Paradise on Earth - Religious Conceptions Of Paradise, Representations In Western Culture, Islamic Art And Literature, East Asia
garden term word persian
The word paradise develops in Western languages from the Greek word paradeisos, the old Persian word pairidaeza, and the modern Arabic and Persian firdaus, all of which originally denoted a walled garden. In the arid environment of the Near East, a garden must be carefully and laboriously constructed with watercourses for irrigation, and its precious flowers and fruits protected from theft by a surrounding wall. The conflation of this term for a type of garden built and cultivated in the Near East with religious imagery of heaven, especially in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, has given the term a far more complex set of meanings, which have come to permeate the cultures of the Christian West and the Islamic world, creating a metaphoric bridge between divine paradise and paradise on earth.
In these cultures the concept of paradise developed in two related levels. The first was scriptural and thus a part of religious belief: paradise is either a place for life after death—often serving as a more tangible and concrete substitute for the vaguer term heaven—or the setting for a primal, idealized epoch in human history: the Garden of Eden. The second way in which the concept developed was through the actual physical depiction or recreation of the religious image of paradise on earth, either in the form of actual gardens or through the use of certain types of garden imagery—with or without religious connotations—in music, literature, and the visual arts.
Additional Topics
In the Jewish Torah, paradise first appears as the Garden of Eden in Genesis. It also is regarded as the abode of God, to which the righteous are welcome (Psalm 73:24–25): Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. In terms of concrete imagery, the most famous Old Testament…
From scriptures and liturgical texts the concept of paradise emerges as a dominant image in the religious art of Christianity and Islam over the centuries and eventually develops what we might term quasi-secular cognates as well, in which theological paradise in effect loans part of its meaning to secular palaces, poetry, and visual arts. In the Christian tradition, images of an essentially script…
In Islamic culture there is likewise a literary tradition of direct depiction of paradise, most typically represented by Mir Haydar's Miraj-nama (Book of the ascension), a fourteenth-century poetic description of the Prophet's mystical journey to heaven and hell, which takes much of its imagery of paradise directly from highly descriptive scriptural passages of the Koran. The most fa…
While the concept of an earthly paradise as a reflection of a heavenly paradise permeates much art in cultures under the influence of Christianity and Islam, a somewhat similar concept of a heavenly presence on earth—not specifically derived from the west Asian firdaus—can also be seen in other cultures, notably those influenced directly or indirectly by Buddhism. A final example of …
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments
4 months ago
zechariah Mathew
The book "conceptions of paradise"
may please despathed to my e-mail address.