This is part 3 of Yet Another Creation Candidate. In the first, we discussed the possibility that Genesis 1 records not just the formation of the Earth, but the Solar System and Galaxy. It isn't a whole lot different from Hugh Ross' attempt to fit Genesis 1 into the Big Bang, so we make no claim for originality, yet it is different from Ross in one respect: language. Ross expects the language of Genesis to conform to nature, while we expect nature to conform to the language of Genesis.

In part 2, we attempt to patch up the riff between three theistic, conservative views of Genesis 1:  ICR, RTB and ID. We posit that each of these views lay at the intersection of three great presuppositions: Faith, Science, and Reason. The resolution, we argue, lies in the middle, in the common ground between them all, and it will be recursion that provides the glue against the polarizing centripetal forces so obviously at work. And the best exemplar of recursion is language. Did you notice they were all using it? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has written extensively on this property of language, and I hope to incorporate some his insight into this discussion, if I can work through the microfilm archive I recently acquired. (Memo to archivists: use character recognition software & store as text, not images!)

In this post, we continue the discussion of Genesis 2, beyond the 6 days that inform most of the debates, to the time period of the Garden. Our claim is that the Edenic paradise can be identified historically, anthropologically, perhaps even geographically. And from that identification, all sorts of conclusions follow; conclusions, I might add, that every Medieval scholar was very cognizant of. It is only in the Modern era that we believed Eden to be a myth, and gave up the search. It is only in the Modern era that Eden became synonymous with Utopia, with Erewhon. 

Yet in this era of dystopias, of "Brave New World" biotechnology, and "atomic holocaust", it is even more important that we identify Eden, and the paradise we have lost, because it tells us what we need, yes, even what we want, way down at the level of our mitochondria. It tells us what Leon Kass can't, what Steven Pinker can't, what Stephen Jay Gould can't; it tells us the purpose and hence the destiny of our children, of our race, of our genes.

Throughout history we have lost Eden many times, and rediscovered it again, anew, each greater than the last. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are converging on the final rediscovery, the eschaton of Isaiah and Revelation. This makes Genesis perhaps more relevant for our age than at any time before, and worthy of our study.

Eden Geographically

Mapping Paradise, by  Alessandro Scafi, is a book about the effort and importance of putting Eden on the map. An excellent review by Anthony Grafton captures the point:

Medieval mapmakers inherited from the historians and the encyclopedists of late antiquity -- writers driven by the need to preserve as much knowledge as they could in capsule form and to make it available to new, less educated elites in state and church -- a powerful schematic image of the known world: the so-called T-O map, which represented the three known continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, as inscribed within a great circle. Asia, the largest of the three, filled the top half of the circle, above the bar of the T (which represented the Don and the Nile). Europe and Africa, the smaller continents, filled the left and right bottom quadrants, separated by the vertical line of the T (which represented the Mediterranean). Oriented to the east -- which took the place of the north in a modern map -- these figures offered not a representation of the world but an icon, a general scheme that defined the parts of the world, for readers of texts that mentioned rivers or continents. (This is the sort of explanation that Wikipedia classifies as a "stub article.")
Before the end of the first millennium, mapmakers began to fill in the outlines of the T-O map with attractive details. They inserted paradise -- sometimes marked only with a legend, sometimes represented as a spring, the source of four rivers -- at the very top of the map, on the far eastern border of Asia. And they placed Jerusalem on many of the maps as well -- not on the border but at the center, where continents, rivers, and oceans met, as a kind of cosmic omphalos. Across Europe, the illuminators of bibles, encyclopedias, and histories used these graphic means to show that space -- the space of the world -- had a spiritual meaning as well as a physical form. It included not only the known place where Christ had sacrificed himself, but also the unknown but equally real place where Adam had fallen, sin had entered the cosmos, and the ultimate sacrifice of God's son had been made necessary....
Medieval mappaemundi -- as Scafi shows, displaying them by the dozens, in all the profusion and the splendor of their multiple graphic codes and unforgettably vivid colors -- superimposed these two visions of the universe, one spatial and one temporal, to produce something new: a stunning Christian vision of time and space. At their most ambitious and elaborate -- as in the enormous, magnificent Ebstorf and Hereford world maps, created in the thirteenth century -- they plotted the salvation history of the world in as much detail as the contours of its surface. These maps provided not only the locations of Creation and Incarnation, but also the full long trail of biblical history that stretched between the two: the Ark, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Joseph's storehouses all figured on them. Above all, these maps made clear to the informed reader that sacred time imparted meaning to sacred space.

