Saving Paradise
109 Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Beacon Press, Boston, 2008
Prologue
xvi
We worked to understand the world of early Christianity not
as the literate few knew it but as the visually literate many knew it when they
worshipped in churches and recited memorized scriptures and creeds. For them visual art and poetic and narrative
literature, found in prayers, stories, psalms, and hymns, shaped Christian life
and sustained it.
Beauty and art, in all its forms, engage the more holistic,
emotional, and sensory-laden dimensions of experience and memory. They capture multilayered experiences of
imagination, feeling, perceiving, and thinking.
Through art, the aesthetic, emotional, sensory and intellectual
dimensions of life can come together and be mixed in fresh ways. . . . we have sought to communicate something of
the aesthetic experience of paradise.
Chapter 1 In
The Beginning . . . Paradise on the Earth
5
The Sumerians, a people of mysterious origins, migrated
south from the mountains in Turkey in prehistoric times and settled in the hot,
flat, fertile delta between the rivers (Tigris & Euphrates). Around the fifth millennium BCE they began to
master flood control and irrigation and built walled settlements. Their stories, first passed on in oral traditions,
came to us as texts pressed on clay tablets that date to around 2100 BCE, near
the end of their history. They recorded
their myths in a phonetic script they invented, called cuneiform (edge-shaped”).
One of the oldest written languages on earth, Sumerian became the
scientific, sacred, ceremonial, and literary language for the Assyrians,
Babylonians, Persians, and many other surrounding cultures for centuries,
despite the fact that it was related to no other language in the region and
that, to become fluent, one had to master its separate dialects for men and
women.
For subsequent cultures, Sumerian, the language and the
culture, was the equivalent of Greek in Roman society or Latin in medieval
Europe: the much admired classical language and culture of antiquity. Sumerians encouraged this view with stories
of the glories of their rulers and gods.
Their conquerors borrowed Sumer'’ stories in creating their own myths
and used its script to write their very different languages just as, today,
English is written with Latin script.
The Bible itself indicates the importance of Sumer; Abram and Sarai
(renamed Abraham and Sarah) trace their lineage back to UR, the last capital of
Sumer, from which they migrated westward to Canaan (Gen. 11:26-13:12).
10
The Babylonians conquered [the Sumerians] for the last time
around 2050 BCE . . . [they]
Sumer became the lost primordial culture of West Asia. By the time Genesis was written, the
Sumerians’ myths had been adapted and edited through more than a millennium of
history in Canaan, where the legendary immigrants from Sumer, Abram and Sarai, had
migrated. The kingdom of Israel emerged
in Canaan under Saul (1029-1000 BCE) and David (1000-961 BCE). The Davidic dynasty collapsed with the death
of David’s son Solomon (961-922 BCE).
The one nation Israel, composed of twelve tribes, became two kingdoms in
921. The Assyrians conquered and annexed
the northern nation of ten tribes, called Israel, in 722 (2 Kings 17:5-6). The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar defeated
the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE and kidnapped its leaders, initiating
five decades of exile for Judah’s people.
11
The Persians and Jews had a long period of contact beginning
with King Cyrus the Great (ca. 576-529 BCE), who conquered Babylonia in 539,
ending its domination of Mesopotamia. .
. . Persian, a modern form of which is
now called Farsi . . . remained a common language of the diverse peoples of
India for many centuries. The word
“paradise” comes into Persian through Median, paridaeza, pari (around), and daeza
(wall), meaning a garden surrounded by a wall. Persian, an Indo-European language like
Sanskrit and Greek, uses paridaida to
refer to vineyards, orchards, forests, tree nurseries, and stables.
12
Cyrus was likely a Zoroastrian, practicing a Persian
religion founded by the prophet Zorothustra (Zoraster in Greek), who lived
around the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Scholars of this history of Zoroastrianism
link its early roots to Hindu ideas, but it became more monotheistic. Zoroaster preached a form of monotheism with
lesser spirits and demons. He also developed
a postmortem dimension of paradise tied to a strong dualism of good and evil.
13
Zoroastrian apocalyptic ideas probably entered Jewish
thinking in the post-exilic time of contact with Persia, since they do not
appear in Jewish literature until after this time, for example, in the book of
Daniel. The Hebrew Bible generally
follows Sumerian traditions in imagining life after death as an underworld that
is mysterious, cold and dark. It depicts
the cosmos as a three-tiered universe: heavens, earth with paradise, and the
underworld, united by the cosmic sacred mountain. Zoroastrian apocalypticism assuredly
influenced Christianity, but a divide of
the afterlife into heaven and hell is absent from Christianity’s visual world
until the medieval.
15
In Genesis, humanity was instructed to be vegetarian, as were the animals, rather
than rapacious or predatory.
In Genesis 2, we arrive in the beautiful garden of
delight. Like Dilmun, this garden is
hard to locate, but it is on the earth.
It has one great river, which later tradition identified with the
Jordan. Because great rivers originate
in mountains, early biblical commentators often suggested a mountaintop as the
location of the garden, perhaps the legendary mountain on which Noah docked his
ark, the seventeen thousand-foot-high Mt. Ararat.
16
The Hebrew word, adam (earthling),
is not a proper name for a male individual, but a generic noun that designates
a being made of ha-dama (earth). As in Genesis 1, adam was a generic human being, encompassing male and female.
When God explained to the earthling that not all the trees
were safe to eat, the story suggested that Creation had boundaries that should
not be crossed and that acquiring knowledge carried risks.
Somewhere, paradise remained in the world, haunting every
tale of folly, injustice, or greed.
17
The actual Hebrew word pardes
rarely occurs in the Bible. One place it
is used is in the Song of Solomon (also called the Song of Songs), which was
compiled from earlier sources, probably in the fourth century BCE. It uses pardes
to capture the eros of a beautiful garden.
Phyllis Trible suggests that these references to a paradise
garden harken back to Genesis and recapture the delight in the earth and human
life in paradise. This celebration of
love and joy provides the antidote to the banishment of Adam and Eve. This return to the garden nullified the curse
of male dominance, hard work, and shame about vulnerability and sexuality.
18
Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the late fourth
century BCE, after which the Hebrew Bible was translated into the Greek, called
the Septuagint. Wherever the Hebrew word
for garden, gan or gan-Eden, appeared, the Septuagint
substituted paradesos, including in
Genesis 2. This importation of the word
“paradise” heightened its importance for both Jewish and Christian
interpreters, since many used the Septuagint.
The intermingling of Persian, North African, and West Asian cultures and
ideas with Greek culture and language began in this period of apocryphal
literature from the third century BCE through the third century BCE made much
greater use of paradeisos. Discussion and speculation about paradise
increased, as apocryphal texts such as I Enoch described journeys to paradise
and heaven.
Amos, the earliest written prophet, warned the northern
kingdom of Israel in the middle of the eighth century BCE that its habits of
violence and greed were unjust and unsustainable.
God as Creator and judge against injustice formed the
context for Amos’s outcry against the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy.
19
[Amos] promised that the gifts of paradise could be restored
to them if they would “establish justice” and “seek good and not evil.”
Let
justice roll down like water And
righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5:24)
The poetry of Amos captures something of the gestalt of
paradise in upholding the struggle for justice, mercy, and peace by anchoring
them in the life-giving waters of earth.
The book of Isaiah contains many references to
paradise. First Isaiah was written
between 742 and 689 BCE, when the Assyrian Empire threatened Judah. It expressed hope by describing a world where
animals lived in harmony, as they did with Adam and Eve in Eden.
During the Exile, after King Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem
in 586 and deported its leaders to Babylonia, second Isaiah used images of
paradise to promise divine deliverance.
20
Some exiles [from Israel], sent to Egypt, believed the hard,
exclusivist monotheism of King Josiah caused Judah to fall.
