The Wondrous Garden in Early Christian  Imagining. 

J.A. McGuckin  

There is a tendency in gardens that runs away, if it can, into wildness: an entropy of landscape. The priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously lauded that energeia of the natural world, which refuses to be  tamed, in his poem ‘Inversnaid.’ This celebrates a little tumbling stream that runs through wild heather and bracken and falls like a thread of silver from a height into Loch Lomond below. The final verse ends with: ‘What would the world be, once bereft /  Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left …./  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’  It is a sentiment I fully share: but only by the shores of Loch Lomond; decidedly not in my garden: which strangely enough (though I did not know it at the time we bought the house) is sandwiched between ‘Orchard Road’, and ‘Eden Lane’: thus giving me some claim, however slight, to have inherited the horticulture of the Garden of Eden.

Vigen Guroian has taught me, as well as countless others, to think of the garden as a theological symbol and proving ground. He is the θεολóγος του κῆποu; the theologian of the garden grove; in a similar way to how Hermann Hesse stands as its Magus. He has brought back into the theological imagination a long overdue corrective to the profoundly depressed way in which many parts of ancient Christian literature approached the concept of the garden: lamenting its paradisial loss (before quite understanding its paradisial significance) and elevating the story of the garden as a threnody to explain why life in the cold and barren wilderness into which Adam and Eve were banished (namely this lush and radiantly beautiful world) is a harsh punishment that brought us, as a species, to sorrow and death. Subsequent Christian imagination, has often thrilled to push this sorrowful lamentation to the forefront of its mind, sometimes even to the point of overwhelming the evident fact of the natural world’s immense and sacred beauty, as well as the even more luminous faith the church has now been given in the power of the Resurrection  of its Lord: the Anastasis as redemptive grace illumining and transfiguring the Cosmos.

Were there no other readings apart from the threnody of being cast out of the paradisial garden: that is,  the garden as a locked gate, with us on the wrong side: in the lane, in the dust, weeping for the lost sights and perfumes, and gracious conversation we might have enjoyed there? Well let’s see. 

In antiquity a garden was not a common thing. Even the Genesis account wishes to stress the unusual features of Paradise Garden by  dwelling on its abundant water and numerous fruit trees clustered around the sacred Tree of Life, and its closeness to the land of Havilah which offered the prospect of gold, perfumes and precious stones. The Genesis narrative suggests that the human being was created precisely in order to enjoy this garden of God, but specifically as its cultivator and guardian: it was Man’s fundamental purpose, that is, to be a steward, a gardener, a keeper of the  wondrous place where God himself wished to walk (as master of the house) in his own garden in the evenings. And this is, perhaps, the first thing that a more hopeful reading of ‘gardens’ might tell us: that this beautiful Earth is not the property of Humankind. It remains God’s own garden. It is a holy thing. Humankind stands within it, among animals and plants and seeds, but stands there in order to keep it sacral: to prevent the profane. For if the garden is profaned, the Genesis story warns of the cessation of the desire of the deity to converse with his steward in the evenings under the trees. Perhaps this anti-profane aspect integral to a garden  is why so many gardeners still testify that they feel the sacralizing effect of being in its embrace and being glad to work the earth: for something is sensed as being made whole again and it entices God to walk once more alongside his good gardeners. Was it not the Christ who even called the Father his own good gardener?

No being in ancient times could ever have thought that human keepers, however incompetent or lazy they might be, could ever damage the structure of the garden per se. There simply weren’t enough human beings and, despite the recurrent theme in Genesis of Man having ‘dominion’, the earth was simply too big, and  humanity far too small to do more than passing damage. Today it is different. We have not just mismanaged the entirety of the Earth, we have, as guardians, still carried on sleeping while more alert voices have been crying in alarm that the very walls of the garden are falling down and the greenhouse [effect] is no longer a nursery of life but, by our own lack of foresight, a harbinger of destruction. And yet, even so: we should remember Hopkins once more: who, having lamented the  squalid besmirching of the natural world caused by Victorian era industrialization, ends with the day-dawn note of hope: ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;’ calling that which is ‘deep down’ in the very structure of the natural order: the Holy Ghost, who: ‘over the bent world broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.’ A similarly hopeful thought is brought to me each time the divine liturgy is served and the veils of the chalice and diskos are being censed in the Prothesis service to the accompaniment of the prayer: ’The Lord has clothed and girded himself with power. He has established the world and it shall not be shaken.’

