From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages by Alistair Minnis (review)

What was life like in the Garden of Eden? And what would it have been like if man had not fallen and sin had not marred the world? Great thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Wyclif, and Calvin were profoundly intellectually engaged with these questions, in part because they wished to understand and interpret scripture and in part because their interpretations had theological and sociological implications in their own cultures. Medieval and Renaissance poets, like Dante, the Pearl-poet, and Milton were similarly engaged, though the form of their rhetoric differs. In From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages, Alistair Minnis explores a variety of Latin and vernacular texts—as well as manuscript illustrations and other medieval works of art—that concern Eden, the earthly paradise first described in Genesis.

Minnis examines several issues that preoccupied medieval writers when they imagined what life was like before the Fall. He analyzes each issue in one of three major categories: the body in Eden, power in paradise, and death and the paradise beyond. In his study, the “paradise beyond” is equated with the patria or heavenly country—hence the connection, indicated in the title, between Eden and eternity.

In the first chapter on the body in Eden, Minnis surveys medieval scholarly, poetic, and artistic views of the bodies of Adam and Eve, their basic bodily functions (e.g., eating and voiding), the nature of their sexuality and experience of pleasure, the operation of their five senses, the possibilities of conception and children before their fall, the extent of their knowledge, the creation of their souls, and their place, in Eden, which was the first habitat for humanity. Some medieval speculations about these matters, Minnis notes, seem to elevate curiosity and trivialize deeper theological issues. Others, however, bring theological issues to the forefront. As Minnis argues in his coda, “Between Paradises,” in response to Caroline Walker Bynum’s assertions about the medieval understanding of “a sense of self as a psychosomatic unity” in which “physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity—and therefore finally to whatever one means by salvation” (228):

For a grand narrative which postulates the ultimate victory of the body as a crucial constituent of selfhood, I would substitute one of incessant battle for the soul of Christianity—or, more accurately, for the dignity of the soul incarnate within the Christian ideology of salvation.

(228–229)

This conflict played out in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons against Gnosticism, of Augustine on Manichaeism, and of late-medieval scholastics on the via negativa and via positiva as well as on the body and the soul. In other words, as both Bynum and Minnis would agree (despite their differences), understanding the physicality of the body was not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity, for it had major implications for the understanding of soteriology.

In the second chapter on power in paradise, Minnis considers medieval views of dominion in Eden before the fall. In addition to considering man’s dominion over the animals, this chapter pays particular attention to the way that writers’ interpretations of Genesis functioned as a rhetorical means of justifying their theological positions (and the resulting sociological implications) on economics, politics, and ownership. The section on economics, narrowly understood as household management in the Middle Ages (“within the tripartite division of practical philosophy, also comprising ethics and politics, which the schoolmen inherited from Aristotle” [95]), examines Eve’s role, the partnership of Adam and Eve, and the friendship in their marriage. The section on politics reviews medieval justifications of hierarchical relationships over equality. Even in a state of innocence, according to Aquinas, one man would have dominion over another, but the exercise of such power would not be as a master’s over a slave, but would rather be for the common good (116). The section on ownership is particularly fascinating as it deals with the debate over whether Adam...