Newton no doubt felt supported in his beliefs by his favourite Jewish scholar, the twelfth-century Rabbi Moses ben Maimun (Maimonides), who had similarly tried to smash a conventional Jewish disregard for animals by insisting that some of Moses’ laws were for the protection of animals (though conversely the prohibition of blood, he believed, was instituted because Satanist pagans drank it to ‘fraternize with the djinns’).37 Claiming that Moses instituted mercy to animals was not unheard of in Christendom either. Francis Bacon said that laws like abstaining from blood were ‘not so meerely Ceremoniall, as Institutions of Mercy’ (though he was by no means calling for its restitution);38 and in a famous article against cruelty to animals in The Guardian (1713), referred to by Conduitt in his notes on Newton, Alexander Pope argued that Moses had instituted mercy to beasts.39 But the dominant Christian line, since St Thomas Aquinas and St Clement of Alexandria, was to deny animals any moral status by claiming that such laws were solely for the protection of humans.40 This was endorsed by both the Catholic commentators, such as Joannes Mercerus, and by Reformers like John Calvin who said ‘that God intends to accustom men to gentleness, by abstinence from the blood of animals …[because otherwise] they would at length not be sparing of even human blood’.41 Newton’s contemporary, the theologian John Edwards, agreed that eating blood made people cruel to each other: ‘God therefore commanded those of Noah’s Posterity to refrain wholly from Blood, that they might not proceed from cruelty to Beasts, to killing of Men. Besides,’ added Edwards, ‘this may seem partly to be a natural Law, Blood being a gross Meat, and not fit for nourishment.’42 Newton probably agreed that eating blood inflamed men to cruelty, but he stressed that the prohibition was also for the sake of the animals themselves.43
Most Anglicans in any case believed that since Christ sacrificed his own blood the law against eating blood had been dissolved.44 But Newton insisted that the Gospel did not have the power to abolish the prohibition of blood as it did the Mosaic food taboos because the blood law was a Noachic law and therefore universal and permanent. Furthermore, he argued, the Acts of the Apostles clearly stated that when the early Christians met at Antioch for a doctrinal convention they explicitly decreed that the Gentile converts could ignore all the Mosaic traditions except the prohibition of eating blood, strangled animals, meat sacrificed to idols, and fornication (Acts 15:24, 29; 21:25).45 This heavily disputed passage preyed on the conscience of many a Christian blood-eater. As one Protestant Reformer put it in 1596: ‘The Apostles commaunded to abstaine from bloud … What Christian observes that this day? and if some few do feare to touch such things, they are mocked of the rest.’46 A few seventeenth-century controversialists, like Newton, usually under the cover of anonymity, did brave the flak to warn fellow Christians of their peril. The author of A Bloudy Tenent confuted, Or, Bloud Forbidden (1646) argued that it was ‘A cruell thing to eat life itself’: eating the life-blood of an animal after it was dead was a token of more ‘extreame crueltie, and unmercifulnesse’ than killing the animal in the first place.47 This conscientious pamphleteer was immediately lambasted by the author of The Eating of Blood Vindicated, who mockingly retorted that ‘This mans charitie is more to the bloud of a dead beast, than it is either to the life itself of man or beast.’48 In 1652 the controversy was reignited by the comically titled, Triall Of A Black-Pudding. Or, The unlawfulness of Eating Blood, which argued that ‘God would not have Men eat the life and soul of Beasts, a thing barbarous and unnaturall.’49 In the 1660s William Roe repudiated the blood-abstaining ‘Hæmapesthites’, calling the error a ‘virulent Contagion’ based on a false reading of Acts.50 But the stain would not budge. In 1669 John Moore, a church minister on the Isle of Wight, attacked ‘Blood-eaters’ in Moses Revived … Wherein the Unlawfulness of Eating Blood is clearly proved, claiming that blood was the food of devils.51 John Evelyn, Newton’s colleague at the Royal Society, agreed that the prohibition had never been revoked – but recognised that trying to preach down the eating of hog’s pudding was in vain;52 and Thomas Tryon insisted that it was impossible to get a pound of flesh without a drop of blood, so even eating meat was a cardinal sin.53 Newton was more extreme even than these critics (save Tryon); they emphasised that eating blood fostered cruelty towards humans; Newton was concerned with the welfare of the animals having their blood shed.
Despite the differences between Newton and these controversialists, association with them and the Judaists opened Newton to ridicule. Catherine Conduitt felt this keenly and leapt to defend Newton against the accusations levelled by his successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston:
Whiston has spread about that Sr I[saac] abstained from eating rabbitts because strangled & from black puddings because made of blood, but he is mistaken Sr I. did not – he often mentioned & followed the rule of St Paul Take & eat what comes from the shambles without asking questions for conscience sake[.] he said meats strangled were forbid because that was a painfull death & the letting out the blood the easiest & that animals should be put to as little pain as possible, that the reason why eating blood was forbid was because it was thought the eating blood inclined men to be cruel.54
If Newton had followed his principles to the letter he would have had to abstain from all butcher’s meat – and this is what some contemporaries advocated.55 But Whiston, who shared Newton’s desire to revive Primitive Christianity and also believed that vegetarianism was suitable for lengthening life,56 suggested that Newton was primarily concerned with strangled animals like rabbits. Catherine Conduitt indicated that he overcame his conscience by adhering to St Paul’s instructions to put social conformity first (1 Corinthians 10:25–7). But even this reveals that Newton was in a constant state of moral conflict.57 In the solitude of his private rooms, perhaps Newton did avoid eating animals slaughtered in a manner contrary to God’s fundamental laws. (Interestingly, Descartes, who was a closet vegetarian, also preferred ‘to be served separately or to eat alone’.58)
It was an odd leap of imagination for Newton to insist so categorically that the biblical prohibition of blood was really against cruelty to animals. His aim had been to find fundamental principles that everyone could agree on – and yet he was willing to stake all on his contentious interpretation of the law against blood. How did he become so convinced of it? No doubt personal sentiments predisposed him to find in divine law something answering his own feelings of sympathy. But equally crucial to his argument was the evidence from foreign cultures.
Newton never said that the original religion banned eating animals, but he was fascinated by the wide spread of vegetarianism in cultures all over the world; he seems to have regarded such instances of superlative clemency as vestiges of the original law of mercy to beasts.59 He thought that ancient Egypt had preserved the original religion in a strikingly pristine form,