Reviewed by: Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things by Virginia Burrus Kathryn Kleinkopf Virginia Burrus Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019 Pp. 296. $65.00. We are living in the midst of an ecological crisis. Every day, dozens of species die as earth's temperature slowly rises. While ancient Christianity may seem like an odd lens through which to investigate this pressing phenomenon, Christianity [End Page 157] has long been viewed as a culprit in ecological destruction. In her newest groundbreaking book, however, Virginia Burrus complicates this narrative by weaving together vast expanses of philosophy, gender theory, and object-oriented ontology to unearth the unfamiliarity of early Christianity's relationship to the animate world. In so doing, she dares us to ask what the late ancient world can teach us about our current ecological predicament. Burrus's captivating book not only will engage experts in late antiquity but also will draw in those with foundations in ecology and new materialism, as she deftly reads late ancient philosophy, hagiography, and even architecture as poetry in order to re-vivify and re-animate the world. These sources, she insists, perform, and are not merely referential or representational. By recognizing humans as merely one aspect of a larger ecosystem endowed with its own agency, the deep animacy and startling strangeness of early Christianity come to light. Even the monograph's structure helps the reader to resist falling into the banality of the familiar, as each part takes a theorist as a guide, exposing the ecology lurking behind seemingly familiar authors. Perhaps the greatest strength of this structure lies in the "interludes," more free-style interjections that sometimes act as summary, other times as modern anecdote, but which always tie the reader intimately to the material, reminding us that we, like early Christians before us, are not separate from the biological community we inhabit. Part I, which takes John Sallis as its guide, focuses on the multifaceted manifestations of Plato's khora as a third cause that haunts the creation of the universe. Since khora constitutes the very "power and possibility of materialization," Burrus postulates that, for early Christian and Jewish authors, thinking about god could not be divorced from thinking ecologically (72). Indeed, for Augustine, as with several of his Alexandrian predecessors, the demiurgical model of the universe did not alone suffice, since creation required a nameless and elusive force that necessitated the liveliness of materiality—that which Burrus identifies as khora. Even when late ancient theologians attempted to deny the khoric, it nevertheless lurked within their cosmologies, urging them to begin again. While modern readers without a firm philosophical grounding may struggle with this section, the interludes usefully summarize aspects of the previous discussion and can easily be returned to if the reader becomes overwhelmed. Part II, which focuses on saints' Lives, follows in the footsteps of Timothy Morton to combine ecocriticism, queer theory, disability theory, and animal studies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the focus of Burrus's previous work, this section is the strongest as she explores how nature queers normativity and the heterosexual and masculinized conceptualization of "natural." Through her readings, the humanness of saints is decentered as they become part of the ecosystem itself as both animal and landscape. These stories, Burrus explains, teach their readers how to find beauty and love in the grotesque, disfigured, and disabled. Remarkably, and in contrast to much modern scholarship, Burrus argues that these men and women were extraordinary, but not exceptional. Their strangeness, instead of raising them above nature, situates them deeply within it; it walks us through a plethora of ways to know, love, and live as we embrace even the worms of the earth as part of our very bodies. As with every section, Burrus expertly pulls back [End Page 158] from her detailed analysis of this literature to demonstrate how learning to love brokenness and accept disability as a fundamental aspect of humanity shows us how to decenter ourselves and care for the earth in its current state of ruination. Burrus eschews both empty platitudes and the impersonal nature of academic writing to demonstrate instead how art teaches us to love more promiscuously. The...