Life: A Natural History of an Early Christian Universe

From ancient peoples’ perspective, the “landscape and weather were simply alive” and “humans lived inside them,” according to this stirring exploration of the cosmology of antiquity. Classicist Chin (Melania) posits that such perceptions of an “ordered and beautiful universe” even transcended creed; drawing on early Christian theologian Origen and his schoolmate, the pagan philosopher Plotinus, Chin shows how their “parallel cosmologies” both articulated “a story of cosmic unity.” Intertwining a “human-sized story” about these two thinkers with an unabashedly poetic attempt to “put the human inside the mind of the larger-than-human universe,” Chin evokes what it meant to believe in the “aliveness” and “unity” of the world. For example, following the thinking of Plotinus, Chin describes plants as “the thought of the natural world,” small beings that transform and are transformed by the humans who grow them, eat them, and, in the case of papyrus, weave them into paper as a home for words—which likewise “enter and change” the human body. Tackling other materials, including stone (buildings are “the rearranged skin of the earth”), Chin constructs an argument that “aliveness” and “unity” inspired early Christian ideas about resurrection (stars resurrect every night, and “heavenly and earthly beings move in like patterns”). Chin’s unique combination of meticulous scholarship and rapturous mysticism offers a vital window onto the history of faith. (Mar.)