Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 4, Part I

Chapter 4 explores the transformative 

4th and 5th centuries.

As Rome extended religious tolerance to Christians, church leaders began to accommodate imperial demands – but they also struggled to hold a power base separate from the empire.   

Yet accepting imperial patronage expanded Christians’ ability to care for the sick and needy, and funded the building of churches filled with lush visual environments of paradise. 

New spaces for public worship

Church of St. Peter, Antakya (Antioch), Turkey

3rd century

This cave church, where St. Peter is believed to have presided as bishop, was used by very first Christians of Antioch. Extensively reconstructed, the oldest surviving elements date from the 3rd–4th centuries.

Artists and architects also took the iconography of the martyr’s shrine and developed it into large-scale public worship spaces. 

Outside Galla Placidia, Ravenna

5th century

Galla Placidia dates from around 430 AD, making it one of the oldest monuments in Ravenna. It is shaped like a Latin cross and covered with magnificent Byzantine mosaics inside.

In Ravenna’s mosaics, we see a continuity of images from the catacombs, as well as the emergence of a full-blown vision of paradise and Jesus Christ as Pantokrator (All-Holding, All-Sustaining, All-Just Presence).  

Inside Galla Placidia, Ravenna

Christ Pantokrator

Early church ideas about paradise were oriented to space – to a universe of many dimensions, blessed by the all-permeating Spirit – rather than to time (paradise now or in the afterlife). 

As early as the 2nd century, Christians were already producing an extensive literature about paradise. The influential Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that “the church has been planted as a paradisus in this world.”  Irenaeus believed that paradise existed now as well as in the next life, because Christ had reversed the Fall and restored Creation. 

A number of influential 4th century theologians – Ephrem the Syrian among them – thought paradise was both a real place on earth and an allegory for human spiritual development...

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Chapter 4, Part II

Ephrem the Syrian