Eden
the garden of paradise. "It would be difficult," says a writer in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible" (i. 482), "in the whole history of opinion, to find any subject which has so invited, and at the same time so completely baffled conjecture, as the Garden of Eden. The three continents of the Old World have been subjected to the most rigorous search; from China to the Canary Isles, from the Mountains of the Moon to the coasts of the Baltic, no locality which in the slightest degree corresponded to the description of the first abode of the human race has been left unexamined." Philo Judæus (flourished about 20) first broached the allegorical theory of interpretation, teaching that paradise shadowed forth the governing faculty of the soul, and that the tree of life represented religion, the true means of immortality. Origen, adopting a somewhat similar view, regarded Eden as heaven, the trees as angels, and the rivers as wisdom; and Ambrosius considered the terrestrial paradise and the third heaven, mentioned by St. Paul (II Cor. xii: 2-4), as identical. Luther taught that Eden was guarded by angels from discovery and consequent profanation until the Deluge, when all traces were destroyed.
Swedenborg, who regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as constituting a divine allegory, taught that Eden represented the state of innocence in which man was orginally created and from which he degenerated in consequence of the Fall.