Catherine Michael Chin, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press 2024, VIII + 246 pp., ISBN 978-0520400689, US$ 29.95 / £25.00 (pb).

This is not a book. At least not in the conceptual world to which its author, Catherine Michael Chin, introduces us. The ecosystem of a late-antique Christian cosmos echoes only faintly in our world, but Chin sets out to intensify these echoes in order to explore a sensory and imaginative answer to the question, “What did it feel like…to live in an early Christian universe?” (134, emphasis mine). The question is not, he clarifies, “‘what did these humans think?’ but ‘where did these humans live, and what did it feel like to live there?’” (8).

The book progresses along two intersecting lines: The first traces the stories of smaller vitalities, from the vegetal and mineral (do stones, in fact, sire young as Theophrastus wonders?) on to shooting stars and angels, horizons spacious and temporal, and the universe’s beginning and end. The second line focuses on the quarrel between Rufinus of Aquileia and Jerome of Stridon, whose feud directly involves the legacy of Origen of Alexandria. What would it have been like, in some sense, to feel what Rufinus felt as he was baptized, as he saw war coming? By choosing these figures, Chin retells their stories “in their conventional sizes, and then explain[s] what it might look like to tell these stories from a series of other points of view, on a series of different scales, and with a variety of nonhuman actors” (2).

Once the reader enters this universe, she discovers that a book is not simply an intelligible imprint of graphic signs upon blunt material. Instead, as Chin outlines in the first chapter, the held object is the “words from that plant book” (23), “pages of plants shaped by human touch” (27), “this bundle of plant bodies platted and painted by human hands” (29), a “paper body” (32). The papyrus and plant bodies which formed the textual material for Life’s central protagonist were small vitalities in this cosmic imaginary whose individual history and story Chin regales alongside Rufinus. These vitalities are the world’s own thoughts, a world that cannot be reduced to a natural organism but a desiring being who possesses act and will just as the many other human and non-human vitalities that populate it. Even words inscribed on papyrus physically contribute to this world’s vibrancy.

What are stones, in a universe like this? In the second chapter, coloured glass mosaics arranged in stone baptistries tell the story of the life, death, and resurrection mystery inaugurated in Jesus. Chin narrates Rufinus’ baptism in one of these baptistries constructed in Aquileia, encouraging us to notice “stone and earthen matter made from life, helping human hands die and come to life again, and this earth and stone becoming the sign of that death life process, holding and telling stories of going away and return” (50). Relying on one of Origen’s meditations on stone, Chin compares “the movement of iron to magnet” with “the movement from material to spiritual,” not as an appropriate figure of speech but as different “forms of attraction and convergence that are simply part of the world’s being alive” (55).

Chin later turns to the affections of the world and its “larger” lives, such as shooting stars, landscapes, weather, and home in the third chapter. He reminds us that the sort of world Rufinus inhabited included an identity between thinking and moving. In a universe made of divine thinking, “to move in our tiny human way through a landscape, is to exist inside knowledge” (76–77). Here, landscapes and weather “were simply alive”; they were living habitats housing the humans who lived inside them (82). And these things were porous to activities of other invisible agents who bear responsibility for the world’s activity. To go beyond the horizon of the world in our thought attempts “to see all of what is real, even the realities that are normally in other places” (97).

In the last formal chapter of the book, Chin navigates the terrain of astral bodies, the cartography of a future written in the stars, and the premonitory ability of the avian species. Within the inextricable space-time hierarchy of the ancient world, when one dies one ascends toward the divine aeon, travelling into the future of God’s eternity. Everything in this vertical universe has something to say. Stars and birds may signal future outcomes despite the hazy process involved in reading their signs; however, their significance is not as portents but as their own beings: “[A] bird is also its own being, with its own life and disposition, like but not the same as, and not compelling, the life and disposition of others. So, too, a star” (114). While a star may be made by gaseous fusion, that is not what it is, to recall Ramandu’s reply to Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In closing, Chin imaginatively commentates Rufinus’ afterlife peregrination as he ascends through the planetary spheres, “slowly approaching and becoming more and more like the visible manifestations of time in the cosmos [stars]…entering yet another scale of time” altogether  (120–1).

Although Chin titles the final section of the book, “Conclusion: A Confession About Method,” the remarks therein function more as a postscript than as a summary of the work’s preceding contents. His methodological confession includes a meditation on knowing and different ways to know. It is a discussion of “approaching historical knowledge production by feel and feeling” (136), and what it might look like for scholars to induct readers into an affective experience of late antiquity, rather than disseminate historical knowledge exclusively in the form of propositions about the world long ago (145). He confesses that he wrote the book by hand (133), which is evident in its cadence and the care with which the reader has to read and reread some its sentences. Furthermore, Chin admits that “this book was also written as a question about bodily sensation” (134), bringing me to one feature I have as of yet left unmentioned: The author complements each chapter with his own artistic contributions.

