History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. - book reviews

Christian Century, April 10, 1996 by E. Glenn Hinson

By Jean Delunwau. Continuum, 2 76 pp., $29.50.

DREAMS OF what might have been or what might be have often tickled the imagination, but historians usually devote themselves to more tangible topics. It is gratifying, therefore, to discover that an historian of jean Delumeau's abilities has launched a three-volume study of the persistent quest for hope.

Volume one examines our nostalgia for all earthly paradise. Volume two mill chart millennial expectations and volume three will study "the hope of perfect and unfailing joy in the divine light of the Christian ether world."

Cruising deftly among sources many would not think of consulting (maps, paintings, flower gardens), Delumeau, a professor in the College de France, demonstrates the continuing power of the Garden of Eden story up to the 19th century, when the discovery of fossils and the framing of an evolutionary hypothesis pushed it aside. Images of Eden never existed in unalloyed form but were mixed with Greco-Roman myths of a golden age and the Happy Isles and interpreted in myriad ways. For a long time jews and Christians believed that paradise existed literally, as a place of waiting, perhaps on earth or in heaven or even floating in space. Many early Christians thought Jesus had reopened paradise when he promised the thief crucified with him that they soon would be there together.

The idea of paradise as an intermediate state gave way during the Middle Ages to the conviction that the Garden of Eden had not vanished from the earth, inspiring all sorts of speculations and eventually explorations to find it. The best medieval minds ranged far and while in their guesses as to its location. Cartographers made sure they inserted the Garden somewhere on their maps--whether in the East or in Africa or, as Columbus thought, along the Equator.

Though unsuccessful in locating the Garden, dreamers were still convinced that they could find dreamlands which, by their proximity to that paradise, took on some of its attractions and privileges. Dreamland legends inspired search after search for the Kingdom of Prester John in Asia, Africa and the Americas from the 12th to the 17th centuries and sent explorers around the globe to chart the way to the Happy Isles. Americans will be pleased to know that Columbus identified the New Indies with these Isles.

In the 16th and 17th centuries Europeans realized the impossibility of returning to the golden age or the earthly paradise, but people did not surrender the dream. They created gardens, both closed and open, that approximated their dream. Protestants and Catholics kept alive the subject of paradise in theological treatises, poetry and art. They expended a lot of energy pondering not only location but also fine points of creation chronology; the advantages, privileges and gifts Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden; the powers and knowledge of our first ancestors; and marriage and society in paradise.

Delumeau speaks of the nostalgia for paradise in a way that makes one feel Westerners may have lost something important when they gave up the quest for Eden. This superb study may leave one wondering if we can't revive the search.

Reviewed by E. Glenn Hinson, professor of spirituality and John Loftis Professor of Church History at Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.