正文
chinapot
[2006.07.01]Positing paradise
[size=6][font=黑體][b][2006.07.01]
[BOOK&ARTS]
Positing paradise
追尋天堂[/b][/font][/size]J
un 29th 2006
From The Economist print edition
For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look like. Two new books trace the history of the hereafter
三千年以來，人們一直試圖描繪出天堂的樣子。有兩本新書將會為我們來追溯這段曆史。
[img]http://www.economist.com/images/20060701/2606BK5.jpg[/img]
Bridgeman
WHERE do you find paradise on a map? To the modern eye, used to the cheap and functional cartography of roads and frontiers, the very question is absurd. Maps show real things, not imaginary ones. You might as well look for happiness in a telephone directory.
你能在這幅地圖中找出天堂嗎？現在看來，在這幅用簡單結構繪製道路和邊境的地圖上尋找到天堂，簡直是荒謬的。如果地圖不是虛構的，而是是真實的，那還不如亂打電話簿裏的電話來尋找快樂。
As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise, pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time and space in a way that is still beautiful, but can seem baffling. Their maps showed God, history, and human woes and joys, often biblical ones. The Garden of Eden was a real place, just as Adam was a real man.
正如對於基督教徒繪製天堂地圖的曆史有深入研究的Alessandro Scafi所指出的，前現代的地圖製作者拋棄了世俗製圖的方法，而是對地圖在精神上的指引的作用情有獨鍾。他們用看似莫名，但卻美妙的方法描繪時間與空間。他們的地圖展現了上帝，宗教曆史和聖經當中人們的喜怒哀樂。伊甸園是真實存在的，正如亞當確有其人一樣。
Such maps depicted paradise as imaginatively and confidently as they did earthly topography. The world was like a plate; paradise was up a mountain, across a sea, perhaps guarded by angels, maybe in China, or Armenia, or Abyssinia, or Mesopotamia. Christopher Columbus, encountering the Amazon river's freshwater, thought it must flow from paradise.
這些地圖描繪的天堂如同在真實的世界中一樣。世俗世界像是一個盤子，跨過群山，穿過海洋，或許在中國，或許在亞美尼亞，或許在埃塞俄比亞，或許在美索布達米亞，就是被天使所守衛的天堂。克裏斯多夫•哥倫布，就曾認為亞馬遜河中的潺潺流水就是來源於天堂。
Mr Scafi's book illustrates beautifully (though, sadly, all too often in black and white) how Eden shifted from the centre of maps to the periphery, and ultimately to the margins. The Renaissance and the Reformation boosted mankind's intellectual and cultural self-confidence. Although belief in a long-ago Eden's literal existence survived, most agreed with Martin Luther that it had perished in the flood. Even pious mapmakers found it hard to reconcile the clues in the Bible (a place where four rivers rose) with the realities of physical geography. Paradise became not just inaccessible, but something out of this world.
Scafi先生的書中用圖示說明了伊甸園是如何一步步從地圖的中心到地圖的外圍，最終淪為地圖的邊緣。文藝複興運動的興起推進了人文主義思想，盡管長久以來在文字上伊甸園仍然存在，但大多數人還是同意了馬丁•路德所持的它已經毀於洪水的觀點。甚至製圖者都很難發現與聖經當中線索（四條河的發源地）相吻合的地形。天堂不僅難以接近，而且似乎並不在我們這個世界之中。
Even today, on the fringes of Christianity and in popular journalism, there are people who claim to have found the Garden of Eden. It may not be paradise now (especially if it is a dusty and desolate corner of Iraq). But it jolly well was once. Mr Scafi tells this story well from the sublime start to the ridiculous end, with spectacular flourishes of art history and confident quotes from Latin, Greek and Hebrew. But the focus is tight; other cultures' heavenly ideas are barely mentioned.
