conversion, living and expressing himself in a plalonic frame of thought, in which the truly real
Book II 79
What is signified by the delights ofParadise
9, 12. Now at last let us take a look at the blissful state of the man, which is signified by the name of Paradise. Since people are accustomed, after all, to enjoy delicious rest in parks, and light dawns upon our bodily senses from the east, and the sky, a body high above our bodies and altogether more sublime, arches up from there: all that is the reason why the spiritual delights which go with the life of bliss are also being figuratively displayed by these words, and why Paradise is planted to the east. Let us take it then that our spiritual joys are signified by every tree that is beautiful to the gaze of the understanding, and good for eating, being the imperishable food on which blessed souls feed. The Lord too says, after all: Workfor thefood which does not perish (Jn 6:27), such as every idea which is food for the soul.
"To the east": to the light of wisdom in Eden, that is, in the immortal delights of the mind.15 Delights, you see, or pleasure, or feasting is what this word is said to mean, if translated from Hebrew into English.16 But it is left untranslated like this in order to give the impression of being a place, and to make the style of the whole passage more figurative. Every tree produced from the earth, then, we take as being every spiritual joy, the kind, that is, that overtops the earth, and is not wrapped up and overwhelmed in the entanglements of earthy lusts.
The tree of life, though, planted in the middle of Paradise signifies the wisdom by which the soul is made to understand that it has been set at a kind of mid-point in the whole order of things, so that although it has every material, bodily nature subject to it, it has to realize that the nature of God is still above itself. So it must not turn aside either to the right, by claiming to be what it is not, or to the left, by being slack and indifferent about living up to what it is.17 That then is the tree of life, planted in the middle of Paradise.
As for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, again it is the halfway centrality of the soul, its integrity in the due order of things, that it signifies. This tree too, after all, was planted in the middle of Paradise; and the reason it is called the tree of distinguishing between good and evil is that if the soul18 turns to itself with its back to God and wants to enjoy its own power without any reference to God, it swells up with pride, which is the startingpoint of all sin (Sir 1 0: 1 3). And when the penalty follows upon this sin of the soul's, it learns by experience what
15. Literally, "in immortal and intelligible delights." Augustine is still, only a few years after his conversion, living and expressing himself in a plalonic frame of thought, in which the truly real world is that of intelligible, unchanging ideas (rationes for Augustine; he has just used the word), as distinct from the only half-real, shadow world of appearances, which we observe with our senses.
1 6. Latin, of course, in the text. 17. See 1s 30:21; Dt 5:32.
1 8. Which should be "stretching out to what lies ahead," that is, to God, "and forgetting what lies behind" (Phil 3:13).