Skip to main content

The Problem of Flesh: Vegetarianism and Edible Matters

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Material Christianity
  • 335 Accesses

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, a surge of religious and philosophical speculation into the nature of matter, spirit, soul, and God arose in early modern Britain. Scholars, ministers, and other writers became newly curious about a wider religious problem of embodied substance—a complex of questions, intellectual curiosities, and cultural anxieties regarding corporeal bodies and their relationship to God. Amid a more general breakdown of the institutional controls over worship, print, and ideology in the 1640s, a range of writers sought new interpretations of the Christian project of corporeal redemption—the means by which the human body was deemed fit for divine knowledge, salvation, and contact with God. The Christian project of corporeal redemption became literalized and materialized: heterodox writers increasingly understood the influence of immaterial stuff—such as the soul, or God’s spiritual presence, or thought—as a broader materialized experience of knowledge and divine contact.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Roger Crab , The English Hermite, or, the Wonder of this Age (London, 1655), 4.

  2. 2.

    Thomas Tryon , The Way to Health (London, 1683), 67.

  3. 3.

    Thomas Tryon , Some Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Tho. Tryon (London, 1705), 26–31.

  4. 4.

    Prominent in the hagiographies of the early church was the idea of “heroic fast,” that situated the control of food and consumption within a wider cosmic struggle. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 47–49.

  5. 5.

    Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 34, passim.

  6. 6.

    Such is the thinking behind Jerome Friedman’s consideration of the radical religious heterodoxy in the 1650s as a revival of Gnostic thought, Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Press, 1987). See also B.J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114–115, who considers Tryon and Roger Crab (along with most of the heterodox writers of the seventeenth century) as reflecting older occult thinking inflected through the work of Jakob Böhme . Ariel Hessayon has noted the lack of social connections to link Crab with the Behmonism of Samuel Pordage and the Philadelphians, “Crab, Roger (c.1616–1680),” Ariel Hessayon in ODNB (Oxford: OUP, 2004).

  7. 7.

    See Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: The English Revolution of the 17th Century, rev. ed. (1958; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 314–322. For early modern responses to animal cruelty see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 290–292.

  8. 8.

    Jane Bennett, “Edible Matter,” New Left Review 45 (2007): 133–136; Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 3, proposition 6.

  9. 9.

    The optic of the fasting female body has led to important contributions to our understanding of the fraught religious and political problems of the later seventeenth century. See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women, 80–81; Simon Schaffer, “Piety, Physic and Prodigious Abstinence,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1996), 171–203; Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 98–118.

  10. 10.

    Crab , English Hermite, sig. A2v-r, 4; Roger Crab, Dagons Downfall (London, 1657), 26–27.

  11. 11.

    Crab , English Hermite, sig. A1r-A2v; Mercurious Democritus (Aug. 4–11, 1652), 148–149. The seemingly obvious pun (at least to modern readers) of the “hermit crab” was not used in reference to Roger Crab . According to the OED, the informal name for the terrestrial crustacean was not in use until the 1735–1736 edition of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. This edition referred to Caribbean land crabs in borrowed shells as “like an hermit in his cell,” Philosophical Transactions, 39, 114–115.

  12. 12.

    Crab , English Hermite, 2–3.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 2–3.

  14. 14.

    Crab was aware of passages in scripture that allowed eating meat, citing 1 Timothy 4.3 and Matthew 15.11. He held that following the letter of such passages “must needs be without the spirit of sanctification,” Ibid., 5.

  15. 15.

    See James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), v.

  16. 16.

    Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. ch. 2. J. C. Davis, a revisionist, also recognizes the influence of the “living God” on personal religious experience, “Radical religion and the English Revolution,” in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 31–35.

  17. 17.

    Crab , English Hermite, 2.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 3.

  19. 19.

    For the radical milieu, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 73–78; Barry Reay, “Radicalism and Religion in the English Revolution: An Introduction” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4–8. For the longer history of antinomianism, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 179–183; David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 38–59; Theodore Dwight Bozeman The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1–6.

  20. 20.

    Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness (London, 1649), p. 76.

  21. 21.

    Laurence Clarkson’s solution to the problem (perhaps the most radical injunction to spiritual libertinism in revolutionary England) was that “the corrupt senses must put on incorruption.” He argued that the body must be sacrificed into sin in order for it to be delivered from the power of sin: one needed to act out a sin in order to free it from the imperatives of the flesh, A Single Eye: All Light, no Darkness (London, 1650), 13–14.