甚至在今天，在基督教的邊緣教派和著名的雜誌上，仍然有人聲稱他們發現了伊甸園。它現在可能已經不是天堂了（特別如果它是在伊拉克的一個肮髒荒涼的角落裏），但它曾經的確是天堂。這就是Scafi先生告訴我們這樣一個包含著拉丁人，希臘人和希伯來人異彩紛呈的藝術曆史和偉大神示箴言但卻始於莊嚴，終於荒謬的故事。感謝對於基督教天堂觀念的密切關注，相比而言，其他文化中關於天堂的描述現在已極少被提及。
Kevin Rushby's book, by contrast, starts earlier, spreads wider and ends later. His enjoyable and informative canter through three millennia of intellectual and religious history highlights the many ways, ingenious, beautiful, wrongheaded or mad, in which humans have tried to define paradise, seek it or, latterly, create it.
相比而言，Kevin Rushby的書描述的有關天堂的觀念則要開始的更早，範圍更加廣闊，結束的也要晚的多。他的令人愉快和內容翔實的書中借助了三千年來知識和宗教曆史所關注人類定義天堂，尋找天堂，直到最後創造天堂的富於創造的，美麗動人的，固執己見的和幾近瘋狂的許多線索。
The idea predates Christianity, coming from ancient Babylon, where a paradeiza was an enclosure used for easy hunting. That idea of abundance, or “endless bacon” as Mr Rushby nicely puts it, is a persistent thread. It comes up again in the Muslim idea of flowing streams and plentiful virgins, though he notes that huri (Persian for nymph) may be a Koranic mistranslation of the Aramaic for “white raisin”.
先於基督教關於天堂的觀念，來自於古巴比倫，天堂被描述為一個易於狩獵的圍場。雖然Rushby先生認為huri是古蘭經對亞拉姆語“白色葡萄幹”的誤譯。但富足的觀念，或者說是像Rushby先生更細致地描述為“無窮的鹹肉”，是一個貫穿該書的線索。也同樣是來源於豐沛的河水和肥沃的處女地的穆斯林觀念。
Yearning for abundance alternates with the idea that real paradise is swapping earthly pleasure for something better. For Pythagoras, true happiness came from knowledge, in particular from the order and harmony of maths. He had a point. The loveliest architecture uses phi, the constant he derived from the proportions of a pentagram (the discussion on phi is a rare moment of truth in the otherwise nonsensical “Da Vinci Code”).
渴望富足的願望演化成了對現實世界中天堂美好生活的憧憬。對於畢達格拉斯，真正的快樂來源於知識，特別是數學上的有序和融洽。他從五角星的結構中獲得靈感，認為最好的的結構應該是希臘語中第21個字母φ的結構。（在《達芬奇密碼》一書中，有過對於該事件真實性的討論）
The third, darker, thread is that paradise means purging the world of unbelievers, sin, filth and so forth. That gets its first outing in the Book of Revelation, a lurid account of the apocalypse probably best read as an allegory of the individual Christian's journey to salvation. Millenarian sects, especially tiny ones, gleefully quote the text showing that only 144,000 people will be saved. All three threads weave in and out of human history. The Pythagoreans resurface whenever scientific and intellectual enlightenment glistens. Mr Rushby's account of the saintly John Tradescant's museum in 17th-century London, with its collection of natural wonders and curiosities from the newly discovered worlds of East and West, is gripping. So is the story of its shameful hijacking by the duplicitous Elias Ashmole. Visitors to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford may ponder the extraordinary unfairness: how many other “ambitious, ingratiating” social climbers have stolen so completely a hero's legacy?
書的第三條隱晦的線索是天堂被認為是清洗世界原罪和汙穢的地方。這使得在《啟示錄》中的第一次由於神示而公開救贖的活動變成了為單個基督徒進行救贖活動的寓言。數千年來，特別是些小教派，都引用《聖經》認為隻有144000人得到了救贖。以上這三條線索交織在人類的曆史之中，哪兒有科學的光芒，哪兒就有畢達格拉斯的信徒。Rushby先生對於17世紀倫敦聖約翰博物館中的奇珍異寶和其對東西方新大陸的好奇心的描述，簡直就是一場伊萊亞斯（希伯來先知）這個兩麵派進行無恥掠奪的故事，但確實是引人入勝的。來到牛津參觀Ashmolean博物館的遊客或許會對這種極大的不公平有所思考：究竟會有多少社會精英參與了這場對於傳說中的英雄的財富的掠奪呢？
Modernity, and the luxury it created (initially for a few, then for many) made earthly abundance seem within reach. The Pilgrim Fathers hoped for an earthly paradise without the sin and selfishness of the Old World. Philanthropists such as Robert Owen wanted that too, but without divine inspiration. His experiment only bankrupted him. Later attempts to build paradise on earth cost millions of lives.
