I HAVE BEEN arguing for a few years now that Byzantines were animists, that their world was a relational web of humans and things, permeated by a deep incarnational theology. What is at stake in such a claim? I might start by saying that we owe past cultures—including ones very much still with us, such as the Byzantine—careful, honest, sympathetic examination of their own definitions, explanations, and aspirations. Such is a historian’s obligation. And an aspect of that obligation is resistance to one’s biases or ideologies. We’ve projected too much of ourselves onto the beliefs and hopes of Byzantines, and we must admit that they were neither modern nor Western in the ways we’ve assumed.

We account for our place in the world through individualism, our sturdy hope that we are resistantly discrete, impermeable entities. And yet we operate fundamentally as dividuals, open and porous, entangled in all things and every thing. This relational foundation of existence is now fraught with danger and escalating risk for all, to a great extent because we have refused to acknowledge and tend it: humans have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world. Our individuated supremacy blinds us to other human possibilities, so that history only mirrors us back to ourselves. And yet we can learn to see ourselves better, more frankly, by looking at things of the past with open minds, and this book invites a reexamination of what we have wrongly explained through solipsism— Byzantine art. And in this way, we might gain something for ourselves.