The apparent anomaly that puts Milton’s paradise on top of a mountain is part of a medieval tradition that figures prominently in Islamic theology. In his classic Islam and the Divine Comedy (1919, trans. 1926), Spanish priest and Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios explains the problem of the location of Paradise in Islam:

The passages in which the Koran tells the biblical story in a slightly altered form, led to a confusion between this paradise and the abode of glory, thus causing it to be laid in heaven. According to another interpretation, however, it was supposed to be situated on earth, more precisely, in the East and on the highest mountain.¹

From the first explanation for the location of paradise comes the Islamic idea of it as heaven, expressed in the Arabic word jannah, which means “garden” but is understood as celestial superstructure composed of twelve levels, the last of which is called firdaws, literally “paradise.” This configuration founded a tradition in which the primordial home of Adam and Eve becomes the final abode of the righteous,

wherein are rivers of water unaltered, rivers of milk the taste of which never changes, rivers of wine delicious to those who drink, and rivers of purified honey, in which they will have from all [kinds of] fruits and forgiveness from their Lord.²

In the West, the most accomplished literary expression of the second explanation for the location of Paradise appears in the Divine Comedy which, according to Asín Palacios, was deeply influenced by Sufi thought, particularly by the mystical Mi’raj tradition present in the 17th sura of the Quran, the Night Journey (0.7), which describes Mohammed’s ascent to the upper spheres of the cosmos. Regarding the concrete location of paradise, it is interesting that in the Comedy it appears at the top of Mount Purgatory, at the limit that marks the beginning of the ascent to the Empyrean. In Dante’s vision, earthly paradise occupies an intermediate position between purgatory and celestial paradise, i.e., it is the threshold between the upper and lower world. Given the liminal condition of purgatory—which is neither heaven nor hell but an intermediate zone of atonement—this threshold also serves as a gateway to the inferior world (inferi), which can be understood as a downward spiral (labyrinth or helter skelter) which goes from the paradeisos and leads, down the slopes of mount purgatory, to the inferno (0.5, 1.2, 3.3.3).

In coincidence with our definition of locus terribilis, Dante’s earthly paradise lies above the upper entrance of the Avernus. (0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9).³

---

1. Miguel Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, 123. This mountainous location for the earthly Paradise, says Asín Palacios, “had the advantage of being reconcilable with the word used in the Koran; for the expulsion of Adam and Eve to the earth would merely mean that God drove them from the summit to the foot of the mountain…” (Islam and the Divine Comedy, 123). ↩︎
2. Quran, Asura 47:15. ↩︎
3. In The Kingdom and the Garden , Giorgio Agamben points out a characteristic of Dante's earthly paradise that pertains to our topic: the “dark wood” the poet encounters at the beginning of the poem (0.8) is described in a similar way to the “ancient wood” of Paradise. Both are qualified with a triple adjective: in the case of the entrance to Hell, 'this wild, harsh, and arduous wood,' and in the case of Paradise, 'the divine wood/dense and living forest.”' “It is as if Dante wanted to suggest to us that the two woods are in reality one and the same, once as a place of bitterness and death ('it is so bitter that little is more death') and at other times as a place of sweetness and life ('the sweet breeze,' 'dense and living'). The wood where the poet has lost his way at the beginning of the poem is, therefore, the same garden where he will find himself again.” (Agamben, The Kingdom and the Garden, 76). This question would corroborate the threshold character represented in the locus ambiguus (0.27) from which both the pleasant place and the terrible place arise. ↩︎