The idea, then, which Alvaro de Freitas had of his distance from the terrestrial Paradise, according to his own words, shows that he considered it to be at the extremity of the earth: that idea, we repeat, proves the influence which the geography of the Middle Ages exercised upon our sailors. As a matter of fact, that idea of the position of the terrestrial Paradise dates from the time of the _Topographia Christiana_ of Cosmas Indicopleustes (see Montfaucon, _Nova Collectio Patrum_, vol. ii), an idea which the journeys accomplished by land during the Middle Ages fortified and reduced to a systematic opinion. On the map of Andrea Bianco, the terrestrial Paradise is to be found marked in the most easterly part of Asia.
Alvaro de Freitas in these words of his, alluded either to the locality in which Paradise was to be found on the ancient charts--and this, we think, is the more probable supposition--or he referred to the _Cosmology_ of Dante, according to which Paradise was situate in the middle of the seas of the southern hemisphere (Dante, _Purgatorio_, cant. xxvi, ll. 100, 127.)]--S.
Santarem's commentary here needs a word of supplement, which we take from the _Dawn of Modern Geography_, pp. 332-3.
"The position of the Garden of Eden, the habitat of the people of Gog Magog and other monstrous races, and the existence of a literal centre for the earth-circle, were problems which exercised the patristic mind only less than the great controversy upon the 'Spherical,' 'Tabernacular,' or other shape of the world itself.
"As to the earthly Paradise, the plain word of Scripture [Genesis, ii, 8; iii, 24] compelled most Theologians to place it in the Furthest East, though a minority inclined to give a symbolic meaning to the crucial words, 'The Lord God planted a garden _eastward_ in Eden ... and placed Cherubim at the East of the Garden, to keep the way of the Tree of Life.' Augustine, here as elsewhere, shows himself inclined to compromise, as well became one who attempted such a task as the re-statement of the whole Catholic Faith. His knowledge was too many-sided, and his intelligence too keen, for him not to perceive the importance of a certain liberality of temper in a creed which aspired to conquer the world, and his treatment of the question of the terrestrial Paradise is a good example of his method. For himself, he holds fast to the real existence of Eden, and the literal sense of Scripture on its position, but he allows any one who will to give the texts at issue a symbolical meaning (_De Civ. Dei_, XIII, ch. xxi; see also Eucherius, Comm. on Genesis in the _Max. Bibl. Vet. Pat._ vi, 874, and A. Graf's interesting essay on the _Legends of the terrestrial Paradise_, Turin, 1878). To the same effect, though more doubtfully, speaks St. Isidore of Seville, who in so many ways reproduces at the end of the sixth century the spirit and method of the Bishop of Hippo in the fifth. In one place the Spanish Doctor repeats the traditional language about Eden, placed in the East, blessed with perpetual summer, but shut off from the approach of man by the fiery wall which reached almost to the Heaven: yet elsewhere he seems to countenance a purely figurative sense. His scepticism is expressed in the _De Differentiis_, i, 10; his traditionalism in the _Etymologies_ or _Origins_, XIV, 3 (De Asia).