Though Isaiah asserted a form of monotheism, it was grounded
in justice, rather than in favoritism or nationalism. God cared for the suffering and oppressed,
and faithful people who were committed to the welfare of all would restore and
sustain paradise.
21
Hese prophetic texts [Isa. 40:8-4:14, Isa. 58:6-11, Isa.
61:1,11] are not, however, unambiguous.
While they proclaimed peace, they often imagined God as a warrior who
would defeat the foes of Israel and slaughter the unrighteous.
22
I Samuel 8 warned against the establishment of a
kingdom. Isaiah said all rulers must
answer to the ethics of justice, neither kings nor nations possessed divine
rights; they were accountable to the standards of righteousness that were the
will of God.
Ezekiel, the sixth-century BCE prophet, wrote in Babylon
during the Exile and reflected on the conflicts among the empires that
dominated his time.
The first chapter opens with a theophany, an appearance of
God. In this theophany, Ezekiel, among
his fellow exiles along a river, looks up to see a thunderstorm. Four living creatures emerge from the clouds
and lightning, each with human form but four faces: a human, lion, ox, and
eagle. Each has four wings, and hooves
that shine as though bronzed. Wheels
spin beside them in the midst of a rainbow.
This vision likely reflected the impressive stone carvings of totem
animals that decorated Babylonian palaces
23
Ezekiel likened the growth of the great empire of Egypt to a
flowering tree in Eden that was nourished by abundant water. The tree became
too proud and God razed it (Ezek. 31).
Ezekiel contrasted the blessed garden of God with the political
ambitions, environmental devastations, and carnage of kings, and he promised a
renewal of paradise for the nation . . .
And they will say, “This land that was desolate has become
like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined towns are now
inhabited and portified.” (Ezekiel 36:33-35)
In his oracles of comfort and hope to the exiles, Ezekiel
pictured the restoration of paradise as abundant pasturelands tended by a
shepherd.
24
Near the end of the book, Ezekiel detailed his vision of the
rebuilt temple on Mt. Zion (Ezek. 40-47).
He described being transported to the eastern gate, the direction of
paradise . . . A great river welled up from below the threshold of the temple,
flowing east and south. . . . Ezekiel
said Jerusalem must be called “The Lord is there” (48:35). It was an earthly place where God drew near
to human beings, and from which waters of life cascaded down to bring life to
all the earth. It was not a place
created after the apocalyptic destruction of this world, but it could be
threatened by war and imperial domination.
From his dwelling place in the temple, God announced, “Enough, O princes
of Israel. Put away violence and oppression,
and do what is just and right.” (Ezek. 45:9)
24-25
Some exiles, liberated by the Persian king Cyrus the Great,
returned to Jerusalem and eventually built the second temple in Jerusalem under
his son King Darius. They completed it
in 516 BCE. The books of Ezra and
Nehemiah describe the controversies with local inhabitants and difficulties
that accompanied this time of restoration, as well as the modest proportions of
this new temple. Some leaders began o
identify the second temple and Mt. Zion as the
actual location of paradise.
One of the mysteries of Dilmun and Eden was their precise
location. Whether in the direction of
the rising sun or between four great rivers, paradise confused any attempts to
pin it on a map. It eluded the control,
captivity, or ownership of any one nation, people, religion, or time. In direct contrast to the wars, economic
exploitation, fratricidal divisions, and environmental devastations of empires,
it offered experiences and visions of justice, of the goodness of ordinary
life, and of a vibrant peace. Paradise
was described in terms recognizable as earthly life at its best. In these descriptions, it could be
experienced as real, not as a permanent state of being but as aspects of life
itself. It flourished where people took
responsibility for the well-being of all and respected and protected the great
cycles of life that sustain human life.
Many of the Psalms date from the second temple period. They praise God’s creativity, justice, and
healing, using images of paradise.
26
The Psalms affirm that the gifts of paradise are tangible in
this life. “O taste and see that the
Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8) The speak of
respite from weariness, pleasure in companionship, freedom from oppression,
comfort in sorrow, delight in beauty, satisfaction of hunger, and protection
from danger. Though these precious
aspects of life can be lost or compromised, they are dimensions of human
experience on the earth, not imaginary ideals.
What it means to say that paradise is in this world: the actual tastes,
sights, fragrances, and textures of paradise touch our lives. They call us to resist the principalities and
powers that deny the goodness of ordinary life, threaten to destroy it, or seek
to secure its blessings for a few at the expense of many.
The descendants of the exiles who rebuilt the temple in
Jerusalem did not enjoy a long peace.
The Persian Empire gave them
breathing space for a time, until the Greeks
conquered the region and brought them once again under oppressive imperial
domination. They maintained a line of
client Jewish kings who heavily taxed the people for Rome and for their own
gain. Herod (c. 74-4 BCE) was notoriously profligate and violent. He massively expanded the Jerusalem temple as
a monument to his dynasty and [even] put a Roman eagle over the main entrance. Many Jewish resistance movements protested
Herodian and Roman abuses, often with nonviolent acts and sometimes in armed
revolt. The Romans suppressed opposition
by crucifying dissident leaders and burning town to the ground. Jewish opposition intensified until the
Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 CE.
They finally leveled Jerusalem in 139, rebuilt it as a pagan city, and
renamed the region Palestine in honor of Israel’s enemies, the
Philistines.
27
In Galilee, the legacy of paradise would feed a movement of
resistance, led by a rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. Like a tree planted by the water, his
movement took root, moistened by the waters of paradise and shaded by its trees
and vines. In the long genealogy of
paradise and its call to humanity to live justly and ethically, was was yet
another branch of this great, sheltering tree.
28
The Bible opens with Creation and with the Garden if Delight
in Genesis 1-2 and closes with the last words of Revelation 22, “Let everyone
who is thirsty, come. Let anyone who
wishes take the water of life as a gift.”
29
Jesus shows ethical
grace in action: love and generosity in community, care for all who have
need, healing of the sick, appreciation for life, confrontation with powers of
injustice and exploitation, and advocacy for freedom of the imprisoned.
In John’s Gospel he says, “I came that they may have life,
and have it abundantly: (10:10), and he speaks frequently of the promise of
“eternal life” to his disciples. The
Gospel defines three dimensions of this eternal life: knowing God; receiving
the one sent by God to proclaim abundant life to all; and loving each other as
he had loved them. Eternal life, in all
three meanings, relates to how life is lived on earth. The concrete acts of care Jesus has shown his
disciples are the key to eternal life.
By folling his example of love, the disciples enter eternal life
now. Eternal life is thus much more than
a hope for postmortem life: it is earthly existence grounded in ethical grace.
30-31
The most oft-told story in the Christian scriptures is the
miracle of loaves and fish . . .
The Roman emperors maintained their power by distributing
bread to the poor.
The early church framed its most important ritual meal as
this act of feeding. They called it the
Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, the meal that celebrated the bread of earth,
blessed by heaven, and shared in community.
John Dominic Crossan notes the significance of this practice: “ It is in food and drink offered equally to
everyone that the presence of God and Jesus is found. But food and drink are the material bases
of life, so the Lord’s Supper is political criticism and economic challenge as
well as sacred rite and liturgical worship.”
31-32
The sky is the most mysterious part of the cosmos, and it is
the most regular and reliable in its patterns.
The sun, moon, and stars make their rhythmic courses, marking the pace
of planting and harvesting and generating the flow of time within the space of
the great cosmos. The heavens bring
sweet water to earth in the rain and fill the mountain storehouses of snow that
feed the great rivers. Thus the heavens
were, for the ancients, the wellspring of spiritual power. They were not something out of this world,
but were the locus of life-giving power within this world, a realm of constancy
from which humanity received many blessings.
Their spiritual messengers visited those who awaited them in dreams and
visions, and their earthly emissaries brought illumination and life.
In the bread of heaven, God blessed ordinary food for
ordinary people.
33
He [Jesus] challenged this paternalistic system [Rome giving
bread to the poor] by offering food blessed by heaven and not by Rome.
The modern world has a tendency to divide the sacred and the
secular and to disconnect the spiritual from the physical.
34
In offering “that which comes down from heaven and gives
life to the world,” Jesus, like the Hebrew prophets, connected paradise,
abundant life, to the practical needs of human beings, who require a
sustainable and sustaining life free from economic exploitation and political
oppression.
This is why, at the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus addresses
Peter, a leader among the disciples, by saying, repeatedly, “If you love me,
feed my sheep.”
34-35
In first-century understandings, the logos (Word) was a divine being who coexisted with God and who
created all things in the kosmos
(world). Many branches of the Israelite
tree shared the concept of the divine Logos.
It emerged from the Hellenization process, the mingling of Greek ideas
with Hebrew and Persian cultures in West Asia and North Africa. Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50CE), a Jew who
used Platonic philosophy to interpret the books of Moses, associated God’s acts
of Creation with Logos.
In the Septuagint,
the Hebrew feminine noun Hokmah (Wisdom),
which was linked to Word, as the principle of Creation. John retells the Creation story found in
Proverbs 8 and fleshes out the connection between Logos and Sophia as synonyms
for creativity (Prov. 8:23-9:6,excerpts).
37
Without those who bring the Spirit of God into the world, in
the flesh, humanity will be bereft of the power of life, the breath of divine
Spirit that makes creation possible.
They said Christ, as the glory of the Word made flesh,
restored to humanity its original glory in Eden.
Baptism “in the name of Jesus” placed humanity in paradise
on earth and bestowed on his disciples the power of Logos/Sophia.
39
People sought to know the spirits that would help them and
avoid those that caused harm. The
Christian scriptures claimed that the Spirit of God, the creativity, wisdom,
and power of life, dwelled in human beings.
This Spirit descended sand took up residence in the flesh, inhabiting
this life in all its diversity, as different in manifestations as we are
different from one another. Jesus was
the sign of this reality. His very name
came to signify the power of life lived in the Spirit. To be baptized in his name was to possess the
same power.
39-40
John’s story of the wedding in Cana and its wine suggests
the vineyard of the Song of Songs (John 2:1-11). The drama begins when the wine runs out
before the festivities have ended.
Prompted to act by his mother and assisted by the household servants,
Jesus turns six jars of water into wine.
The wedding has already taken place offstage; the story focuses on the
guests enjoying the banquet. Until Jesus
acts, the existence of paradise, symbolized by wine, the fruit of the garden,
is uncertain. The miracle of water into
wine “revealed his glory” and demonstrated that, at the moment, the joys of the
garden flowed into the world. A chapter later,
John the Baptist testifies to his joy by speaking of Jesus as the bridegroom
and himself as the best man at the wedding: “The friend of the bridegroom, who
stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. The wedding has happened. Paradise
is here.
42-43
The story of the Samaritan woman.
Her theological disputation with Jesus is the longest in the
New Testament.
Her interrogation opens an extended conversation about
ordinary water and the living water of eternal life. Using a paradise image of the “well of living
water” first mentioned in the Song of Song 4:15, Jesus tells her he has living
water to offer: Those who drink . . .
She says she would be glad to have some of his water, but
rejoins that Samaritans have their own sacred mountain, different from Jews who
claim all people ought to worship in their temple in Jerusalem. With this brief comment, she alludes to the
biblical stories of fratricidal enmity amount the twelve tribes of Israel and
the civil war that split them north and south.
The ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel, the “Samaritans,” had
build their capital of Samaria on Mount Gerizim and the two southern tribes in
Judah, the “Jews,” had their capital in Jerusalem on Mount Zion. . . .
the Samaritans had long rejected the Jews and their temple. Her comment about their differences can be
seen as a test of Jesus’s loyalties to that temple. Jesus rejects it, identifying himself as a
friend of the Samaritans. He says that
he embraces all who worship God “in spirit and truth.” She concedes that her people awaited a
Messiah who would “proclaim all things to us.”
Jesus replies, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you” (John 4:24-26). In saying “I am,” ego eimi, Jesus invokes Moses, the
Samaritan’s most important religious figure.
When God called Moses from the burning bush, Moses asked for God’s name.
“I am who I am,” God replied (Exod. 3:14).
By echoing these words, Jesus announces to the Samaritan woman that he,
like Moses, possesses the power of the Name and embodies God’s life-giving
presence. He is the fulfillment of her
people’s hopes. This “I am” statement is
the first of many in John’s Gospel.
44
The Samaritan woman
would become one of the most popular figures in early Christian art.
Her boldness in
disputation suggests that one way paradise flows into the world as living water
is through those who raise questions
probe answers, and stay in the conversation.
45
The Gospels challenge systems of domination wherever they
manifested themselves, including gender relationships.
Jesus had women friends, shared communal meals that
transgressed social divisions, and refuted dogmatic applications of sacred
scripture. . . . these practices
threatened even the male disciples, who complained that Jesus spoke with women
and was too generous to outcasts.
46-47
Eternal
life consisted of knowing God and loving one another, in this life and in God’s
world. “I am not asking you to take them out of the world,” Jesus
says (John 17:15). Eternal life was possible here and now because the presence of divinity
in the world, come down from heaven to bless this earthly life.
They knew and saw God in this life now, as well as in the
life to come. They possessed the power
to resist unjust powers. They lived deeply rooted in holy ground, in
paradise.
47
Defiant of Rome to the end, Jesus spoke directly to Pontius
Pilate of the power he served. Pilate,
interrogating Jesus at his trial about his title of king of the Jews, asked,
“What have you done?” Jesus replied, “My kingdom is not from this world. . . .
Jesus’s use of “this world” distinguished imperial strategies of war,
torture, and state terrorism from an ethic of nonviolent resistance to
injustice. “This world” was the empire occupying Jerusalem. Jesus’s realm had a different source.
The world of Pilate was imperial violence; the world of
Jesus was life-giving truth.
48
. . . resistance to his authority, Pilate threatened that he
determined whether Jesus lived or died.
Jesus replied, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given
you from above . . . The Geek world translated here as ”power” signified
authority conferred from a source beyond the individual. . . . Pilate’s power came from Rome, not God. . . .
Imperial, totalitarian control lacked the power of truth, love,
generosity, or ethical grace.
When Jews accused him of blasphemy for claiming to be God’s
Son, he replied by quoting Psalm 82, using scripture sacred to the Jews to make
the case that God as many children, he was not unique (John 10:34-38).
49
Most early church teachers believed God worked through the
Spirit of wisdom, the flow of justice, the strength of truth, acts of love, and
the lure of beauty.
50
Jesus’s suffering on the cross and his corpse did not appear
in Christian art until the tenth century.
[The authors] were puzzled by this absence. After all, the Gospels commit significant
rucifixion was designed to destroy both bodies and identities . . .
In the slave rebellion of Spartacus that was defeated in 71 BCE, six
thousand crucified bodies rotted along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome.
51
The authors of the Passion narratives constructed an
innovative strategy to resist public torture and execution. They created a literature of disclosure and
wove the killing of Jesus into the fabric of a long history of violence against
those who spoke for justice. In placing
the opening of Psalm 22 on Jesus’s lips, they evoked the bitter lament of grief
and struggle that runs through the whole Psalm: My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Ps.22:1)
The Passion narratives broke silence about the shame and
fear that crucifixion instilled. To
lament was to claim powers that crucifixion was designed to destroy: dignity,
courage, love, creativity, ad truth-telling.
In telling his story, his community remembered his name and claimed the
death-defying power of saying his name aloud.
52
The purpose of such writing is assuredly not to valorize
victims, to praise their suffering as redemptive,
to reveal “true love” as submission and self-sacrifice, or to say that God requires
the passive acceptance of violence. . .
. The story of Jesus’s crucifixion, in
marked contrast, asserted that the answer to abusive power is the courageous
and decisive employment of the powers of life, to do deeds in Jesus’s name.
53
The Passion narratives defied the power of crucifixion to
silence Jesus’s movement. In doing so,
they placed before his movement the choice to tell the truth and live by
ethical grace. They said life is found
in surviving the worst a community can imagine, in lamenting the consequences
of imperialism, and in holding fast to the core goodness of this world, blessed
by divine justice and abundant life.
The final disclosure of paradise in John comes with the
Resurrection. Galgotha . . . had a
garden. . . . two of Jesus’s secret
Jewish followers, one of whom was Nicodemus, took his body to a new tomb and
buried him . . . Mary found two angels in the tomb instead of a body. Jesus appeared to her in the garden at dawn .
. .
54
The Resurrection appearances in all four Gospels have the
quality of visions and dreams, the way people are surprised by apparitions of
the departed.
The Resurrection was the gift of persistent love, stronger
that death: “life in his name” (John 20:31).
It was not, however, a panacea or a final solution to life’s struggles
and conflicts. It did not quell conflict
within the community of Jesus.
54-55
In Luke 23:43, when Jesus said to the thief hanging next to
him on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise,” Christian believed
he meant it. They understood that in
extremities of repression and pain, “Many waters cannot quench love, neither
can floods drown it . . . for love is strong as death” (Song of Sol
8:7,6). Rage, protest, and lamentation
carried the energy of this power, as did acts of compassion, generosity, and
justice. Those who loved him, comforted
by the ancient words of scripture, the choreography of well-knows rituals, and
the prayers of many, resided with Jesus in paradise, the space of resistance to
the death-dealing powers of Rome and its many legions.
In the cross-cultural brew that produced early Christianity,
the assurance of paradise was an inebriating grace, a life-giving recipe drawn
from many ancient sources. . . . When Christians gathered to share of the
bread of heaven, partaking in the Eucharist feast, they entered the most
concentrated form of paradise on earth, where living and dead communed with the
risen Christ, and the banquet of abundance was spread for all. From feasting in paradise, they took strength
to embody ethical grace in the
world, the world that God so generously loved.
56
. . . Jesus[,] the pioneer and perfecter of our faith . . .
has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
(parts of) Hebrews 12:1-3
The dead and the living remain connected. In their retelling, the stories were shaped
and reshaped by those who told them, and who tell them still.
Where and how the dead live on can be experienced in many
ways. The book of Hebrews pictured the
assembly of departed saints as a “great cloud of witnesses” who surround the
living.
57
You have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and
to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the
judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to
Jesus. (Heb. 12:22-23) The idea that the righteous live on after death and inhabit
a realm from which they could visit the living is an ancient one. In testifying to the presence of the risen Christ,
Christians reflected a mix of ideas about the realm of the dead that emerged
from the cultures that influenced the Hebrew Bible, as well as from Greek and
Roman traditions. Visitations from the
dead were a familiar experience, as they continue to be for many today. The book of I Enoch, a Jewish apocryphal text composed
during the third to first centuries BCE, described the abode of the righteous
as a version of Eden, a garden of delight and abundance located on the
earth. There, the first-century
Testament of Abraham said, the dead rested “where there is no toil, no sadness
no sighing, but peace and joy and endless life.”
58-59
By the third century, the Christian realm of the dead had
become a place of beauty and peace. The
departed rested close by in a region of earthly paradise, a mysterious
dimension of this world with green meadows, streams, and fragrant flowers and
fruits. The dead could rest because
Satan could not enter, and they no longer had to wrestle with sin, evil, or
oppression. They did not, however, rest
so far away that they could not visit the living to give advice, comfort, or
guidance. In their realm of paradise,
resurrected saints were restored to the divine presence and gained spiritual
power to assist the living. . . . The living could feast with them in sacred
meals and could experience their presence in dreams and visions.
59
Memorial feasts with the dead were common and popular. The meals were usually held in the evening,
often outdoors under covered arbors near the entrance to tombs. Participants spread tables with special foods
and wine and invited the dead to join the meal.
Small stone chairs have survived on which a lighted candle
would be placed to signify the presence of the dead.
Following such banquets, it was traditional to distribute
food or coins to the poor, extending the grace of the feast to benefit others.
In the fourth century, some Christian bishops began to
preach against these banquets, apparently appalled that the living indulged
with too much enthusiasm on occasion.
Christians held memorial feasts with the dead in the
catacombs outside of Rome. Romans
required that Jews and Christians inter their dead outside the walls of the
city, where areas of soft underground tufa rock lent itself to the digging of
burial caverns. Most pagans cremated
their dead, though some also began burying them around the second century.
60
To keep the population from shrinking and undermining the
financial base of the empire, every woman needed to have at least five children
before she died. Rome penalized citizens
who did not marry and bear as many children as possible.
The catacombs were religiously diverse burial sites,
reflecting close relationships among Jews, Christians, and pagans. Catacomb art contains no images related to judgment and hell.
60-61
In the third century, empire-wide persecutions of Christians
erupted several times. The first
identifiably Christian images appear around the same time in the
catacombs. . . . Though the catacombs were not secret
gathering places, many catacomb images depict biblical stories about resistance
to empires.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are shown standing in a
fiery furnace without being burned.
These three youths defied imperial coercion successfully because of
diine protection (Dan. 3:12-97). [other
stories: Daniel and the lions, Susanna, and Jonah] The catacombs include no images of Jesus’s crucifixion, but
they show his birth. . . . the three
magi is the most commonly depicted. The
Gospel of Matthew said they were from the east, the direction of paradise. They were, by legend, Persian astrologers and
magicians.
62
Jesus appears in the catacomb images as a miracle worker and
healer. He and Moses are both shown
using a magic wand and performing water miracles.
Origen of Alexandria (c.185-c.254), a Greek theologian born
inEgypt, said that the Egyptians maligned Moses as a magician and that the
Romans slandered Jesus Christ on similar charges.
63
Most
often, Jesus has the l
look of a shepherd. He occasionally milks a sheep. Someimes he even wears a puffy hat, like the
magi. He is often young and beadles with
long hair, quite at odds with the cropped, mature, masculine look of an
emperor.
63-64
The attentive, personal care of a shepherd differed from the
remote imperial model of military control and delegated political
authority. Church leaders were expected
to model themselves on the shepherd, the bishop’s staff is a shepherd’s
crook. They saw to the care of the sick,
ministered to those in prison, offered hospitality to strangers, managed
commonly held resources and distributed them to the poor and elderly, and
settled disputes and conflicts. In
addition, they taught the basic ideas of the faith, explained the stories in
the scriptures, prophesied, initiated converts, and organized community
participation in the rituals. By the
third century, these community practices of leadership and care created a
Christian social welfare network in cities throughout the empire.
The success of the church’s system of networked communities
increasingly threatened the empire’s bread and circuses, strategies of welfare
and violent entertainment designed to pacify the unruly masses. Rome responded to the threats by killing
Christian leaders, which led to speculation about who or what survived death in
the afterlife. Two North Africans of the
early third century, one Latin and one Greek, offered divergent explanations. Tertullian
of Carthage (c.160-225). One of the earliest Latin theologians of the
church, highly valued the body and argued that paradise was found in the
material life of Creation. Death would
bring an even greater union of flesh and spirit, which the cycles of renewal in
nature already revealed. To be restored
to paradise after death required a resurrection of flesh and spirit, since
there could be no residence in paradise without a body.
64-65
Origen of Alexandria, who was a neo-Platonist, argued that
spiritual power lay in the soul’s immateriality. As was typical in Roman society, he saw the
body as a lesser reality in need of discipline and control by
civilization. He understood paradise as
a spiritual journey of the soul to God, in which material existence would be
left behind. He described martyrdom as
liberation from the body, “Bring wild
beasts, bring crosses, bring fire, bring tortures. I know that as soon as I die, I come forth
from the body, I rest with Christ.”
