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[2006.07.01]Positing paradise
[size=6][font=黑体][b][2006.07.01]
[BOOK&ARTS]
Positing paradise
追寻天堂[/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
三千年以来，人们一直试图描绘出天堂的样子。有两本新书将会为我们来追溯这段历史。
[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.
你能在这幅地图中找出天堂吗？现在看来，在这幅用简单结构绘制道路和边境的地图上寻找到天堂，简直是荒谬的。如果地图不是虚构的，而是是真实的，那还不如乱打电话簿里的电话来寻找快乐。
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.
正如对于基督教徒绘制天堂地图的历史有深入研究的Alessandro Scafi所指出的，前现代的地图制作者抛弃了世俗制图的方法，而是对地图在精神上的指引的作用情有独钟。他们用看似莫名，但却美妙的方法描绘时间与空间。他们的地图展现了上帝，宗教历史和圣经当中人们的喜怒哀乐。伊甸园是真实存在的，正如亚当确有其人一样。
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.
这些地图描绘的天堂如同在真实的世界中一样。世俗世界像是一个盘子，跨过群山，穿过海洋，或许在中国，或许在亚美尼亚，或许在埃塞俄比亚，或许在美索布达米亚，就是被天使所守卫的天堂。克里斯多夫•哥伦布，就曾认为亚马逊河中的潺潺流水就是来源于天堂。
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先生的书中用图示说明了伊甸园是如何一步步从地图的中心到地图的外围，最终沦为地图的边缘。文艺复兴运动的兴起推进了人文主义思想，尽管长久以来在文字上伊甸园仍然存在，但大多数人还是同意了马丁•路德所持的它已经毁于洪水的观点。甚至制图者都很难发现与圣经当中线索（四条河的发源地）相吻合的地形。天堂不仅难以接近，而且似乎并不在我们这个世界之中。
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，在基督教的边缘教派和著名的杂志上，仍然有人声称他们发现了伊甸园。它现在可能已经不是天堂了（特别如果它是在伊拉克的一个肮脏荒凉的角落里），但它曾经的确是天堂。这就是Scafi先生告诉我们这样一个包含着拉丁人，希腊人和希伯来人异彩纷呈的艺术历史和伟大神示箴言但却始于庄严，终于荒谬的故事。感谢对于基督教天堂观念的密切关注，相比而言，其他文化中关于天堂的描述现在已极少被提及。
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的书描述的有关天堂的观念则要开始的更早，范围更加广阔，结束的也要晚的多。他的令人愉快和内容翔实的书中借助了三千年来知识和宗教历史所关注人类定义天堂，寻找天堂，直到最后创造天堂的富于创造的，美丽动人的，固执己见的和几近疯狂的许多线索。
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”.
先于基督教关于天堂的观念，来自于古巴比伦，天堂被描述为一个易于狩猎的围场。虽然Rushby先生认为huri是古兰经对亚拉姆语“白色葡萄干”的误译。但富足的观念，或者说是像Rushby先生更细致地描述为“无穷的咸肉”，是一个贯穿该书的线索。也同样是来源于丰沛的河水和肥沃的处女地的穆斯林观念。
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”).
渴望富足的愿望演化成了对现实世界中天堂美好生活的憧憬。对于毕达格拉斯，真正的快乐来源于知识，特别是数学上的有序和融洽。他从五角星的结构中获得灵感，认为最好的的结构应该是希腊语中第21个字母φ的结构。（在《达芬奇密码》一书中，有过对于该事件真实性的讨论）
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?
书的第三条隐晦的线索是天堂被认为是清洗世界原罪和污秽的地方。这使得在《启示录》中的第一次由于神示而公开救赎的活动变成了为单个基督徒进行救赎活动的寓言。数千年来，特别是些小教派，都引用《圣经》认为只有144000人得到了救赎。以上这三条线索交织在人类的历史之中，哪儿有科学的光芒，哪儿就有毕达格拉斯的信徒。Rushby先生对于17世纪伦敦圣约翰博物馆中的奇珍异宝和其对东西方新大陆的好奇心的描述，简直就是一场伊莱亚斯（希伯来先知）这个两面派进行无耻掠夺的故事，但确实是引人入胜的。来到牛津参观Ashmolean博物馆的游客或许会对这种极大的不公平有所思考：究竟会有多少社会精英参与了这场对于传说中的英雄的财富的掠夺呢？
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.
人类所进行的现代化建设和所创造的社会财富使得神话中的富足在世俗世界中得以实现，Pilgrim神父希望人间天堂会是一个没有罪恶和自私的新世界，虽然没有神示，但像欧文这样的慈善家们也希望如此，虽然他的实践行动使自己破了产，在其后的建立世俗天堂的尝试中，又有数百万条生命为此付出了代价。
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.
对于尽善尽美的追求促使了一些伟大思想的产生，当然也怂恿了更多的极端思想。如果你做一件事，并且相信这是个正确的抉择，那你将会坦然面对“故天将降大任于斯人也，必先苦其心志，劳其筋骨， 饿其体肤，空乏其身行，行拂乱其所为，所以动心忍性，曾益其所不能。人恒过，然后能改。 困于心，衡于虑，而后作。”然后，最终你确信会为此而升入天堂。这将是多么大的动力啊，但往往结果却不尽人意。
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先生的写作灵感并非来源于使人们向往田园生活现代消费主义和回归自然主义。他认为，与其去根除别人的缺点，倒不如先克服自己的缺点。我们但愿以上所述皆能成真。
[2006.07.01]Positing paradise
[size=6][font=黑体][b][2006.07.01]
[BOOK&ARTS]
Positing paradise
追寻天堂[/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
三千年以来，人们一直试图描绘出天堂的样子。有两本新书将会为我们来追溯这段历史。
[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.
