Thomas Arentzen Et Al - Byzantine Tree Life-Christianity and The Arboreal Imagination (2021)

NEW APPROACHES TO
BYZANTINE HISTORY AND CULTURE
Byzantine Tree Life

Christianity and the
Arboreal Imagination
Thomas Arentzen · Virginia Burrus
Glenn Peers
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
Series Editors
Florin Curta
University of Florida
FL, USA
Leonora Neville
University of Wisconsin Madison
WI, USA
Shaun Tougher
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture publishes high-quality
scholarship on all aspects of Byzantine culture and society from the fourth
to the fifteenth centuries, presenting fresh approaches to key aspects of
Byzantine civilization and new studies of unexplored topics to a broad
academic audience. The series is a venue for both methodologically inno-
vative work and ground-breaking studies on new topics, seeking to engage
medievalists beyond the narrow confines of Byzantine studies.
The core of the series is original scholarly monographs on various
aspects of Byzantine culture or society, with a particular focus on books
that foster the interdisciplinarity and methodological sophistication of
Byzantine studies. The series editors are interested in works that combine
textual and material sources, that make exemplary use of advanced meth-
ods for the analysis of those sources, and that bring theoretical practices of
other fields, such as gender theory, subaltern studies, religious studies
theory, anthropology, etc. to the study of Byzantine culture and society.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14755
Thomas Arentzen • Virginia Burrus
Glenn Peers
Byzantine Tree Life

Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination
Thomas Arentzen Virginia Burrus
Uppsala University Syracuse University
Uppsala, Sweden Syracuse, NY, USA
Glenn Peers
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY, USA
ISSN 2730-9363 ISSN 2730-9371 (electronic)

New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-75901-8 ISBN 978-3-030-75902-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: skaman306
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For LARCeNY,
where these thoughts first took root
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to the “Late Ancient Religion in Central New York”
collectivity, also known as LARCeNY, an extraordinary group of scholars
who have nurtured our tree-thinking with their conversation and friend-
ship. In particular, Glenn and Virginia are grateful to Rachel Carpenter,
Georgia Frank, Jennifer Glancy, Kim Haines-Eitzen, Karmen MacKendrick,
Patricia Cox Miller, and Matthew Westermayer, for their stimulating
engagement, and also to the Central New York Humanities Corridor for a
grant that allowed LARCeNY to host a symposium, “Trees and More:
Ecological Thinking and the Ancient Christian Imagination” (6 April
2019). On that occasion, Thomas was our keynote speaker, and all three
of us presented arboreal papers that formed the seeds for this book.
Thomas is grateful too.
Glenn and Virginia thank The Clark Art Institute of Williamstown,
MA, and Dean Karin Ruhlandt of the College of Arts and Sciences at
Syracuse University for their support of our sabbaticals during the aca-
demic year 2020–21. When we arrived in Williamstown, we were pleased
to discover two wonderful works of tree art on the Clark grounds that
sparked our imaginations: Giuseppe Penone’s “Le foglie delle radici (The
Leaves of the Roots),” 2011, and Kelly Akashi’s “A Device to See the
World Twice,” 2020; both of these are discussed in the pages of this book.
We are also grateful to the Clark Research and Academic Program and
Library staff, who kept us supplied with books even during a pandemic, to
Associate Curator Robert Wiesenberger’s kind consultation regarding
trees in contemporary art, and to Williams College Art History MA stu-
dent Elisama Llera, who did a wonderful job of tracking down images for us.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thomas wishes to extend his gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks Research

Library and Collection. A year as Fellow of Byzantine Studies in 2018–19
yielded numerous arboreal encounters in the magnificent, mysterious gar-
den of Dumbarton Oaks. The other fellows generously shared and inspired
plant thoughts as this project was in its budding phase, while Alice-Mary
Talbot and Annemarie Weyl Carr both contributed to the cultivation of
new arboreal ideas. Thomas’s contribution to the present volume is part
of the research project, generously funded by the Swedish Research
Council, titled Beyond the Garden: An Ecocritical Approach to Early
Byzantine Christianity (2018-01130), which he conducts in Uppsala. He
is deeply grateful to colleagues in the Greek seminar at Department of
Linguistics and Philology in Uppsala, Christian Høgel, Ingela Nilsson,
Antonios Pontoropoulos, Fredrik Sixtensson, Myrto Veiko, and David
Westberg, for conversations and encouragements.
