Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (review)

Why were medieval maps so inaccurate and fanciful, even on well-traveled routes where sailors, traders, or pilgrims knew better? Perhaps early world maps are accurate and insightful descriptions of something, but of what?

This is the question Alessandro Scafi so engagingly addresses in his erudite, thorough, and beautiful volume, specifically addressing the place of the Garden of Eden, the biblical paradise, on mappae mundi. More than a thousand of these maps survive and their descendants in the modern era are legion. His answer: these mappae mundi are conceptual representations, neither serving the same purpose as today's maps nor ever envisioned so. Their evolution depicts the theological centrality and rational evolution of the concept of perfected Paradise, the beginning and end of time, and man's journey through this cosmography.

Scafi begins with the two interpretations of Eden in early Christian theology: the allegorical and the literal. In the Platonic view of Eden set out by the Judeo-Hellenic philosopher Philo, the garden was the rational human soul, its trees representing virtues and wisdom. The four rivers of Eden represented Prudence, Courage, Self-Mastery, and Justice. Adam was the divine archetype, and the story of the Fall was one of moral struggle to return to divine perfection. Origen in Alexandria continued in this allegorical tradition: Eve, the heart, was married to Adam, the spirit, and as the heart succumbs to corporeal pleasures, the spirit is drawn away from divine perfection. The Garden of Eden was the perfected Church and the Tree of Life an allusion to Christ.

At the same time,however, John Chrysostom of Constantinople argued that Eden was a literal, physical place, and the story of the Fall happened in literal history. Augustine not only united these two trends but also gave Eden the theological and metaphorical power that made it a focus of attention for centuries:" The geography of Eden, initially a marginal aspect of Augustine's version of history, became an issue that snowballed through the Middle Ages and bequeathed to the modern period a conundrum which . . . has continued to haunt Western thought to the present day" (p. 47). The Paradise of medieval maps thus differed critically from depictions of other fantastical lands.

Paradise was both the beginning of time (the Eden of Genesis) and the end of time (the Heavenly City of Revelation). For this reason, Eden is depicted in many maps not as a green garden but as a walled city. A world map that did not include the Edenic Paradise left out not only central truths of salvation but also of the world as it was.

That is the big picture. The book's cornucopia of charms, however, lie in the details. Why did medieval and Renaissance thinkers locate the Garden of Eden in India,Ceylon, China, Armenia, Syria, Persia, Arabia, Africa, Palestine, the Alps, the Caspian, the South Pole, America, underground, or on the moon? Each had its implications for theology and history, and each had its geographical and theological justifications. What happened to the cherubim and the flaming sword set to guard Paradise? Were the fragrant spice branches found floating down the Nile really broken from trees in Eden? Did Alexander the Great and Ulysses succeed in their attempts to sail to Paradise? Why did Dante put Paradise on a mountain peak in the southern hemisphere? If north-oriented maps and east-oriented maps coexisted for centuries, why did the north-oriented maps eventually become standard, and what were the theological implications of this shift?

By the fourteenth century, the "honeymoon" of philosophy and theology had ended, and by 1500 it was already apparent to scholars, theologians, and geographers that no credible earthly location for the Edenic Paradise had been found. The allegorical reading revived with the ascendance of neo-Platonism, but literalists too found new explanations. Numerous Renaissance humanists now argued that Eden had been the whole earth, which had been transformed in...