人類所進行的現代化建設和所創造的社會財富使得神話中的富足在世俗世界中得以實現，Pilgrim神父希望人間天堂會是一個沒有罪惡和自私的新世界，雖然沒有神示，但像歐文這樣的慈善家們也希望如此，雖然他的實踐行動使自己破了產，在其後的建立世俗天堂的嚐試中，又有數百萬條生命為此付出了代價。
The prospect of acquired perfection lies behind many big ideas and most bad ones. If you do the right thing, believe the right thing, suffer enough, love enough, work hard enough, kill enough of the wrong people or breed enough of the right ones—then you will end up in paradise. That is a great motivator, often with awful results.
對於盡善盡美的追求促使了一些偉大思想的產生，當然也慫恿了更多的極端思想。如果你做一件事，並且相信這是個正確的抉擇，那你將會坦然麵對“故天將降大任於斯人也，必先苦其心誌，勞其筋骨， 餓其體膚，空乏其身行，行拂亂其所為，所以動心忍性，曾益其所不能。人恒過，然後能改。 困於心，衡於慮，而後作。”然後，最終你確信會為此而升入天堂。這將是多麽大的動力啊，但往往結果卻不盡人意。
Neither modern consumerism nor the back-to-nature sentiments that make people yearn for rural bliss get a good write-up from Mr Rushby. Trying to transcend our own imperfections, rather than eradicating those of others, is the best bet, he argues. Amen to that.
Rushby先生的寫作靈感並非來源於使人們向往田園生活現代消費主義和回歸自然主義。他認為，與其去根除別人的缺點，倒不如先克服自己的缺點。我們但願以上所述皆能成真。
[2006.07.01]Positing paradise
[size=6][font=黑體][b][2006.07.01]
[BOOK&ARTS]
Positing paradise
追尋天堂[/b][/font][/size]J
un 29th 2006
From The Economist print edition
For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look like. Two new books trace the history of the hereafter
三千年以來，人們一直試圖描繪出天堂的樣子。有兩本新書將會為我們來追溯這段曆史。
[img]http://www.economist.com/images/20060701/2606BK5.jpg[/img]
Bridgeman
WHERE do you find paradise on a map? To the modern eye, used to the cheap and functional cartography of roads and frontiers, the very question is absurd. Maps show real things, not imaginary ones. You might as well look for happiness in a telephone directory.
你能在這幅地圖中找出天堂嗎？現在看來，在這幅用簡單結構繪製道路和邊境的地圖上尋找到天堂，簡直是荒謬的。如果地圖不是虛構的，而是是真實的，那還不如亂打電話簿裏的電話來尋找快樂。
As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise, pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time and space in a way that is still beautiful, but can seem baffling. Their maps showed God, history, and human woes and joys, often biblical ones. The Garden of Eden was a real place, just as Adam was a real man.
正如對於基督教徒繪製天堂地圖的曆史有深入研究的Alessandro Scafi所指出的，前現代的地圖製作者拋棄了世俗製圖的方法，而是對地圖在精神上的指引的作用情有獨鍾。他們用看似莫名，但卻美妙的方法描繪時間與空間。他們的地圖展現了上帝，宗教曆史和聖經當中人們的喜怒哀樂。伊甸園是真實存在的，正如亞當確有其人一樣。
Such maps depicted paradise as imaginatively and confidently as they did earthly topography. The world was like a plate; paradise was up a mountain, across a sea, perhaps guarded by angels, maybe in China, or Armenia, or Abyssinia, or Mesopotamia. Christopher Columbus, encountering the Amazon river's freshwater, thought it must flow from paradise.