Virginia is grateful to Marco Formisano for inviting her to participate
in the interdisciplinary round table “‘Listen. There’s something you need
to hear.’ A conversation about trees, ancient and modern,” sponsored by
the Ghent Institute of Classical Studies. Glenn and Thomas both enjoyed
the chance to speak about dendrite saints at the conference “The Reception
of Stylites: Rereadings and Recastings of Late Ancient Syrian Super-
Heroes,” which took place at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul;
Thomas co-organized the conference with funding from Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond. Thomas would like to thank Helena Bodin for inviting
him to give a presentation on trees as the Annual Lecture in Memory of
Lennart Rydén in 2019. Thanks also to Andreas Nordlander, Andreas
Westergren, and other church historians who participated in the seminar
“Ancient Ecotheologies” in Lund.
We are of course most of all grateful to the trees that have nurtured
each of us with their quiet presence, ever-changing beauty, and sustaining
breath, during what has been an extraordinarily challenging year of pan-
demic, social crisis, and personal loss. They have inspired us, comforted us,
and taught us so much, not least about the importance of connections and
emergences. In a time of most difficult isolation, they brought the three of
us together to share reading and writing, conversation and companion-
ship, mournfulness and hope. That was a great gift indeed.
And yet we are also aware not only of the privilege that marks our very
access to treed spaces but also of the histories of colonialism, racism, and
genocide complicit in that privilege. Virginia and Glenn live and work in
Syracuse, New York, on the ancestral lands of the Onondaga Nation,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
where Lake Onondaga and its forested environs, sacred to the Onondaga
Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were first taken illegally
from the Nation by European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and then severely polluted in the twentieth. We are aware too
that in our own moment, in both Europe and North America, exclusive
claims to the cultural artifacts of antiquity and the Middle Ages, including
their ecological insights and practices, have been made on behalf of spe-
cific racial, ethnic, and religious groups. This book on Byzantine tree life
should by no means be understood to collude even indirectly with the
identity politics of a racist or ethnocentric environmentalism. Ecological
thought, whatever its origins or forms, is necessarily radically inclusive. No
doubt our work has many limitations and blind spots, but our intention is
to render Byzantine Christian thought, literature, and art as capacious and
generous as possible.
We should all be able to breathe freely with the trees. We should all be
able to breathe.
Praise for Byzantine Tree Life
“Byzantine thought comes to life in this fabulous book. The authors’ lively writing
style and astounding erudition brush away the dust of centuries, revitalizing the
texts and images from what they call the ‘long Byzantium.’ And the lives that come
to light here are not only human. With care and precision, Arentzen, Burrus, and
Peers enable trees to come to the fore as the agents of intellectual, aesthetic, and
religious history in their own right.”
—Michael Marder, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
“The quest in this three-faceted book is to give voice to the postmodern tree and
its cult, while also discovering and enunciating its Byzantine equivalent. Our awe
of the tree, majestic, romanticized, and endangered, is so steeped in the threats of
our own era that it claims overweening urgency over every other, yet we know that
the premodern era preceded many factors of denaturalization that we are now
combatting. That is the book’s challenge.”
—Annemarie Weyl Carr, Professor Emerita, Southern Methodist University, USA
“This is a remarkable book that should be of great interest to many scholars and
theologians, not only Byzantinists, as it ranges chronologically from the Minoans
in the second millennium BC to philosophers at the beginning of the third millen-
nium AD. The entire book propels one into ideas of human-arboreal relations that
one had never before contemplated: no reader will turn the last page unchanged
in attitude to the natural world.”
