[De contemptu mundi]

filled with all beauty, a storehouse of joy and exultation, exceeding the intelligence of sensitive creation, a divine region, and worthy of him who was according to the image, in which nothing irrational lived, but only man, the creation of divine hands. Also, Strabo and Bede say that paradise is a place placed in the east, with the ocean and opposing mountains placed between it and the regions that men inhabit; it is secret and most remote, reaching in height as far as the circle of the moon itself. The place was most suitable for innocent man because of its extreme temperateness, because there is no cold there, nor heat, but a perpetual temperateness. Also, because of the abundance of all goods, because, as Augustine says in De civitate Dei On the City of God, book 14, chapter 10: What could those men fear or grieve in such a great affluence of goods, where there was nothing absent that a good will might desire, and there was nothing present that might offend the flesh and soul of man living happily, or trouble him in any way? Also, because of the extreme pleasantness, for it was a storehouse of all beauty, as Damascene says, which the imperishable beauty of trees as well as leaves and flowers attests. For trees do not lose their foliage, flowers do not