L’Eden biblique et l’Utopie de Thomas More
The biblical Garden of Eden and Thomas More’s Utopia

Summary/Abstract: Utopias are the inheritors of the “semantic basin” constituted by the corpus of initiation voyages of Late Antiquity and of the Middle Ages. Classical utopian authors, from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, borrowed from the medieval myth of the Terrestrial Paradise both the imaginary location of the Garden of Eden and the rich symbolical material concerning the marvelous flora and fauna, as well as the monstrous human races that inhabited the fabulous countries of Asia. Starting with the discoveries of the Renaissance, the “marvels of the East” were transferred to the West, so that the newly found continent became the New Indies. Christopher Columbus even thought that South America was literally the Garden of Eden. When Thomas More searched a location for his Utopia, he situated it on the precise spot of the otherwise very vague world map where Columbus placed the Terrestrial Paradise. This implies that the humanist City of Man was the inheritor of the Christian Garden of God.

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