這些地圖描繪的天堂如同在真實的世界中一樣。世俗世界像是一個盤子，跨過群山，穿過海洋，或許在中國，或許在亞美尼亞，或許在埃塞俄比亞，或許在美索布達米亞，就是被天使所守衛的天堂。克裏斯多夫•哥倫布，就曾認為亞馬遜河中的潺潺流水就是來源於天堂。
Mr Scafi's book illustrates beautifully (though, sadly, all too often in black and white) how Eden shifted from the centre of maps to the periphery, and ultimately to the margins. The Renaissance and the Reformation boosted mankind's intellectual and cultural self-confidence. Although belief in a long-ago Eden's literal existence survived, most agreed with Martin Luther that it had perished in the flood. Even pious mapmakers found it hard to reconcile the clues in the Bible (a place where four rivers rose) with the realities of physical geography. Paradise became not just inaccessible, but something out of this world.
Scafi先生的書中用圖示說明了伊甸園是如何一步步從地圖的中心到地圖的外圍，最終淪為地圖的邊緣。文藝複興運動的興起推進了人文主義思想，盡管長久以來在文字上伊甸園仍然存在，但大多數人還是同意了馬丁•路德所持的它已經毀於洪水的觀點。甚至製圖者都很難發現與聖經當中線索（四條河的發源地）相吻合的地形。天堂不僅難以接近，而且似乎並不在我們這個世界之中。
Even today, on the fringes of Christianity and in popular journalism, there are people who claim to have found the Garden of Eden. It may not be paradise now (especially if it is a dusty and desolate corner of Iraq). But it jolly well was once. Mr Scafi tells this story well from the sublime start to the ridiculous end, with spectacular flourishes of art history and confident quotes from Latin, Greek and Hebrew. But the focus is tight; other cultures' heavenly ideas are barely mentioned.
甚至在今天，在基督教的邊緣教派和著名的雜誌上，仍然有人聲稱他們發現了伊甸園。它現在可能已經不是天堂了（特別如果它是在伊拉克的一個肮髒荒涼的角落裏），但它曾經的確是天堂。這就是Scafi先生告訴我們這樣一個包含著拉丁人，希臘人和希伯來人異彩紛呈的藝術曆史和偉大神示箴言但卻始於莊嚴，終於荒謬的故事。感謝對於基督教天堂觀念的密切關注，相比而言，其他文化中關於天堂的描述現在已極少被提及。
Kevin Rushby's book, by contrast, starts earlier, spreads wider and ends later. His enjoyable and informative canter through three millennia of intellectual and religious history highlights the many ways, ingenious, beautiful, wrongheaded or mad, in which humans have tried to define paradise, seek it or, latterly, create it.
相比而言，Kevin Rushby的書描述的有關天堂的觀念則要開始的更早，範圍更加廣闊，結束的也要晚的多。他的令人愉快和內容翔實的書中借助了三千年來知識和宗教曆史所關注人類定義天堂，尋找天堂，直到最後創造天堂的富於創造的，美麗動人的，固執己見的和幾近瘋狂的許多線索。
The idea predates Christianity, coming from ancient Babylon, where a paradeiza was an enclosure used for easy hunting. That idea of abundance, or “endless bacon” as Mr Rushby nicely puts it, is a persistent thread. It comes up again in the Muslim idea of flowing streams and plentiful virgins, though he notes that huri (Persian for nymph) may be a Koranic mistranslation of the Aramaic for “white raisin”.
先於基督教關於天堂的觀念，來自於古巴比倫，天堂被描述為一個易於狩獵的圍場。雖然Rushby先生認為huri是古蘭經對亞拉姆語“白色葡萄幹”的誤譯。但富足的觀念，或者說是像Rushby先生更細致地描述為“無窮的鹹肉”，是一個貫穿該書的線索。也同樣是來源於豐沛的河水和肥沃的處女地的穆斯林觀念。
Yearning for abundance alternates with the idea that real paradise is swapping earthly pleasure for something better. For Pythagoras, true happiness came from knowledge, in particular from the order and harmony of maths. He had a point. The loveliest architecture uses phi, the constant he derived from the proportions of a pentagram (the discussion on phi is a rare moment of truth in the otherwise nonsensical “Da Vinci Code”).
