In a recent article (A Slippery Slope) I mentioned Albert Einstein, and I learned that he became a vegetarian for the last years of his life only. Somehow I had been under the impression that he didn’t eat animals for most of his life, and that he even was vegan… This made me curious. What other famous scientists, philosophers, artists – people who had shaped our culture and worldview – were vegan/vegetarian, and why did they choose to go without any animal products? Has this component of their legacy and lifestyle influenced later thinking? And do they have anything in common?
I’m excluding celebrities such as Joaquim Phoenix, there’s just too many of them… I take this to be a good sign for human culture in general, but I’m sure you hear/read about them without my help.
Pythagoras
The earliest known vegetarian is Pythagoras of Samos, ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician who lived from around 570 to around 495 BC. It seems safe to say that at that time, a strict distinction between science, religion, and art did not yet exist within Greek culture. While he is most famous for his Pythagorean theorem (a² + b² = c²), for him and his followers numbers were an expression of a divine order which was manifest in the whole universe and in human souls. Greek temples and statues were created according to the same fundamental relationships which ruled the planets as well as nature. The outer sense-perceptible world could be understood as the densification, so to speak, of eternal ideas and archetypal beings.
The brotherhood (which included women as well as men) founded by Pythagoras unified science, religion, and art in a grand vision. They believed in the immortality of the soul and its repeated bodily incarnation during successive earth lives. Geometry was not a dry intellectual pursuit but a meditative practice, bringing the mind into resonance with universal order and raising thought-patterns to the level of archetypal divine truth. This order found expression throughout the universe as well as within each human being. The world, a single, living whole, displays a structural order in the relationship of its various parts. Pythagoras is said to be the first to call it a kosmos1, a word which combined the notions of order, fitness, and beauty.
Pythagoras and his followers ate only vegetarian food. His speech in Ovid's Metamorphoses implores his followers to adhere to a strictly vegetarian diet. The emphasis for this lifestyle was based on the principle of doing no harm to any other living being.
To Pythagoras… vegetarianism, pacifism, and humane treatment of other living things were all part of the path to inner peace and, by extension, world peace in that humans could never live in harmony as long as they killed, ate, and were cruel to animals. Poor treatment of animals, and eating animal flesh, devalued all life by maintaining that some creatures (humans) were worth more in life than others. Pythagoras believed that all creatures were created equal and should be treated with respect.2
We don’t know for sure whether Pythagoras was a vegan, or whether he was even vegetarian, because he left no written records. Everything we know about him comes from later writers such as Herodotus and even Aristotle. My next subject from antiquity, the Arab writer, poet, and philosopher Al-Ma’arri, is the earliest known vegan.
Al-Ma’arri
Born in the Syrian city of al-Ma’arra, he lived from 973 to 1057 CE. Although he contracted smallpox as a young child which left him blind, he studied literature and Islam in Aleppo and other Syrian cities and became a famous poet. He was probably even more famous for his anti-religious views; he eschewed Islam, Christianity, and Judaism:
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.
But he firmly believed in the sanctity of life, ALL life, and he was convinced that no living creature should be harmed. Here is a poem which clearly shows his aversion to consuming animal products, including milk:
I No Longer Steal From Nature
You are diseased in understanding and religion.
Come to me, that you may hear something of sound truth.
Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,
And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,
Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught
for their young, not noble ladies.
And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;
for injustice is the worst of crimes.
And spare the honey which the bees get industriously
from the flowers of fragrant plants;
For they did not store it that it might belong to others,
Nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.
I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I
Perceived my way before my hair went grey!
It’s interesting that both Pythagoras and Al-Ma’arri had nothing much to do with organized religion. They had a deep sense of ethics, opposing any kind of violence, and were committed to a life of compassion and empathy. They felt some kind of kinship with both the smallest creatures and with the cosmos at large. Maybe they were more sensitive to the feelings of non-human animals. When I looked up Empathy on Wikipedia, I was surprised to see that almost the whole entry is about humans, how empathy relates to the recognition of emotions of other humans. A very small section lists empathy between other non-human animals. But empathy FOR other non-human animals wasn’t mentioned at all.
That’s the reason why only FOUR percent of all the mammals on Earth are wild animals. Why only 30 percent of all birds are wild. Why one third of the Earth’s forests has been lost to deforestation and cattle ranchers. Why more than ten billion five hundred seventy-four million animals have been killed for food this year in the US, according to animalclock.org. We have become so callused, desensitized that we can’t feel the suffering of all these animals, the forests, and the Earth. On one hand, this may be good – if a human really could emphatically feel all this pain it certainly would kill. On the other hand, if we don’t learn to become more compassionate and stop the destruction of animals and their habitat, we’ll destroy our own habitat as well. Which may be nothing but “Good Riddance” for the Earth.