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On this account some allegorize all that concerns Paradise itself,
where the first men, the parents of the human race, are, according to
the truth of holy Scripture, recorded to have been; and they
understand all its trees and fruit-bearing plants as virtues and habits
of life, as if they had no existence in the external world, but were
only so spoken of or related for the sake of spiritual meanings. As if
there could not be a real terrestrial Paradise! As if there never
existed these two women, Sarah and Hagar, nor the two sons who were
born to Abraham, the one of the bond woman, the other of the free,
because the apostle says that in them the two covenants were
prefigured; or as if water never flowed from the rock when Moses
struck it, because therein Christ can be seen in a figure, as the
same apostle says, "Now that rock was Christ!" No one, then,
denies that Paradise may signify the life of the blessed; its four
rivers, the four virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and
justice; its trees, all useful knowledge; its fruits, the customs of
the godly; its tree of life, wisdom herself, the mother of all good;
and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the experience of a
broken commandment. The punishment which God appointed was in
itself, a just, and therefore a good thing; but man's experience of
it is not good.
These things can also and more profitably be understood of the
Church, so that they become prophetic foreshadowings of things to
come. Thus Paradise is the Church, as it is called in the
Canticles; the four rivers of Paradise are the four gospels; the
fruit-trees the saints, and the fruit their works; the tree of life
is the holy of holies, Christ; the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, the will's free choice. For if man despise the will of God,
he can only destroy himself; and so he learns the difference between
consecrating himself to the common good and revelling in his own. For
he who loves himself is abandoned to himself, in order that, being
overwhelmed with fears and sorrows, he may cry, if there be yet soul
in him to feel his ills, in the words of the psalm, "My soul is cast
down within me," and when chastened, may say," Because of his
strength I will wait upon Thee." These and similar allegorical
interpretations may be suitably put upon Paradise without giving
offence to any one, while yet we believe the strict truth of the
history, confirmed by its circumstantial narrative of facts
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