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

Yet another book from Alastair the Indefatigable, and a fascinating one. Like all of Minnis’s work, it is impressively learned and couched in fluent and charming prose. Its central concerns are the nature and capacities of prelapsarian man and the nature of his lordship in Eden; the happy posthumous experience of the disembodied souls of the righteous; and the final, perfect state in which soul and resurrected body, both glorified, will attain the vision of the divine essence.

The book contains a vast amount of detailed information, and at times the argument becomes overburdened with examples and analysis. It requires slow and careful reading, but the argument is clearly made, the information provided is fascinating, and the effort is worthwhile. To read the book through, moreover, is to receive not only a thorough review of medieval ideas about Paradise but an excellent introduction to medieval scholasticism. Much of the argument begins from the Sentences of Peter Lombard, whose presentation of Christian doctrine is in turn grounded in the thought of Augustine. Minnis examines the responses of later theologians to the Lombard’s formulations, drawing most often on the commentaries of Aquinas and Bonaventure on the Sentences, but borrowing freely from other scholastics, notably Albert, Robert Grosseteste, and John Wyclif. His citations are consistently to the point, and though the ideas he discusses are often highly complex, his analyses are lucid and precise. In addition to his remarkable learning, Minnis is a fine literary critic, and I know no other medievalist capable of presenting work so learned with his deftness and subtlety. He frequently draws on poetry and vernacular theology for apt summations of doctrinal points, and shows how Dante and the poet of the Middle English Pearl make their own original contributions to the discussion.

A selection of paintings and manuscript illuminations shows the imagination of the artist augmenting information provided by the Bible. Close examination of the Garden of Earthly Delights of Hieronymus Bosch shows him filling the “gap between what might have happened and what actually happened . . . how life in Paradise might have been without the Original Sin” (pp. 22–23). Hans Memling’s Last Judgment Triptych imagines the end of time and the Archangel Michael weighing resurrected humans as their bodies emerge from the earth (pp. 168–69). Here, too, Minnis’s choice of exemplary material is excellent, and his use of it is consistently illuminating.

One of the fascinations of the book is that most of the ideas with which Minnis engages are wholly speculative. We cannot know how long Adam and Eve lived in Eden; how Adam exercised dominion over the flora and fauna of the garden; whether the couple had carnal relations, and if so, whether they experienced physical pleasure; whether they would have conceived children if the Fall had not occurred; whether their moderate vegetarian diet made defecation necessary (Aquinas accepts this necessity but says it would have occurred nulla indecentia); or whether the beasts of the field preyed on other beasts in Eden, which might have given our first parents a tentative understanding of the death against which God had warned.

On all of these questions there were conflicting views. Augustine, followed by Lombard, had emphasized Adam’s rationality, to the point of denying that in carnal union with Eve he would have experienced the ardor libidinis; “having an erection,” Minnis observes, “would have been no different from bringing the hand to the mouth” (p. 42). Against this view, Aquinas and others asserted the Aristotelian view that knowledge originates in the senses, and that in his unfallen state Adam’s senses were surely keener than ours. He would have known physical pleasure of all kinds, fully experiencing touch and taste as well as the visual delights offered by the garden. Similarly, though Adam had received certain basic knowledge by...