PARADISE ON EARTH.

The word paradise develops in Western languages from the Greek word paradeisos, the old Persian word pairidaeza, and the modern Arabic and Persian firdaus, all of which originally denoted a walled garden. In the arid environment of the Near East, a garden must be carefully and laboriously constructed with watercourses for irrigation, and its precious flowers and fruits protected from theft by a surrounding wall. The conflation of this term for a type of garden built and cultivated in the Near East with religious imagery of heaven, especially in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, has given the term a far more complex set of meanings, which have come to permeate the cultures of the Christian West and the Islamic world, creating a metaphoric bridge between divine paradise and paradise on earth.

In these cultures the concept of paradise developed in two related levels. The first was scriptural and thus a part of religious belief: paradise is either a place for life after death—often serving as a more tangible and concrete substitute for the vaguer term heaven —or the setting for a primal, idealized epoch in human history: the Garden of Eden. The second way in which the concept developed was through the actual physical depiction or recreation of the religious image of paradise on earth, either in the form of actual gardens or through the use of certain types of garden imagery—with or without religious connotations—in music, literature, and the visual arts.

Religious Conceptions of Paradise

In the Jewish Torah, paradise first appears as the Garden of Eden in Genesis. It also is regarded as the abode of God, to which the righteous are welcome (Psalm 73:24–25):

Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee.

In terms of concrete imagery, the most famous Old Testament vision of paradise is set forth in Psalm 23:2: "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters." In Christianity paradise is the blessed afterlife promised by Christ in the Gospels—"And Jesus said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43)—or the more complex, mystical, and tangible paradise of the Book of Revelation (22:1–2):

And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

In Islamic scripture the image of paradise (Ar. janna, garden) is far more concrete and descriptive, a garden with flowering trees, running streams, silken cushions, and chaste companions promised in so many passages in the Koran:

This is the picture of Paradise promised to those who fear God: it contains rivers of ever-fresh water, rivers of milk that never sours, rivers of wine that are a delight to those who drink, and rivers of pure honey; also for those who fear God are found every fruit, and their Lord's forgiveness. (47:15)

They will be attended by youths perpetually young, carrying chalices and ewers and cups filled from a flowing spring, neither giving a headache nor intoxication, and such fruits as they wish, and the meat of birds as they wish. They will have as companions beautiful black-eyed maidens, pure as well-guarded pearls, a recompense for their righteousness. There will not be heard any vain or profane words, but only: "peace, peace, peace." (56:10–25)

Although the concept of paradise as a religious afterlife is primarily found in the three monotheistic religions originating in the Near East, the association of a garden with religious repose is also found in Buddhism, where it ultimately influenced secular garden culture in China and Japan. Of course for those of a secular bent, the metaphor of a heavenly garden may ultimately derive from the ancient use of a garden as a place of earthly pleasure, rest, or contemplation, but in the world of metaphor the heavenly garden precedes and influences its earthly counterpart.

In an intermediate step from scriptural sources toward earthly recreation in the arts, paradise forms a part of various liturgies, especially those involving funerals. Thus paradise is invoked in the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Islamic mawlid, and the Roman Catholic requiem mass, where paradise is also seen as the heavenly Jerusalem, what St. Augustine of Hippo termed the City of God: "May the Angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you and lead you into the holy city of Jerusalem."

Representations in Western Culture

From scriptures and liturgical texts the concept of paradise emerges as a dominant image in the religious art of Christianity and Islam over the centuries and eventually develops what we might term quasi-secular cognates as well, in which theological paradise in effect loans part of its meaning to secular palaces, poetry, and visual arts. In the Christian tradition, images of an essentially scriptural paradise figure prominently in literature of the West. These range from the Neoplatonic vision of a multi-tiered heaven in the early-sixth-century Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite through the paradise described by the ninth-century Beatus of Liebana in his Commentaries on the Apocalypse to the lofty poetic visions of Dante's Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century and Milton's Paradise Lost in the seventeenth, finding echoes in the earthy twentieth-century representations of Roark Bradford and Marc Connelly, epitomized in the latter's The Green Pastures.

