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Le Goût du Paradis. Jardins cartusiens et franciscains

Summary: Even though St. Bruno describes the charm of his own monstery in Calabria and not the austere Chartreuse, when emphasising the expansion of the spirit that the monastery brings about, Adam Scot is quick to reduce the monastic garden to allegory, to the four streams that irrigate it (lectio, meditatio, oratio, opus manuum). This sort of garden will end up symbolising, not only the whole of religious life, but also the four “senses” or meanings of Scripture, and even the four parts of theology, following the Commentary on the Sentences and St. Bonaventure too. Nonetheless, in turning away from the received image of the cloister, but also from allegory, St. Francis discovers, not only the garden of the world, but also a garden closer to home than that of the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, of Genesis or of the Canticle of Canticles. The urban dimension of the Fraternity favours likewise the perception of the garden as a place of leisure and of personal health and sanity, and no longer only as a Biblical symbol, place of toil or of refuge for the infirm.