SOME ODD IDEAS.
“Our intelligence,” says the celebrated Montaigne, “is a kind of vagabond instrument, daring and dangerous, to which it is difficult to associate order or appoint limits. It is a hurtful weapon to its owner himself, if he does not know how to use it discreetly.”
No one can doubt the truth of this observation who has ever studied the workings of his own individual mind with some little attention. And even when we cannot perceive the beam in our own eye, how very evident is the straw in our neighbor’s! Though unsuspecting of the bee in our own bonnet, how quickly we hear it buzzing in his!
A specimen of some of the extravagant vagaries of human wit may perhaps interest and amuse. To begin at the beginning: thinkers have endeavored to imagine what was going on before the Creation.
In the seventeenth century, a mystic writer composed a work on
the occupations of God before the creation of the universe! Nearly all of it is incomprehensible, but a few sentences will give an idea of its style:
“To ask what God was doing before the Creation is an impertinence, a puerility.… It is certain that the eternal God who made this earth by the power of his word had no need of the world and all the creatures it contains—he had lived and reigned before Time began, happy and contented in the paradise of his essence and in the essence of himself.… He was contemplating his only Son, not made, not created, but begotten from all eternity; in the eternal Word he contemplated the archetype, the world of the world, angels, souls, and all things. In conclusion, we may say that God, before the creation of the world, did something and did nothing.…”
Singular problems, most daringly
resolved, have been presented respecting the epoch of the Creation. Chevreau, in his Histoire du Monde, 1686, tells us that, according to some writers, the earth was created in the spring; according to others, equally good authorities, on a Friday, the 6th of September, at four o’clock in the afternoon!
A learned Italian of the last century, Monsignor Baiardi, in the course of a conversation with the Abbé Barthélemy, mentioned that he was about writing an abridgment of universal history, and that he intended to commence his work with the solution of one of the most important problems of astronomy and history. His desire was to determine the exact spot in the firmament in which God had placed the sun when he made the earth. “And,” says Barthélemy, “he had just discovered it, and showed it to me on a globe.”
Our common father has been the subject of an infinite number of curious suppositions, not to say crack-brained fancies. The Talmudists, for instance, have constructed the following programme of Adam’s first day of life:
In the first hour, the Creator kneaded the clay of which man was made, and moulded the outlines of his form.
In the second hour, Adam was perfected and capable of action.
In the fourth hour, God called to him, and commanded him to give names to the beasts, birds, and fishes.
In the seventh hour, the marriage of our first parents took place.
In the tenth hour, Adam sinned.
In the twelfth hour, the penalty of labor began.
James Salien, a Jesuit of the seventeenth
century, tells us in his Annales Ecclesiastici that, “while man was being created, the divine hands, ambrosial face, and admirable arms of his Creator were visible to him.”
The Arabs have a tradition that Adam, when first created, stretched from one extremity of the earth to the other. But after he had sinned, God pressed him down with his almighty hand, and thus diminished his height to nine hundred cubits. The Creator, it is added, did this at the request of the angels, who regarded the gigantic mortal with strange fear.
According to Moreri, Adam possessed a profound knowledge of all the sciences, especially of astrology, many secrets of which he taught to his children, besides engraving two tables of observations on the movements of the planets. All the learned doctors of the Middle Ages are agreed in ascribing the possession of immense science to Adam. The angels themselves, they say, were inferior to him in knowledge; and they relate as proof of this that God, having heard them speak of man with contempt, determined to confound them by asking them what were the names of certain beasts which he called into his presence at that moment. The angels could not answer; man, summoned to the task, gave each animal its due appellation without hesitation.
Adam, being thus endowed with unlimited knowledge, would have been culpable towards his posterity if he had left none of it behind him. We are accordingly told that he composed two works, one upon the Creation, the other upon the Divinity. Having been present, we may almost say, at the first, and conversed familiarly with the second, he was able to tell us something interesting
about both, and it is our misfortune that the two works have been lost. It is, however, said that they survived the Deluge, for a Mahometan author relates that Abraham, being in the country of the Sabeans, opened Adam’s chest, and found in it not only our progenitor’s writings but also those of Seth.
