In an old New Yorker cartoon, two signs offer to send the newcomer to heaven in two opposite directions. One points to “paradise,” the other to “lectures on paradise.” To be sure, a collection of scholarly essays on ancient perceptions of paradise, such as this one, falls short of a promise to regain long lost paradise. And yet, from Dante's Paradiso to Baudelaire's Les paradis artificiels, powerful attempts have been made, time and again, to reclaim paradise through writing. The central human experience of paradise, it seems, is double: that of nostalgia for an irretrievable loss, and that of the unquenchable expectation for regaining it; what one could call the tension toward paradise, the epektasis of paradise. Indeed, paradise never disappeared from Western consciousness, and, despite Entmythologisierung, real or imagined, the concept retains in late modernity its force of attraction on earlier generations. “Work on Myth,” (Arbeit am Mythos, to use the apt title of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg's powerful study of Western culture): the history of paradise in Christian culture may be compared to a kaleidoscope, where images, symbols, mythologoumena and concepts play a major part, and can be rearranged in a series of formations, at once similar and different, but always stimulating.

The word “paradise,” as is well known, stems from Iran. The concept's career in the cultures issued from the biblical traditions, however, starts with the first chapters of Genesis. Soon, in early Judaism, the paradise from Genesis “blows up,” as it were.

‘Let one man worship God, another Jove’ ‘Colat alius Deum, alius Iovem’. With this lapidary plea Tertullian establishes himself as one of the earliest advocates of religious tolerance in the Christian tradition. In the Roman Empire of the late second century, the Christians were in great need of some religious toleration. Those Christian writers whom we call the Apologists aimed, precisely, at convincing Roman intellectuals in the corridors of power that toleration of the Christians and of their religious beliefs would in no way harm the state, and that such a toleration was, moreover, congruent with principles of reason shared, at least in theory, by all people.

One of the major historical paradoxes reflected by the development of early Christianity is its transformation, during the course of the fourth century, from a religio illicita seeking recognition and tolerance into an established religion refusing to grant others (and its own dissenters from within, the ‘heretics’) what it had sought for itself until the recent past. The traditional answer to our paradox is that, as long as the Christians were in need of religious toleration for themselves, they knew how to make a case for its necessity. As soon as they came to power, however, they forgot their early virtues and learned how to deprive others of what they had just acquired. Christian intolerance, in such a view of things, would be rooted in human nature, rather than in some implicit aspects of Christian theology.

This explanation no doubt suffers from an oversimplification of complex phenomena.