The Genesis scribe, with the sadness of an exile’s heart, wishes to make us sad with the feeling of being locked out of the garden. It is certainly sad to feel locked out of anything. Even if we never wanted to join a club, it is sad that they never invited us in. Groucho Marx famously resigned membership of the Hollywood Delaney club with a telegram  saying: ‘Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.’  But his humor in that instance masked the fact that the antisemitic snub of an existing member there had taken away his delight to belong to that class of people. 

Yet, gardens, in the antique world were exclusive in the main; largely about private space keeping people out, not letting them walk round free of charge. The ancient Greek literature about gardens suggests (chiefly because they were a very rare thing in antique urban societies that had little time for, and no great range of, flowers) that they are a half legendary (certainly imaginary) thing; a fantastic luxury of idleness. Such were the gardens of Alcinoüs with their fruit trees and fountains and multiple types of flora; or those of the Hesperides. When the Greeks did actually encounter the concept of a real garden it was in the  form of the paradizai of the Persian Satraps, which the British Victorian scholar Philip Smith notes in a rather flat manner: ‘resembled our parks.’ He means, I am sure, a large space of lawns and trees and a few flower beds, as in the parks of London; though I was first drawn, on reading that, to think of my own municipal park, as a child; adjacent to gasworks, shipyards and a coke burning factory, but with a climbing frame, yellowed patchy grass, and a few militarily ordered flower beds, as well as a very grumpy resident park-keeper. There were residual memories of Eden, nevertheless, in the numerous “Keep Off” signs that were placed everywhere.

The exception to this ancient paucity of gardens was the Greek ‘sacred groves’ which seem to have especially cultivated vines and olives and scented flowers such as violets and roses, which may have been employed for the making of ritual artifacts such as garlands. So even for the pagans, scented gardens were associated with divine presence. While setting about finding sets of exemplary morals about reconciling adversities, Plutarch refers his readers to the good gardening practice of interspersing rows of roses and violets with leeks and onions; which sounds odd at first. But then if you reconsidered rows of Roses and Violet  with intervening Allium and Agave it would all be quite nicely balanced: with the benefit falling to the Greeks that they could, at least, eat half the produce in the Fall. 

    Rich Romans had a more pronounced taste for formal garden layouts where walks could be taken (ambulatoria). Their range of flowers was more extensive than the Greeks, a taste they seemed to have learned from Ptolemaic Egypt. Longus, in his Pastoral Romance describes an idealized Egyptian ‘all-year’ garden: ‘In spring, with roses, lilies, hyacinths, and violets. In summer, with poppies, pears and all manner of fruit. In autumn, vines and figs, pomegranates and myrtles.’ But the run of the mill élite Roman garden seems to have been more of a flat terrace divided up by formalized box hedges  with set places for strolling, in between, and shaped topiary scattered about to give height and effect. Indeed the standard Latin word for a gardener (as distinct from a farmer) is topiarius. After the time of Martial and Pliny, who are the first to mention them, some of the gardens of the very rich even had hot-houses to bring on exotic plants and late season fruit; and almost every Roman garden had a special area set aside for vegetables (olera). At Pompei, where space was at a premium, at least one of the villas inside the town had a small walled garden where the external walls depicted an even larger garden in trompe l'oeil fresco, and where the owner had set pots of flowers against the walls to increase the illusion: an example illustrated in Sir William Gell’s Pompeiana.

