I suspect that few of us might consider the Church Fathers to be promising candidates to whom Christians could turn for spiritual resources during an environmental crisis that threatens the health of our planet. After all, the earliest of them looked forward to the return of the Lord and the complete transformation of this cosmos in the not too distant future, and most of the later ones viewed the world through a Platonist lens that valued the eternal and immaterial over the temporal and material. Yet few historians of ancient Christian thought are as insightful as Virginia Burrus when it comes to reading the Fathers in ways that we (and perhaps they) might not expect, finding theological wisdom in early Christian literature other than the usual theological treatises, and connecting the theoretical and spiritual concerns of the present with those of the past. In this case, she turns to early Christianity ‘to think the ecological thought’ and to weave ‘a creaturely poiesis’ that ‘is productive and performative rather than referential, representation, or propositional’ and that encourages us to imagine new forms of life at this critical moment (p. 5). As such, the book presents the reader, not with an argument (although there are plenty of historically rigorous arguments), but with an invitation to join the early Christians in seeing and hearing the creation in new, less anthropocentric ways.

As the subtitle indicates, the book divides into three parts, which, as the author explains, can be read independently or in any order. Each part consists of fragments that range from historical-theological argument to poetic reflection and that readers of different interests can access as they will. Part i (‘Beginning again with Khora: Traces of a Dark Cosmology’) follows the figure of khora from its first appearance in Plato's Timaeus into Philo, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine and the rabbinic Genesis Rabbah; it finds that a mysterious, even eerie material presence or possibility always exists alongside the God who presumably creates ex nihilo. Burrus interacts with the philosophy of John Sallis as she considers how to think about God in relation to khora. Part ii (‘Queering Creation: Hagiography without Humans’) turns to queer theory, disability theory and animal studies, among other conversation partners, as Burrus reflects on how saints’ Lives often construct their subjects as part of a natural landscape, even bestial in their embodied flux. Among the late ancient holy people she ponders are Plotinus, Antony, Mary of Egypt, Syncletica and Simeon the Stylite. Part iii (‘Things and Practices: Arts of Coexistence’) brings the new materialism and thing theory to a study of Christian interaction with material objects like relics, icons and church buildings. Hymns and sermons of Basil, Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius suggest the praise and wonder that Christians sought to perform. An epilogue, inspired by a statement of Darwin on the importance of worms to the world's history, thinks with worms about cosmology, materiality, narrative, liturgy and the future. It is one of the best parts of the book, in which Burrus comes closest – thanks to the worm's role in eternal punishment – to considering at length eschatology, that is, where early Christians saw themselves and their earth going.

The book encourages the reader to think about scale, as it moves beautifully to the tiny worm from the vast khora, from which emerges the entire cosmos, and through every level in between. The ancient Christians somehow could see the fullness of divinity in tiny fragments of bone or wood, and yet they could scarcely have imagined the extremes of scale with which modern human beings can interact (and not merely imagine), from surveying the farthest reaches of our galaxy to examining single strands of our DNA. How do we navigate the disjuncture between the immensity of the climate crisis we face and the discouragingly small efforts of the individual human being? The early Christians, Burrus suggests, would have us start by listening to God's song of ‘love of all things’ and then living that love (p. 231).

Lest the ecclesiastical historians who read this Journal feel that they and their questions have been left behind, I can assure them that they will understand better Plato and Athanasius, Simeon and Syncletica, relics and basilica mosaics after they have read Ancient Christian ecopoetics. Book by book and essay by essay, historians of late ancient Christianity have been patiently restoring the material to ‘the age of spirituality’, when austere Christians allegedly turned away from the corporeality and idolatry of ‘paganism’. In the 1980s they started with what lies closest at hand, the body, but since then they have added material objects of all kinds, visual images, buildings, food, odours, inscribed words, parchment and papyri – in short, the material world itself. But what did it all mean? To scale up from our micro studies to a comprehensive vision is a challenge that few historians can accept and one that can never be fully met, but in this book Virginia Burrus weaves an ecopoetics that is persuasively ancient Christian even as it speaks to our most current fears and hopes.