  22. 22.

    Richard Coppin, Divine Teachings: The Exaltation of All Things in Christ (London, 1649), 14–15.

  23. 23.

    Joseph Salmon, Divinity Anatomized (London, 1649) in A Collection of Ranter Writings, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 174–175.

  24. 24.

    Humphrey Ellis, Psuedochristus: or a True and Faithful Relation (London, 1650), 39.

  25. 25.

    Crab , English Hermite, 1–2.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., “To the Reader.” See also “Norwood, Robert (c.1610–1654),” Ariel Hessayon in ODNB.

  27. 27.

    Crab , English Hermite, 4.

  28. 28.

    Whittington’s press near the Royal Exchange in London was a central publisher for parliamentary tracts during the late 1640s, producing petitions, remonstrances, and responses regarding the Leveler agitations. It also published heterodox theology , including Henrick Niclaes’s The Glass of Righteousness in 1649.

  29. 29.

    Valentine Weigel , Astrologie Theologized (London, 1649), 19–21. Weigel’s mysticism was influenced by Johannes Tauler’s emphasis upon the need to find spiritual unity with God, the astrological doctrines of Paracelsus, and the interiority of spiritual life advocated by Sebastian Franck and Caspar Schwenckfeldt. His writings made their way to German presses in 1609, decades after his death in 1588. See Rufus Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London, 1914), 139; Russell H. Hvolbek, “Being and Knowing: Spiritualist Epistemology and Anthropology from Sweckenfeld to Böhme ,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 103–105.

  30. 30.

    Weigel , Astrologie Theologized, 8–9. Weigel fits into Leon Kass’s neo-classical theory of edible matter—the idea that matter is ontologically inferior to “life,” and only gains meaning when incorporated into the vitalized “form” of an organism. Indeed, like Weigel , Kass places man at the hierarchical center of the universe; The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 19, 40–44.

  31. 31.

    Patrick Little and David L. Smith, Parliament and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 130–148.

  32. 32.

    Crab , English Hermite, 2.

  33. 33.

    Crab , English Hermite, 7–8.

  34. 34.

    Crab’s very existence stemmed from the desire for material gain. He claimed that without his mother’s income of 20 pounds per year, his father would not “have agreed that they should come together for generation,” Dagons Downfall, 2–4.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 9–11.

  36. 36.

    Karl Gunther and Ethan Shagan, “Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Past and Present 194 (2007): 38–43.

  37. 37.

    Crab , English Hermite, 9–10, 12.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 14.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 13.

  40. 40.

    Crab , Dagons Downfall, 12–13.

  41. 41.

    Crab , English Hermite, sig. B1v, 4–5

  42. 42.

    Turner, One Flesh, 124–126.

  43. 43.

    In Henry More’s literal cabbala all creatures in Paradise were plant eaters, Conjectura Cabbalistica. Or A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Minde of Moses (London, 1653), sig. A3r, 8–9.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 36–37, 48, 50–51.

  45. 45.

    Jakob Böhme , Mysterium Magnum: Or An Exposition on the First Book of Moses called Genesis trans. John Sparrow (London, 1654), 78–79, 88–89, 94. See Turner, One Flesh, 142–148.

  46. 46.

    Pordage suggested that Adam’s fall was tripartite: from angelic purity to fleshly materiality, from androgenous unity to sexual division from Eve, and from material obedience to disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit, Mundorum Explicatio (London, 1661), 57–62.

  47. 47.

    Crab , English Hermite, 4.

  48. 48.

    Jan Baptiste van Helmont , Ortus Medicinus (Amsterdam, 1648), trans. John Chandler, Oriatrike, Or, Physick Refined (London, 1662), 287–288. All references will be to this English version.

  49. 49.

    Even as he was unpacking the literal physiological effects of the Fall, van Helmont insisted he was not allegorizing in the manner of “atheists and libertines, [who] even at this day, take the text of the dissuaded apple… for an allegory,” Ibid., 651.

  50. 50.

    Van Helmont defended his anatomy of the soul by noting several examples in which trauma to the upper abdomen led to death, Ibid., 283–284. For the influence of van Helmont’s anatomy on English practitioners see Robert Godfrey, Various Injuries and Abuses in Chemical and Galenical Physick (London, 1674), 117–120.

  51. 51.

    Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont : Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 35–36, 40, 96–98; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 368–371.

  52. 52.

