Searching for the Garden of Eden in a remote corner of Nicaragua Credo by Geoffrey Rowell The Times September 09, 2006

The Times September 09, 2006


Searching for the Garden of Eden in a remote corner of Nicaragua
Credo by Geoffrey Rowell



NESTLED in the southeast corner of Lake Nicaragua — called by the Spanish conquistadors mar dulce, the sweet or freshwater sea — is the little archipelago of Solentiname. It is a knot of sparsely populated, densely wooded islands, with a rich bird and animal life. Tall snowy egrets stand sentinel along the water’s edge; cormorants keep guard on overhanging branches; snail-hawks circle after water snails and kingfishers dart for fish. Parrots and howler monkeys are found in the trees.
On Mancarrón Island there is a small settlement with a simple church. It was there that the Catholic poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal ministered in the early 1960s. With a conscience stirred by the political inequalities and oppression of Nicaragua at the time, Cardenal also saw the artistic potential of the islanders and gave them classes in painting and balsa wood sculpture. When I went there this summer I found the altar of the little church decorated with patterned and ornamented linear bands in dusky reds, oranges and blues. A striking relief on the east wall shows the crucified Christ, with head drooping, knees bent and hands grasping the nails dimly reminiscent of Grünewald’s powerful Isenheim altarpiece. It is set against a blood-red background. Above, the peacock, the symbol of eternity, spreads its tail in a many-eyed fan, and the walls are decorated with the birds, animals, flowering trees, and the simple local houses that are the setting of Solentiname.



What Cardenal started has flourished. The Solentiname artists produce wonderfully rich and bright naive paintings in which the natural world of the islands and the rainforest is shown in iridescent colour. It is indeed a vision of paradise, a vision of life in harmony with the natural world, reminding us insistently of the need to care for that world, to guard against exploitation, and to be aware that the beauty to which our eyes are opened is intimately linked with the delicate ecological balance, which we destroy and distort at our peril.

The word paradise comes from an old Persian word pairidaêza, meaning an enclosed park or garden. In the Greek Old Testament it is the word used for the Garden of Eden, and paradise became synonomous with Eden. The world of perfect harmony and natural beauty undistorted by sin which we sense we have lost, and for which we have a nostalgic longing, is a symbol of the deeper harmony between humanity and God, which characterised the innocence of Adam and Eve in the garden in the archetypal story in Genesis. It is not for nothing that Milton called his great epic poem Paradise Lost. A literal Eden there may not have been, but the nostalgia for paradise is all too real, as a casual glimpse at the advertisements of travel agents or estate agents will quickly show. We long for a place where beauty and harmony, trust and goodness, will flourish. Those who wove traditional carpets were often concerned to depict paradise, a new creation that could adorn the wall or mark out the floor, sometimes in the Oriental Christian tradition being used as a curtain to veil the sanctuary, the paradise within.

And if there was a nostalgia for a paradise lost, so there is also a longing for a paradise regained. Gardens, formal or wild, with landscaped vistas or intimate small patios, are windows into such a paradise. A universe redeemed, paradise regained, is a world transfigured. Edwin Muir in his poem The Transfiguration speaks of “the source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed.” In the light of paradise we see things differently, and see again a world in harmony: “The painted animals Assembled there in gentle congregations, Or sought apart their leafy oratories, Or walked in peace the wild and tame together.” Even “the refuse heaps were grained with that fine dust that made the world”.

“In Thy light shall we see light” wrote the psalmist. Light, and seeing things in the brightness of light, is another picture of paradise regained. The haloes of saints are symbols of the light of Heaven and Dante, led to the heart of paradise, sees the nine orders of angels in the form of nine circles of light spinning around the brilliant point of God’s light at the centre. It is to that heavenly light that the apses and rose windows of the great medieval cathedrals point — holy places in which in worship, praise and contemplation we taste and see and know that grace of transforming love, through which alone paradise is regained.




The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe