I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  The traditional Christian linkage of human calendrical microcosms to universal historical macrocosms proceeds as an argument in five stages.

  1. The original millennium, as expressed in the famous biblical prophecy of Revelation, chapter 20, referred to a future one-thousand-year period of bliss following the return of Jesus and the binding of Satan, not to a secular passage of one thousand years in recorded human history. How, then, did the primary meaning of “millennium” change from the duration of a future epoch to the ticking of current calendars?

  2. The earliest Christians expected an imminent inception of the millennium, as Jesus had apparently stated in foreseeing his quick return after bodily death: “Verily I say unto you, There shall be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). The failure of this expectation unleashed an extended discussion among early Christians on the meaning of the millennium and the true timing of the second coming of Christ.

  3. Opinions varied widely, but the most popular claim rested upon several biblical passages suggesting an equation of God’s days with a thousand human years, as in the admonition of 2 Peter 3:8—“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

  4. The link between human calendars and the inception of the true millennium then rested upon an analogistic argument that we, by modern standards, would tend to regard as fuzzy, indefinite, and metaphorical, but that seemed quite satisfactory to many of our forebears (who used their equally powerful brains in different conceptual contexts): If God created the earth in six days and rested on a seventh, and if each of God’s days equals one thousand human years, then the earth’s full history must mirror God’s complete span of creation by lasting six thousand years, while God’s seventh day of rest must correspond to the forthcoming blissful millennium of one thousand additional years. If, therefore, we can count the earth’s history in millennia (periods of one thousand years representing God’s days), we will know, with precision, the end of the current order and the time of inception for the millennium—for this transition will occur exactly six thousand years after the earth’s beginning.

  5. This argument inspired a burst of scholarship (culminating in the seventeenth century) that tried to use the Bible and other ancient records to construct a true and exact chronology for universal history. In the most popular scheme, Christ was born exactly four thousand years after creation, and the current order may therefore persist for an additional two thousand years. Finally, if the birth of Jesus occurred at the B.C.–A.D. transition of our calendar, then the end of this secular millennium should terminate our current order and initiate the millennium (in the original meaning of a forthcoming period of bliss) of Jesus’ second coming. Clearly, then, we should care about microcosmal human calendars because they mark the epochs of macrocosmal universal history and prepare us for the fears of apocalypse followed by a better world to come.

  I have presented this influential argument of Christian history as a prologue to a segue devoted to reminding readers about the most boring of all general topics—one that we would all rather forget, but remember so well, from our primary school years: the inevitable “what I did on my . . .” assigned upon every return to school after an extended absence (with “my summer vacation” and “my Christmas break” as the most common particulars). I shall now dare to regale you with an essay in precisely this dreaded form: “What I did on the millennial day of January 1, 2000.” I can only hope and pray that my prologue, combined with a forthcoming explication, may build an apparatus to overcome the inherent limitations of this general topic.

  The purely factual resolution requires but a phrase: I sang in a performance of Joseph Haydn’s great oratorio The Creation, presented by the Boston Cecilia at Jordan Hall. For my larger topic, let me try to explain (an effort, alas, that will take a bit more space than the factual assertion stated just above) why the conjunction of this particular piece with the millennial day strikes me as so optimally appropriate in a general sense; why the privilege of participation meant so much to me personally (an otherwise private matter, but vouchsafed to essayists ever since Montaigne defined this genre as personal commentary upon generalities more than four centuries ago); and why a topic so off the left-field wall (to combine two common metaphors for the bizarre)—namely a musical composition on a text drawn from the same creation narrative, Genesis 1, now urged by our antiscientific opponents as an alternative to teaching evolution in America’s public schools—might find a truly fitting place in a book of essays about natural history.

  Now, if I may try your patience for just one more round of annoyingly necessary (and prefatory) footnotes, let me dismiss three little niggling issues about dates before we come to Haydn’s magisterial creation of light in C major.

  1. With apologies for shining the factual torch of modern science on the best-laid intellectual schemes of ancestral mice and men, the earth is really about 4.7 billion years old, and life’s known fossil record extends back to about 3.6 billion years—so days and millennia scarcely qualify as terms for a serious discussion of factual matters related to life’s origin and history.

  2. Even within the system that exalted millennial transitions as God’s days, and the end of the sixth transition as the termination of our current universe, the year 2000 really doesn’t qualify for much consideration. Unfortunately, poor Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short), the sixth-century monk who devised the B.C.–A.D. calendrical system, made a little error in setting Christ’s birth. We have no direct testimony about the historical Jesus, and no eyewitness account can set his time of birth. But we do know that Herod died in 4 B.C. (Kings tend to leave better written evidence of their lives than poor kids born in stables.) Now, if Herod and Jesus overlapped—and some of the most rousing biblical stories must be discounted if they did not (the Slaughter of the Innocents, the return of the Magi to their own country, rather than to Herod)—then Jesus, despite the oxymoronic nature of the claim, must have been born in 4 B.C. or earlier. Thus, by the millennial chronology, the current order should actually have ended a few years ago—and it didn’t.

