Opplyst liv
On Paradise
This lecture was given at an Ecumenical Conference at Pannonhalma on 26 September 2025. The theme of the conference, reminiscent of the one set for August’s Rimini Meeting, was a verse from Isaiah, ‘Her wasteland he shall make like the garden of the Lord’. Speakers were invited to reflect on the topos of the garden from different angles. My purpose was to make sense of it in monastic literature. So I called my talk
Like a Pleasure-Garden on a River: The Monastic Pursuit of Paradise Lost
Newcomers to the Biblical canon, set on reading Scripture from A to Z, starting from the outset, are often puzzled by the juxtaposition of two creation narratives. After the solemn account of Genesis 1, paced by the cadence, ‘God said … and it was so’, comes a retelling in a different, more lively idiom, the same music transposed into a different key, with variations.
For centuries, indeed for millennia, exegetes have rhapsodised on this two-part development; but I think we may say that it has only come to pose a problem in recent times, as women and men have got used to assuming that there is but a single version of any truth. Forfeiting a previously innate ability to hear, and enjoy, polyphony, we listen out instead, now, for a single, simple tune, ideally to be hammered out by the thump of a strong, unchangeable bass rhythm.
How are the two creation stories complementary? We might consider for example the different ways in which they use perspective.
The first account gives an expanding view. It proceeds from the slender gap of light that first differentiates all-encompassing darkness through a series of divisions towards an enchanting view of the differentiated whole, which the Septuagint calls the kosmos of created things (Gen 2.1). When God, the supreme contemplative, beheld this universe, he was glad.
The second account proposes an inversion of perspective. It sets out from an awareness of ‘the earth and the heavens’ in fullness, then narrows in on a given place, a given presence.
Used as we are to gadgets, we might think of a photographer adjusting his lens: first outward, to catch totality in a breathtaking perspective which exceeds that of a bird’s eye; then inward, focusing on narrower sections until it rests on a single leaf of a single plant, then reveals a small insect moving up and down it. The first account culminates in a view of galaxies. The second lets our gaze rest in a garden.
The emergence of the Gan Eden (or Paradise, a Persian word meaning ‘pleasure-garden’) within creation makes the perfection of God’s work perceptible. We cannot endure an awareness of the whole all the time. Even a luminous eye, here below, sees in a glass, darkly, constrained by limitations of time and space. Only in eternity shall we see as we are seen, and as seers at last apprehend connections that presently, most of the time, elude us.
The second creation narrative is not just another story; it is a clarifying sequel to the first. The first posits man as the crown of creation; the second lets us take creation in from his point of view. It is anthropocentric. The order of created things, on this account, is incomplete without man. Until Adam emerges, the cosmos waits. Vegetation remains in a potential state, curiously patient (cf. Gen 2.5-7):
no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
The mist arising from the bowels of the earth was sufficient to prevent decay but insufficient for growth. There was no rain, remarks Rashi, the brilliant rabbinic scholar of Troyes, a contemporary of the founders of Cîteaux, because there was ‘no one yet who could recognise the utility of rain’. It is an engaging definition of the human being: one apt to grasp the usefulness of rain.
Rashi, thinking like a potter, adds that the mist providentially prepared, too, the clay out of which man was formed. His point is that for nature’s promise to be realised, for earth, that is, to become a garden, man is required, summoned to arise out of the dust as God’s steward and co-worker.
Centuries of Christian self-scrutiny have accustomed us to thinking of work as an upshot of the fall, a species of punishment. It is true that God, confronting Adam, drawn from the moist adamah, with his betrayal says: ‘cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life […]. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ (Gen 3.17-19). It was not work as such, though, that pertained to the order of sanction, merely its novel circumstances east of Eden. Once man passes beyond the cherubim’s flaming sword, the one that makes of Eden a sequestered enclosure, he will find that nature is no longer an ally. It offers itself to him no more. Henceforth he must conquer it, locked in antagonism marked by toil.
In the beginning, when the garden was still home, work was a delight: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it’, that he might eat of it freely and pleasantly (Gen 2.15f., 9). Man was not made to just loaf about. The Avot of Rabbi Natan, a work hard to date, but certainly pre-medieval, remarks: ‘See what a great thing is work! The first man was not to taste of anything until he had done some work. Only after God told him to cultivate and keep the garden, did he give him permission to eat of its fruits’.
It is good to reflect on this. We are helped to grasp how God intended human life to unfold in an unwounded world. We may also be afforded a glimpse of the form which beatitude will take for those who, earthly labours done, are admitted to Paradise in the Dantean sense, as an eternity, not of passive indolence, but of engagement in a providential purpose. Thérèse of Lisieux intuited this reality when she said: ‘Je passerai mon ciel à faire du bien’ — ‘I’ll spend heaven doing good’. The primacy of being does not obliterate action; it hallows it.