Among the later Christian fathers who clearly find delight in the notion of the garden,  were the many who had taken Origen’s warning to heart that the  text of the scriptures, especially Genesis’ cosmogonic narrative, was not to be taken woodenly and literally. The garden is meant to be a symbol more than a fact even when it is being used as a sad lament. Severian the bishop of Gabala in Syria, who became a popular preacher in Constantinople in the early fifth century, feels he needs to make the point ‘scientifically’ to his readers. He made careful note of the fact that the relatively small size of the garden as recorded in Genesis proves that it cannot be identified with God’s paradise. But Severian was a ‘naïve and unscientific’ exegete, as Quasten describes him, excessively literalist even to the point of vociferously defending  the flat earth theory too. He uses the term κηποῦριν to signify that he is talking here specifically about the garden of Eden. 

St. Gregory of Nyssa, a writer whose Epistle 15 To Adelphius demonstrates how greatly he appreciated a well laid out garden, mixing fine architecture with vines and fruit trees and water features with fish ponds, develops the imagery of a garden to explain, in his major treatise On the Making of Man, how it is that God develops a variety of things (bones, cartilage, veins and so on) out of a common substrate of the human body. He takes the notion of a well irrigated garden  to show,  by analogy, that the single substance of water flowing in all parts of the soil can become bitter in wormwood, poison in the hemlock, but completely other in saffron balsam and poppies where it is, by turn, hot and cold and moderately flavoured. The same water becomes scent in  the laurel and mastic trees, sugar in the fig and pear, juice for making wine in the case of the vine. The self-same water is red in the rose, radiant white in the lily, blue in the violet and purple in the hyacinth.  As with his enthusiasm over Adelphius’ garden estate, Gregory demonstrates here his eye for beautiful symmetry like other classical authors, but also underscores the immense variety that God has put into the created synthesis of life. Elsewhere he applies the metaphor of the garden  (κῆπος) to describe the church. He takes the text of the Bride calling upon the wind (πνευμα) to blow gently through her garden  to be the Church of Christ which perpetually enjoys the inspirations of the Holy Spirit (Πνευμα). The image , lifted from the  Song of Songs is also an evocation of how the lost garden of delight has now been restored in Christ’s living community.

Other fathers move from this use of Canticles to using the symbol to refer to the Blessed Virgin as a personal summation of creation once again made perfect and radiant, like a scented garden, in the Redemption. Epiphanius of Salamis says: ‘She is that enclosed garden’ of delightful spices and pleasant breezes ‘that the prophet cries out about.’ The  emphasis on ‘enclosed’ is taken patristically as a symbol of her virginity, but they also know, quite exactly that ‘enclosed garden’ is the very definition of the word paradise: and this is how they extract the double-sense of the theology of Mary’s spiritual radiance as being the icon par-excellence of Paradise restored. St. Theodore the Studite hymns her, saying: ‘Rejoice Thou Garden Enclosed.’  Proklos of Constantinople offers us one of the finest examples of such Chairetismoi (acclamational) hymns of the Blessed Virgin where he piles on title on title, but surely alluding to  the Song of Songs, where  the ‘enclosed’ garden and ‘sealed’ spring are ciphers for her Virginity: ‘Mary: that Servant, Mother, Virgin, and Paradise. The only bridge from God to humankind,’ he says.  Chrysippus of Jerusalem acclaims her as the: ‘Very garden of the Father Himself.’

While knowing this Marian tradition, Gregory of Nyssa wishes to make the point in his Homilies on the Song of Songs that this divine acclamation of being the scented garden and the Bride of Christ, actually refers to the divine calling which God gives to all true disciples. All believers are called to the restoration of beauty and intimacy with God (like Mary herself) that the concept of garden evokes. Gregory teaches: ‘Where the Bridegroom says “My bride is an enclosed garden,” we learn how one can become the Lord’s sister and spouse. If, then, someone is so changed as to become bride because he has been joined to the Lord, and sister because she has done his will as the Gospel says, let her thus become a thriving garden that contains the splendor of all the plants: the sweet fig tree with the fruitful olive, the lofty-headed date palm, and the flourishing vine; and no thorn or briar, but instead cypress and myrtle.’  