—A. R. Littlewood, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario, Canada
“An intriguing, innovative and sympathetic approach to the role of trees—as sym-
bol, metaphor and perceived reality—in late antique and Byzantine Christian
thought, this volume turns over a new leaf to tap into a powerful and exciting new
current in cultural- and literary-historical research. No longer is the ‘natural’ envi-
ronment—whether floral or faunal—to be taken at face value.”
—John Haldon, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, USA
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Writing on Trees 21
3 In the Beginning, Trees 65
4 Becoming-Tree107
5 Three Leaves: A Theopoetic Epilogue163
Bibliography171
Index187
xiii
Abbreviations
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (series)

DOML Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
Ep. Epistle
FC Fathers of the Church (series)
GCS Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (series)
Hex. Hexaemeron
JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies
LCL Loeb Classical Library
LSJ Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon
NH Natural History (Pliny the Elder)
NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (series)
PG Patrologia Graeca (series, ed. J. P. Migne)
SC Sources Chrétiennes (series)
Symp. Symposium
VChr Vigiliae Christianae
VChrSupp Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Apse mosaic, sixth century, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna,

Italy. (Photograph courtesy of José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro/CC
BY-SA 4.0) 12
Fig. 1.2 Kelly Akashi, “A Device to See the World Twice,” 2020, The
Clark Art Museum, Williamstown, MA. (Photograph courtesy
of the Artist; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar
Gallery, New York; and The Clark Institute) 17
Fig. 2.1 Edwin A. Grosvenor, “Men Sitting Below the Tree of the
Janissaries,” 1909. (Photograph courtesy of the National
Geographic Image Collection) 22
Fig. 2.2 Anna Silva with possible descendants of Gregory’s plane tree,
2006. (Photograph courtesy of Carmel Silva) 48
Fig. 2.3 Floor mosaic of Jonah in repose under an arbor, fourth century,
Basilica of Theodore, Aquileia, Italy. (Photograph courtesy of
Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY) 59
Fig. 2.4 Sculpture of Jonah Under the Gourd Vine, 280–290 CE, Asia
Minor, Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
1965.239. (Photograph courtesy of The Cleveland Museum
of Art) 60
Fig. 3.1 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, “Palm Tree near the
Church of Sts. Theodore, Athens,” 1842, daguerreotype,
23.5 × 18.2 cm. (Photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France [EG7-750]) 66
Fig. 3.2 Floor mosaic of animals and trees, sixth century, Great Basilica,
Herakleia Lynkestis, North Macedonia. (Photograph courtesy
of Carole Raddato/CC) 67
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 3.3 Mosaic of the personification of Earth (Ge), sixth century,

Bishop Sergius Church in Umm Ar-Rasas, Jordan. (Photograph
by Michele Piccirillo, courtesy of the Studium Biblicum
Franciscanum Photographic Archive, Jerusalem) 75
Fig. 3.4 David Rebel, “Third Day of Creation,” Copy of the Cotton
Genesis (Cotton Otho B.VI; burned 1731), fr. 9530, fol. 32r,
1622. (Photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France)82
Fig. 3.5 Mosaic fragment depicting a pair of goats and palm trees, ca.
535/6, Khirbat al-Mukhayyat (City of Nebo), Jordan.
