Milad Doueihi's beautiful book does not seek to lift the mystery over earthly paradise. He shows, with select erudition, how this history prior to history informs the foundations of modernity. This modernity, while it is inaugurated with a contestation of the authority of the Bible, inherits and depends upon the same Biblical categories it seeks to undermine.
   --Fabrice Hadjaj, Art Press

Milad Doueihi's essay shows that a theological and erudite past can rejoin, through singular ways reconstructed here, some of the essential interrogations of our present. Although our sense of modernity may suffer from it, there are living cultural units that only mastered erudition, and the subtlety of analysis, allow us to reconstruct in their slow but certain elaboration.
   --Jean Marie Goulemot, La quinzaine littéraire

Anyone who wants to understand the ethical turn in modern philosophy, or the intellectual roots of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, needs to read Doueihi's account of the philosophical conditions under which our ideas of paradise developed and were at last overthrown. In this lucid study, beautifully translated by Jane Marie Todd, Milad Doueihi, argues that while the earthly paradise belongs to myth, it is a myth around which our most vital thinking continually turns.
   --Gordon Teskey, Harvard University

Milad Doueihi is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

Read More by Milad Doueihi:

• A Perverse History of the Human Heart

Read More by Jane Marie Todd:

• The Flowering of Muslim Theology
• Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination
• Race and Erudition
• Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World