Shortly after this passage he identifies this same mystery of the soul becoming a wondrous garden as a veritable synonym of the deification of the believer through the transformative grace of the Redemption: ‘For the goal of the entire life of virtue is participation in God, and it is surely Godhead which the reference to frankincense signifies. Yet the soul that is ever being led by the Word toward something more sublime does not come to a halt even here, but after her fragrance has become similar to that of frankincense, she becomes a garden after the likeness of the paradise; and no garden untended or unguarded, as among the first human beings, but rather a garden walled on every side by recollection of the commandment.’

So we can see that, after all, we do have in all of this a veritable tradition that lauds the beauty of the garden rather than lamenting our sad loss through its motif. But there is one garden, with which we shall end, that is both a beauty and a sorrow at the same time: a place of radiant glory and simultaneously of deep tragedy. It is the anvil of our salvation in many ways: the garden of Gethsemane.

This garden was, from before Jesus’ time, an olive grove (the name comes from gat shemanim, or ‘olive press’). It  lies at the foot of the slope of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, on a low eastern ridge parallel to the ancient city walls. There can hardly be a Christian that does not know this garden, and the story attached to it; and yet, perhaps, few have thought about it from the perspective of what it meant to be in a garden very late at night. Why this garden; here at this place; at this particular and unusual moment?     So, let me tell the story in a way Emily Dickinson would have approved: ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise.’

The old city where Jesus and his disciples held the Last, or Mystical, Supper together was in a narrow maze of buildings not far away from the now excavated site of Caiaphas’ residence. The latter was possessed of dungeon cells as it was also the headquarters of the much feared personal police force of Caiaphas who had charge of all security arrangements relating to the city as a religious pilgrimage centre. The Gospels tell us that the High Priest’s police were already on the lookout to arrest Jesus, especially after his causing of a particular fracas in the money changing area of the  Temple.

Animals for sacrifice entered the Temple precincts by the west side of the Southern Court, between the present Barclay gate and the Royal Stoa. Here, adjacent to the animal corrals, were the  changing tables so that foreign/secular money could be exchanged for Temple shekels before ritual animals were purchased. It was in this area that Jesus overturned the  coin dealers’ tables: partly in a protest against the trafficking of sacrificial animals, and partly in protest against the venality of the merchants and priests. From that moment onward, politically speaking, Jesus and his disciples were reckoned as guilty of sacrilege and were ‘wanted’ by the police. The Gospels, recounting Jesus’ last meal with his followers in the old city, therefore, are telling us of an immense risk that he was taking. Caiaphas’ police were stationed all over the city and the rooms where they were eating (not the  so-called Upper Room which was a Crusader-era invention without historical support) were probably close to the ancient stairway (itself near to the house of Caiaphas, close by Kaiser Wilhelm’s modern church of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin) which can still be seen running down the hill into the Kidron valley below, and exiting near the so-called ‘tombs of the prophets.’ 

In the Gospel accounts much is made of the fact that Judas ‘betrays’ Jesus at the meal and walks out of the room. What was this betrayal other than his decision to go across the street a few hundred yards and enter the  house of Caiaphas to tell them one particular thing: and that was the place where Jesus and his disciples were lodging that same night. As all good totalitarian police forces know, arrests of groups of dissidents are best made between three and four in the morning when all the household will be fast asleep and the whole crowd can be seized and bound before they can muster resistance. What the police needed to hear was exactly where Jesus and friends would all be at three that morning: and the answer Judas supplied to them was: Bethany, (modern Al Eizariya)  just over two miles to the south of the ancient city.

After the Supper, burned in Christian memory now, of course, because of the institution of the eucharist celebrated there, Jesus would have left the upper room cautiously, but not seeing any police presence would have known that the expected trouble would come much later. The disciples exited the festal occasion, having drunk abundantly one presumes, but happily singing the Hodayot (Thanksgiving) psalms appointed for the occasion. Passing down the ancient stairway (still visible today) Jesus would have turned left at the empty and imposing Mausolea in the west of the Kidron valley  (reminding him doubtless of his own prophetic words how Jerusalem preferred to kill prophets and build memorials for them afterwards). 

