Paradise

For even though Moses, somewhat later, seems the first to have dedicated the God of the world in the temple of his own writings, the birthdays of His recognition are not therefore to be reckoned from the Pentateuch — since the whole pen of Moses does not establish the knowledge of the Creator, but, beginning from the very origin, recounts that He is to be reckoned from Paradise and Adam, not from Egypt and Moses.

"And God placed the man in Paradise" — the one he formed, not the one he breathed;

Man is condemned to death for the tasting of one little tree, and thence sins go forward with their punishments, and now all perish who know not a single sod of Paradise.

and God placed the man whom He had formed in paradise.

For those skin tunics, which Adam and Eve, stripped of paradise, put on, will not be, as some would have it, the reshaping of flesh out of slime — since somewhat earlier Adam recognized, already in the woman, the offshoot of his own substance as flesh ("This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh"), and the very portion drawn off from the male was filled out into the female with flesh — to …

Even if anyone will dare to argue the holy land to be paradise rather, which it may also receive to be called the land of the fathers — of Adam and Eve, namely — then likewise a restitution into paradise will seem promised to the flesh, which was allotted to dwell in it and keep it, so that such a man be recalled thither as was driven thence.

He, being without beginning together with the Father and coeternal with him, and having set the heavens and the earth in place by his word, fashioned man with his own hands and honoured him with immortality and made him king of the things on earth, setting apart for him, as a kind of royal palace, the fairest of all things, paradise.

and, having renounced the demons, I have joined myself to Christ, the Son and Word of God the Father, by whose word all things were brought forth out of nothing — who also, having fashioned man out of dust, breathed into him the breath of life, and set him to dwell in the paradise of delight;

The first man played, free, in paradise, for he was a child of God;

As, then, we do not force the horse to plough nor the bull to hunt, but lead each animal round to that for which it is by nature framed, so, of course, we call man too, born for the contemplation of heaven, a heavenly plant in truth, to the knowledge of God, having grasped what is proper to him and choice and peculiar to him beyond the other animals, a self-sufficient provision for the ages — piet …

" Take, for instance, how Moses, allegorizing the divine prudence, named it a tree of life planted in paradise — which paradise may also be the world, in which all things from creation grow.

It is embodied in the most striking manner by the legend of Trajan’s miraculous translation to Paradise, the reward of a signal act of justice;

For the primordial law was given to Adam and Eve in paradise as the womb of all the precepts of God.

If from our mysteries, as from the earlier source, then ours are the more trustworthy and the more to be believed, whose very images find belief.

And if we name paradise, a place of divine pleasantness appointed for the receiving of the spirits of the holy, cut off from the knowledge of the common world by a kind of fiery wall of that zone — the Elysian fields have taken up the faith of it.

And how is it that the region of paradise, revealed to John in the Spirit, which lies beneath the altar, showed no other souls with it save those of the martyrs?

Whence it is to be presumed that these, who shall wish to be received within paradise, ought at length to cease from that thing from which paradise is untouched.

and lastly, the whole man is recalled into paradise, where he was from the beginning.

after his ejection from paradise and subjection to death — when again he had hastened to his own mercy, from that time onward in his own self consecrated repentance, rescinding the sentence of his former wrath, having covenanted to pardon his own work and image.

For, sinner of all marks though I am, and born for nothing but repentance, I cannot easily keep silent about that of which even Adam himself — the head both of the human stock and of the offence against the Lord — restored by exomologesis to his own paradise, does not keep silent.

He was innocent, and a close friend of God, and a tiller of paradise.

the palaces of Kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of Paradise.

Well, Lysander, the whole of the measurement and arrangement is my own work, and I did some of the planting myself.

and for wonder of these things he cried, Cyrus, I really do admire all these lovely things, but I am far more impressed with your agent’s skill in measuring and arranging everything so exactly.

Then it is of course necessary, Socrates, to take care that these paradises in which the king spends his time shall contain a fine stock of trees and all other beautiful things that the soil produces.