Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian UniverseA vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten. Life immerses the reader in the cosmic sea of existences that made up the late ancient Mediterranean world. Loosely structured around events in the biography of one early Christian writer and traveler, this book weaves together the philosophical, religious, sensory, and scientific worlds of the later Roman Empire to tell the story of how human lives were lived under different natural and spiritual laws than those we now know today. This book takes a highly literary and sensory approach to its subject, evoking an imagined experience of an ancient natural and supernatural world, rather than merely explaining ancient thought about the natural world. It mixes visual and literary genres to give the reader a sensory and affective experience of a thought-world that is very different from our own. An experimental intellectual history, Life invites readers into the premodern cosmos to experience a world that is at once familiar, strange, and deeply compelling. |
Contents
Small Alive Things | 17 |
2 | 47 |
A Horizon Is Not a Limit | 75 |
The Future is Very Far Away and We Have Not Arrived | 109 |
Image Descriptions | 155 |
Acknowledgments | 205 |
| 233 | |
Other editions - View all
Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe Catherine Michael Chin Limited preview - 2024 |
Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe Catherine Michael Chin Limited preview - 2024 |
Common terms and phrases
Alaric Ammianus Ammianus Marcellinus Aquileia Aristotle baptism baptistery become birds bodies Butterworth California Press Cambridge University Press Catherine Michael Chin century Cerf Chromatius Commentary Cyperus papyrus Damascius death Didymus the Blind discussion divine Early Christian earth edited Egypt Enneads flesh future Gothic Goths Greek Harvard University Press heaven Historia Monachorum Homilies on Numbers HORIZON human inside Intimacy Italy Jerome Jerusalem Jordanes Journal Karst kinesthetic knowledge landscape Late Ancient Late Antiquity Lausiac History Liber Pontificalis living Loeb Classical Library London look MacKenna Melania monks move movement Natural History NOTES TO PAGES Origen Oxford University Press Palladius papyrus Performance plants Pliny the Elder Plotinus Porphyry Princeton Principles Psalms Rome Routledge Rufinus of Aquileia Rufinus’s says scripture Sicily silver SMALL ALIVE THINGS sometimes souls stags stars stone story Studies tell Theophrastus thought tion trans translation University of California words writes York