These ‘whitewashed sepulchres’ gleamed pallid marble in the full moon of that evening (we know this, for it was Passover time) and loomed over them all as the disciples cheerfully walked up the valley eastward to Gethsemane, while Jesus became more and more thoughtful and anxious. And here, at this precise spot, he stopped. As it tells us in the texts: ‘For here was a garden.’ It was also, as may be less well known, the major crossroads out of Jerusalem. One road led into the wilderness of the Judaean desert (where no police force could ever find them in  the dark: and Jesus was already skilled in evading the police of Antipas we remember); another of those roads led up the coastal path to Tyre (perhaps back to Capernaum where they had started?); yet another led over the brow of the hill at Gethsemane on to the short road back to Bethany where they were supposed to be staying the night. The disciples were surely eager now to get on to Bethany and a good sleep after a heavy festive dinner. Bethany for them was safety, and home. For Jesus it was arrest and death; probably fatal for all of them, for he now knew the police were planning to act that very night. And this is why he commanded the disciples to set a watch. This has been so often interpreted piously as ‘keep watch (i.e. pray) with me’ that it has obscured the fact that he meant it so  as to ‘keep watch for me, while I pray’. 

The reason for this was that Jesus needed urgently to confer with the Father in prayer about whether he could avoid this disaster that loomed, or whether that fatal outcome was what his Father intended. And so he prayed, for hour after hour, in a torment of agony. As long as the others  kept watch however, they could not be surprised. Anyone looking down the length of the Kidron valley from the raised vantage point of Gethsemane’s garden could see all  the foot traffic that was coming their way for at least half a mile. As planned, the police force of Caiaphas, with Judas  in tow, came clattering down the Kidron valley, with torches flaring and not a care  for any stealth: only  thinking they needed to be quiet and under cover of darkness after they had walked the further two miles to Bethany. By this time of night, after so many hours had passed since the Jesus group had been noted to have left the city, they thought they must surely have been in bed asleep for hours. 

But  one person, of course, was awake in that garden: one person had prevented the group from moving on over the hill and had heard the police chatter coming; one person saw their torches moving towards him even before they came to the garden gate. And looking to see why his disciples had not warned him a long time earlier, Jesus saw that they were all in various states of sleep. In that same instant he knew he had no choice: no choice unless he was to shout a warning and they could all wake up as fast as they could and run – but in that, risk the capture of several, and their possible deaths, and the even worse prospect of abandoning them to save himself. In  that instant, he knew he had no other choice but to shout that warning and then walk resolutely down the road through the  garden gate, thus blocking it, to call  out to the police, greet them and identify himself. In that chaos of surprise that followed, it is no accident at all that Jesus alone was arrested. Every one of the disciples  had time to wake up,  see for themselves exactly what was transpiring and do the instinctive thing: run  away into the darkness and escape. 

It was only afterwards,  surely, that reflecting on that chaotic moment they must have realized that if there was any single moment (though it was a lifetime of process not a single moment) when Jesus could have been said to have freely delivered himself over to death for their sake – it was that instant when he chose to protect his loved ones and walk through the garden gate into the hands of his enemies: precisely so that they could go free.

This is what fills my mind, when I think of our last garden, the olive grove of Gethsemane: a moonlit garden where immense courage and profound love and loyalty temper the tragedy of betrayal, brutality and carelessness that surrounded him that night. This was a garden of love, nonetheless: a love that with its brightness and courage is remembered as our Soteria, our safety and salvation through and beyond all the guilt and shame attendant on it. And that is why it can serve very well  as our last scene of a garden. It has some of the pain of the Genesis garden: much of the tragedy of loss that accompanies that archetypal narrative. But it is also a garden of love and light, like the other gardens that our tradition speaks of, where they stand as images of loving hopefulness in our Redemption. Though the night was full of moonlight on that Passover in Gethsemane, it was a garden lit up by a loyalty and protectiveness of the Saviour that dwarfed the moonlight and in so doing became a beacon of salvation for countless generations to come: O felix culpa quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem.