How did late ancient Christians think about nature? This is not Virginia Burrus's question, but her erudite and evocative new book Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things helps answer it. To be clear, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics is not a book about how Origen or Augustine conceptualized God's creation or man's relationship to animals, though both of these topics appear. “Nature,” as a reified, dominated, and sentimentalized otherness is firmly, and correctly, rejected in this study. Rather, Burrus's project, while historically rooted in places, seeks to highlight the relevance of select early Christian theologians for contemporary discussions about religion and ecology within our own moment of environmental crisis, though she invokes these thinkers neither as guides nor as cautionary tales. Specifically, the book explores some of the ways in which early Christian authors engaged in “the ecological thought,” a phrase coined by ecocritic Timothy Morton in his book of the same title (Harvard University Press, 2010), which invokes an approach to the universe—everything and anything really—that recognizes the scaled, fractal interconnectedness of all things: living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. Morton's concept “the ecological thought” performs double duty in Ancient Christian Ecopoetics. On the one hand, it is Burrus's own guiding conceptual framework, informing her reading of texts and objects. On the other, Burrus presents “the ecological thought” as evocative of an ancient Christian experience, writing: “Ancient Mediterranean Christians experienced humans as coexisting with a wide range of other lively, relational beings, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, angelic or demonic, divine or creaturely, large or small. This ancient ecopoetics is both materialistic and animistic” (6). For Burrus, in other words, “the ecological thought” offers a way into early Christian understanding and experiences of materiality and the relatedness of being as well as an opportunity for us to reflect on our own place in this cosmic “mesh” of relations.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Beginning Again with Khora: Traces of a Dark Cosmology,” explores Plato's figure of khora in the Timaeus, which Burrus describes as “something like the nature of nature—so long as we understand that this ‘nature’ is less of a grounding than an abysmal ungrounding and that we are ourselves are in the thick of it” (12). Burrus then considers how subsequent Jewish and early Christian thinkers (e.g., Philo, Origen, Augustine, the rabbinic Genesis Rabbah) responded to this Platonic khora and how they made sense of an adjacent cosmological force acting alongside the more familiar demiurgical or divine model. The second section, “Queering Creation: Hagiography without Humans,” draws liberally on ecocriticism and queer theory as well as disability and animal studies to explore how we might understand the figure of the early Christian saint and the genre of hagiography differently. Saints’ lives, Burrus suggests, “queer” time, space, and the very body of the holy man or woman by breaking down or refusing to acknowledge expected boundaries, especially those seeming to divide the material from the cultural. In her reading, the body of a saint-like Simeon Stylites, whose rotting, maggot-ridden flesh is vividly described in several of his lives, mutates into a fluid assemblage of human and nonhuman: the man, the ropes that bind him, the column on which he sits, and the worms that fester in his wounds. “Hagiography,” she suggests, “undoes human exceptionalism. In the same gesture, it undermines any concept of natural order” (142). In the third and final section, “Things and Practices: Arts of Coexistence,” Burrus combines ecocriticism with thing theory to explore the interrelatedness of early Christians and their material objects (i.e., relics and reliquaries) and spaces (i.e., basilicas), asking “what might it mean to conceptualize things from a nonanthropocentric perspective” (148). Here her fascination with scale and the idea that physical objects possess not simply agency but vitality comes into the fore as she ruminates on the ways in which early Christian authors understood holy objects and spaces as “alive” and hence pregnant with experiences of their own.

Whether you like this book will depend in part on your tolerance for nontraditional forms of scholarly writing and explanation. Burrus, for example, uses poetry in places to distill her thoughts and draws on contemporary performance art as an alternative heuristic for reading saints’ lives. In this reader's opinion, Burrus's intellectual audacity succeeds, but some may not agree. It also will ultimately depend on whether you buy into Morton's conceptualization of “the ecological thought” as a sort of cosmic hermeneutic. While Morton's fractal interconnectedness and the neo-animism that underlies it work well when discussing relics and reliquaries, I do wonder whether they can as helpfully illuminate ancient Christian experiences of city walls or, more mundanely still, a random rock in the garden. Moreover, this is a book in dialogue with a wide spectrum of interlocutors, many of whom are not scholars of early Christianity, and which conveys a deliberately presentist message. For Burrus, “the ecological thought” is not just a lens for looking at the past; it is a necessary response to our own age of ecological crisis.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot here for the historian of early Christianity and late antiquity. Ancient Christian Ecopoetics is a crucial contribution to the cultural history of materiality in late antiquity, representing yet another significant step forward along a scholarly path first forged by Patricia Cox Miller with her book The Corporeal Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Put simply: this is the kind of study that cultural historians of late antiquity interested in the material turn need to be undertaking. The recent spate of publications on late antiquity's environmental history, many of which attract popular attention because of their dramatic claims to explain Rome's “decline and fall” as a response to climate change and pandemic disease, collectively fail to consider a critical question that Burrus probes in this book: how did late Romans experience and relate to their physical worlds? While purposely narrow in scope, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics presents us with one possible set of answers as well as a framework for pursuing further research.