(Photograph by Michele Piccirillo, courtesy of the Studium
Biblicum Franciscanum Photographic Archive, Jerusalem) 93
Fig. 4.1 “To Sinai via the Red Sea, Tor, and Wady Hebron. Almond
Tree in Blossom at the Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai,”
1910–20. (Photograph courtesy of the American Colony,
Jerusalem, Photo Department) 108
Fig. 4.2 Icon of Saints Symeon and David, Late Byzantine, Vatopaidi
Monastery, Mount Athos, Greece, 30 × 43 cm. (Photograph
courtesy of Nick Thompson, Theological and Religious Studies,
University of Auckland) 110
Fig. 4.3 Gianlorenzo Bernini, “Daphne and Apollo,” 1622–25, marble,
height: 243 cm. (Photograph by Luciano Romano, courtesy of
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo—
Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy) 114
Fig. 4.4 Fresco of St. David the Dendrite, 1315–21, Parekklesion,
Kariye Camii, Istanbul. (Photograph courtesy of The Byzantine
Institute and Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork records and papers,
circa late 1920s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard
University, Washington, D.C.) 116
Fig. 4.5 Icon of the Entry into Jerusalem, Late Byzantine, Tempera and
gold leaf on canvas mounted on wood, 48.9 × 35.6 × 1.9 cm,
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (1997–16 DJ), Tenth
Anniversary purchase, with funds provided by The Brown
Foundation, Inc.; The Wortham Foundation, Inc.; Mr. and
Mrs. James Elkins, Jr.; Shell Oil Company; and Houston
Endowment, Inc. (Photograph by Paul Hester, courtesy of The
Menil Collection) 141
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Byzantine Christians,1 like most humans, lived with and among trees, both
urban and rural, cultivated and wild. They enjoyed trees’ hospitality, gen-
erosity, and beauty. They saw themselves mirrored in trees as well—their
erect stance and reaching branches, rooted constancy, vibrant fecundity,
and above all, perhaps, their yearning for the light. Sometimes they even
took on the challenge of entering into close and active relationships with
trees: engaging tree-being and -thinking, they became a little more tree-
like in the encounter with arboreal others. Indeed, trees beckoned with
the possibility of transformation, given their dramatic cycles of death and
regeneration, the adaptability of their growth, and their capacity to give
and receive one another as grafts. Trees were constantly becoming other
than themselves, if only through the remarkable variety of their seasonal
appearance, or the magic of the change from seed to sapling and flower to
fruit.2 Might humans not hope to transform themselves too, especially
with trees for teachers?
1
We use the term Byzantine Christians to describe those Christians nourished by both
classical Greek and biblical cultures; ours is a long Byzantium, reaching from late antiquity to
the fifteenth century.
2
Luce Irigaray frames the seasonal variation of trees as a kind of subjective multiplicity or
non-identity: “Now we designate a birch with the same name in the spring, the summer, the
autumn and the winter, although this name refers to forms, colors, and even to sounds and
to odors, which are absolutely different according to the time of the year, not to say that of
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
Arentzen, Burrus, Peers, Byzantine Tree Life,
New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5_1
2 ARENTZEN, BURRUS, AND PEERS
The themes of tree-hospitality, tree-affinity, and tree-transformation

will unfurl in the chapters that follow, as we explore literary and artistic
artifacts of human-tree encounters in the late ancient and medieval
Mediterranean. To be sure, these cultural remains, all of which are inflected
(if never entirely determined) by distinctly Christian practices and beliefs,
reveal much more about how humans understood and imagined trees
than about their actual interactions with them. Moreover, they might
seem to have precious little to say about the life and agency of trees them-
selves. And yet it is precisely the life of trees that engages us here and
incites our interpretations and reflections, even if it remains inevitably elu-
sive. “Trees … define a specific way of making the world and making
communities.”3
We are not botanists or dendrologists, but historians. Thus, our
approach to the life of trees will be made in the company of our historical
subjects, Byzantine Christians who are themselves in many ways as strange
to us as trees. It is that very strangeness that gives us our opening. Tree life
leaves its imprint on Byzantine thought and imagination differently than
on ours. We wager that this difference has something to teach us. Yet the
difference is also never absolute, and what we learn inevitably comes at
least in part in the form of recognition—a recollection of what has been
forgotten or ignored, rather than a completely novel revelation.
Paradoxically, although we here propose to engage the life of trees
through the mediation of Byzantine literature and art, trees themselves
already mediate our engagement with those other humans we call
Byzantine. Like plants, more generally, they “not only augment and
the day. Using the same name to allude to the birch at any time, we remove it from its living
presence and deprive ourselves of our sensory perceptions to enter into presence with it”
(Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives
[New York: Columbia University Press, 2016], 49). Michael Marder suggests that “the mor-
phê of plant-soul is extremely elastic, to the point of indefiniteness” and suggests that plants’
“freedom” is expressed in the exuberant and unpredictable efflorescence of their “spatial
forms” (Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life [New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013], 121, 129). Emanuele Coccia notes, with regard to plant life, “where
no movement, no action, no choice are possible, meeting someone or something is possible
exclusively through a metamorphosis of the self” (The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture,
translated by Dylan J. Montanari [Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019], 99).
