“There was the sound of harp and the clear singing of the minstrel; there spake he that had knowledge to unfold from far-off days the first beginning of men, telling how the Almighty wrought the earth, a vale of bright loveliness that the waters encircle; how triumphant He set the radiance of the sun and moon as light for the dwellers in the lands.”
One can well imagine sitting in that long ago Scandinavian mead hall in the depths of Europe’s Dark Ages, listening to how the world began. This is an account from the very first work of English literature, Beowulf (J.R.R. Tolkien translation), and is thought to be well over 1,000 years old. One can imagine the shadows cast by the flickering fire as a minstrel familiar with the legends of the new religion – Christianity – sang tales of a time when time was new. Yet outside that hall the night was still pagan, and in it lurked Beowulf’s foe, the monster Grendel, waiting his chance to seize whom he might and drink “blood from veins, great gobbets gorging down.”
For most of the time that man has been on this earth, time itself was very different. Our modern penchant for ordering the flow of time is a recent development. Most of the humans who have ever lived probably didn’t even know how old they were. Time was the cycles of the sun and moon, and because they were regular in their repetitions, there was no need to straighten them out and count their passings.
Our conception of linear time developed gradually, chiefly to keep track of the years a particular king had reigned — our time today counts the years of Christ’s reign. By uncovering and adding up the sparse and fragmented records of the temporal rulers of old, a chronology of civilization has slowly been developed. But to those listening to the story of our beginning while huddled around fires, the beginning was just long ago, and it was a wonder that any recollection at all had survived.
It was by counting the lifespans of biblical personages that the Archbishop of Ireland, James Ussher, deduced that the events “spake” of in the passage from Beowulf began on the evening before Sunday, October 23rd (the beginning of the Jewish year), 4004 BC. In the mid-1600s when Archbishop Ussher reached this conclusion, it made sense. But in the years to follow, as the deductive powers of science were brought to bear on rock formations to fossils, the age of the world grew and grew, until today it stands at 4.54 billion years.
Yet a recent Gallup poll shows that 46% of Americans believe Archbishop Ussher’s reckoning is correct, that the Earth has been here less than 10,000 years. So compelling to them is the creation story that long-ago minstrel told that they embrace his tale even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps the reason creation stories endure is because they fulfill a fundamental need for humans to know where we come from. It’s a need that drives adoptees to seek out their birth parents and has fueled the growth of websites like Ancestry.com which help us trace our families back into the mists of time.
The Buddhists believe that time is an illusion, that there is only now, and that we should remain ever mindful of the present moment. And there is wisdom in this view. But as long as it remains our nature to want to know where we come from, stories about creation will always be with us.