One of the images used throughout Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (Chapter 4: “The Future is Very Far Away and We Have Not Arrived There Yet”) meant to evoke a sensory aspect as we follow him in his exploration of the imagined world of Origen, Rufinus, Plotinus, and Porphyry. Image provided by Dr. Chin.
by Emy Pinto
On October 2nd, 2024, the Department of Religious Studies hosted Dr. C. Michael Chin to talk about his new book, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (2024). Dr. Chin is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis, and his research interests include the social and intellectual history of late antiquity; how the natural and wondrous were construed; the literary cultures of this period; performance, ritual, and performing objects; and how gender, sexuality, and the body were understood. Dr. Chin also has a background in theatre and puppetry.
With Life, Dr. Chin attempts to recreate for modern readers a complex and vibrant early-Christian universe as conceived through the interplay of writings by Origen of Alexandria and Rufinus of Aquileia, in particular, but also those of Plotinus, Porphyry, and others.
This recreating of worlds, as it were, is done by looking above the human scale of these human actors, at the stories they held in their heads. Rufinus, along with Jerome of Stridon, became interested in the philosopher Origen, who lived in the third century and whose cosmology had won over a good number of thinkers during his lifetime before sparking a major controversy in subsequent centuries. Origen’s cosmogony had proposed that God had created beings out of love, through its Logos (God’s Divine Word). Human beings were at first created as immaterial rational beings, joined together with the Logos and God. However, having lost their concentration, they also lost their connection to the rational flame. God, therefore, created the earth to house the formerly immaterial beings who are now cooled-off beings or souls who, along with everything else, yearn to return to their original state.
Dr. Chin lays out this very universe, with help from the aforementioned ancient sources. This world’s through-line is its aliveness, which runs through even stones and metals, each of which have their own life journey. Humans, stones, metals—these all are moved to their original home. In line with his interests, Dr. Chin also shares images which he took himself. These images are found in his book and useful for imagining the materiality and texture of this ancient world, which writing can only go so far to recreate. The usage of these images elicits this imagination, and particular to the one used above, is effective in conveying the idea that the destination has not yet been reached. During our discussion, he added that he had even written out this book by hand at least once to tap into an embodied way of knowing.
This colloquium was led by four students from the department’s professionalization seminar for third-year doctoral students, which included Sergio Glajar, Katie Brown, Rikki Liu, and Sugopi Palakala. They introduced and welcomed Dr. Chin at the start and noted their understanding of the central arguments and interventions of his book before presenting Dr. Chin with questions and then turning it over to the rest of the attendees. Questions ranged from the applicability of Chin’s approach to work in other contexts, to why Chin physically wrote out his manuscript, the reception of this genre-bending book, and why he used photographs, among other topics.
This colloquium was interactive and bursting with the aliveness we may imagine ran through the enchanted worlds of Origen, Rufinus, and the like. Jordan Swanson, a 5th-year doctoral student in the department and an early scholar of the Origenist controversy, said, “What I found most useful was the discussion of trying to communicate a cosmology that is so different from our own, and by turning to sensory experience we can catch a glimpse of that world which they tried to communicate in writing.”
The department would like to thank Dr. Chin for coming in and sharing his work with us, and we wish him the best of luck with his new research projects.
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Dr. C. Michael Chin is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis. Aside from publishing Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (2024), other publications include “After Post, or, Animal Religion in an Age of Extinction” (Ancient Jew Review, 2018), “Marvelous Things Heard: On Finding Historical Radiance” (The Massachusetts Review 58.3, 2017) and Melania: Early Christianity Through the Life of One Family, co-edited with Caroline T. Schroeder (2016).
Emy Pinto is a first-year PhD student in the Ancient Mediterranean Religions program in UT’s Religious Studies Department. She completed her BA (Hons) in Ancient Greek at Stellenbosch University.
