Mapping Paradise

A History of Heaven on Earth

Alessandro Scafi

University of Chicago Press, $55, 400 pp.
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I have been reading Alessandro Scafi’s book Mapping Paradise in small doses over the past few months. It is one of those works one hates to see come to a conclusion, rich as it is in content and lavish in illustration. I consider it a tour de force of intellectual history. It is also a near-perfect example of what historians call the Nachleben of a text from Scripture-the history of how a text has been read, pondered, and analyzed over the centuries.

The Book of Genesis gives a description of the Garden of Eden in relationship to four rivers (Genesis 2:10-14), and later tells us that in the east of Eden, God placed the cherubim and a flaming sword “to guard the tree of life” (Genesis 2:28). Some early commentators, preeminently Origen of Alexandria, saw the Garden of Eden strictly through the lens of allegory, but the vast majority of commentators, Jewish and Christian, thought that Genesis was describing a real geographical place located somewhere in Mesopotamia.

With the text’s historicity taken for granted, two questions arose: Where is that place? And could it be found again? The few clues supplied by Genesis chapter 2 have given rise to centuries of animated discussions and even some exploration in search of Eden. It has been Scafi’s task to trace in rather minute detail the story of these explorations. He demonstrates that the search for Eden generated not only advances in cartography but also treatises on geography, chronicles of exploration, the dissemination of myths and legends, philosophical reflections, and theological discourses. The search continued almost up until the Enlightenment.

As Scafi indicates, the Genesis text itself is not without ambiguities. Everyone in the West until the Reformation read the Genesis account in Jerome’s Vulgate (except Augustine, who read the Old Latin). In the Hebrew, Eden was a garden, but the Septuagint chose the word “paradise,” meaning an enclosed garden. Furthermore, the Hebrew word miqedem could mean “from the beginning” (Jerome’s interpretation) or “away to the East” (the interpretation in the Septuagint and, later, in the Authorized version). These differences of interpretation-to say nothing of the four rivers mentioned in Genesis-make geographical markers more difficult. The earliest commentators not only had to make sense of those ambiguous clues but also query the text in other ways. Was it possible that the four rivers came from one source? Were there actual trees in the garden? Was there still a real garden? It was Augustine who launched the Western search for Eden by arguing that Eden was a real place.

His reading also led to the effort to locate that place on a map of the world. Readers of Dante will remember that he places the earthly paradise at the summit of the mount of purgatory in the Southern Hemisphere. Other medieval commentators had different ways of placing the garden. Yet all such efforts began with the assumption that the center of the world was Jerusalem because it was there that the central events of our salvation took place. Visitors to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre can still see the spot in the nave of the church that was supposed to mark the exact center of the world.

Today the search for the Garden of Eden has been largely abandoned, but a few decades ago I knew of a fervent writer in North Florida who argued, mainly in self-published books, that Eden was in his very county, between the Ochlockonee River and the Apalachicola River. He may have been the last representative of a tradition that runs back for nearly two thousand years, a tradition intelligently and carefully explored in Scafi’s fine book.

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Holiness

Donna Orsuto

Continuum, $24.95, 212 pp.
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The American theologian Donna Orsuto is the director of the Lay Centre at the Foyer Unitas in Rome and a long-time lecturer in the Institute of Spirituality at the Gregorian University. This book takes as its fundamental focus the biblical theme of holiness and uses it to formulate a careful synthesis of Christian spirituality. Orsuto imagines the life of Christian holiness as a well-constructed house, an image she discovered in C. S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity (the image is of course also found in the Gospels). She pursues the house metaphor throughout this eminently readable book, without ever pushing it too far.

Holiness consists of five chapters. The first is a study of the foundational concept of holiness mainfest in the Bible. The second delineates several models of holiness as they have shown up in the history of the tradition. Chapter 3 is devoted to the “ordinary maintenance” of the house of holiness: the sacramental life, the discipline of prayer, the ascetical practices of fasting and almsgiving, the devotional usages found in the church, the cultivation of virtue, and the “stewardship of mind and body.” Chapter 4 explores the contemporary meaning of holiness as it is lived out in the realities mentioned by, and developing from, Vatican II. In that chapter she ranges over topics as different as the right use of leisure and the demands of social justice and political life. The final chapter looks toward the demands of the twenty-first century. The author uses the categories of contemplation and action to examine such topics as globalization, the communications revolution, and world religions. Within these five chapters, Orsuto covers a number of topics germane to any serious consideration of the Christian life.

