Annotatio XXXVIII

”God had planted a Paradise in Eden.” — Genesis 2:8

Bede the Priest, when he took up this passage to explain, said that Paradise is a place situated in a higher part of the earth, and raised up from the plain of the earth so far that it touches the Lunar globe.¹ Following his opinion, the Master of the Scholastic History [Peter Comestor], in book 1, chapter 13, says: “Paradise is a most pleasant place, secluded from our habitable zone by a long tract of land and sea, so elevated that it reaches up to the Lunar globe; whence the waters of the Flood did not reach thither.” St. Thomas, in the first part of the Summa Theologica, question 102, article 1, reply to [objection] 1, thinks this opinion false if it be understood of a loftiness of place — which is entirely uninhabitable for human nature; but true, if we understand there to be there a perpetual pleasantness and likeness of temperateness, such as is the temperateness in that Lunar region, removed from all the intemperance of this murky air.