65
Though Tertullian and Origen held contrasting views of
resurrection, they affirmed that persecution could not sever the connection
between the living and the dead. “[The deceased are] as it were present and
reclining at the banquet held for them,”
Tertullian wrote. Origen pictured
the dead joining with the living whenever Christians gathered for worship. In fact, the dead would be the first to
arrive: “Souls come more rapidly than living persons to the places of
worship.” The living received the
blessing of paradise when the dead visited them.
The word “martyr” literally means witness.
66
Early Christians did not regard martyrs as victims, but as
people who manifested the power of God.
Christian who resisted Rome unto death were actually few and
far between.
67
As a cosmopolitan movement, Christianity benefited from the
empire’s infrastructures. [i.e. social
stability in cities, protection from invasions in towns near frontiers,
imperial system of roads]
The story of Perpetua [who] was killed on March 7 in the
year 203 in Carthage, Tunisia.
69
Elements of Perpetua’s dream echo the Christian ritual of
baptism, in which the newly baptized were given white robes and welcomed into
earthly paradise in their first Eucharist feast.
The paradise of the dead existed simultaneously with this
life, and it could be accessed through rituals and altered states of
consciousness.
70
Their visions [Perpetua’s and Saturus’s] traversed the
permeable boundaries between the paradise of the living and of the
departed. The two experienced a world
that already existed, where beloved friends awaited their arrival.
71-72
Perpetua and her community may have belonged to the New Prophecy movement. Perpetua received cheese from the shepherd in her vision
of paradise, and opponents of New Prophecy groups pejoratively called them
“bread and cheesers” because they used cheese in their Eucharist. Also called Montanists, they claimed legitimacy through their legacies of
martyrs and their apocalyptic visions of a transformed world that would descend
from the heavens. The New Prophecy was
led by the women Priscilla and Maxmilla, prophets and estatic visionariew, and
by the man Montanus. The movement
stressed ecstatic visions of the Holy Spirit speaking through their prophets
and practicing fasting and chastity.
The movement endured until around the fifth century. Tertullian may have been the editor of the Perpetua story,
he was probably in Carthage at the time of the executions. A master polemicist and satirist, Tertullian
maintained an uncompromising support of martyrdom and ridiculed Rome for persecuting
Christians.
If the Tiber rises so high it floods the
walls, or the Nile so low it doesn’t flood the fields, if the earth opens, or
the heavens don’t, if there is famine, if there is plague, instantly the howl
goes up, “The Christians to the lion!”
What, all of them? To a single lion.?
73
[Tertullian’s] turn to Christianity was accompanied by
purist moral sensibilities and his sharp, ironic wit. Sometimes, in his most outrageous writings,
one easily imagines him winking at the reader.
He is notorious for calling women the “gateway of the devil” and
proposing the term “original sin.” Tertullian
eventually turned his acid polemics and wit against other Christian leaders,
who he thought compromised with the empire too much.
Persecuted Christians faced a dramatic choice of life or
death: hold fast to the power “not of this world” and dwell in paradise, or
deny it and succumb to the unjust and oppressive power of Rome, losing paradise
here and paradise beyond the grave. The New Prophecy martyrs had clear
apocalyptic expectations about the transformation of the world, but their
vision of change differed from early Christianity’s most famous version of
apocalypticism, the book of Revelation.
Revelations envisions the total destruction of the earth, rather than
the descent of heavenly power into a beloved place.
“Apocalypse” means unveiling. Revelation unveiled the principalities and
powers of oikoumene, the household of
Rome, and described their destruction.
The text exposed how empires inflate appearances of power by
fomenting fear and terrorizing people into submission. The author’s outrage is worthy of Amos. Like the prophets, it too proclaimed that the
savage bloodletting, environmental catastrophes, and cataclysmic horrors of
empires carried the seeds of their own destruction.
[Revelation] disguised the past as the future, making
memory, the destruction of Babylonia, into a foretelling, as if to say history
was fated to repeat itself. . . . Revelation’s coded message left open
speculation about what would be destroyed.
. . . [Its] visions of a final
cosmic battle of good against evil and the creation of a new heaven and earth
came to dominate later Christian readings of the future. . . . [Scripts
about the end of the world] fed what theologian Catherine Keller calls the
West’s “apocalyptic habit,” the predilection to see the impending end of
history in one’s own time and to act it out.
Mesmerized by stark, apocalyptic either/or choices in a complex world,
people drive toward solutions that seek salvation
through destruction.
74-75
After decades of internal turmoil and struggle against Roman
oppression, Jews rose up in revolt in 66-70
CE. Rome responded with massive
force, sending troops into Jerusalem to raze its temple. Three years later at Masada, a fortress on a
mesa along the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea, a thousand Jewish resisters
and their families were the last holdouts against the empire. Their situation hopeless, they thought death
at their own hands to be preferable to capture.
. . . Jews organized a second revolt in 139 CE. . . .
DeDio’sRoman History reported
the destruction of “50 Jewish fortresses, 985 villages and the death in battle alone of 580,000 Jewish
men.” . . . The book of Revelation was probably written
around this time.
In Revelation, Babylonia represents the Roman Empire, just
as it does in the catacomb depictions of stories from the book of Daniel. The whore of Babylon, its corrupt capital
city, symbolizes not Rome bu Jerusalem.
Harlotry was used by the Hebrew prophets as a metaphor for apostasy. Pagan Rome was not an apostate city, but
Herod’s Jerusalem was. The Author of
Revelation depicted scenes of destruction worthy of what Rome did to Jerusalem
when its legion devastated the city in 139 CE…
He told his people to purify themselves and their communities, to trust
in God, and to await the arrival of a new heaven and new earth. Jerusalem was to blame for her own
destruction. What else was left to hope
for but an entirely new beginning?
75-76
The author of Revelation drew on Ezekiel’s visions in
constructing his prophecy. He was
steeped in the prophet’s images of mythical beasts and cosmic wonders, and he
added his own fantastic nightmares, inspired by Zoroastrian images of heaven
and, especially, hell.
There failings sounded almost moders. They were to stop consuming poisonous foods
and harming themselves. They were to
reject the poverty of riches, the hollowness of soulless consumerism. Instead of gazing inward, they were to wake
up and pay attention to what was happening in the world.
The author told his listeners to hold fast in times of
trial, to uphold truth, and to overcome self-satishied mediocrity and lukewarm
equivocating. He told the church at
Ephesus, hardworking and patient, that its intolerance of evildoers had stolen
its capacity to love. If it repented and
found its love, the author promised, “To everyone who conquers I will give
permission to eat from the tree of life
that is in the paradise of God.” (Rev. 2:7).
77
With his images of Jezeel and the whore of Babylon, the
writer of Revelation perpetuated the use of female promiscuity as a symbol for
religious apostasy, reinforcing the mandate of violence against women . . .
Revelation’s image of a wrathful, punishing God was a major
reason it was frequently left behind when Christians assembled lists of their
sacred books. It had difficulty being included in the Christian canon and has
remained controversial since. Yet it
also criticized its own fantasy of destruction.
Sometimes, when it spoke of victory, it advocated a power different from
the violence used in “this world,” a power that scholar Barbara Rossing
describes as “lamb power.” The power was
what Jesus said was not of “this world,” and it was the power of the enthroned
lamb in paradise
79
Revelation asks its readers to believe that the murderous
powers of war and catastrophe are instruments of good when wielded by the
heavenly opponents of apostasy. Its idol
is the sheer power of destruction, which dissolves moral distenctions between
good and evil, between the legions of Satan and the forces of God. Alfred North Whiehead noted, “The church gave unto God the
attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.” The idea of an omnipotent God who is not
accountable to moral questions but defines his own morality is still common in
Christian circles today. In the face of
the last two centuries of genocide, natural disasters, wars, and accumulations of
weapons of mass destruction, an increasing number of religious people of
conscience have concluded that an omnipotent God is neither good nor
moral. If the power of God is no
different from Satan, where is goodness to be found?