3
Emanuele Coccia, “Experiencing the World,” in Trees, ed. Bruce Albert, Hervé Chandès,
and Isabelle Gaudefroy (Paris: Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019), 27.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
transform how we perceive, but also change and undo what we are.”4 For
starters, they play a strong role in fixing and orienting time and place.
Indeed, trees’ relationship to, and determination of, time and place have
been deeply formative for Mediterranean cultures since antiquity, and
trees continue to mediate our own relationship to the past that we study.
“Stationary and visible, they may serve as spatial markers within a physical,
tangible territory; stationary and long-lived, they may also be temporal
markers, in that they relate a particular moment in the past, as one point
in the whole passage of time, to the present.”5 If we are to grant trees ages
and dates (and clonal trees defy linear, finite dating that we apply to mea-
surement of our lifetimes), then some have had extraordinary spans of life.
On Mount Smolikas, in the Pindos range in northwestern Greece, a
Bosnian pine tree named Adonis is calculated to be more than 1075 years
old. Trees in the Americas have been discovered to have lived twice or
even four times that long (the oldest being the bristle cone pine Prometheus
in Nevada, who was cut down in 1964 at age 4862),6 and similar (if less
scientific) claims have been made for so-called heritage trees, including a
yew tree in the Black Sea region of Turkey thought to be 4112 years old.7
Trees thus exceed our limits as humans, even as we move and pass before
them. The men and women discussed here have long since died, but some
of the trees alive when they were living are with us still. They provide
bridges across times and places.
Trees also mediate our engagement with Byzantine Christians more
concretely through the materiality of our sources. The Greek biblos refers
both to a book and to the bark of the papyrus plant, while the Greek papy-
rus gives its name to paper in English and Latin-based languages; in Latin,
codex means tree trunk, wood, or book; in Swedish and other Germanic
languages including English, the words for book and beech are the same
4
Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 172.
5
Darice Birge, “Trees in the Landscape of Pausanias’ Periegesis,” in Placing the Gods:
Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 231–45, here 232. See also Christina G. Williamson,
“Mountain, Myth, and Territory: Teuthrania as Focal Point in the Landscape of Pergamon,”
in Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity: Natural Environment and Cultural
Imagination, ed. Jeremey McInerney and Ineke Sluiter, Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 393
(Leiden: Brill, 2016), 70–99.
6
Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2020), 29–40.
7
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/oldest-yew-tree-found-in-turkeys-north-100428
or similar. In modernity, of course, literary works are inscribed not on

papyrus but on wood-based paper. Icons are traditionally painted on
wooden panels. Thus, trees not only frequently live longer than we
humans; they also allow our words and images to extend their lives longer
still, often at the expense of their own longevity. They lend our human
expression their own longue durée. This tree-materiality matters.
Indeed, at the most basic level, for ancient and medieval Greek-speakers,
trees convey materiality itself: the term hyle can be translated either “for-
est,” “wood,” or “matter.” If this layering of meaning implies a distinctly
instrumental view of trees (and it certainly can), it also points to a power
and mystery at the heart of tree-being. The potentiality conveyed by mate-
riality—Aristotle’s hyle, but also Plato’s khora—could never be exhausted
by human ends or goals. Hyle could always become something else, some-
thing more. And while it might be formed and animated by the needs and
desires of other beings, most forcefully by the needs and desires of humans,
it was also imbued with an intentionality and animacy of its own. In other
words, the semantic range of hyle points to the potential reduction of trees
to mere matter, but it also points to the endowment of matter with the
liveliness and agency not only of a single tree but also of an entire forest of
possibility.
