Split light: coloring of Medieval descriptions of paradise

Abstract

The most important attribute of paradise in most of its medieval descriptions is light, which is usually characterized in superlatives: paradise is filled with such a bright radiance that any differentiation of colors is apparently impossible here. However, some texts suggest a certain, albeit modest, color diversity of paradise: they mention the colors of plants present in paradise, the colors of rivers flowing in it, etc. It seems to us that such a “splitting” of undifferentiated light that dominates paradise space does two functions. First, it symbolically expresses the difference in virtues in terms of their quality and meaning (medieval paradise, like the earthly world, is strictly differentiated, although not in a social but in a moral sense). Differentiation of colors from objects can be transferred to human bodies. Secondly, the coloring of paradise, albeit not rich, corresponds to the multicolor criterion characteristic of medieval artistic thinking: paradise is interpreted as a “decorated” place (in this respect it correlates with “decorated” speech in rhetorical theory), and decoration requires the presence of “colores” (As in rhetoric, embellishment is achieved by using verbal “colores”, i.e. tropes and figures).