Revelation
has more words devoted to paradise than does any other text in the
scriptures. But
Revelation’s paradise is too thin and meager to carry the weight of its
fury. In being obsessed with the dualism
of good and evil and galvanizing its attention on empire, it closes the door,
finally, on any possibility of forgiveness, and it envisions a denatures new
Jerusalem that is out of this world. It
loses its grounding in the world as a gift of God. Once its volcanic heat is blown, it can only
offer a crystalline, cold comfort. It
promises a glittering antiworld, a place absent meadows, night, dreams,
animals, companionship, and pleasure.
Its paradise resembles Doris Lessing’s description of hell in a locked
psychiatric word, the light are on all the time, and nowhere can one find
tender mercies or the warmth of love.
80
. . . .
[E]mperor Diocletian took control of the
empire in 284, and for nineteen years he worked to save it from a century of
runaway inflation and bankruptcy, a military stretched too thin, civil wars,
urban riots, plagues, invasions, and the dropout members of the ruling and
wealthy classes . . .
During the third century of disasters and failed emperors,
Christian churches formed regional systems with presbyters and deacons, headed
by a bishop, with the bishop of the largest city leading the region. By the middle of the third century, Rome had
155 priests, and North Africa had more than ninety bishops. . . .
Christians renounced personal wealth and status by donating their
holdings to the community and sharing them in common, a practice described in
the book of Acts and letters of Paul. By
the mid-third century, the church in Rome was reported to be supporting about
fifteen hundred widows, orphans, elderly men, shipwrecked sailors, miners,
prisoners, and sick people.
80-81
In 303, Diocletian turned his attention to Christianity and
issued a series of bans against it. He
began by confiscating property and destroying churches. . . .
His ten-year, empirewide persecution was the worst in the church’s
history and is often called the Great
Persecution.
81-82
There are worse things than dying. One is having to live with the knowledge that
you, by your own choice, have surrendered to forces you abhor and been
complicit in the destruction of what you most love. To submit to Rome’s demands was, for many, a
different kind of heath sentence.
Apostate leaders severed their connection to the Spirit, relinquished
their freedom and moral agency, and abandoned their community.
Christian cherished the remains of martyr’s bodies, holding
to tatters of cloth and fragments of bone as talismans of life-giving power. They interred [the bones] in the catacombs or
build small octagonal or round building to hold the remains of martyr near
where they died. Eventually, beautiful
reliquaries were crafted to hold the saint’s relics. Churches were built on or next to the martyria,
and the lives of martyrs in paradise were depicted on the walls in vivid
mosaics. Such places became major
pilgrimage sites, where the faithful could come and experience the power of the
Spirit and gain access to energies of resistance, healing, and life. . . . “To come to the tomb of a major saint .
. . was to breathe in a little of the healing air of Paradise.” -Peter Brown
Resistance cannot be measured by one life or one lifetime
alone. It requires solidarity across the
generations. In our time,the righteous
dead call us to keep the faith . . .
83
[from a contemporary memorial prayer:] “Those who lived
before us, who struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us, have not
melted into the dust, and have not disappeared.
They are with us still.” Their
devotion to life is a sustaining inheritance.
When we choose to hold fast to love as they did, we enter withy them
into paradise, now.
84
Theodore of Euchaita, a Christian, was conscripted into the
Roman army in 306. He refused to worship
the emperor and was burned at the take for it.
“I have been, am, and shall be with my Christ.”
85
Emperors Constantine (306-337) and Licinius (308-324),
issued the Edict of Milan in 313,
which decriminalized Christianity and established religious tolerance. . . .
After the edict, church leaders responded to Christianity’s favored
status in several ways. They
accommodated imperial demands; they struggled to hold a power base separate
from the empire; and they used their newfound clout to fight their Jewish and
pagan opponents. Imperial favor lasted
barely a half-century. Constantine’s
nephew Julian, who took power in 361 and was slain in battle in 363, briefly
reinstated paganism, patronized Judaism, and persecuted Christians. His was the last attempt to reclaim the old
pagan Rome. . . . Theodosian Codes of 429-438 CE transformed
some church cannons, passed at councils of bishops, into Roman civil laws.
In the midst of this century of changing fortunes, Christian
leaders produced an extensive literature about paradise. They advanced ideas and practices already
developed over three previous centuries of resistance to imperialism, and they
forged new patterns of dissidence. They
also accepted imperial patronage, which expanded their capacities to care for
the sick and needy and funded the building of churches filled with lush visual
environment of paradise. The church
maintained its tensions with empire by insisting that paradise in this world
was most concretely realized in the church nd that Jesus Christ incarnated God
and returned humanity to paradise.
86
Artists and architects took the iconography of the martyr’s
shrines and developed it into large-scale public worship spaces. Most artwork from the fourth century has been
lost, but mosaics from the fifth and sixth centuries have survived in Ravenna, Italy . . .
As soon as the congregants entered ancient churches, they
stood in a three-tiered sacred cosmos. A
starry night sky or multihued clouds represented the first tier, the heavens;
from this mysterious realm, the right hand of God emerged to bless the world,
and celestial beings hovered in golden skies.
The second tier was an intermediary space over which the living Christ
presided. The departed saints stood with
him in the meadows of paradise and visited to bless the living. The third tier was the floor of the church
where worshippers stood in God’s garden on earth.
. . . the sacred cosmos in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia
in Ravenna [was] a small, cross-shaped building. Built around 430 as a martyrium commemorating
St. Lawrence, the interior central dome displays a midnight blue sky that teems
with gold stars. A simple Latin cross
marks the center apex of the sky, and the winged creatures of Ezekiel’s
heavenly vision, a lion, ox, eagle, and man, emerge from red and white clouds
in the corners of the dome.
87
Ancient visitors to this shrine would have stood . . . one
level below on the stone floor looking up at the canopy of the heavens, and
around at the paradise that was home to Christ and the departed saints.
In this three-tiered universe, paradise had both a “here”
and “not here” quality. Christians
taught that paradise had always been
here on earth. Sin had once closed
its portals, but Jesus Christ had reopened them for the living. While Christians could taste, see, and feel
the traces of it in ordinary life, they arrived most fully in paradise in community worship. With its art and building, the church created
a space that united the living on earth with the heavenly beings and departed
saints, who surrounded and blessed the living.
. . . touch the heavens at every Eucharist. In that holy ritual, the community stood
within the sacred cosmos, blessed by the fruits of the earth and the power of
the saints.
Early church sensibilities about
salvation were oriented to space, to a world of many dimensions, blessed by the
all-permeating Spirit. However, the modern Western
religious consciousness imagines salvation almost entirely in temporal terms.
Theologians speak of sacred and profane time, of salvation history, and of
hope. They interpret the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from paradise as the beginning of salvation history: the world
runs along a hard arrow of time, beginning with human sin and culminating in a
final New Age, kingdom of God, Second Coming, or New Heaven and Earth. Humanity lives “between the times,” awaiting a future yet to be consummated. Christ will return to fulfill God’s promise
of salvation, which the faithful will receive after death, after God destroys
this evil world, or after God creates a just world and has beaten all swords
into plowshares. While these
future-oriented themes are present among early Christian ideas, they did not
delay salvation until after death or in an indefinite future time. They pictured salvation as the landscape of
paradise, an environment full of life that was entered here and now through the
church.
Salvation in paradise was an experience and a place, as well
as work yet to be completed. The early
church understood that paradise encompassed many dimensions, material and
spiritual, awaiting and fulfilled. . .
