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| Of Paradise, that It Can Be Understood in a Spiritual Sense Without Sacrificing the Historic Truth of the Narrative Regarding The Real Place.
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Chapter 21.—Of Paradise, that It
Can Be Understood in a Spiritual Sense Without Sacrificing the
Historic Truth of the Narrative Regarding The Real
Place.
On this account some allegorize all
that concerns Paradise itself, where the first men, the parents of
the human race, are, according to the truth of holy Scripture,
recorded to have been; and they understand all its trees and
fruit-bearing plants as virtues and habits of life, as if they had
no existence in the external world, but were only so spoken of or
related for the sake of spiritual meanings. As if there could not
be a real terrestrial Paradise! As if there never existed these
two women, Sarah and Hagar, nor the two sons who were born to
Abraham, the one of the bond woman, the other of the free, because
the apostle says that in them the two covenants were prefigured; or
as if water never flowed from the rock when Moses struck it,
because therein Christ can be seen in a figure, as the same apostle
says, “Now that rock was Christ!”607
No one, then, denies that
Paradise may signify the life of the blessed; its four rivers, the
four virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; its
trees, all useful knowledge; its fruits, the customs of the godly;
its tree of life, wisdom herself, the mother of all good; and the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the experience of a broken
commandment. The punishment which God appointed was in itself, a
just, and therefore a good thing; but man’s experience of it is
not good.
These things can also and more
profitably be understood of the Church, so that they become
prophetic foreshadowings of things to come. Thus Paradise is the
Church, as it is called in the Canticles;608
the four rivers of Paradise are the
four gospels; the fruit-trees the saints, and the fruit their
works; the tree of life is the holy of holies, Christ; the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, the will’s free choice. For if
man despise the will of God, he can only destroy himself; and so he
learns the difference between consecrating himself to the common
good and revelling in his own. For he who loves himself is
abandoned to himself, in order that, being overwhelmed with fears
and sorrows, he may cry, if there be yet soul in him to feel his
ills, in the words of the psalm, “My soul is cast down within
me,”609
and when
chastened, may say,” Because of his strength I will wait upon
Thee.”610
These and
similar allegorical interpretations may be suitably put upon
Paradise without giving offence to any one, while yet we believe
the strict truth of the history, confirmed by its circumstantial
narrative of facts.611
| 611 Those who wish to pursue this
subject will find a pretty full collection of opinions in the
learned commentary on Genesis by the Jesuit Pererius. Philo was,
of course, the leading culprit, but Ambrose and other Church
fathers went nearly as far. Augustin condemns the Seleucians for
this among other heresies, that they denied a visible
Paradise.—De Hæres. 59. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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