    Early moderns inherited Aristotelian views of digestion , theories that considered the assimilation of food into the body as a mechanism of heat; Aristotle , De Anima, 415a14–416b31; Michael Boylan, “The Digestive and ‘Circulatory’ Systems in Aristotle’s Biology ,” Journal of the History of Biology 15 (Spring, 1982): 94–102. Mechanical theories of digestion became prominent in this period. For examples see Walter Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London, 1659), 9–10; Thomas Willis, A Medical-Philosophical Discourse of Fermentation (London, 1681), 2, 9–15.

  53. 53.

    Van Helmont , Oriatrike, 195–203.

  54. 54.

    The digestive tract was paramount in the human commonwealth; in particular, the stomach and the spleen shared the crucial digesting archei that were “chief in the government of life.” Van Helmont (and translator) continued the political analogy to the body politic, referring to the stomach and spleen as “the duumvirate or sheriffdom” of the body, ibid., 201–203, 206–207, 215. See also Walter Pagel, “The Smiling Spleen,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones et al. (London: Duckworth & Co., 1981), 81–87.

  55. 55.

    Sarah Hutton, “Of Physic and Philosophy: Anne Conway, F.M. van Helmont and Seventeenth-Century Medicine” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1996), 234–39.

  56. 56.

    Francis Mercury van Helmont, trans. Daniel Foote, “Observations, physical, alchemical, and theological,” BL Sloane MS 530, 1682, fo. 19.

  57. 57.

    Francis Mercury van Helmont, The Spirit of Diseases; Or, Diseases from the Spirit (London, 1694), 24–31.

  58. 58.

    The poem was published in 1685 in Miscellany, a collection of poems collected by Behn, 252–256. It was included in another of Tryon’s temperance guidebooks, The Way to Make All People Rich, and in the prefatory matter of The Way to Health’s third print edition in 1697. See Janet Todd, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 179–180, 412; “Behn, Aphra (1640?–1689),” Janet Todd in ODNB, ed. Lawrence Goldman, (Oxford: OUP, 2004). I thank James Grantham Turner for bringing Behn to my attention.

  59. 59.

    Tryon was aware of what Jane Bennett considers to be a material vibrancy in food. I agree with Bennett’s argument about the conative powers of edible matter—she focuses on motifs from Nietzsche and Thoreau—but formulations of food’s vital materiality begin much earlier in the late seventeenth century and indicate the advent of modern interest and anxieties about the efficacy and power of foodstuffs. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 39–51.

  60. 60.

    Max Weber would have considered Tryon as an ideal type of the “inner-worldly ascetic,” rationally acting within the institutions of the world as an instrument of God, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 541–556.

  61. 61.

    Tryon , Some Memoirs, 7–27.

  62. 62.

    After marriage in 1661 Tryon voyaged abroad, thriving in the expanding American markets of the English empire and finding success in the lucrative beaver pelt trade. When he returned to London, Tryon’s diligent work as a hatter led to increasingly prosperity. He settled with his wife in Hackney, had five children, and “made a pretty good progress on the Base-viol,” Some Memoirs, 26–29, 37–41, 58–63 (misnumbered as “40–46”).

  63. 63.

    Similar to Weigel , Tryon’s writings indicate the influence of Jakob Böhme , who relied heavily upon the notion of micro-macrocosm, Memoirs, 30–34. See also Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, 114–115.

  64. 64.

    Thomas Tryon , Health’s Grand Preservative (London, 1682), 6–7.

  65. 65.

    Tryon , Way to Health, 202.

  66. 66.

    Tryon, Way to Health, 39–43; Tryon, Grand Preservative, 19.

  67. 67.

    Keith Thomas suggests that Tryon’s vegetarianism was motivated by a precocious shift in sensibility, a belief that bestial creatures bore the image of the creator and thus should not be killed or cruelly treated, Man and the Natural World, 290–292. But far more prominent in the hat-maker’s writings was the bestial otherness of animal flesh—that meat was innately fallen and corporeal.

  68. 68.

    Tryon , Way to Health, 397–398. Through the wounds of the animal, the poisons in animal blood were exposed to the air. The evaporation of blood’s “dark, wrathful spirits” defiled anyone who inhaled them. Tryon believed the constant inhalation of “dark, wrathful spirits” in the air explained why butchers and others of “killing employments” tended to be fierce and cruel, Health’s Grand Preservative, 15–19.

  69. 69.