These scriptural, liturgical, and literary images of paradise in turn had a profound influence on music and the visual arts, starting with illustrations to the texts in question. The medieval sculptural reliefs of the Last Judgment that so often grace the doorways of eleventh-and twelfth-century Romanesque churches traditionally depicted the rewards of paradise on the left (to the right of a central figure of Christ) and the torments of hell to the right or below, with details taken from Revelation and from the Beatus manuscripts. From Dante's late medieval exegesis and expansion of biblical texts came a view of paradise that was to influence later generations of visual artists. From Genesis combined with Milton's poetic text came Franz Joseph Haydn's musical depiction of paradise in The Creation as well as a number of depictions in painting.

The image of paradise on Earth in the Western tradition is not exclusively Christian in inspiration. An idyllic earthly paradise is also evoked in the rich tradition of poetry and art inspired by the Greek myths of Arcadia and given defining shape in the poetry of Virgil. The classical Arcadia is a land of shepherds and idyllic peace that returns again and again in the poetry, prose, and painting of the West, given perhaps its most characteristic form in the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in seventeenth-century France.

In Western art of the Christian tradition, where the illustration of religious texts is encouraged rather than actively discouraged as in Judaism and Islam, depictions of paradise are as likely to recall the primal innocence of Eden as they are the reward awaiting Christians in the afterlife. Seen from a strictly narrative perspective, the artistic potential of Christian hell is rich in pictorial possibilities, full of emotion and activity, while that of heaven or paradise is, comparatively speaking, both formulaic and limited, with the exception of the high drama of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. The Western art tradition does not, however, possess the embedded cultural tradition of the walled garden, and so, to paraphrase Freud, in Western art a flower is often simply a flower.

Among the many depictions of paradise in Western art, two may serve to illustrate the gamut of imagery. In the famous Ghent altarpiece painted by the Van Eyck brothers between 1425 and 1432, a literal depiction of paradise in the lower central panel of the open altarpiece shows a green meadow populated by crowds of angels, apostles, clerics, martyrs, and other saints, adoring the Holy Lamb on a stone altar, while an octagonal basin in the foreground, recalling the baptismal font with its water of salvation, contains a playing fountain of life. The inspiration for the imagery comes in part from Revelation and probably in part from the liturgy of All Saints, and the imagery itself is Roman Catholic in conception and detail. By contrast, the various depictions of the Peaceable Kingdom by the American naive painter Edward Hicks recall the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah 11:6, the peaceable kingdom that will arrive on earth with the coming of the Messiah: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

Explicit physical recreations of paradise in Western landscape architecture are rare. The enclosed cloisters of medieval monasteries sometimes carried such an association, and the forecourts or enclosed gardenlike settings for some churches, referred to as parvises, carry the same connotation.

Islamic Art and Literature

In Islamic culture there is likewise a literary tradition of direct depiction of paradise, most typically represented by Mir Haydar's Miraj-nama (Book of the ascension), a fourteenth-century poetic description of the Prophet's mystical journey to heaven and hell, which takes much of its imagery of paradise directly from highly descriptive scriptural passages of the Koran. The most famous illustrated manuscript of the poem, created for the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh in Herat in about 1435, depicts a paradise with triple gates, four flowing rivers of water, milk, wine, and honey, and flowering trees, among which the houris engage in games and provide refreshments. In a fal-nama or "book of divination" manuscript created in Istanbul around 1600, a famous miniature depicts Adam and Eve expelled from paradise along with the serpent, as an astonished angel and a peacock look on.

In the complex metaphorical imagery of Persian poetry, the drinking of wine in the setting of a garden combines secular cultural praxis with the mystical notion of divine intoxication. For this reason, illustrations to the texts of poets such as Hafiz often show couples or individuals drinking wine in a garden, or even, in one famous example painted around 1529 by the Tabriz artist Sultan-Muhammad, a sort of half-earthly, half-heavenly saturnalia of elderly sheikhs and heaven-sent angels.

