Longevity of the patriarchs

What does the age of the patriarchs in general, and that of Methuselah in particular, matter to you? Nature, know it well, never had nonsense and irregularities; and if the human machine sometimes varied, it never repelled for so long the material destruction: death. As I have already told you, the Bible is a magnificent oriental poem, where human passions are divinized, like the passions that the Greeks idealized, after the example of the great colonies of Asia Minor. There is no reason to associate conciseness with emphasis, clarity with diffusion, the coldness of modern reasoning and logic with oriental exaltation. The cherubim of the Bible had six wings, as you know: almost monsters! The God of the Jews bathed in blood; you know it and you wish that your angels be the same angels and that your God, sovereignly just and good, be the same God? Do not, then, ally your modern poetic analysis with the lying poetry of the ancient Jews or pagans. The age of the patriarchs is a moral figure, and not a reality; the authority, the remembrance of those great names, of those true shepherds of peoples, enriched with mysteries and legends that they made radiate around them, existed among those superstitious and idolatrous nomads of remembrances. It is probable that Methuselah lived a long time in the heart of his descendants. Note that in oriental poetry every moral idea is incorporated, incarnated, clothed in a brilliant, radiant, splendid form, contrary to modern poetry, which disincarnates, which breaks the envelope to let the idea escape up to the heaven. Modern poetry is not only expressed by the brilliance and the color of the image, but, also, by the firm and correct design of logic, in a word, by the idea. How do you wish to associate these two great principles so contrary? When you read the Bible under the lights of the Orient, amid the gilded images, the interminable and diffuse horizons of the deserts, of the steppes, make the electricity run that traverses all the abysses, all the darkness, that is, make use of your reason and judge always the difference of time, of forms and of comprehensions. Lamennais. n [1]

[see Lamennais.]