  3. Even if we didn’t know about this inconvenient issue of Jesus’ birth, or just wish to maintain a polite fiction about his appearance right at the B.C.–A.D. junction, we have still erred in concentrating our millennial fears on the 1999–2000 transition. Again, we must recognize Dionysius Exiguus as the culprit, although we cannot cast much blame this time. No zero existed in Western mathematics when Dionysius performed his calendrical duties, so he began A.D. time on January 1, year one—and our calendar never experienced a year zero. Now, if you believe that the blessed millennium of Jesus’ second coming will begin exactly two thousand years after his birth, then you still have another year to wait. For the completion of two thousand years since Jesus’ birth occurs at the 2000–2001 transition, not on the day of fear that has just passed.

  Of course, as most folks know by now, this same issue underlies the great, unresolvable, and basically silly debate about whether the new millennium starts at the beginning of 2000 or 2001. I won’t rehearse this particular well-beaten and very dead horse—although you may all consult my now remaindered book, Questioning the Millennium, if the subject still holds any interest for you. I will only observe—and then promise never to raise the subject again—that this debate expresses nothing new, but has erupted at the end of every century (admittedly with greater intensity this time because this particular turning encompasses a millennium as well, and also occurs in our age of media overkill for everything). I merely append an illustration from a French pamphlet, published in 1699, and titled “Dissertation on the beginning of the next century and the solution to the problem: to know which one of the two years, 1700 or 1701, is the first of the century.” As our Gallic cousins like to say: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).


  Haydn’s text faithfully follows the six-day sequence of creation in Genesis 1—the basis (by the traditional argument outlined above) for regarding the day of our singing as the end of history and the inception of a new order. (Haydn wrote The Creation in German, but based on a translated English text taken mostly from Genesis and from some paraphrases of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Haydn published the text in both languages and apparently intended his piece for bilingual performance.)

  One can easily formulate the obvious and legitimate excuses: “such great music . . .” and “you can’t blame Haydn in 1798 for not anticipating what Darwin would publish in 1859.” But shouldn’t a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, sitting on stage in the chorus, become at least a bit uncomfortable when the angel Raphael, recounting the origin of land animals on the sixth day, explicitly proclaims their sudden creation “in perfect forms, and fully grown”?

  The cover page for a French pamphlet, published in 1699, and proving the antiquity of the argument about whether centuries (and millennia) begin in the ’00 or the ’01 year.

  I don’t deny that participation in some great music raises difficult issues and considerable emotional distress—particularly the strongly anti-Semitic choral passages, representing the Jewish crowd taunting Jesus or demanding his death, in J. S. Bach’s sublime St. Matthew and St. John Passions, perhaps the greatest choral works ever written. (The power and quality of the music, of course, only enhances the discomfort.) I find the “blood guilt” passage from the Matthew Passion particularly disturbing because I know that these very words served, for centuries, as a primary rationale—often with explicitly deadly consequences for my people—for labeling Jews as the killers of Christ. (For my own personal resolution, I decided long ago that whenever we sang this work, I would at least mention the historical context during our first rehearsal of this text—based on the statement of the Jewish crowd, after Pilate finds no guilt in Jesus and literally washes his hands of the affair: sein Blut komme über uns and unsre Kinder—let his blood then be upon us and upon our children).

  I do, by the way, accept the different historical context of Bach’s time. I feel no enmity toward this great man, who may never have known a Jew, and who probably never considered the issue as he simply set the literal text of Matthew. Nor would I ever consider changing the words for any modern performance, lest an understandable deed for a particular purpose establish a precedent and open a floodgate for wholesale revision of any great work to suit the whims of fashion. But I do think that the issue should never be avoided, and should always be explicitly discussed—in pre-concert lectures, program notes, etc.

  But I feel not the slightest tinge of discomfort—and, quite to the contrary, experience nothing but joy—in singing the text of Haydn’s Creation. In explaining these different reactions, I must begin by saying that I don’t use factual accuracy as a major criterion for judging a musical libretto any more than I would look for aesthetic beauty (to my personal sensitivities) or moral rectitude in assessing the validity of a scientific conclusion. (Much of nature’s factuality strikes us as both messy and unpleasant—but no less true or fascinating thereby.) I recoil from the anti-Semitic Passion texts because they express the worst aspects of our common nature, and because these words have wreaked actual death and havoc. Similarly, I embrace Haydn’s Creation text for its moral and aesthetic qualities, while regarding its factual inaccuracies as quite irrelevant and beside the point.