While paradisiacal imagery is found in many different Islamic arts, from ceramics and metalwork to miniature painting, some of the most memorable evocations of the heavenly garden are seen in textile arts. Many of the most famous Islamic carpets created under the Safavid dynasty in Iran in the sixteenth century are in the form of what one scholar has termed a "paradise park" format, in which an outer border symbolic of the surrounding wall encloses a lush vision of paradise that often includes depictions of the drinking of wine, the royal sport of hunting (itself often a metaphor of the soul's search for paradise), and lovers enjoying the floral ambience of the garden. The same motifs grace many of the famous figural Safavid velvets, in which the images of lovers in a garden are conflated with the idea of the soul's love of God. The two celebrated Ardebil carpets, probably woven in Kashan around 1537, depict the reflection of the sun's medal-lion—a metaphor for God as the giver of light—in a dark blue formal pool filled with countless floating lotus flowers on scrolling stems. Other Islamic carpet forms, such as the sajjadah or prayer rug, often depict a gateway to a tree-and flower-filled paradise, while one carpet form, the garden carpet, actually depicts a traditional Islamic garden with its cruciform axial watercourses (often filled with fish) and rectangular plantings, in a woven form that conveniently remains in bloom throughout the year.

In the Islamic world, the combination of a pre-Islamic form of walled garden from Iran known as a char bagh —literally a "fourfold garden"—and the imagery of the Koranic texts combined to foster a long tradition of princely garden building in which religious ideas formed a sort of symbolic overlay. The four long pools arranged in cruciform fashion that divide the garden into four represent the four heavenly rivers; a pavilion set in the middle of the garden might then take on equally heavenly symbolism, as in the Hasht Bihisht ("eight heavens") Safavid palace from seventeenth-century Isfahan. Among the countless Islamic attempts to create an earthly paradise, two gardens have achieved unusual historical prominence. The earlier of these, known today as the Court of the Lions, graces the fourteenth-century Nasrid Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Its four streams, fed by a central playing fountain in a basin borne on the backs of twelve sculpted lions, recall the heavenly rivers of the Koran, together with the fountain Salsabil that graces Islamic paradise (Koran 76:12). The other Islamic garden of special prominence is the great char bagh arrayed before the Mughal royal mausoleum known as the Taj Mahal, created in the mid-seventeenth century in Agra, India, by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The inscriptions of the Taj Mahal itself stress the metaphor of an earthly depiction of heavenly paradise, in which the mausoleum itself is a symbol for the throne of God. The popularity of the char bagh in Islamic cultures from India to Iberia is a strong testament to its Islamic religious associations with paradise, as well as to the astonishing persistence of pre-Islamic forms in Islamic art.

East Asia

While the concept of an earthly paradise as a reflection of a heavenly paradise permeates much art in cultures under the influence of Christianity and Islam, a somewhat similar concept of a heavenly presence on earth—not specifically derived from the west Asian firdaus —can also be seen in other cultures, notably those influenced directly or indirectly by Buddhism. A final example of a constructed heaven on earth may be seen in the succession of Chinese capital cities and royal palaces built in Beijing by the Jin, Yuan (Mongol), Ming, and Qing dynasties. The elevation of the emperor in China to semi-divine status encouraged the creation of a quasi-celestial abode for the emperor on earth. The hierarchical organization of the Forbidden City, with its succession of courts and gateways, each leading to a more rarified and exclusive precinct, also represents an attempt to create a heavenly city on earth, if not embodying direct metaphors for a scriptural paradise such as those found in the Christian and Islamic West. This in turn led to reflections of an earthly paradise in the palace architecture (and, in Japan especially, in the construction of palace gardens as places of aesthetic as well as religious contemplation) in other cultures of East Asia.

See also Garden ; Heaven and Hell ; Landscape in the Arts ; Utopia .

bibliography

Blair, Sheila S., and Jonathan M. Bloom, eds. Images of Paradise in Islamic Art. Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, 1991.

Gardet, L. "Djanna." In Encyclopedia of Islam. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 1965.

Lehrmann, Jonas. Earthly Paradise: Garden and Courtyard in Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Moynihan, Elisabeth B. Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India. New York: Braziller, 1979.

Psaki, Regina, and Charles Hindley, eds. The Earthly Paradise: The Garden of Eden from Antiquity to Modernity. Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications, Binghamton University, 2002.

Walter B. Denny