Opinions are various concerning the form the tempter assumed to deceive poor Eve. It has been asserted that Sammaël, the prince of devils, came to her mounted on a serpent as large in girth as a camel; and then again it is said that Satan borrowed the form of the serpent, and made it more seductive by the addition of a sweet maiden’s face! This tradition has been adopted by poets and painters.
As the name of the forbidden fruit is not mentioned in the Book of Genesis, conjecture has had full scope. Northern nations believe that it was an apple; southern people that it was a fig or citron. Rabbi Salomon thinks that Moses concealed the name of the fruit purposely, fearing that, if it were known, nobody would ever eat of it.
According to St. Jerome, Adam was buried in Hebron; other learned authors say on Calvary; either assertion is difficult of verification, for both Hebron and Calvary only date from the Deluge. “Barcepha alleges,” says Bayle, “that a highly esteemed Syrian doctor had said that Noe dwelt in Judea; that he planted in the plains of Sodom the cedar-trees with which he afterwards built the ark; and that he carried Adam’s bones into the ark with him. When he came out of the ark, he divided these bones among his three sons; the skull fell to the share of Sem, and when the descendants of Sem took possession of Judea, they
buried it in the very spot where the tomb of Adam had once been situated.” The reader will doubtless feel that Barcepha’s allegation settles the question!
In 1615, a shoemaker of Amiens published a treatise entitled De Calceo Antiquo. In this history of shoes, the writer begins at the beginning of the world, and gravely informs us that Adam made the first pair from the prepared skins of beasts, the secret of tanning having been taught him by God himself!
In the last century, Henrion, a French Orientalist, and a member of the Institute of France, conceived the idea of composing an exhaustive work on the weights and measures of the ancients, and presented a specimen of his labors to the Academy of Inscriptions, to which he belonged. It was a kind of chronological scale of the differences in man’s stature from the epoch of Adam’s creation to the time of our Saviour.
Adam, he stated, measured one hundred and twenty-three feet, nine inches; Eve, one hundred and eighteen feet, nine and three-quarter inches; Noe, one hundred and three feet; Abraham, twenty-seven feet; Moses, thirteen feet; Hercules, ten feet; Alexander, six feet; Julius Cæsar, five feet.
He remarked upon this scale that “though men are no longer measured by their stature, if Providence had not deigned to suspend such an extraordinarily rapid rate of diminution, we, at this day, should scarcely dare to class ourselves, with respect to our size, among the large insects of our globe!”
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to wrest from Adam the honor of being the first man. Isaac de la
Peyrère pulished a work in 1655, entitled Præadamitæ, seu Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 Capitis V. Epistolæ B. Pauli ad Romanos, in which he endeavors to prove that there were two creations of men—the first on the sixth day, when God created man, male and female; which, he asserts, means men and women in all parts of the earth, progenitors of the Gentiles. The second creation, he says, did not take place until some time after, when God made Adam to be the father of the Jews. Those who adopted this idea were called Preadamites. La Peyrère lived to abjure his opinions at the feet of Pope Alexander VI.
Such are a few of the many odd ideas upon the Creation and the first man which human wit, that “dangerous instrument” when not kept within due limits, has been continually devising ever since the beginning of history. The logic
of the nineteenth century rejects them all; nevertheless, while we laugh at the extraordinary suppositions of our ancestors, it is pleasant to observe that, even in the most extravagant about our common father, the sentiment of the first man’s innate nobleness is always present. Adam always shines forth greater and grander than his sons—stronger, both physically and mentally. The old fathers of the church, nay, even the pedants of the Middle Ages, adhered to the Scripture text, and believed that in the “looks divine” of the first human pair
“The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severe and pure.”
Is it not curious that the queerest crank of all concerning Adam—that which strives to prove that he was an ourang-outang—should have been reserved for our own days of culture, of philosophical research and science?