Eden in Biblical language is not coterminous with original creation. It is a pocket within it, a gated community in which man, made in God’s image to be like him (Gen 1.27), might practise happiness. The book of Genesis presents Eden as a privileged space where the sweetness and goodness of creation are astoundingly explicit, issuing forth as from a fountain, thence to trickle into other places. Even before we face the prospect of an inhospitable elsewhere, a wilderness of thorns and thistles beyond the garden wall (Gen 3.18), this image lets us conceptualise the expanding nature of Edenic bliss. We intuit that the garden, an enclosure of communion, is not an end in itself, but a prototype of how reality might function, providentially enabled to saturate the face of the earth.
For ‘a river went out of Eden to water the garden; from thence it was parted, and became four heads’. The conduits bore resonant names: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Gen 2.10-14). The latter two define Biblical history. They enabled the coining of the term Mesopotamia, ‘the land between rivers’, where the destiny and task of God’s chosen people were forged and repeatedly refined. Pishon and Gihon are less easily placed on a map — though plenty of people have tried. What the Biblical author conveys is this: the ordered, beautiful perfection of existence we read of in Genesis 2 is other than man’s historical experience for reasons explained in the aetiology of sin; but it is not intrinsically foreign to such experience. No, the point of Eden is to manifest both a point of origin and a desirable finality, a call that shows women and men what their life might, could, should be like.
Genesis points to Eden’s intelligibility, the articulation of which is crucial to Adam’s first call. Once God’s work is done, once creation is ready in its wonderful diversity, its parts are brought before man for naming. Scripture describes how ‘every animal of the field and every bird of the air’ is brought ‘to man to see what he would call them’ (Gen 2.19). To name the birds and beasts is already a formidable task. Adam did not restrict himself, though, to zoology. He set about naming ‘every living creature’, including, in time, the trees of the forest that shout for joy and the stars that cry out, ‘Here we are!’ (Gen 2.20, Ps 96.12). The concern to classify and name phenomena, a gift for patient observation and taxonomy, is deeply human.
Adam’s labour of naming reaches beyond a dynamic of dominion; it speaks of an urge to subsist in relation, not to be a stranger among other creatures. Endowed with language, man is commissioned to articulate the nature of other presences made by God, to speak up for them and in their name, summoning them to praise their Maker: ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!’ (Ps 148.7-8).
Was Eden intended to be eternal? Does it represent an image of beatitude as such? The Fathers differ in their understanding. An emerging consensus, however, thought not. Eden provides a paradigm of terrestrial bliss. It shows what harmony and joy life on earth can bring. Man’s trajectory is envisaged as a passage through the garden, at the bottom of which he would find, in his state of bright prelapsarian innocence, something like an open door in the wall that would let him slip into eternity without suffering the inconvenience of death. Paradise, in this view, is heaven’s forecourt; a novitiate set up to ready creatures of dust for celestial life.
Only later, by symbolic extension, did the word ‘paradise’ come actually to spell ‘heaven’. It makes sense that it should: it represented a known environment in which man might live in harmony with God and fellow creatures, free and unafraid.
Sin changed the intended pattern of seamlessness. Remembrance of the garden, prompted by man’s aptitude for it (which no fall could obliterate), still let a resonance of Eden penetrate man’s aspirations as Scripture presents them. It flowed into the sensibility of the Biblical mind in its furthest reaches, quite the way paradisal waters, in the beginning, trickled out to the ends of the earth.
Psalm 103, the great hymn of evening praise in the Byzantine liturgy, picks up the theme of the archaic fountain when it speaks of blessed waters gushing forth in the valleys, flowing between the hills, quenching the thirst of wild asses, enabling man to draw food from the earth, that his face might shine with oil, his heart be strengthened by bread and gladdened with wine. This splendid text exhorts us to see what harmony creation can display and how we can live in it harmoniously. The garden is a hermeneutic key that unlocks the secret of the natural world as we know it. Creation is not merely a quarry of resources and comforts to be cynically mined. It is to be tended and kept with respect for its latent loveliness.
The promise of the Land, stirring Israelite hearts in exile, was presented as the promise of a garden. The grapes, figs, and pomegranates brought from Canaan by the spies Moses sent heartened the nation encamped in the wilderness of Paran (Nb 12.16-13.25). The fruits displayed a connatural link between the goal they had set out to reach and the setting for which man had first been created: both stood for bounty and sharable abundance. The thought of the land was, still is, caught up with prospects of everyone sitting ‘under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid’ (Micah 4.4).
Once the land had been reached and the temple was built in it, Israel’s cult, too, was envisaged in horticultural terms. ‘The righteous’, says a Psalm, shall ‘flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bring forth fruit in old age, ever full of sap and green’ (Ps 91.12-14). The notion of the faithful Israelite as a verdant, fruitful tree sprung from nurturing soil contrasts with that of the dry ‘chaff’ which is all ‘the wicked’ amount to, destined to be driven away by the cleansing wind (Ps 1.4).
The garden motif flows into the register of Messianic hope. Isaiah’s end-time vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together harks back to the account of Eden (Isa 11.6). Christ draws on this register in his farming parables, in his image of the vine, and not least in his self-identification as the ‘good’, or ‘beautiful’, shepherd, ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, the prototype of human nature restored to immaculateness. Christ the shepherd knows his sheep, quite as Adam in paradise knew the totality of creatures; he would teach us to know likewise. The symbolic bridge between a primal, integral world and a world restored is accomplished when Jesus on the cross, having sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, says to the thief: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Lk 23.43).
