Positing paradise
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7109138
Jun 29th 2006
From The Economist print edition
For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look
like. Two new books trace the history of the hereafter
WHERE do you find paradise on a map? To the modern eye, used to the
cheap and functional cartography of roads and frontiers, the very
question is absurd. Maps show real things, not imaginary ones. You
might as well look for happiness in a telephone directory.
As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian
effort to map paradise, pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual
navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time and space
in a way that is still beautiful, but can seem baffling. Their maps
showed God, history, and human woes and joys, often biblical ones. The
Garden of Eden was a real place, just as Adam was a real man.
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