渴望富足的願望演化成了對現實世界中天堂美好生活的憧憬。對於畢達格拉斯，真正的快樂來源於知識，特別是數學上的有序和融洽。他從五角星的結構中獲得靈感，認為最好的的結構應該是希臘語中第21個字母φ的結構。（在《達芬奇密碼》一書中，有過對於該事件真實性的討論）
The third, darker, thread is that paradise means purging the world of unbelievers, sin, filth and so forth. That gets its first outing in the Book of Revelation, a lurid account of the apocalypse probably best read as an allegory of the individual Christian's journey to salvation. Millenarian sects, especially tiny ones, gleefully quote the text showing that only 144,000 people will be saved. All three threads weave in and out of human history. The Pythagoreans resurface whenever scientific and intellectual enlightenment glistens. Mr Rushby's account of the saintly John Tradescant's museum in 17th-century London, with its collection of natural wonders and curiosities from the newly discovered worlds of East and West, is gripping. So is the story of its shameful hijacking by the duplicitous Elias Ashmole. Visitors to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford may ponder the extraordinary unfairness: how many other “ambitious, ingratiating” social climbers have stolen so completely a hero's legacy?
書的第三條隱晦的線索是天堂被認為是清洗世界原罪和汙穢的地方。這使得在《啟示錄》中的第一次由於神示而公開救贖的活動變成了為單個基督徒進行救贖活動的寓言。數千年來，特別是些小教派，都引用《聖經》認為隻有144000人得到了救贖。以上這三條線索交織在人類的曆史之中，哪兒有科學的光芒，哪兒就有畢達格拉斯的信徒。Rushby先生對於17世紀倫敦聖約翰博物館中的奇珍異寶和其對東西方新大陸的好奇心的描述，簡直就是一場伊萊亞斯（希伯來先知）這個兩麵派進行無恥掠奪的故事，但確實是引人入勝的。來到牛津參觀Ashmolean博物館的遊客或許會對這種極大的不公平有所思考：究竟會有多少社會精英參與了這場對於傳說中的英雄的財富的掠奪呢？
Modernity, and the luxury it created (initially for a few, then for many) made earthly abundance seem within reach. The Pilgrim Fathers hoped for an earthly paradise without the sin and selfishness of the Old World. Philanthropists such as Robert Owen wanted that too, but without divine inspiration. His experiment only bankrupted him. Later attempts to build paradise on earth cost millions of lives.
人類所進行的現代化建設和所創造的社會財富使得神話中的富足在世俗世界中得以實現，Pilgrim神父希望人間天堂會是一個沒有罪惡和自私的新世界，雖然沒有神示，但像歐文這樣的慈善家們也希望如此，雖然他的實踐行動使自己破了產，在其後的建立世俗天堂的嚐試中，又有數百萬條生命為此付出了代價。
The prospect of acquired perfection lies behind many big ideas and most bad ones. If you do the right thing, believe the right thing, suffer enough, love enough, work hard enough, kill enough of the wrong people or breed enough of the right ones—then you will end up in paradise. That is a great motivator, often with awful results.
對於盡善盡美的追求促使了一些偉大思想的產生，當然也慫恿了更多的極端思想。如果你做一件事，並且相信這是個正確的抉擇，那你將會坦然麵對“故天將降大任於斯人也，必先苦其心誌，勞其筋骨， 餓其體膚，空乏其身行，行拂亂其所為，所以動心忍性，曾益其所不能。人恒過，然後能改。 困於心，衡於慮，而後作。”然後，最終你確信會為此而升入天堂。這將是多麽大的動力啊，但往往結果卻不盡人意。
Neither modern consumerism nor the back-to-nature sentiments that make people yearn for rural bliss get a good write-up from Mr Rushby. Trying to transcend our own imperfections, rather than eradicating those of others, is the best bet, he argues. Amen to that.
Rushby先生的寫作靈感並非來源於使人們向往田園生活現代消費主義和回歸自然主義。他認為，與其去根除別人的缺點，倒不如先克服自己的缺點。我們但願以上所述皆能成真。
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