The merits of Orsuto’s work are many. First, she is a clear writer. Second, she pays due attention to both the history of spirituality and the canons of serious theology. She never falls prey to the temptation to turn spirituality into anthropology, sociology, or psychology, though she is well aware of the contributions these disciplines may make. She is above all a theologian, and it is her particular gift to articulate a theological vision of Christian spirituality in a solidly accessible way. This book reflects her years of teaching and lecturing in various parts of the world. I can easily imagine it being used both in college classrooms and in adult formation classes in parishes; the well-placed subheads in each chapter are especially useful for pedagogical purposes. But this is also a fine book for the general reader. Although Orsuto does not append a bibliography to her book, there are abundant endnotes after each chapter from which interested readers can glean clues for further reading. There is also a very good index.

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The Heirs of Saint Teresa of Avila

Edited by Christopher C. Wilson

ICS Publications, $12.95, 140 pp.
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The Heirs of Saint Teresa of Avila is a collection of essays edited by Christopher Wilson. Its subtitle gives the reader an accurate summary of the book’s contents: “Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy.” Carmelite scholars gathered at Georgetown University in 2004 to discuss the impact of Teresa of Avila’s life and writings in the era after her death in 1582. As Jodi Bilinkoff shows in her essay, Teresa’s writings were dispersed throughout Europe and the New World within a decade of her death. They inspired women from all over the Catholic world to enter the Carmels that were then being founded in various countries. St. Francis de Sales read her works in French and acknowledged their influence on his own thinking, an influence perhaps most apparent in his classic work On the Love of God.

St. Teresa’s influence extended well beyond her writings. Toward the end of her life, Carmelite sisters, including some who knew her and had been formed under her, began to establish communities in France. It is hard to overestimate the impact of their spirituality on the growth of the so-called French School of Spirituality. Kieran Kavanaugh, an eminent translator of Carmelite texts, has an interesting essay in this collection on the tense relationship between Blessed Anne of St. Bartholomew and Pierre de Bérulle, who tried to serve as a kind of overseer of the Carmelite women in France. Bérulle, of course, was one of the leading lights of the French school, but he found it hard to corral this Spanish nun who had begun as a lay sister in Spain and only became a choir nun so that she could advance as a superior in the order. Blessed Anne never wavered in her will to keep close to the founding charism of the Teresian reform.

The essays in this collection are unfailingly interesting, giving, as they do, intelligent background to the vigorous flourishing of Catholic spirituality in the seventeenth century. One essay, by Barbara Mujica, deals more directly with Teresa herself. It has long been noted that while Teresa held John of the Cross in high esteem, she was closer emotionally to Friar Jeronimo Gracian, a somewhat impetuous Carmelite thirty years her junior. Teresa was at times almost giddy in her admiration for him. Mujica sorts out this relationship with an even hand and concludes that Teresa was not so enthralled by Gracian that “she failed to see his many weaknesses or...accepted his direction uncritically.”

I could not read these essays, which concentrate mainly on the seventeenth century, without thinking of the much later impact that Teresa had on one of the luminous figures of our time: Edith Stein. Stein tells of reading Teresa’s Mi Vida all at once at the home of a friend and saying to herself: “This is the truth.” Stein became a Catholic, entered Carmel, and is today venerated as a saint. Teresa, in turn, had been inspired by Augustine’s Confessions, which tells of his own conversion after reading a codex of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. A woman with whom I spoke recently has decided to enter a Carmel after reading Stein’s The Science of the Cross. Books still have real power and are often the immediate catalysts of conversion.

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Short Trip to the Edge

Scott Cairns

HarperSanFrancisco, $22.95, 272 pp.
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More than thirty years ago I had the opportunity to spend a little over a week visiting some of the monasteries on Mount Athos. At the time, the monastic population was in severe decline, but in the intervening decades there has been a renewal of life on the holy mountain. The great Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon had fewer than twenty monks when I was there; Scott Cairns reports that now there are forty. (At the beginning of the twentieth century, they numbered in the thousands.) It was with great interest that I read the Cairns book about his own visits there. Cairns, a university professor and poet, is a convert to Orthodoxy (he had been a nominal Protestant before), so his visits were spiritual ones: he wanted to learn how to pray more perfectly, and he wanted to strengthen his new faith.

