Paradise Found?

In 1885 the theologian William F. Warren, then president of Boston University, could no longer keep silent. Society was turning away from "old time religion" in favor of an ever-expanding naturalism that made(in Warren's view) the world a colder, darker place. The removal of the supernatural from science threatened all Warren held dear;

For many years the public mind has been schooled in a narrow naturalism, which has in its world-view as little room for the extraordinary as it has for the supernatural. Decade after decade the representatives of this teaching have been measuring the natural phenomena of every age and of every place by the petty measuring rod of their own local and temporary experience. So long and so successfully have they dogmatized on the constancy of Nature's laws and the uniformity of Nature's forces that of late it has required no small degree of courage to enable an intelligent man to stand up in the face of his generation and avow his personal faith in the early existence of men of gigantic stature and of almost millenarian longevity.

Warren, however, did not lack the courage to "avow his personal faith." The quote comes from the preface to his book Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. At this time no one had reached the North Pole and what may be found there was still a mystery. Could it have been the location of Eden? Warren thought so, and Paradise Found was his attempt to prove it.

Warren knew that he would have to deal with a tough crowd. "The suggestion that primitive Eden was at the Arctic Pole," he conceded, "seems at first sight the most incredible of all wild and willful paradoxes." Thus his opening lines carry a defensive tone;

This book is not the work of a dreamer. Neither has it proceeded from a love of learned paradox. Nor yet is it a cunningly devised fable aimed at particular tendencies in current science, philosophy, or religion. It is a thoroughly serious and sincere attempt to present what is to the author's mind the true and final solution of one of the greatest and most fascinating of all problems connected with the history of mankind.

To make his case Warren surveyed ancient religious texts, accounts of early European explorers, and the work of contemporary scientists. Indeed, as one chapter title notes there were "Seven sciences to be satisfied", being "general geogony", "mathematical or astronomical geography", "physiographical geology", "prehistoric climatology", "paleontological botany", "paleontological zoology", and "paleontological anthropology and ethnology" (with "comparative mythology" thrown in for good measure).

Yet whatever science Warren used was bent to his theological speculations, which I hazard to guess came first. For Warren the North Pole would have been the highest (and hence holiest) place on the planet. Who could stand in such a place, closest to heaven, and deny the existence of their Creator? It would have been a tropical paradise at the top of the world, and the forces that caused the aurora borealis would have also caused "a high probability that if ever such a land as we have supposed existed, it must have presented forms of life surpassing those with which we are familiar." Indeed, Eden would have contained;

a flora and fauna of almost unimagined vigor and luxuriance of development. Under such conditions men themselves may well have had a stature and strength and longevity never attained since the Deluge, which destroyed "the world that then was," and immediately or ultimately occasioned the translocation of the seed of our new post-diluvian humanity into the cold and barren and desolate regions of the Northern Temperate zone. And if the first men were of the stature and strength and longevity supposed, how certainly would traditions of the fact linger in the memory of mankind long after its exile from its earlier and happier home!

To prove this was so Warren briefly plucked findings by scientists that fit with his notions. His case that the North Pole was the birthplace for all animals, for instance, rested on the statements of biogeographers (including A.R. Wallace) that creatures of the high northern latitudes were similar across continents. Warren does not contemplate that this is due to past connections and dispersals across North America and Asia, but instead sees this as proof that all animals (like all plants) had their origin at the North Pole.

Warren likewise piggbacked on discussions of the "cradle of humanity" among paleoanthropologists. Many favored Asia as the place where humans first appeared, and the French naturalist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages had suggested that it was perhaps in polar Asia as the place to look. This was close enough for Warren; the fact that some naturalists considered northern Asia to have been the birthplace of our species was enough for him to give his hypothesis a modicum of credibility. Warren, however, differed in that he was not thinking about evolution. While naturalists considered changes in climate, particularly the "Ice Age", to be critical to human evolution Warren held fast to Creation. "Few will be disposed," he wrote, "to accept the doctrine that man is simply a judiciously-iced pithecoid."

Despite the breadth of his research the driving force behind the book can be found on page 432. Sneering at the "higher criticism" of the Bible that caused so much fuss Warren appealed to Isiah to make his point; "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth ; but the word of our God shall stand forever." Whatever naturalists and other theologians said Warren was committed to "the word of [his] God" (which was surely the One True Word among the varying interpretations).

Whatever direct proof of Warren's hypothesis was long gone, of course. For all his work there was no way for anyone to follow his map and find Eden;

Sadder yet, it is Eden no longer. Even could some new Columbus penetrate to the secret centre of this Wonderland of the Ages, he could but hurriedly kneel amid a frozen desolation and, dumb with a nameless awe, let fall a few hot tears above the buried and desolated hearthstone of Humanity's earliest and loveliest home.

But did others agree that the North Pole was truly the "navel of the world" and the center of Creation? If Warren had written his book as a scientific treatise dealing with the evolution of humanity and a figurative Eden then his book might have gained some traction. Since he was defending a literalistic reading of Genesis, complete with giants, however, the book would attract more criticism than acclaim. A review in the Atlantic Monthly began;

When the historian of literature renders his account of the scientific writings of the nineteenth century, he will have an interesting chapter on the semi- scientific books which were devoted to the task of reconciling the old mythologies to modern learning. No part of his task will be more charming than that which sets forth the many efforts to determine the seat of paradise, that fair cradle of the golden youth of man, whence he was driven to the toil and woe of the rude outer world.

Paradise Found was one such attempt, a book that looked to one of the last mysterious places on the planet for vestiges of Eden. The evidence Warren gathered was bent to his fit his hypothesis, and the best that could be said of it was that it was an interesting book. (The author of the review also credited Warren for realizing that his case had to be made scientifically and could not rest on the Bible alone.)

A review in the Universalist Quarterly and General Review was likewise critical of the scientific hypothesis Warren tried to establish, and the best compliment that could be given was that Warren had worked hard on the project. The summary in the The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine, however, had a more biting tone;

This chapter [on the "Tree of Life"] gives a very good idea of the method of President Warren's madness. He searches all literature for traditions that have any connection with the word " tree," and turns them all into confirmations of the very letter of Genesis, utterly regardless of any opposing argument.

Particularly damning was the inclusion of a letter of a "divinely inspired" German theology student in the appendix, who happened to have a revelation similar to Warren's thesis. Of this letter the reviewer wrote;

If any reader of this absurdly elaborate production does not find in this German ally the reductio ad absurdum of the north pole theory, let him turn to Dillmann on Genesis or any other scholarly commentator without a hobby, and learn how coolly Dr. Warren omits the arguments which go to show conclusively that the Eden legend refers to a central part of Asia, to which all Eastern tradition refers unanimously.

What value could such a book hold? It was certainly interesting but Warren pushed so hard that the fragile edifice came crumbling down. Works attempting to reconcile science and religion would continue to be published (and they still are today), but Warren's attempt to cram science into Genesis was an anachronism.

Even if a case could be made that all life flowed from some polar region in the ancient past Warren clung so tightly to Scripture that he immediately undermined his own cause. Any search for a literal Eden is in vain for there is so reason to think that such a place ever existed. (Perhaps there was a place that inspired the description of Eden, but the Garden as described in the Bible is a myth.) Yet Scripture seemed to demand that is be so, for how could the rest of the Bible make sense without the expulsion of our kind from Paradise? Warren was thus caught between the changing science of his time and his deep desire for a real Eden. His attempts to find compromise between the two only produced a rotten result.