Among these images one finds an extended vignette of a purple plush duck photographed––from what the reader can tell––as having been ran over by a car. Chin proceeds to illustrate the duck in comic panels, parodically representing Rufinus’ ascent to the heavens, except now with the plush duck making his own vertiginous journey to the empyrean. The appendix concerning the images recounts the event succinctly: “The panel shows the toy duck slowly rising from the sidewalk into the air…The second panel shows the duck rising past the curve of the planet earth, entering outer space, with stars in the background” (156–7). These images are meant to be “associative” rather than “illustrative,” as Chin instructs the reader in a beginning note (vii). Together with the accompanying artworks, the ethereal and poetic prose style Chin employs attempts to “tie together words with sensations and with the imagination of things that were felt a long time ago and have long since been erased from the bodies that felt them” (134).

What, then, to make of this? The subtitle of the book cleverly contains the book’s parallel task. On the one hand, the word natural serves the same function as describing a book as a “paper body” (32). The word choice reminds the reader that the universe indigenous to the first few centuries of the Common Era was not the mechanistic naturalism in which we find ourselves autochthons. While connoting its materiality Chin reclaims its vitality. The natural universe of the early Christian age was populated by elements and creatures that were all, like trees arching toward sunlight, desiring the light and life of their true home. To be natural in that world was to be alive; to be natural in ours is often to be dead.

Life’s style and subject matter cannot ultimately be divided. After all, Chin’s intends to affectively instil in the reader what it would feel like to be in a world from another time. Consequently, the degree to which it succeeds is determined by the reader’s own experience of reading and therefore a matter, unavoidably, of taste. This decision risks alienating readers who cannot accommodate its style. But if the dissemination of knowledge of the past takes as its goal “the creation of a physical experience of knowing, unfolding in time” (135), then I can witness to its success.

Having finished reading the book, I began more carefully to notice the universe in all its vital wholeness and grand eloquence; indeed, the world felt more alive. I rarely consider plants, rocks, stars, or the wind as having their own stories, as being the narration of “gods and angels” which “set up patterns in the world for finding what was lost” (43). Never has an author of a scholarly work of patristic history designed his or her work to be judged by this criteria. And, again, the style with which Chin writes can effect this experience, besides the occasional moment of indulgence. I think here of chapter three where the author curiously intersperses a conversational poem throughout its sections with little context, and without any discernible benefit besides aesthetic interruption. That aside, Life draws attention to what should be more considered in the field of the historical disciplines: The importance of writing, and the significance of style as something that cannot be divorced from substance.

This does not mean, however, that Chin sacrifices scholarly acuity for the sake of the reader’s experience. The forty-four page “Notes” section corroborates this fact. But there remains, at times, cause for reservation about the execution of this affective process. During the ending confession, he sketches the positive use of anachronism and mistranslation: “[E]vocations and archaisms, and even wrongnesses or incoherences, of past transmissions and translations” can form “part of our material for making” (144).¹ According to Chin, knowledge-sharing is a collaborative act of making that involves elements of theatrical falsity, including the positive appropriation of evocative anachronism. One could repurpose, for example, Theophilus of Antioch’s, “Show me yourself and I will show you my God” as an adage directly addressing theological anthropology, if bracketed with an honest admission that this is not its immediate relevance, as Chin does with Jerome at one point. But purposeful mistranslation and anachronism are proposed as tools in a context where the intention is to make and share the past. If the ancient world we are meant to encounter is indeed other than the choice to anachronize seemingly imperils the ability for the ancient world to remain other and endangers the possibility of an authentic encounter with its difference and provisional illegibility. We risk making the glass of the past into a mirror rather than a mosaic.

Whatever reservations one has about Chin’s articulation of other means of knowing, the confession remains an important admonition for academics to remember that the variety of ways to know exceed the propositional. After all, “the beings who lived before us in the past did not live only in propositions” (154). The scholarly future Chin outlines creatively transcends the sterility of entrenched historiographical methods. Every investigation, whether of the past or the natural sciences, is predicated upon a prior intentionality, that is, a passion to know or a feeling that one ought to. Despite it sometimes confusing rather than clarifying the book’s fundamental convictions (cf. 146–7 where it remains unclear to what degree knowing the past is possible or impossible, mistranslatable or untranslatable), it raises important questions about the future incorporation of thinking and feeling, and what it might mean to write and to read as a living body. In particular, how might scholars and writers curate their work in a way that makes the individuals about whom they write appear alive? It remains to be seen in what ways these insights will be implemented, or if they can be.

Regardless, it is a deeply commendable and truly singular effort in accounting for the bodily subject while maintaining the rigor demanded of its discipline. Life’s museum of vitalities challenges all those who are invested in meeting and making the past in order to see possibilities of another future to further explore the impact of feeling, art, and objects on historical knowing, while compellingly retelling the stories of the vibrant citizens of this universe. Yes, the world whose tale Chin tells was lost long ago. But this world remembers itself.

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