    Tryon , Way to Health, 46–47, 79; Tryon, Health’s Grand Preservative, 1. Tryon’s concerns about the bestial disposition of animal matter were similar to those raised by xenotranfusions in France in 1668. Peter Sahlins argues that the scandal caused by the transfusion of animal blood into human produced a resurgent anthropocentrism that traversed divisions between “modern” Cartesians and traditional Galenists. Antitranfusionists articulated vitalist notions of animal blood particles to convey moral and metaphysical worries about the passions and brutal animality within the human. This included worries about transfusion more generally as a form of cannibalism, “The Beast Within: Animals in the First Xenotransfusion Experiments in France, ca. 1667–68,” Representations 129 (2015): 25–55, esp. 44–45.

  70. 70.

    Tryon , The Way to Health, 3, 12–14, 19.

  71. 71.

    Tryon maintained Crab’s condemnation the conspicuous carnality of holidays and feasts. Elites had made the Sabbath a celebration of ribald consumption, a day when wealthy “English belly-slaves” made their servants work more preparing meat than they did any other day of the week. He was shocked to watch the bodies of “slaughtered fellow-creatures” loaded upon the backs of porters and carried to aristocratic estates, Health’s Grand Preservative, 22.

  72. 72.

    Tryon , The Way to Health, 383–387;

  73. 73.

    Perplexed by the idea of noble blood, Tryon “inquired of chirugeons and chemists” and concluded that there was no difference in the blood of nobles. Indeed, God had made men anatomically similar: “the meanest farmer had altogether as large a stomach, though not so large an house, as his landlord,” The Way to Health, 385–395.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 444–446.

  75. 75.

    Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 2nd ed. (London, 1643), 84–85; George Thomson, Orthometodos Iatrochymike, or, The Direct Method of Curing Chymically (London, 1675), 97–98.

  76. 76.

    Tryon , Memoirs, 55–56, misnumbered as “37–39.”

  77. 77.

    Tryon , Way to Health, 49.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 49, 62–63.

  79. 79.

    For the rise of the medical market place in the emergent consumer society see Roy Porter, Health For Sale: Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 40–46.

  80. 80.

    Tryon , Way to Health, 47–49.

  81. 81.

    Thomas Tryon , A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats and Drinks of the Preparation of Food (London, 1682), 1–5.

  82. 82.

    Tim Harris, “Revising the Restoration,” in The Politics in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris et al. (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1990); Richard L. Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet: Radicals and Noncomformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  83. 83.

    Cheyne’s 1724 An Essay of Health and Long Life reached nine editions during Cheyne’s lifetime. It was translated into several European languages and reprinted into the 1820s, see Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 118.

  84. 84.

    Wesley recommended Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life to his mother in 1724. Anita Guerrini, “Isaac Newton, George Cheyne , and the ‘Principia Medicinae,’” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 240.

  85. 85.

    Guerrini, Obesity and Depression, 107–114

  86. 86.

    Porter, Health For Sale, 40–46.

  87. 87.

    George Cheyne , An Essay of Health (London, 1724), 29–32.

  88. 88.

    George Cheyne, An Essay on the Gout: The 2nd Edition (London, 1720), 97–98.

  89. 89.

    Cheyne’s anatomical views were influenced by Archibald Pitcairne, an early proponent for the revision of medical practice to reflect Newton’s physical theories as well as older the mechanist philosophies of Descartes , Bellini, Borelli, and Boyle. See Anita Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne , and Newtonian Physiology, 1690–1740,” Journal of the History of Biology, 18 (1985): 247–266.

  90. 90.

    George Cheyne , Essay of Health, 19–20.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 21–22.

  92. 92.

    Ibid., 27

  93. 93.

    Anita Guerrini, “Isaac Newton, George Cheyne ” 226–227; Porter, Health for Sale, 31–39.

  94. 94.

    George Cheyne , “The Case of the Author,” in The English Malady: Or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London, 1733), 325–329.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., 342–343.

  96. 96.

