An Earthly Paradise?

ardeners, like poets and artists, are a materialistic lot. The pure sensuality of gardening supplies motivation enough for our habit (think of the joy of  muddied hands, the scent of the rain-washed soil; the brilliance of a jonquil-flower; the gnarled filigree of tree-bark). It comes as no surprise then that a poet, Robert Frost, should conjure this gardener’s sensibility best. In Putting in the Seed, the poet confesses himself ‘slave to a Springtime passion for the earth’:

How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

Here Frost likens gardening to sex; or rather, sex to gardening. The ‘white/soft petals fallen from the apple tree’, which the poet desires so ardently to bury, are, after all, ‘not so barren quite/mingled with these smooth bean and wrinkled pea’. Frost’s ‘sturdy seedling with arched body’, alluding as much to a child as to a sapling, represents the consummation of this sensual contact with the earth. It is a material, present, corporeal being; but it is also something more, something entirely beyond the gardener, beyond itself; something whole and fulfilled. Is this wholeness what we gardeners have been yearning for? what we’ve been seeking through our very own ‘Putting in the Seed’? It’s certainly no new yearning. As a matter of fact, it’s a very old one. And it’s not confined to gardeners.

Romanian anthropologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade has said much about this yearning. To quote his 1965 Mephistopheles and the Androgyne:

Man feels himself torn and separate. He often finds it difficult properly to explain to himself the nature of this separation, for sometimes he feels himself to be cut off from “something” powerful, “something” utterly other than himself, and at other times from an indefinable, timeless “state”, of which he has no precise memory, but which he does however remember in the depths of his being: a primordial state which he enjoyed before Time, before History.

Variations of this theme of the Fall of Man have cropped up within myths and religions the world over, from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece to the Dreamtime stories of Indigenous Australia. In the West, the same theme has for some time inhabited the boundaries of a garden: Eden. Indeed, the notion of ‘garden’ and the notion of ‘paradise’ are synonymous; the latter word having stemmed from the Persian pairidaeza, signifying a walled garden. Moving from Persian to Greek, the word became παράδεισος (paradeisos), whence came Latin paradisus and English paradise.

Genesis 2:8-10 describes Eden thus: ‘and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden…And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads’. Medieval thinkers speculated much about the location of this Biblical Eden. In On Man’s Abode, Which Is Paradise, the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas discusses his predecessors varying opinions of the whereabouts of the paradisaical dwelling. He quotes St. Isidore: ‘[paradise] is a place situated in the east, its name being the Greek for garden’; the Venerable Bede: ‘paradise reaches to the lunar circle’; and Augustine: ‘some understand [paradise to be] a place merely corporeal, others a place entirely spiritual, while others… hold that paradise was both corporeal and spiritual’.

As Augustine has said, the notion of a bipartite paradise, possessing at once an earthly and a heavenly manifestation, had no little parlance throughout the Middle Ages. Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy draws upon this very notion. At the end of the second book, the ‘Purgatorio’, Dante and Virgil ascend to the peak of Mount Purgatory, upon whose summit they discover the ‘Earthly Paradise’. Here Dante meets the figure of Beatrice, embodying his feminine muse, who draws him further; guiding him and Virgil up through the  nine spheres of the ‘Celestial Paradise’.

The association of an allegorical, feminine figure with the locus of the paradise-garden did not begin with Dante; the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, had long been associated with the virginity of Mary. ‘Entering the garden’ could thus draw out some rather ribald connotations, as was certainly the case within many a dirty troubadour lyric. In (somewhat) more respectable circles, the garden had also become a central trope of the Courtly Love tradition, exemplified by Guillaume de Lorris’s long thirteenth-century poem, the Roman de la Rose. The whole episode of the poem takes place within a high-walled garden, wherein the protagonist discovers his ‘dame’-his lady-the ‘Rose’ herself.

A sensual as well as a spiritual place, the garden could suggest sexual consummation and virginity at once.  Within the Christian Neoplatonism of late antiquity and the Middle Ages,  these two states were not unreconcilable.  The third-century neoplatonist and theologian Origen posited that the figure of Adam, signifying humanity before the Fall, was without gender; a being of  essentially androgynous character. The Fall of Man, the expulsion from  Eden, brought about  not only the division of Adam itself, creating woman and man; but also the division of all creation: earth from sky, light from dark, good from evil. For the neoplatonist, sexual consummation was the symbolic rememberment of creation. That deep sensual joy, to be sought within the walls of the flowering and many-treed hortus, could thus become the reclamation of a lost Adamic wholeness, opening the gateway to the primordial garden-the Earthly Paradise.