你能在这幅地图中找出天堂吗？现在看来，在这幅用简单结构绘制道路和边境的地图上寻找到天堂，简直是荒谬的。如果地图不是虚构的，而是是真实的，那还不如乱打电话簿里的电话来寻找快乐。
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.
正如对于基督教徒绘制天堂地图的历史有深入研究的Alessandro Scafi所指出的，前现代的地图制作者抛弃了世俗制图的方法，而是对地图在精神上的指引的作用情有独钟。他们用看似莫名，但却美妙的方法描绘时间与空间。他们的地图展现了上帝，宗教历史和圣经当中人们的喜怒哀乐。伊甸园是真实存在的，正如亚当确有其人一样。
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.
这些地图描绘的天堂如同在真实的世界中一样。世俗世界像是一个盘子，跨过群山，穿过海洋，或许在中国，或许在亚美尼亚，或许在埃塞俄比亚，或许在美索布达米亚，就是被天使所守卫的天堂。克里斯多夫•哥伦布，就曾认为亚马逊河中的潺潺流水就是来源于天堂。
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先生的书中用图示说明了伊甸园是如何一步步从地图的中心到地图的外围，最终沦为地图的边缘。文艺复兴运动的兴起推进了人文主义思想，尽管长久以来在文字上伊甸园仍然存在，但大多数人还是同意了马丁•路德所持的它已经毁于洪水的观点。甚至制图者都很难发现与圣经当中线索（四条河的发源地）相吻合的地形。天堂不仅难以接近，而且似乎并不在我们这个世界之中。
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，在基督教的边缘教派和著名的杂志上，仍然有人声称他们发现了伊甸园。它现在可能已经不是天堂了（特别如果它是在伊拉克的一个肮脏荒凉的角落里），但它曾经的确是天堂。这就是Scafi先生告诉我们这样一个包含着拉丁人，希腊人和希伯来人异彩纷呈的艺术历史和伟大神示箴言但却始于庄严，终于荒谬的故事。感谢对于基督教天堂观念的密切关注，相比而言，其他文化中关于天堂的描述现在已极少被提及。
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的书描述的有关天堂的观念则要开始的更早，范围更加广阔，结束的也要晚的多。他的令人愉快和内容翔实的书中借助了三千年来知识和宗教历史所关注人类定义天堂，寻找天堂，直到最后创造天堂的富于创造的，美丽动人的，固执己见的和几近疯狂的许多线索。
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”.
先于基督教关于天堂的观念，来自于古巴比伦，天堂被描述为一个易于狩猎的围场。虽然Rushby先生认为huri是古兰经对亚拉姆语“白色葡萄干”的误译。但富足的观念，或者说是像Rushby先生更细致地描述为“无穷的咸肉”，是一个贯穿该书的线索。也同样是来源于丰沛的河水和肥沃的处女地的穆斯林观念。
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”).
渴望富足的愿望演化成了对现实世界中天堂美好生活的憧憬。对于毕达格拉斯，真正的快乐来源于知识，特别是数学上的有序和融洽。他从五角星的结构中获得灵感，认为最好的的结构应该是希腊语中第21个字母φ的结构。（在《达芬奇密码》一书中，有过对于该事件真实性的讨论）
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?
书的第三条隐晦的线索是天堂被认为是清洗世界原罪和污秽的地方。这使得在《启示录》中的第一次由于神示而公开救赎的活动变成了为单个基督徒进行救赎活动的寓言。数千年来，特别是些小教派，都引用《圣经》认为只有144000人得到了救赎。以上这三条线索交织在人类的历史之中，哪儿有科学的光芒，哪儿就有毕达格拉斯的信徒。Rushby先生对于17世纪伦敦圣约翰博物馆中的奇珍异宝和其对东西方新大陆的好奇心的描述，简直就是一场伊莱亚斯（希伯来先知）这个两面派进行无耻掠夺的故事，但确实是引人入胜的。来到牛津参观Ashmolean博物馆的游客或许会对这种极大的不公平有所思考：究竟会有多少社会精英参与了这场对于传说中的英雄的财富的掠夺呢？
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.
人类所进行的现代化建设和所创造的社会财富使得神话中的富足在世俗世界中得以实现，Pilgrim神父希望人间天堂会是一个没有罪恶和自私的新世界，虽然没有神示，但像欧文这样的慈善家们也希望如此，虽然他的实践行动使自己破了产，在其后的建立世俗天堂的尝试中，又有数百万条生命为此付出了代价。
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.
对于尽善尽美的追求促使了一些伟大思想的产生，当然也怂恿了更多的极端思想。如果你做一件事，并且相信这是个正确的抉择，那你将会坦然面对“故天将降大任于斯人也，必先苦其心志，劳其筋骨， 饿其体肤，空乏其身行，行拂乱其所为，所以动心忍性，曾益其所不能。人恒过，然后能改。 困于心，衡于虑，而后作。”然后，最终你确信会为此而升入天堂。这将是多么大的动力啊，但往往结果却不尽人意。
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先生的写作灵感并非来源于使人们向往田园生活现代消费主义和回归自然主义。他认为，与其去根除别人的缺点，倒不如先克服自己的缺点。我们但愿以上所述皆能成真。
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