    Cheyne’s mysticism makes him unique among the Newtonian physicians, and the historiography regarding his life and work has debated the nature of his beliefs. G. S. Rousseau’s consideration of Cheyne as turning “mere Enthusiast” in 1705 ignores the pragmatism of Cheyne’s therapies, as well as his attempt to continued adherence to Newton’s mechanics within a broader Neoplatonic cosmology. Yet Anita Guerrini’s positioning of Cheyne as a “moderate” between mystical fanaticism and deist naturalism also obscures how the moderation of the physician’s thought depended on its immediate context. Indeed, such labels of “moderate” and “radical” are problematic given the shifting political landscape of post-1688 Britain. The question of Cheyne’s mysticism , as Rousseau himself concludes, may be “ultimately paradoxical,” but more likely it is the inadequacy of sectarian and philosophical labels to contain the ideological ambivalence occasioned by acute spiritual crises in the later seventeenth century. G. S. Rousseau, “Mysticism and Millenarianism: ‘Immortal Dr. Cheyne’,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800, ed. Richard H. Popkin, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), 116–124; Guerrini, Obesity and Depression, 45, 72, 81, et passim.

  97. 97.

    Guerrini, Obesity and Depression, 3–4, 68–79.

  98. 98.

    Cheyne , “Case of the Author,” 330–333.

  99. 99.

    For G. S. Rousseau, the proximity of the French Prophets and the possibility that Cheyne read Böhme explains Cheyne’s abstemious therapies, “Mysticism and Millenarianism: ‘Immortal Dr. Cheyne ’,” 95–100.

  100. 100.

    Guerrini, Obesity and Depression, 10–20, 79–88, 143–149.

  101. 101.

    Anita Guerrini describes Keith as the “nerve center” of the group, but sees the reference to George Garden in English Malady as evidence for Garden’s central influence; Obesity and Depression, 12–13, 137.

  102. 102.

    Keith’s friends and contacts included Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, Scottish Jacobites, Presbyterians, in addition to the London Philadelphians Francis Lee and Richard Roach; G.D. Henderson, Mystic of the North-east (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1934), 56–61, 65–67, 75–80, passim.

  103. 103.

    Attributing Rawlinson MS A. 404 to Keith cannot be certain, but there is evidence to suggest his affiliation with the manuscript. A flyleaf at the beginning of the manuscript states that “this was found amongst Dr. Keith’s papers, a Philadelphian and a mystic.” Keith corresponded with the Philadelphian leaders Francis Lee and Richard Roach. Additionally, the manuscript reflects a Newtonian understanding of spiritual qualities and a platonic continuum of substance from matter to spirit that is very similar to Cheyne’s later ideas.

  104. 104.

    Bodl., Rawlinson MS A. 404, fo 2. It was this blend of will and perception that defined life. All things, including plants, had a will and intelligence according to Keith. He cited Jan Baptiste van Helmont that even minerals “have some sort of perception, will, and election proportionate to their life,” fo. 4.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., fos. 98–99.

  106. 106.

    George, Cheyne , Philosophical Principles (London, 1715), preface part 2, sig. A3v-sig. A4v; Guerrini, Obesity and Depression, 87.

  107. 107.

    In Philosophical Principles Cheyne wrote that attraction and gravity were caused by God’s love and desire. Interestingly, James Keith described the attractive properties of matter as due to the extended desires of spiritual will and perception. The fulfillment of this desire was consumptive “nourishment” unifying or “eating” a desired object imparted a “real joy” that diffused into the consuming spirit, “penetrating and tincturing the whole being of the spirit.” Rawlinson A 404, fos. 10–11; Anita Guerrini, “Newtonian Physiology,” 247–266.

  108. 108.

    Guerrini, “Newtonian Physiology,” 253.

  109. 109.

    George Cheyne , The English Malady, 75; Guerrini, “Isaac Newton, George Cheyne ,” 235–236.

  110. 110.

    Cheyne , Essay of Health, 144–145.

  111. 111.

    Cheyne , English Malady, 85–87.

  112. 112.

    Cheyne , Essay of Health, 149–150.

  113. 113.

    Ibid., 25.

  114. 114.

    George Cheyne , An Essay on Regimen (London, 1740), 23.

  115. 115.

    Cheyne , Case of the Author,” 344–345.

  116. 116.

    Cheyne , Essay on Regimen, xv.

  117. 117.

    For Cheyne as representing a modern, capitalist process of social rationalization, see Brian S. Turner, “The Government of the Body: Medical Regimens and the Rationalization of Diet,” The British Journal of Sociology 33 (1982): 254–269.

  118. 118.

    An Essay of Health contained chapters on exercise and sleep in addition to Cheyne’s lengthy guides to food.

  119. 119.

    George Cheyne , The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body (London, 1742), 79.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samuel F. Robinson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Robinson, S.F. (2020). The Problem of Flesh: Vegetarianism and Edible Matters. In: Ocker, C., Elm, S. (eds) Material Christianity. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32018-8_4

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics