William of Auvergne on the Dangers of Paradise: Biblical Exegesis Between Natural Philosophy and Anti-Islamic Polemic

The Earthly Paradise was a favorite topic of medieval theologians, philosophers, poets, and artists.¹ Drawn as much from the biblical para-disus voluptatis (Gen. 2:8–14) and hortus conclusus (Song of Sol. 4:12) as from Greek and Roman accounts of a locus amoenus, the general outlines of paradise were well established by the patristic period: it is a garden or garden-like natural place, on Earth but set aside by God, perfect in every attribute, wholly uncorrupted, temperate in its climate, gently watered by rivers and fountains, ever fertile in its soil, rich in fruits and beasts of every kind; its inhabitants do not experience exertion, passion, illness, pain, or shame; in short, it is a place free of the consequences of sin.² These attributes were frequently applied to both the Garden of Eden enjoyed by the first parents and the Heaven enjoyed by the blessed after death, so “paradise” could be understood in both terrestrial and celestial forms, overlapping spiritually and materially.³

Paradise, defined in terms of its physical delights, became part of what Natalia Lozovsky calls “the background context — a certain set of associations ready in the mind of the medieval audience — on which an author could safely rely.”⁴ Equally important to the medieval “background context” are three assumptions about the Earthly Paradise, the former two usually explicit and the last usually implicit: 1) we can never go back to this paradise because of sin, but 2) Enoch and Elijah were taken there bodily before death,⁵ and 3) if we could return there like those lucky two, it would be to experience the greatest of delights, both physical and spiritual. These assumptions lie behind the desire to reach, or at least describe, such delights in tales of the voyages of St. Brendan, Alexander the Great, the sons of Adam in the Gospel of Nicodemus, or Dante to the peak of the purgatorial mountain.⁶ These tales share a fourth assumption underlying the previous three: the paradise of Eden (whether east or west, in a river valley or near the circle of the moon) continues to exist and its very delightfulness was established by, and is continually approved by, God.

A rare exception to this set of assumptions is found in the writings of William of Auvergne (ca. 1180–1249), master of theology in the schools of Paris by 1223 and bishop of that city from 1228 to 1249. According to William, paradise is no longer a habitation suitable for man in his fallen state because the delights it offers are “very harmful [valde noxiae] to human souls.” In William’s opinion, the most delightful and well-known attributes of paradise — pleasant weather, constant leisure, spices, and bountiful feasts — would not enlighten but rather inebriate our souls, diverting them from truth and rectitude and alienating them from God. These drunken souls would forget their creator and willingly enter into a life of slavery to every form of corruption.⁷

Such a description of paradise would have come as a shock to any medieval Christian who, however much he or she understood that access to Eden was irretrievably lost, believed that Eden still existed, producing the greatest of earthly delights, able to be approached if not entered as part of mundane and sacred geographies attesting to God’s past and future grace. Where else do Enoch and Elijah, taken up bodily by the Lord before their deaths, now reside? And did not almost every medieval map place paradise at the very edge of the world, yet still plausibly within reach?⁸ William, of course, does not deny the existence of the Earthly Paradise, nor the delights briefly enjoyed by the first parents before the Fall, but he takes pains throughout his theological-philosophical treatise De universo, and intermittently in other works, to stress the logical and moral impossibility of a physical paradise with physical delights, especially in the form taught by the heretic Muhammad, as a reward for postlapsarian mankind.

Why would William depict the Earthly Paradise as...