What do we mean when we appeal to the liveliness and agency of trees,
or more simply to tree life? We might say that the appeal invites a compari-
son. It invites us to encounter trees in their likeness to us, as living, acting
beings. It also invites us to attend to their difference and distinctiveness as
living, acting beings. And finally, it invites us to discover some of that very
difference in ourselves as well. As plant philosopher Michael Marder puts
it, “The gap separating humans from plants may dwindle—though not
altogether disappear—thanks to the discovery of traces of the latter in the
former, and vice versa.”8 Trees, perhaps more than any other plants, allow
us to perceive our own vegetal natures.
Such an insight is reflected in the earliest Christian Gospel, whose
author considers it unremarkable that trees would provide a visual baseline
for humanity in the eyes of a newly sighted man: “I see humans, for I
behold [something] like trees [ὡς δένδρα] walking around” (Mark 8:24).
The unusual syntax of this verse, together with its enigmatic sense, puts
any translation on wobbly footing. The text may indicate that the formerly
blind man is looking at humans, whose visual appearance is not familiar to
8
Marder, Plant-Thinking, 9.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
him, and comparing them to walking trees, whose visual appearance he

somehow recognizes. But why is he able to recognize trees more easily
than humans? Perhaps he experiences an affinity even more basic with
arboreal figures; as Emanuele Coccia puts it (and Genesis before him),
“The world begins with trees.”9 Alternatively, the text may indicate that
the man is looking at trees, not humans, since he and Jesus have evidently
withdrawn from others; on this reading, the appearance of the trees gives
him some idea of the appearance of humans, either because their own
swaying suggests walking or because the man can form a mental picture of
humans by imagining the trees as ambulatory rather than rooted in place.
Finally, it is possible to read the phrase “like trees” as referring to the man
himself: like trees, he stands still, observing (other) humans walking
around. The instability of the passage has a dizzying effect that amplifies
the unsettling insight running across all the possible interpretations: some-
times humans and trees are so much alike as to be almost
indistinguishable.
Artists and novelists have explored this sense of continuity between
trees and humans with insight, pathos, and humor. As a character in
Michael Christie’s 2019 novel Greenwood muses regarding the human
spine, “What else could it be, he thinks—with its gently curving trunk of
bone, its limbs and branches and tributaries of nerve tissue, its flexibility
and delicacy and elegant perfection—other than a kind of tree, buried in
our backs, standing us up?”10 Giuseppe Penone likewise plays with the
rhyming forms of trees and humans in a number of his art works, includ-
ing “Le foglie delle radici (The Leaves of the Roots)” (2011), a thirty-
foot-tall sculpture of an inverted tree, resting on its branches with a live
eastern red cedar sapling growing on top of its roots. One of the effects of
the inversion is to make the tree form distinctly humanlike, with its branch-
ing “arms” and “legs” reaching downward.11 However, instead of either
the humanlike “head” or the extended root system that we might expect
on top, the base of the trunk—itself a very elongated “neck”—cradles a
tiny living tree that is right side up, growing toward the sky. A whimsical
9
Coccia, “Experiencing the World,” 28.
10
Michael Christie, Greenwood: A Novel (London: Hogarth, 2019), 425.
11
https://www.clarkart.edu/exhibition/detail/penone. Another Penone sculpture,
“Pantaloni” (1987, Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, NY), dresses a tree branch in an
inverted pair of linen pants partially printed with a barklike pattern, playing on a smaller scale
with the same resemblance of human legs to tree branches.
figure, the little cedar hints at a fragile triumph of tree nature over human
art, while also suggesting the possibility of a kind of tree-thinking.12
Trees thus prompt humans to ask: are we too hyle? The question is itself
a multitude. Morphological affinities tempt us to project an all-too-human
sense of autonomous individuality onto trees, but they also promise to
disturb that same sensibility: every comparison potentially runs in two
directions. Trees like all plants are deeply and ineradicably enmeshed in
the life of the places that sustain them. Thinking and growing most vigor-
ously as a collectivity—hyle—trees are also utterly dependent on their non-
arboreal others—light, air, water, and earth, to name only the most
obvious and elemental. They cannot but remember what we footloose
humans are often inclined to forget, even when our forgetfulness ulti-
mately cuts against our own survival. Life is co-emergence, growth with
interconnection.13
The Greek philosopher Plato famously proposes a tripartite soul for
humans, consisting of the logistikon (rational, head-based, distinctly
human), the thumetikon (passionate, heart-based, shared with animals),
and the epithumetikon (appetitive, stomach-based, shared with plants). In
his dialogue Timaeus, Plato associates the third kind of soul with culti-
vated “trees and plants and seeds,” while seemingly wanting to distance
humans from the exuberance of spontaneous, unregulated plant growth
(Timaeus 77a). Plato’s successor Aristotle further develops and canonizes
this hierarchy of life, which is mapped onto every human, body-and-soul.