What happened to this Medieval vision, this synthesis of space-time, this purposeful universe?

Equally fascinating is Scafi's account of how this elaborate picture of the world, which functioned so well for hundreds of years, finally collapsed. ... New ways of mapping, which spread through the Mediterranean from the thirteenth century on, also challenged the older ways of representing space. Late medieval cartographers did their best to reconcile the new pragmatic maps with older systems of representation. But their work showed evident strain: the maps that now came into being seemed to offer not only an account of the sacred and distant past, but a practical way to navigate to the unreachable paradise at the world's end. Did paradise really exist in a special, separate place? No wonder that some influential thinkers, such as Duns Scotus, began to question whether one could locate the earthly paradise at all.
The final blows to the old system came when the great Alexandrian atlas of Ptolemy, the Geography, came back to light in fifteenth-century Italy, and when the Portuguese rounded Africa. Ptolemy's magnificent work showed readers how to map the world in accordance with a range of projection systems. Each had its advantages -- and none had space for paradise, in which Ptolemy, a pagan, had no interest. At the same time, the discoveries of the Portuguese (and, later, of Columbus and others) began to bring all traditional maps into discredit. Even printed editions of Ptolemy began to include sections of "new maps" that showed, as his did not, the open bottom of the Indian Ocean. Like his ancient maps, these included no place for Eden.

 As the Catholics lost their Paradise, how did the Protestants rediscover Eden?

Yet even as paradise fell off the world map, new maps of Eden sprouted like mushrooms in the illustrated bibles that Martin Luther and the other warring theologians of the Reformation brought out to underpin their religious ideas. They are not the heroes of Scafi's tale. His deepest sympathies seem reserved for the constructive cartographers of the Middle Ages, and he shows a pronounced sense of irony as he charts the minutely detailed efforts of Luther, Calvin, Steucho, and a host of less famous polymaths to work out, from close scrutiny of the biblical text, which rivers had watered paradise and whether its site still existed or had been -- as Luther thought -- expunged by the universal Flood. Scafi and his reader know in advance, thanks to his excellent introductory section on Genesis, that these efforts were doomed to failure.
Yet here, too, Scafi's exposition rests on deep research, and he explicates the new sacred geography and antiquarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- and even the new archaeological geography and biblical tourism of more recent times -- with impeccable erudition and patience. Above all, he makes clear that the new methods of early modern scholars -- who insisted on finding Eden somewhere in the larger Near East, as the biblical text seemed to require, and no longer necessarily believed that they could map providential time on ordered space -- are what stand between us and the mappaemundi. The medieval map of paradise came to seem funny not in the age of Bouvard and Pecuchet, the positivist world that produced the first studies of the history of geography, but in the Renaissance; and it can be understood only by abandoning the condescension of the humanists.

This effort of the Reformation, then, explains these news stories of the rebirth of Eden, now identified with the Marshes at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Perhaps it would not be too great a stretch to suggest that the Iraqi War is all about rediscovering Eden, bringing the Protestant vision of the New World back to the Old Garden.

Scafi shows his Catholic roots, perhaps, in his unfavorable treatment of Protestant cartography, but Alan Jacobs review is fitting Protestant conclusion:

Looking through the many and lavish illustrations of Alessandro Scafi’s Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth, I find myself drawn again and again to a photograph reproduced near the book’s end. It appeared originally in the Times of London and was taken in 1944 in the town of Qurna in Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. One of those rivers fills the picture’s background, and in the foreground is an octagonal wall of pale brick, perhaps three feet high, like a baptismal font. Within the wall is a dead tree, which seems to have fallen so that two bare branches sink into the dirt outside the font.

The branches angle strangely, giving the vivid appearance of an enormous insect, a praying mantis crawling out of the font and onto the surrounding bare dirt, there no doubt to perish. A carefully made sign at the top of the wall, canted awkwardly against the tree’s dead trunk, reads: “The Original GARDEN of EDEN.” Locals call the tree the Tree of Adam, that is, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The Adam Tree.

