THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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earth, as the subtropicurn of earthly bliss. Thus it was that the power of poetry still populated the ‘terra inhabitabilis’ of its theory in the most humane way: how often
must Columbus, before he set out on his voyages to Eldorado­Eden, have connected the lines from Dante about this morning radiance with his own imago mundi. And
Dante's theoretical restriction of the earthly paradise to the top of a mountain inaccessible to all living beings did not dispel the general belief in a continental location of
the earthly paradise, nor the hope that living beings could reach its vicinity. On this point, however, the legend of Alexander had a more powerful influence, and it did
not point to a postmortal island but to a populous continent in the southern sea. It pointed to India, it pointed to the overland route, and later to the sea route to the
earthly paradise in Asia. That is why there was no major river in Asia which had not been connected with one of the biblical streams of Paradise; such as the Ganges,
such as, in Marco Polo, the Oxus. The overland route and the sea route to the earthly paradise were thus chiefly orientated towards India, to the tropically mysterious
land, full of marvels of another existence compared with the European­Near Eastern world. The ancient world and then the Church Fathers placed their Fortunate Isles
essentially in the Atlantic, the Middle Ages essentially added these too to India or allowed India, the geographical utopian space par excellence, to extend as far as
them. And in the end the voyage west itself, owing to the spherical shape of the earth, was not inconsistent with the south­easterly location: ex oriente lux, in the
Christian Middle Ages the earthly paradise was explained by means of India, through all the oceans of seaweed.
Voyage of St Brendan, the kingdom of Prester John; American, Asiatic paradise
It remained there even when the ship steered a westward course. As was natural in the case of Irish and Norman seafarers; no eastern ocean lay on their doorstep.
Moreover, the Isle of the Blest continued to have an effect, the wholly Atlantic and not yet Indian one. Yet for medieval legend it is still viewed in an Indian fight, the
Greek one alone was not mysterious enough. The contradiction between the Greek tradition, which located the land of the blessed in the west, and the biblical one
which sought it in the east, admittedly did not break out yet in these early days, despite all the fluctuations, but the still so Atlantic Isle of the Blest already had