"The recognition that the paradise of knowledge enjoyed by our parents was an historical reality, combined with the acceptance of the command to 'have dominion' in its full literal sense, provided a vital impetus to the seventeenth-century quest to know and master the world. Only when the story of creation was divested of its symbolic elements could God's commands to Adam be related to worldly activities. If the Garden of Eden were but a lofty allegory, as Philo, Origen, and later Hugh of St. Victor, had suggested, there would be little point in attempting to re-establish a paradise on earth. If God's command to Adam to tend the garden had primarily symbolic significance, as Augustine had believed, then the idea that man was to re-establish paradise through gardening and agriculture would simply not have presented itself so strongly to the seventeenth-century mind."
-- The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison, 1998, p. 207.
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