Scafi is perhaps too detailed in his coverage of his subject, but there’s no doubt that the rivers became a topic of hot controversy precisely because they raised in unique ways the increasingly dominant problem in the Western world of how to reconcile Biblical testimony with scientific discovery, especially as in the nineteenth century the new science of archaeology rises and develops. Archaeology has, overall, done far more to reinforce and support the biblical narrative than most practitioners in the field ever imagined it could, but it has left the quest for a geographically definite Eden in permanent and irrecoverable disarray. There are, of course, still a handful of cranks and oddballs searching for Eden or believing that they have discovered it through some combination of geography, textual criticism, trigonometry, and personal revelation....Nevertheless, in the long story of these maps and of an imaginative world progressively disenchanted and disoriented, we’re all allegorists now, all members of the Alexandrian school, though Origen might blanch to see the company he’s now keeping. Meanwhile, far away in Qurna, perhaps by now they have planted another Tree of Adam.

Such is the world mapped out by the Reformation. It has an Eden, and a dead tree, in the midst of war, and dust, and desolation.

One wishes that like the Catholics, Eden had been lost, for then it would have remained an Atlantis, a Numenor, a place of longing. But no, we Protestants had to tear down the vision and with materialist fervor, methodically trample it in the dust. And then bleed all over it.

But it need not be so. For just as the medieval cartographers always expected the latest exploration to find it, just as Columbus sailing up the Orinoco thought he had found it, so today there remains the possibility that we may indeed rediscover Eden. When Luther argued that the Flood would have destroyed Eden, he was reconciling science and theology. When the Scholastics put Eden on a very high mountain, they were employing the separation of science and theology that motivated Kant.  Eden, they reasoned, must not be destroyed by the sinfulness of man, Eden must remain pristine, a beacon and destination for the aspirations of men. Even today, in the most secular of churches, the Environmentalists, the fervor of the greens demonstrate this primordial desire for paradise.

For it seems that both the Reformers and the mappaemundi were right. As I will explain in greater detail below, language is the mark of Adam, the characteristic that sets modern man apart from Neanderthal and CroMagnon. And language spread along the same lanes as Y-chromosomes, from a center somewhere in the Middle East. A recent news article says that housecats followed man from a genetic locale in the middle east. Somewhere in that vicinity is the  "heimat-ort" of mankind, his homeland.

Nor is it inconceivable that the Flood did destroy Eden, as all the legends say of Atlantis. For it is conceivable that in the last ice-age, a glacial ice-dam built up around the pillars of Hercules, the 10 mile wide entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Since the Mediterranean evaporates more water than reaches it by rivers, it would have led to a great inland salt sea. Since it lies below sea level, it would be quite a bit warmer than the ice-covered glaciers of Europe, likely a fertile savanna, teeming with game. The fresh waters of the Nile and the Danube, the Black Sea pouring through the Bosporus (fresh at that time) and ?? would perhaps make up the four rivers of Paradise. Perhaps this is the "plains of Shinar" and the hunting ground of the great Nimrod. There would be no reason to spread beyond this region, to the ice mountains of Europe in the north or the searing Sahara in the South. Then in Noah's day, when the ice-dam gave way and the ocean flooded in, all civilization would lie buried under the waters of the Mediterranean. There are many other clues that suggest that this is more than a futile hypothesis, cities found underwater in the Black Sea; salt deposits on the floor of the Mediterranean demonstrating periods when it was isolated from the Atlantic. What about the names of two rivers being Tigris and Euphrates? Perhaps, since names have meanings beyond the destruction of their referents, Noah's descendants populated the Mesopatamian valley and named the two rivers there by the names of those destroyed rivers, causing the confusion in Quma and the Reformers.

And what does relocating Eden a 500 miles to the West accomplish? It  tells us that the angel still guards the gates of Eden, that mankind did spread from a center in the Mid East, that there are real clues in Genesis that can help us understand our past, and hence, our future. For if Eden really existed as a geographical location, it also existed as a historical Eden, and then the story of Eden tells us why we are rational, and holy, and sacred, it tells us what it means to be human.

In the next post, we look at Eden historically.