The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1863

What does it matter to you the age of patriarchs in general and that of Methuselah in particular? Nature, know this well, has never been contradictory or shown irregularities and even if the human machine has varied any time it has never repelled the material destruction: death.

As I have already told you the Bible is a magnificent oriental poem in which human passions are divinized like the passions idealized by the Greek like the great colonies of Asia Minor.

There is no need to match concision with emphasis, clarity with diffusion, the coldness of reason and modern logic with the oriental exaltation. The cherubims of the Bible had six wings as you know: almost monsters! The God of the Jewish would bathe in blood; would you like your angels to be the same as those and your sovereignly good and just God to be that one same God?

Hence you must not ally your poetic modern analysis with the lying poetry of the antique Jews or Pagans. The age of the patriarchs is a moral figure and not a reality. The authority, the memory of those great names, of those true shepherds of peoples, enriched by the mystery and legends that radiated around them, existed among those superstitious and nomad worshipers of memories. It is likely that Methuselah had lived for a long time in the hearts of his descendants.

Notice that in the oriental poetry every moral idea is incorporated, incarnate, covered in a brilliant, radiant, splendid form, contrary to modern poetry that discarnate that breaks the shell allowing the idea to rise to heavens. Modern poetry is not only expressed by the color and shine of the image but also by the firm and correct drawing of logic, in a word, by the idea. How would you like to join these two great and contrary principles? When you read the Bible by the rays of the orient, among the golden images, in the endless and diffuse horizons of the deserts, of the steppes, let electricity flow, trespassing the abysses and darkness’s, using your reason to always judge the difference in time, forms and understandings.
Lamennais