“Modern studies of the Fathers have revealed beyond question that one of the main motives that impelled men to embrace the ‘angelic life’ (bios angelikos) of solitude and poverty in the desert was precisely the hope that by so doing they might return to paradise.

“Now this concept must be properly and accurately understood. Paradise is not ‘heaven.’ Paradise is a state, or indeed a place, on earth. Paradise belongs more properly to the present than to the future life. In some sense it belongs to both. It is the state in which man was originally created to live on earth. It is also conceived as a kind of antechamber to heaven after death–as for instance at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio. Christ, dying on the cross, said to the good thief at His side: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise,’ and it was clear that this did not mean, and could not have meant, heaven.” (p. 53)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.