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.