. Through such wisdom, Christians
sought to live joyfully and enact justice, nonviolence, and love.
89
. . . even in a conflict-ridden, difficult world, paradise
existed on the earth. . . .
Early on, teacher spoke of the church itself as the renewed
paradise of God. Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon exhorted those who might be misled by
unsound, heretical ideas . . .
Irenaeus did not blame Adam and Eve for sinning and
threatening human destiny. He thought
they were like naïve children who made a huge mistake. . . .
90
Theophilus
of Antioch, another theologian of the second century, taught that
humanity was not intrinsically good or evil but had the freedom to become
divine. To assist humanity with this
possibility, Gd gave Adam and Eve a place to learn: . . .
Origen
of Alexandria agreed that the church offered
paradise in some form in this life and that Eden existed somewhere as a real
place. However, as a neo-Platonist, he
disliked literal interpretations of paradise:
. . . the world of ideas was
superior to material life . . . the soul preexisted the body. Humanity would ultimately join with the world
soul, God, from which it had descended into this life.
Origen’s comtemporary, Cyprian
(c. 200-258), a bishop of Carthage
martyred in the same persecution that killed Lawrence, taught that the church
was the paradisus com fructus pomorum (the
garden with abundant fruit) described in the Song of Songs and the place of
miraculous waters in the desert . .
. These metaphors affirmed that the
church provided both material and spiritual nourishment.
The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate versions of Genesis
supported material understandings of the earth as paradise.
91
Hippolytus
of Rome (c. 170-c. 236) observed . . . that paradise is not heavenly
but part of heaven.
Many theologians speculated about how much paradise infused
this life and in what ways it was known.
Some placed it on top of a remote mountain in Mesopotamia, since the
Tigris and Euphrates flowed from there.
Attempts to identify the other two rivers, the Gihon and Pishon, shifted
the placement. The Gihon was usually the
Nile, but the Pishon could be the Ganges, the Danube, or even the Arabian
Sea. Those who preferred the Ganges
placed paradise east of India, somewhere off the coast of China. . . .
Basil the Great (c. 330-379)
concluded that remnants of paradise existed on the heights of virtually any
mountain.
Early church discussions of paradise tended to be pastoral,
poetic, and meandering.
92
Whether or not Adam and Eve had sex in Eden was disputed,
most though not, but Augustine insisted
they did, but without lust.
Early Christian theologians incorporated Greek and Roman
ideas into their musings about paradise.
Hesiod described a golden age
when humanity “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from
toil and grief.” . . . Homer’s
Odyssey
told of a great orchard island with two abundant springs. . . .Virgil, Ovid, and Horace were
among other writers who described a golden past, Happy Isles, or other places
in which, in their native state, human beings “kept faith and did the right.”
The cross-cultural, multireligious origins of paradise were
enough to make pagans accuse Christians of stealing their ideas. . . . Justin
Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) justified these influences by claiming that Homer borrowed his ideas of paradise
from Moses, the designated author of
Genesis. Philo of Alexandria, . . . mounted a similar defense in the first
century about the relationship of Plato and Moses.
93
. . . fourth-century theologians, Ephrem, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, said it was both a
real place on earth and an allegory for human spiritual development.
Ephrem
the Syrian (c. 306-373), a poet, teacher, and lay
ascetic from Nisibis, Suria, was the
greatest writer of his century on paradise.
Nisibis, located in conflicted borderlands between the Roman and Persian
empires, was a major crossroads that attracted Asian, African, and European
residents . . .
[Ephrem] wrote poems that argued against the Manicheans, who promised release for
souls trapped in the earthly “realm of darkness.” Their prophet Mani
taught that souls could merge after death into the “paradise of light” by
practicing a strict asceticism during this life. Though he was a voluntary lay ascetic who had
taken a vow of celibacy, Ephrem affirmed the body and sex.
[parts of] Genesis 1-2:
. . . the story of Paradise . . .
lifted me up and transported me from the bosom of the Book to the bosom of
Paradise.
95
Ephrem’s most extensive reflections on paradise were
recorded in his Hymns on Paradise, a
book comprising fifteen long poems. In
these poems, Ephrem spoke of paradise as a landscape that called humanity to
live ethical, just, and joyous lives and to journey toward God. He pictured paradise as a great cosmic
mountain that encompassed the earth and the ocean. “Gloriously entwined is the wreath of
Paradise that encircles the whole of creation.”
The baptized entered paradise now and lived within the embrace of this
mountain. Its foothills were the home of
the repentant; its slopes housed the just.
Its higher regions, past the tree of knowledge, were the abode of the
glorious, the children of light. The
summit, beyond the tree of life, was the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the
shining presence of God. From these
heights, “Divinity flew down to draw humanity up.” The descent of Christ and the ascent of
humanity took place on the holy mountain of paradise. This exchange restored humanity to Eden.
All dimensions of life, heart, mind, soul, and strength,
belonged in paradise. In Ephrem’s
symbolism, different zones of the mountain also represented dimensions of human
existence. The base was the body; the
rising slopes were the soul, the spirit, and the intellect; and the summit was
humanity’s divine nature. Ephrem used
erotic images from the Song of Songs to describe these zones. The delights of the garden filled the lowest
regions; the summit was the bridal chamber.
In the church, humanity gained access to all the zones of paradise and
its inebriating pleasures: . . .
96
Born into a Christian family during the Great Persecution,
[Ephrem’s] life was marked by the wars of Rome and Persia. When Constantine conquered the eastern half
of the Roman Empire in 324, the Christians in Nisibis, which was located on the
easternmost edge of the empire, enjoyed security for a time. However, peace was short-lived. Beginning in 335, King Shapur II of Persia
began a long campaign to reconquer Mesopotamia.
In the period 337-350, Shapur besieged the city . . . The inhabitants resisted the attack and
rebuilt their city.
In 361, the emperor Julian, Constantine’s pagan nephew,
seized power and tried once again to suppress Christianity.
97-98
After the fall of Nisibis, Ephrem made a new life in exile
in Edessa, a city known as the “Athens of the East.” . . . When a famine struck Edessa in 372,
leaders of the city’s church asked Ephrem to lead the effort to alleviate
it. His writings and actions during this
famine and the epidemics that followed it demonstrate his understanding of what
living in paradise required. Ephrem
organized food distribution and set up hospitals to care for the sick. He enlisted the cooperation of the healthy to
maintain the community and extended the church’s care to the entire city. His poetry and hymns on paradise show us that
he encouraged those under his care to savor the mystery of the goodness of life
until their last breath[.]
99
For Ephrem, paradise was a reality that infused the church
through works of love and rituals of sensual joy. He perceived proofs of paradise in
communities that struggled to live with ethical grace: to care for one another,
to live nonviolently and wisely, to resistempires when necessary, and to
appreciate the beauties and pleasures of ordinary life. Though paradise was only partially realized
in the church it could still be tasted and experienced there.
The Eastern church affectionatelycalls [Ephrem] still, the Songbird of Paradise.”
99-100
Ambrose of Milan (c. 3390-397) [was] trained in law, [and]
became governor of Liguria and Emilia in 370. . . In 374, . . . Ambrose was drafted to be the
bishop of Milan, which made him the emperor’s bishop. Ambrose had to be
baptized, ordained, and consecrated in eight days; this was after the community
caught him trying to leave town. Ambrose
commented that his lack of education in theology required him to teach in the
morning what he had learned overnight.
Brose wrote an extensive commentary on Genesis 2-3 that he
called Paradise. . . . [He] still could not pin down where and
what paradise was exactly. He explained
that even Paul, who was “caught up in paradise,” could not remember if he
experienced paradise “in or out of the body” (2 Cor. 12:2-4).
