What do you think?
Rate this book
Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe
A 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.
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.
257 pages, Paperback
Published March 26, 2024
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 4, 2024
‘“[performing objects are] ambassador[s] or pilgrim[s] to human beings from the world of things,”and when we perceive them as such ambassadors, we can recognize how limited our understanding of their world must necessarily be.’ 147
In this book, Chin explores the material culture of early Christianity, namely the period of Rufinus and Jerome, and argues how they may have viewed sensual objects as living objects. Papyrus, for example, is an object that is impressed upon by humans but also changes how the human writer feels, senses, understands the world. In a sense, the papyrus book is a living thing with feeling.
The early Christian’s view of the world is similar to the Buddhist idea of dependent coarising, the idea that there isn’t necessarily a unique self but that all things condition each other and are conditioned by each other and are in that sense, alive.
However this book is much more than that. Chin’s writing is elegant and the ideas simple but complex. I do not know how to evaluate this book, similarly to how Chin says we don’t know how to evaluate the sense objects of a world 1500 years ago, but that perhaps through trying to understand something about their world we can understand something intimately about our own.
In this book, Chin explores the material culture of early Christianity, namely the period of Rufinus and Jerome, and argues how they may have viewed sensual objects as living objects. Papyrus, for example, is an object that is impressed upon by humans but also changes how the human writer feels, senses, understands the world. In a sense, the papyrus book is a living thing with feeling.
The early Christian’s view of the world is similar to the Buddhist idea of dependent coarising, the idea that there isn’t necessarily a unique self but that all things condition each other and are conditioned by each other and are in that sense, alive.
However this book is much more than that. Chin’s writing is elegant and the ideas simple but complex. I do not know how to evaluate this book, similarly to how Chin says we don’t know how to evaluate the sense objects of a world 1500 years ago, but that perhaps through trying to understand something about their world we can understand something intimately about our own.
Displaying 1 of 1 review