Judging from the book, a great deal of change has taken place on Mount Athos. When I visited, all travel was by foot, except for the odd monk who plodded along on the back of a mule and a single bus that plied the road from the port of Daphne to the monastic town of Karyes. Today, after receiving the necessary pass from the authorities, one travels from town to the various monasteries in a minivan. The number of visitors on any given day is restricted. Only men are permitted on Athos, and the ratio of Orthodox to non-Orthodox visitors is regulated. Other things remain pretty much the same. The guest master still greets a pilgrim with a tray containing coffee, cold water, and a piece of Turkish delight. (I also remember a spoonful of jam to sweeten the strong coffee.) The liturgy still begins around three in the morning and ends, typically, four or five hours later. Each monastery has its own personality, and some are more welcoming than others. My traveling companion was a Greek-speaking Jew of no particular faith who was always received cordially after the monks had asked him about his religion, whereas my own admission of being Roman Catholic was accepted with a certain reserved coolness.

Cairns is a good writer, and his accounts of monastic life and Orthodox spirituality are particularly intelligent and instructive. Information is presented to the reader gradually, as it was gradually discovered by the author during his visits. Mount Athos, of course, has an ancient history and its inhabitants have contributed much to the shaping of Orthodox spirituality for almost a thousand years. It is the home of the Hesychast approach to prayer, and one of its most illustrious nineteenth-century monks is the compiler of the Philocalia. A spiritual classic still central to Greek Orthodoxy, it became the key text of Russian spirituality once it was translated into Slavonic.

Unlike some converts, Cairns is not a triumphalist. He does not hesitate to record experiences that do not reflect well on parts of Orthodox Christianity. For example, at a monastic community in Arizona (founded by one of the Athonite Elders) he finds beauty in the monastery itself but a spirit of dour rigidity among the lay congregants who have made it their parish. Visitors who wish to attend the liturgical services and are not themselves Orthodox may do so only from the porch of the church.

Monasticism has had a far more central role in shaping the spirituality of the East than that of the West, and a book like this gives a fair indication of that fact. There is often a tendency to romanticize monasticism as an institution, and there is a hint of that in this somewhat breathless account of Mount Athos-but only a hint. I read this book with great pleasure. It brought back memories of a time in my life when I could easily trudge over the roads of this ancient center of Christian faith and be inspired by its natural beauty, its ancient way of life, and the continuing vitality of the search not just to pray, but to become prayer.

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Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church

George E. Demacopoulos

University of Notre Dame Press, $30, 288 pp.
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One reason Cairns went to Mount Athos was to find a “spiritual father” who could guide him into a deeper life of prayer. George E. Demacopoulos’s excellent scholarly study of spiritual direction in the early church sheds new light on the role of the spiritual guide. That role has deep roots in monasticism. Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church shows how, when monks left their monasteries to become priests and bishops in the cities of the late antique world, they were able to translate their spirituality into something appropriate for those who came under their pastoral care.

Demacopoulos studies this transition from the monastic world to what he calls the “clerical” world by closely examining four bishops who had an asceticmonastic background-Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine, Gregory the Great-and one who was not a bishop, Cassian. He concludes that each of these men had a different way of approaching the transition. This is an extremely interesting book with a firm grasp of the scholarly literature.

Despite their differences, all these bishops did sound certain common themes. They uniformly lamented the poverty of sermons and the shortage of qualified priests (plus ça change...). They also insisted that distinguished preaching was the first priority of every priest. (Augustine was especially vehement on this subject). They saw preaching, celebration of the sacraments, and the work of charity as the three main tasks of the clergy. They modified their pastoral oversight according to the kinds of people they were dealing with: religious communities of monks and nuns were not subject to the same ascetical practices as lay people. Each group required a form of life befitting their place in the world. Most of these bishops agonized over the tension between the contemplative life and the life of action. Demacopoulos singles out Gregory of Nazianzen, who first proposed a way to harmonize the two. Augustine’s militant stand against the Pelagians brought him into conflict with certain monastic centers, and with Cassian in particular. Cassian is a critical figure in this story because it was he, more than anyone else, who incorporated the monastic customs of the East into the practices of the West. Gregory the Great is given his due for the highly influential book he wrote on pastoral care (one of the first books translated into the vernacular in Britain). Gregory also attempted to balance the contemplative life with the pastoral life, as Benedict XVI recently reminded us in his first encyclical, God Is Love.

Neither Athanasius nor Augustine put much emphasis on the role of the “spiritual father,” or guide. Like Gregory Na¬z¬ianzen, Augustine was more concerned with the formal education of the clergy. By contrast, Cassian, himself well educated, argued that discretion and spiritual experience should be the governing principles of monastic formation, and that this formation should take place under the direction of an elder. Since by the fifth century most bishops were drawn from the monastic communities (as most still are in the Christian East), this negotiation between ascetic styles and clerical styles of spiritual formation was always an issue. Demacopoulos argues that the negotiation eventually became a synthesis.