Getting back to the garden, by various means
I recently had the pleasure of reacquainting myself with a number of eminent crackpots with whom I once spent countless hours in the course of not finishing one of my many unfinished written works, in this case a doomed master's thesis, "The Search for a Universal Language in 17th-Century England." Though dead for almost 400 years, these characters suddenly showed up again in two excellent books, "Paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules the World," by Kevin Rushby (Carroll & Graf, paperback, $15.95), and "The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times," by Tristram Stuart (Norton, $29.95).
Stuart, and perhaps even Rushby, would, I think, bristle at the word "crackpot," so let me say that I mean it in the nicest way possible. These were fellows whose heads teemed with theories about space travel, perpetual motion, squaring the circle, prelapsarian harmony, postlapsarian strife, the nature of Nature, the language of God, and of babies and beasts, and about diet, of course. They were natural philosophers, inventors, collectors, catalogers, and systematizers. They were the projectors, in fact, of whom Jonathan Swift made such sport in "Gulliver's Travels." For them the fall of Adam and Eve was not a disaster so much as it was proof that human beings were capable of perfection. It was just a matter of getting back to the basics; and such restoration and, indeed, a new reign of harmony was not only possible but at hand thanks to the men whose lucubrations fill my ancient notes, the likes of Jacob Boehme, Jan Amos Comenius, Francis Bacon, John Wilkins, and Samuel Hartlib .
Rushby, who writes in an entertaining, insouciant style, was himself raised in England in a millenarian sect, the Christadelphians, who look forward to Christ's return to earth, where he will reign over the righteous in a restored paradise -- though "the sect," he tells us, "had given up setting exact dates after failures in 1868 and 1910." Rushby's personal history, travels, and adventures are woven into the book, not exactly seamlessly, but most engagingly. In fact, the work as a whole is more episodic than comprehensive and is absent any academic solemnity.
Over the centuries people have sought paradise in essentially two ways. At one extreme are those who look to uncover or introduce a pre-existent harmony and, in this way, get the world, now all askew, back in tune with the proper order of things. Pythagoras, who believed that numbers are the key to the cosmos and that music reflects their harmony, was the first and most influential of such seekers. This tradition goes down through the ages, gradually evolving from a religious to a secular view, that is, from various forms of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism to the hopes of early explorers for finding Eden in America, to the projects of my 17th-century eggheads, to later expectations of fulfillment through nature, or the economy, or satisfied desire. Today we find it expressed in, among other ways, environmentalism, fundamentalist capitalism, and consumerism. This, I hasten to say, is to put crudely what Rushby describes with a great deal of brio and marvelous historical examples.
At the other extreme of the "paradise-seeking tradition" are those who expect and even hope for a cataclysm that will vanquish the wicked or eliminate the polluted, ushering in a new dispensation of the righteous and wholesome. This edifying tradition finds its most influential expression in John of Patmos and the Book of Revelation , with which we are far too familiar these days. It moves through history, taking in the Crusades and continuing down to the present to manifest itself in certain evangelical persuasions, while at the same time evolving toward a secular expression in utopianism, Marxism, and National Socialism.
Though Rushby writes with high spirits, his descriptions of even the most remote historical expressions of attempts to institute paradise are still awfully and mostly unhappily familiar. "Paradise," he says, " has become the unacknowledged faith of our times, the driving myth of progress and consumer capitalism." To which he might have added our foreign policy, still under the influence of the millenarian delusions of the Project for the New American Century .
Since the 17th century in the West, rejection of meat has often been an element in schemes for setting the world right, and its implications have been thoroughgoing. In "The Bloodless Revolution," Stuart shows that the question of whether meat eating is moral or even natural goes right to the heart of what human beings are. Does man stand at the top of creation with the animal world set below him for his dining pleasure? That's the idea that one might gain from the Bible, but a closer reading suggests that this meat-eating business is actually part of the degradation attendant upon our expulsion from Eden. Roger Crab (1621-80), an early vegetarian, claimed, according to a report, that meat made "the body a Dunghill, filling it with gross Humors and snakie Diseases, engenderers of Lust, Sloth and Melancholy, that so corrupt the senses & bodies of men and Women, that take aside a little reason, there is no difference between them and bruit beasts."
Though, in the 17th century, a vegetarian diet was occasionally put forward as a virtuous stand against luxury and excess, the point was soon made that there is, in fact, no fundamental difference between man and beast. That both are animals in a material sense was the contribution of natural philosophers, some of whom also speculated that man was not originally carnivorous. Far more radical -- and of neglected importance, according to Stuart -- was the understanding that arose out of Europe's exposure to India and the Hindu religion. In this view, both man and beast are one with each other in the totality of sentient nature, and for man to devour animals was tantamount to devouring himself and contrary to the harmonious order of things. Stuart nimbly traces the evolution of this insight, the cultural currents that joined it, the permutations it underwent, and its implications for views of human nature and society. He even deals unflinchingly with Hitler's vegetarianism and the fascist attraction to its "rhetoric of purification." Far from being merely a lengthy panegyric to vegetarianism -- as I with carnivorous prejudice thought it must be on first sight -- the book is a rich and complex history of a movement whose influence has been felt far beyond the table.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
