Posted: May 14 2006 at 7:56pm | IP Logged

JennGM wrote: I'm reading a fabulous book right now on Medieval Gardens, and I would highly recommend St. Benedict for the Italian garden. His establishment of his Rule and his monasteries set up a pattern of monastic gardening which many point to the beginning of herb gardens. Plus...our current pope will be remembered in prayer when one strolls the garden.

I was struck that this most excellent book developed a thesis, with extensive documentation, of the deterioration of the religious sense of gardening in England associated with the Anglican schism and the dissolution of monasticism...quite similar to the thesis I developed
in my 1953 article, "Man in God's Garden".

The inside rear fly-leaf of the book jacket indicates that Teresa McLean is 30 years old, is of Irish-Scottish-English background, was educated in an English convent school, read history at Oxford, wrote a doctoral thesis on the estates of a Priory for Cambridge and worked for a year with Mother Teresa in Calcutta - from all this
very evidently a Roman Catholic.

p. 120 'Paradise', said St Augustine, 'is a place where there are trees growing.' He had some other things to say about it but this simple statement gives us a crucial insight into the medieval vision of Paradise. According to St Augustine, it was generally thought of in three ways: materially, as a place somewhere on the earth; spiritually, as state of the soul, and in both ways at different times. He himself thought of it in this last, double way, which was the one that appealed most to the medieval mind. The basic image of it which each of the views interpreted was the one described in Genesis 2:8-9: the place with tree to which St. Augustine alluded; the Garden of Eden.

p. 125 Eden was a tree garden, and the mystical trees of good and evil which grew in it never lost their appeal for the Medievals; indeed it increased throughout the period. The New Testament constantly uses trees as symbols, the greatest of them being the Tree of the Cross itself. Because of its role in the Redemption, it was depicted as the opposite of the Tree of Sins. As the Tree of the Cross became a more and more popular theme from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, so did the theme of the two opposing tree of good and evil. Whole systems of vices and virtues were worked out on these symbolic trees. The shade of the Tree of Good was generally represented in the Middle Ages as Sapientia -- the true wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the Book of Wisdom, and the shade of the Tree of Evil as scientia -- the false wisdom of the world. This was in accordance with the Augustinian dichotomy between Charity and Cupidity, which was the basis of the whole iconographical scheme of the opposing trees.