Aurelius awoke from his deep slumber. He threw back his mantellum, which in colder weather doubled up as his cloak, and sheepishly raised himself to life. After a few quick breathes to get the life blood flowing through him, he stretched and got up on his feet and soon found himself peering out of his fenestram on the scene outside.
It was a fine new spring day. The sun was already shinning down, and the world was blossoming into life. Well, the small cross section of it that was visible to Aurelius in the atrium of his domum. There were various flowers dotted around, gleaning some sunlight through an opening in the roof. Aurelius quickly put his toga and sandals on, as he was eager to get out of his cubiculum and to start enjoying the beauty of the new day. He was in such a hurry though that he stubbed his little toe (one of the hazards of so much sandal wearing!) on the postis of his doorway as he was exiting.
Aside from the brief spurt of pain, it caused him to look down. Part of the floor mosaic which ran throughout the domum came into sight. The mosaic depicted various scenes from the myths of the Roman Gods. The house was inherited and that was his ancestors’ sort of thing.
The mosaic in Aurelius’ cubiculum seemed to show a divine being making a chaotic mess into an orderly scene of sun, stars, moon and the terra on which all mankind is stationed. This was the Roman’s way of explaining where everything came from. Come to think of it, this was each cultures’, or at least the one’s Aurelius knew of, way of explaining things, except that different cultures had different takes on the God’s. Aurelius wondered if people from different places ever reflected on the contradictions that existed. Surely, not everyone could be right.
Take for example, the Greeks. In their version of creation, Gaia appears out of the chaos, produces Uranus and then has relations with him to produce other Gods and the like. In the Roman version, these Greek characters have been given different names, for example Gaia is now Terra Mater, but otherwise many of the details are the same (except for the details which don’t even agree amongst themselves – Terra Mater mated with Caelus or Jupiter or whom, by Jove!).
The Egyptians however viewed Ra, the sun God, to be the creator of all things, although Aurelius had heard from some that Ra was himself born out of an egg. That’s not to mention the various other versions that he had heard from different cultures near and far.
Aurelius’ thought processes had now been stimulated, so he found a comfy cathedra, reclined back and allowed himself the luxury of a few moments of reflection at the beginning of this beautiful day. The idea occurred to him that with regard to the creation of the world there could in essence be three perspectives.
Firstly, that everything was created by some sort of higher being. This was common with every culture having their own version. As he had already noted, there were conflicts between these versions, which means that they couldn’t all be right. Either they were all wrong or one was right and the others wrong. Some tried to reconcile things by saying that there were different Gods reigning in different places, but Aurelius was sceptical. If Egypt’s Ra had created things in one way, that didn’t explain how Rome’s God’s could have created in another. Either we were all Zeus’ offspring, or we weren’t!
Some more forward thinkers even tried to say that it didn’t matter what you believed as there were elements of the truth in every religion and they all went towards the same direction. Well, Aurelius didn’t quite see that
The second option was that things had always been the way they are. Aurelius usually liked the avoid the question approach to things, although this was one way of avoiding things that didn’t sit well with him. Just the very nature of things spoke to him of growth, change and progress. If a baby remained a baby it would be a tragedy contrary to the usual course of things. Humans were born to develop into adults, live out their lives and then pass out of this world. That was the way it was throughout nature. So, how could it be that the creation had simply always existed when its very nature was change? This wasn’t logical as his Greek friends would say!
Thirdly, there was the new-fangled idea of self-creation. Some modern thinkers had come up with the idea that the world had created itself! Talking about logic, this idea sounded very strange to Aurelius’ ears. When walking around you sometimes made unusual discoveries. One time, Aurelius had even found a broken-up sun dial on the floor in some long grass on the outskirts of town. His first thought was that the sun dial had been made by someone for the purpose of telling the time, but at some point, it had been disregarded by its own and was now lying about in disuse. The thought had never occurred to him that some how the forces of nature had combined to bring together in a random process the required materials and then form them into something that happened to be a sundial. He would be interested to know what his Greek friends thought of that!
No, it seemed to Aurelius that everything had a purpose and that purpose must have come from somewhere. There was a new religion about town, although maybe religion wasn’t the right word as it wasn’t so much about certain traditions and ways of thinking as about believing in a certain God, Credo was more the right way of looking at it. In any case, they took their perspective in creation from the Old Testament, the holy book of the Jewish people, and here the very first verse read:
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’
So, no philosophical arguments trying to justify how things came into being or to confirm the deity or deities responsible. Rather a simple affirmation that God (i.e. the God that would then be presented throughout the rest of the book) had created all things starting from the heavens and he earth. The heavens, not to mention Terra (as Aurelius liked to call it), had then been further developed as this God spoke different things into being: light, sea, land, vegetation, creatures, even humans!
There seemed to Aurelius no logical reason to reject this. It was like a summary of what the different religions believed anyway, although each religion gave things their own spin. He wasn’t sure what his forefathers would think about the absence of Jupiter in all this for example, but why go for a complicated explanation when he had something simple and straightforward written down? His friend Sandus was pretty convinced in any case and he felt inclined to feel the same.
