ABSTRACT
Apart from visits in dreams and visions, the nearest that any living Byzantines got to paradise was twenty miles from its gates, a point that was reportedly reached by three Mesopotamian monks, Theophilos, Sergios, and Hygieinos, after a long and arduous journey to the east. Although there were some Early Christian writers, notably Origen, who denied the physical existence of the earthly paradise, seeing in the biblical account only a tissue of allegories, most early commentators were prepared to accept the earthly paradise as a real place, which, to be sure, had the potential for further allegorization, like all objects in the material world. The Early Christian authors agreed that once the four rivers of paradise reached the inhabited earth they acquired their familiar mundane characteristics. Ephrem Syrus specified that the rivers here do not taste the same as the waters of the fountain in paradise.
