the records of a life even so important and influential as that of the founder of Pythagoreanism are meagre and scanty.

      

      The earliest account of his teaching is given by Philolaus (“Lover of the People,” an auspicious name) of Tarentum, who, born about forty or fifty years after the death of his master—was thus contemporary with Sokrates and Plato. His Pythagorean System, in three books, was so highly esteemed by Plato that he is said to have given £400 or £500 for a copy, and to have incorporated the principal part of it in his Timæus. Sharing the fate of so many other valuable products of the Greek genius, it has long since perished. Our remaining authorities for the Life are Diogenes of Laerte, Porphyry, one of the most erudite writers of any age, and Iamblichus. Of these, the biography of the last is the fullest, if not the most critical; that of Porphyry wants the beginning and the end; whilst of the

Скачать книгу