  After all, we read the Bible as a source of moral debate and instruction, not as a treatise in natural history. Moreover, even if Haydn had decided to express the science of his day, he would not have written a libretto about evolution. As for creation in six days, Haydn, as a devout Catholic, surely never conceived the text as a set of statements about twenty-four-hour periods—for no literalist tradition existed within the doctrines of his church, and such interpretations never gained currency after Saint Augustine’s entirely persuasive denials more than one thousand years before. Our currently active scourge of fundamentalism, or biblical literalism, arose later and from different traditions. The basic analogy of God’s days to human millennia, while still ungenerous by the standards of geological time, surely illustrates a Catholic consensus for reading “days” of creation as sequential intervals, not as equal and predetermined tickings of God’s stopwatch.

  All cultures generate creation myths, and such stories play a part in the drama of human life far different from the role that we grant to the fascination and utility of factual discoveries made by science. With this perspective, I can summarize my case for Haydn’s text in a paragraph: The Book of Genesis presents two entirely different creation myths, told in chapters 1 and 2.1 find two aspects of the second myth morally troubling, whereas (with one exception) I rejoice in the meanings and implications of the first story. Interestingly, Haydn’s text uses only the first story, and explicitly deletes the one theme (human hegemony over the rest of God’s creation) that disturbs me (and has troubled so much of human history as well). I do not think that these textual decisions were accidental, and I therefore regard Haydn’s Creation as an affirmation of all the themes that a wise and maximally useful creation myth should stress—joy, generosity, optimism—while not forgetting the dark side and our resulting capacity to make a horrid mess out of such promise.

  The second creation myth of Genesis 2—the text that Haydn did not set—emphasizes two themes that I find less than inspiring: God’s order (by fiat and not by explanation) that we not seek certain kinds of knowledge, and an anatomical rationale for the subjugation of women. We tend to forget the profound differences between the two stories of Genesis, and we usually amalgamate parts of this second tale with out primary memory of the first story (see essay 7 for a very different context, but longer analysis, of these two distinct creation myths). In Genesis 2, God creates Adam first, and then builds the Garden of Eden. To assuage Adam’s loneliness, he then creates the animals and permits Adam to assign their names. But Adam is still lonely, so God creates Eve from his rib. (Genesis 1, Haydn’s text, says nothing about forbidden fruits, and describes the simultaneous creation of man and woman: “So God created man in his own image . . . male and female created he them.”)

  Creation of Adam and Eve, Flemish school, seventeenth century.

  The theme of forbidden access to knowledge occurs only in Genesis 2. (I recognize, of course, that some exegetes can and have suggested a benign meaning for these passages in terms of moral restraint upon our darker capacities. But most people, throughout Western history, have read these words as a divine indiction against questioning certain forms of authority and seeking certain forms of knowledge—injunctions that cannot be congenial to any scientist.) “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17).

  Similarly, no statement in Genesis 1 speaks about inequality between the sexes, but Adam uses Eve’s status as both subsequent and partial to hint at such a claim in Genesis 2: “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).

  Haydn’s text divides the creation myth of Genesis 1 into three sensible and dramatic units. We usually view the six-day sequence as a story of successive additions, but I think that such a reading seriously mistakes the form of this particular myth (see essay 20 for a detailed development of this argument). Creation myths, based on limits of our mental powers, and also on the structural possibilities of material objects, can only “go” in a few basic ways—and Genesis 1 invokes the primary theme of successive differentiation from initial chaos, not sequential addition. The universe begins in undefined confusion (“without form and void”). God then constructs a series of separations and divisions to mark the first four days. On day one, he divides light from darkness. Haydn’s ama
zing overture violates many contemporary musical traditions of tonality and structure in order to depict this initial chaos. He then, at the end of the first chorus, describes the creation of light with a device both amazingly simple and (to this day) startlingly evocative: a series of crashing chords in bright and utterly unsophisticated C major. (A virtual cliché among statements in the history of classical music designates this passage—but so truly—as the most stunningly effective C-major chords ever written.)

  On day two, God divides the waters of earth and sky; on day three, he separates the earth into water and land (and also allows the land to bring forth plants). On day four, he returns to the heavens to concentrate the diffuse light into two great sources, the sun and the moon (“he made the stars also” as an afterthought). Soloists describe the work of each day, and each sequence finishes with a wonderful chorus. Part 1 therefore ends with Haydn’s most famous ensemble: “The heavens are telling the glory of God”—the heavens, that is, because no animals have yet been formed!