The idea, then, which Alvaro de Freitas had of his distance from the terrestrial Paradise, according to his own words, shows that he considered it to be at the extremity of the earth: that idea, we repeat, proves the influence which the geography of the Middle Ages exercised upon our sailors. As a matter of fact, that idea of the position of the terrestrial Paradise dates from the time of the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas Indicopleustes (see Montfaucon, Nova Collectio Patrum, vol. ii), an idea which the journeys accomplished by land during the Middle Ages fortified and reduced to a systematic opinion. On the map of Andrea Bianco, the terrestrial Paradise is to be found marked in the most easterly part of Asia.
Alvaro de Freitas in these words of his, alluded either to the locality in which Paradise was to be found on the ancient charts—and this, we think, is the more probable supposition—or he referred to the Cosmology of Dante, according to which Paradise was situate in the middle of the seas of the southern hemisphere (Dante, Purgatorio, cant. xxvi, ll. 100, 127.)]—S.
Santarem's commentary here needs a word of supplement, which we take from the Dawn of Modern Geography, pp. 332-3.
"The position of the Garden of Eden, the habitat of the people of Gog Magog and other monstrous races, and the existence of a literal centre for the earth-circle, were problems which exercised the patristic mind only less than the great controversy upon the 'Spherical,' 'Tabernacular,' or other shape of the world itself.
"As to the earthly Paradise, the plain word of Scripture [Genesis, ii, 8; iii, 24] compelled most Theologians to place it in the Furthest East, though a minority inclined to give a symbolic meaning to the crucial words, 'The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden ... and placed Cherubim at the East of the Garden, to keep the way of the Tree of Life.' Augustine, here as elsewhere, shows himself inclined to compromise, as well became one who attempted such a task as the re-statement of the whole Catholic Faith. His knowledge was too many-sided, and his intelligence too keen, for him not to perceive the importance of a certain liberality of temper in a creed which aspired to conquer the world, and his treatment of the question of the terrestrial Paradise is a good example of his method. For himself, he holds fast to the real existence of Eden, and the literal sense of Scripture on its position, but he allows any one who will to give the texts at issue a symbolical meaning (De Civ. Dei, XIII, ch. xxi; see also Eucherius, Comm. on Genesis in the Max. Bibl. Vet. Pat. vi, 874, and A. Graf's interesting essay on the Legends of the terrestrial Paradise, Turin, 1878). To the same effect, though more doubtfully, speaks St. Isidore of Seville, who in so many ways reproduces at the end of the sixth century the spirit and method of the Bishop of Hippo in the fifth. In one place the Spanish Doctor repeats the traditional language about Eden, placed in the East, blessed with perpetual summer, but shut off from the approach of man by the fiery wall which reached almost to the Heaven: yet elsewhere he seems to countenance a purely figurative sense. His scepticism is expressed in the De Differentiis, i, 10; his traditionalism in the Etymologies or Origins, XIV, 3 (De Asia).
"The ordinary conclusion of the more philosophic school of Churchmen is perhaps expressed by Moses Bar-Cepha, 'Bishop of Bethraman and Guardian of sacred things in Mozal' [i.e., Mosul? or Nineveh], near Bagdad, about a.d. 900 [Migne's editor of Moses, in Pat. Græc., cxi, pp. 482-608 (1863), places him later, about a.d. 950; but Marinelli, Erdkunde, 20-1, dates him about a.d. 700, doubtless with the assent of S. Günther and L. Neumann, who are responsible for the enlarged German edition of Marinelli's admirable essay. The most interesting passages of Moses' geography are in Pt. I, chs. i, ii, vii-ix, xi-xiv]. In his Commentary on Paradise, the ingenious prelate solves past difficulties in the spirit of Hegel himself. The terrestrial Eden had one existence under two conditions, visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, sensual and intellectual. As pertaining to this world, it existed, he considers, in a land which was on, but not of, the earth that we inhabit; for it lay on higher ground, it breathed a purer air, and, though many of the saints had fixed it in the East, it was really beyond our ken.
"From Augustine onwards, through the writings of Eucherius of Lyons [Commentary on Genesis], of St. Basil the Great, and many others, something of this tendency to compromise between the literal meaning of Scripture and the tacit opposition of geography, may be traced in this attempt to give reality to the earthly Paradise; and the same comes out in the conjecture of Severian of Gabala, adopted by Cosmas and by many of the traditionalists, that the rivers of Eden dived under the earth for a long space before reappearing in our world as Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Pison (Severian of Gabala, v, 6; according to S., this subterranean course was to prevent men from tracking their way up to Paradise; cf. Philostorgius, III, 7-12.)
"Homeric and other pre-Christian fancies led many in the early Christian period still to look for Paradise in the north, among the Upper Boreans, in the south among the blameless Ethiopians, or in the west in the Isles of the Blessed, of the Hesperides, or of Fortune. Thus Capella, who was probably a pagan survival at the beginning of the most brilliant age of patristic literature, naturally enough looks for his Elysium 'where the axis of the world is ever turning' at the northern pole [Capella, vi, 664]; but when we find Archbishop Basil of Novgorod speculating about a Paradise in the White Sea [see Karamsin's Russian History, as cited by Marinelli, Erdkunde, p. 22, note 84; and by Cardinal Zurla, Vantaggi derivati alla Geografia, etc., p. 44] we have a better illustration of the undying vigour of the oldest and most poetic of physical myths, under almost any changes of politics and religion."
[138] (p. 176). Or else upon their feathers for the rest of the time ... other fish.—[This bird is the Phœnicopterus.]—S.
Ibid: Other birds, etc.—[See note 128 to p. 156, on the Buceros Africanus.]—S.