. . . paradise was . . . the spiritual state of a “fertile
soul” who produced “good fruits.” He
described each of the four rivers of Paradise as flowing through geographical
regions of the earth such as India and Ethiopia, but at the same time the Great River, or fount of paradise, was
Jesus Christ, or Wisdom.
101
After Ambrose established a power base of churches in
northern Italy, he had the audacity and political acumen in 390 to
excommunicate the Roman emperor Theodosius, who had ordered a massacre in
Thessalonica . . . Ambrose, in keeping
with the church’s teaching that shedding human blood was a sin, forbade the
emperor from participating in the Eucharist until he had performed sufficient
penance.
Theodosius accepted the discipline of his bishop and his
Christian community . . .
102
At the time of the emperor’s penance, Augustine was in Milan
. . .
In compelling the repentance of the emperor for shedding
human blood, Ambrose showed the extent to which a bishop of the church had
authority over a baptized emperor, and he demonstrated that life in paradise
had ethical requirements that could call even an emperor’s behavior into
question
102-103
Augustine (354-430) . . . converted to Christianity largely
because of Ambrose . . . His mother,
Monica, had attempted to raise him in the Christian faith, but he found it
simple and inadequate. . . . he became a
Manichaean dualist and rejected the Jewish scriptures. . . . at the age of thirty he achieved one of
the highest academic positions in the Latin world: teacher to the imperial
court in Milan. . . . Ambrose baptized him in 387. . . . rather than marry the wealthy young
girl whom Monica selected for him, he chose celibacy and the priesthood. . . . served as the bishop of Hippo, about
sixty miles west of Carthage, from 395 to the end of his long life. . . . Augustine rejected the idea that the
world was the “displeasing” product of an evil source hostile to God.
Augustine turned to Creation and paradise as alternatives .
. . He concluded his Confessions with an extended meditation
on the seven days of Creation. The
Spirit had breathed over the depths of humanity’s fallen state and the voice of
God had called, “Let there be light.” .
. . “Displeased with our darkness, we
turned unto Thee, and there was light”
Augustine associated the light of Creation with deeds of justice and
mercy: . . .
104
Augustine called the world “a smiling place.” He suggested that “paradise” had multiple,
interconnected meanings: The word
“paradise” properly means any wooded place, but figuratively it can also be
used for any spiritual region, . . . ( . . . wonderfully and singularly
sublime), . . .joy springing from a good conscience within man himself is
Paradise. Hence the Church also, in the
saints who live temperately and justly and devoutly, is rightly called
Paradise, vigorous as it is with an abundance of graces and with pure delights.
The church responded to Creation with praise and joy and
sought to yield fruits of love, justice, and compassion.
When the Vandals sacked Rome in 410 . . . Augustine wrote The City of God to distinguish the “city
of the world,” Rome, from the “city of God,” the church. In this book, which many consider his
greatest, Augustine again affirmed paradise as a real place on the earth, and
also as an allegory for the church’s mission in the world:
105
Paradise is the Church, as it is called in the [Song of
Songs]; the four rivers of Paradise are the four gospels; the fruit-trees the saints,
and the fruit their work; the tree of life is the holy of holies, Christ; the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the will’s free choice.
106
. . . the early church, before and after Constantine, taught
that paradise was a place, a way of life, even an ecosystem. The church as a community that dispensed “the
medicine of life” nourished human life in paradise. The church was a concentration of paradise, a
place where the strengths, weakness, needs, and contributions of each member
could complement the others. Their life
in paradise was a shared accomplishment in which the exercise of human powers
and the imperatives of human need worked together to save and sustain life for
all members together. People could come
to see the value of their own lives and learn that their actions mattered to
others, to see power in a personal sense of agency. They could learn to negotiate power and its
responsible uses for the good of the whole.
Talents and gifts could bless many.
Heavy burdens and difficulties that might have crushed individuals could
instead be borne on the shoulders of many.
No form of governance and no society can thrive without this
interstitial zone of human contact and interaction, what the ancient church
called the body of Christ, the church of the Holy Spirit, the assembly of
saints, and paradise on earth.
107-108
[Constantine] invited fifteen hundred bishops to his summer
palace in Nicaea, Anatolia, in 325, all expenses paid, only about three hundred
attended. . . . [He] wanted bishops at the Council of Nicaea
to settle disputes about the nature of the divinity of Jesus Christ. . . .
Was he “subordinate” to God (homo-i-iota)
or “of the same substance” as God (homo-ousios)? That I,
the iota, raised important issues not just for Christ’s identity and power, but
for the identity and power of baptized Christians who became partakers of
Christ’s divinity. [Constantine] wanted
a unified church so it could more efficiently serve the empire. . . .
Roman imperial practices viewed the emperor as a son of God who was
divinized after death (or occasionally during his lifetime).
. . . the bishops satisfied Constantine’s demand for
agreement, . . . Christ was “of the same substance” as
God, . . . they gave themselves and every baptized Christian
who shared in Christ’s divinity greater spiritual power and authority than the
unbaptized emperor Constantine.
The anti-iota stance would later be called orthodox or
Nicene Christianity.
109
The Nicene Christ held a tension between the church and imperial
domination and established a power struggle between them.
The pro-iota position was associated with the Alexandrian
presbyter Arius (250-336) and came to be called Arianism after it lost the
vote. Arius . . . regarded Jesus as
divine, but saw him as a “creature” descended from God, not a creator alongside
of God. He held to a strong monotheism,
and his teachings emphasized that Christ shared humanity’s creaturely struggles
and difficulties.
110
The controversy over Nicaea would rage for another century .
. .
THE
GOOD SHEPHERD AND CAESAR
In the earliest surviving apse image of Christ, Rome’s
early-fifth-century St. Pudenziana Church, Christ sat on a throne of Jupiter, a
sign that he was higher than Caesar. His
apostles were dressed in togas and seated like a council of gods at a time when
not even senators were allowed to sit in the presence of the emperor. Christ held a book, not a scepter. Above this scene hovers a large, golden,
jeweled cross. The bishop’s chair would
have been positioned directly under the image of Christ to indicate the
divinity of the church as Christ’s living body.
[Thomas Mathews,] “[T]he victory over Arianism was a
vindication of the freedom of the Church from imperial control”
By the fifth and sixth centuries, Christians had formed a
full-blown iconography that placed worshipping Christians in the sacred space
of paradise, presided over by the living Christ.
[The authors] saw this iconography for [themselves] when
[they] visited the Church of St. Vitale
in Ravenna, consecrated in 547.
. . . the Galla Placidia mausoleum, [was] located across the
yard and built about a century before St. Vitale.
Blue globes, like the one Christ sat on [his “enormous
orb”], appeared frequently in Roman imperial art, usually as a small orb held
in the hand of an emperor. The globelike
orb symbolized Roman control of the known world.
113-114
[Continuing description of the apse mosaic at St. Vitale in
Ravenna] All around Moses, . . .
little bushes blazed. All earth
was holy ground, illumined by the Spirit.
Every ritual in the church took place in this cosmos, the image of
paradise in this world. Fourth-century
rabbis taught that the presence of God, the Shekinah,
had departed from the earth when Adam and Eve sinned, rising higher and higher
with the tragedies of human failure told in Genesis. They said that through the righteous,
beginning with Abraham and culminating with Moses on Sinai, God’s presence had
returned to dwell with humanity, and paradise was regained.
Everywhere, the images in St. Vitale said, God’s presence
assured liberation from unjust empires and the opening of paradise for those
who had been in exile.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The
Portal to Paradise
Baptism was the portal to paradise. Through this ritual, Christians gained entrance
into the garden of God, which stood beyond the open doors of every church. The church dipped initiates into lakes,
immersed them in rivers, or drenched them from urns to wash them in the living
waters of the Jordan, the great river of paradise that flowed throughout the
earth and blessed all its waters. “Water
was the beginning of the world, and the Jordan the beginning of the Gospel
tidings,” said Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem.
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