The most thorough and imaginative description of Eden—and of the drama of the expulsion from the original paradisiacal state—appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), one of the most important epic poems in the English language. Of course, Milton’s story includes the spring and the rivers of Genesis:

How from that sapphire fount the crisped brooks,

Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,

With mazy error under pendant shades

Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed

Flowers worthy of Paradise which not nice art

In beds and curious knots, but nature boon

Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain…¹

Aside from the presence of water and bountiful nature, another feature that binds Milton’s version of the Garden of Eden with the idea of paradeisos is its closed character. This trait is not openly enunciated in the book of Genesis, but it does figure tacitly when, after having eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden through an opening at the east that would appear to be its only access. Just as you cannot “enter” into the open (0.9), you can only “exit” a place that is closed.

In Book IV, we find Satan admiring the garden from afar, with the intention of perverting the creation of his eternal opponent.

So on he fares, and to the border comes,

Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,

Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,

As with a rural mound the champaign head

Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides

With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,

Access denied; and overhead up grew

Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, 

A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend

Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view. Yet higher that their tops

The verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung:

Which to our general sire gave prospect large

Into his nether empire neighbouring round.²

Eden’s geography has changed substantially, it is not a humid plain anymore but something more akin to a northern european forest, a rural mound in a vast wilderness overgrown with “hairy sides” and surrounded by “a verdurous wall.” In other words, a natural fortress which, in contrast to the surrounding wilderness, keeps within itself all that is amenable and necessary to human life, that is, all that is “of the home,” that has already been domesticated (0.24). As a political concept the biblical Paradise legitimizes domestication by turning it into the natural state of the human animal, that is, making the separation between self and other something supposedly natural.

By Milton’s time the connotations implied in the word paradeisos had already thoroughly penetrated the Western imaginary. Like the Persian hunting parks, Milton’s Eden is an enclosure surrounded by a thick wall—made of trees in this primordial stage—a natural obstacle that evinces the estructural relation between the locus amoenus and the locus terribilis (perfectly expressed in the epigraph by Rousseau which opens this study): that which protects you may very well enclose you and suffocate you. The difference between these two poles rests mainly in the voluntary character of the pleasant and the involuntary of the terrible (0.4).

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1. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 237-243. ↩︎
2. Ibid. IV, 131-149. ↩︎