At that point, the gatekeeping cherubim lay down their fiery swords. The gate shut on Adam is reopened. Christ’s faithful are invited in while grace pours out in a new dispensation of grace, whose consequence is glimpsed in the eschatological vision of St John’s Apocalypse. Eden is mystically reconciled, there, with Jerusalem.
The garden finds fulfilment as a city. The city reveals its purpose as a garden, its twelve gates open to channel the overflow of ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, [that flows] from the throne of God and of the Lamb’, pouring gladness forth, lined by ‘the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Ap 22.1-2).
This story in its entirety, the full sweep of Biblical history, is presupposed in the remark Athanasius makes in his Life of Antony, a seminal text in Christian and monastic history, when he records what awaited him as, travelling south from his see of Alexandria, freely or by force in one of his multiple exiles, he entered the Egyptian wilderness settled by Antony’s disciples. He saw, as he put it,
in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, […], rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other […]. [On seeing it, one was led to exclaim:] Lovely are your dwellings, Jacob, and your tents, Israel; like shady groves and like a paradise beside a river, and like tents that the Lord has staked.
On these terms the Atonine movement made ‘of the desert a city’, a heavenward city imaging the Gan Eden in a world still fallen but now illumined by light pouring forth from Christ’s glorious Cross and from his joy-bearing resurrection.
This theme is intrinsic to monastic self-consciousness from Antony on. Monks and nuns go out into the wilderness to place themselves into God’s hands, there to be healed, restored, refashioned, and made whole in order, in tempore opportuno, to appear, the way Antony did, as ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος, human beings once again recognisably God’s, reflecting their Maker’s beauty, goodness, and light, and so irresistibly attractive, bearers of hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Not for nothing is a monastery traditionally built around a cloister garth with a fountain. Eden is the norm a monastic community is held to in its endeavour of conversion, as the brethren, each individually and all together, renounce themselves, turn their back on the region of unlikeness, and return to the Father’s house and garden. The monastery, says St Benedict, is to be so organised that all necessaries are found within its gates, giving the monks no need to leave. There is in this precept a consideration of observance. More essentially, there is a promise. Whoever becomes part of a Christian community worthy of its name will not want to leave. He or she will have all that is needed for their thriving and for hospitable sharing. And ‘guests are never missing in the monastery’, says St Benedict. They are always welcome in, to be greeted by shouts of Deo gratias and to be treated with all kindness, as if they were Christ himself. Thereby paradise is concretised from conjecture. Rivulets from the monastery’s enclosure fountain pour forth into the country round about in just the ways Athanasius indicated: through the impact of the liturgy, almsgiving, hospitality, and the monks’ commitment unto death to a life of fraternal communion.
The monastic fascination with gardens, found in authors from St Jerome to St Bernard and into modernity, materially evident in parks that touch visitors on account of their sweetness, is no mere corporate eccentricity. It is the exteriorisation of an inward task. It reminds us, if we stay clear-sighted, that we are called, amid encroaching, arid wastelands, to create Edenic oases of beauty, order, discretion, fraternity, charity, and peace — that Benedictine hallmark transmitting, not just a feeling of tranquility, but the presence in a given place of him ‘who is our peace’ while being, without any contradiction, ‘always at work’ (Eph 2.14, Jn 5.17).
In the world that is ours and in the grave historical moment entrusted to us, anno Domini 2025, we need this standard to be held before us often. These days, the Sartrian principle, ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’, seems often presupposed as the major premise in a generally accepted syllogism. Ours is a desert-making time when leaders of nations can be heard proclaiming, ‘I hate my opponents’; when one man denies his neighbour’s right to live, and the scenario repeats itself grotesquely at the level of nations; when we have lost the sense of life’s, our being’s, our body’s significance; when we drive large parts of the world’s flora and fauna to extinction while producing barren continents of contaminated plastic; when no cry of ‘Benedic!’ meets strangers at the gate but instead mad dogs are set on them.
It is time to focus again on the garden’s call, to let it define our Christian enterprise, also across denominational boundaries. If we do, minor causes of disunity will prove manageable. The chief Gardener, Christ, who appeared in a garden as Death’s conqueror, will manage them if we let him. He will allow neither our blindness nor our malice to obstruct his design to make of all one. We have but to submit to his action in us, and in each other.
To be in Paradise henceforth is to be where Christ is. If we live, move, and have our being in him, if he encompasses us with his commandments, we shall be a garden he may cultivate. That is what remembrance of Eden and its eschatological imperative require of us. As the English Cistercian Gilbert of Hoyland once wrote: ‘If it is your desire to offer your heart to Christ as a garden of delights, do not take it ill if you are enclosed. […] One who does not know how to be enclosed, does not know how to be a garden.’ He or she may be a pretty wildflower meadow for a while, but will sooner or later turn into fruitless, thistle-infested wilderness.
May that not be our lot.
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch – giving one, as all the artist’s works, much to think about. The triptych is now in El Prado.