12
Penone’s sculpture, on exhibit at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA, in 2020,
echoes another tree sculpture just down the road at MASS MoCA. Natalie Jeremijenko’s
“Tree Logic” (1999) is an ongoing, dynamic work in which six live sugar maple trees are
inverted and suspended; as they grow, they gradually bend themselves toward the sky. The
first trees, when they grew too big for the exhibit, were planted on the grounds of the Clark;
initially bent, they gradually re-straightened their trunks. Trees and plants more generally
have increasingly entered western museums and galleries, and have challenged our museo-
logical discretion. For example, see these recent exhibitions: Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of
Noon, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, 26 September 2020–20 June 2021; Among the
Trees, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 1 August–31 October 2020; The Botanical Mind: Art,
Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree, Camden Art Centre, London, UK, 24 September–23
December 2020; and Trees of Life: Stories for a Damaged Planet, Frankfurter Kunstverein,
Frankfurt, Germany, 10 October 2019–16 February 2020. See also “Plants,” a recent issue
of the art magazine Spike 65 (Autumn 2020).
13
The interconnectedness that makes a forest so very much more than the sum of its indi-
vidual tree-parts is brought out especially well by Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees:
What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World, trans. Jane
Billinghurst (Vancouver/Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2015).
1 INTRODUCTION 7
The problematic nature of the hierarchy is easy to spot and widely acknowl-
edged: plants (especially “wild” plants) are demeaned as the “lowest” life
form, humans exalted as the “highest,” leaving animals somewhere in
between. Recently philosophers have come to recognize that it is not so
much the animal as the (uncultivated) plant that is the human’s excluded
“other” in western thought.14 However, we should not miss the inclusivity
that is also implied in the positing of the vegetal soul as the basis of all life,
animal as well as plant. Plato suggests playfully that humans are upside-
down plants, rooted by their rational souls in the realm of ideas and
thereby kept upright, in a kind of inverted grounding (Timaeus 90a-b).15
(We are reminded of Penone’s “The Leaves of the Roots.”) Aristotle offers
an earthier comparison: soil is an external stomach for plants, whereas
humans and other animals carry both soil and roots within them in their
digestive and circulatory systems. “Our locomotion is made possible by
such a portable earth, which is to say a vegetable soul or power of growth
that moves along with us,” as Jeffrey Nealon frames the Aristotelian
thought. “Likewise, Aristotle is very clear that our circulatory systems are
plantlike. In short, for Aristotle we are not only rational animals; we are
also walking plants”16—or more specifically, walking trees, as the gospel
writer has it. For Plato as well as Aristotle, despite their differences, humans
are not only a kind of animal—a view in harmony with our own thought—
but also (like other animals) a kind of plant.
The vegetal soul, a concept discarded by modern philosophy and sci-
ence alike, has been taken up again by recent plant theorists. For Michael
Marder, the very concept of plant-soul challenges the (transcendentaliz-
ing, human-centered) premises of western metaphysics: “the plant con-
firms the ‘truth’ of the soul as something, in large part, non-ideal,
embodied, mortal, and this-worldly, while the soul, shared with other liv-
ing entities and construed as the very figure for sharing, corroborates the
vivacity of the plant in excess of a reductively conceptual grasp.” Plant-
soul thus becomes a productive way of thinking life itself—“its precarious-
ness, violability, and, at the same time, its astonishing tenacity, its capacity
for survival.”17 It provides a grounding for what Marder calls “vegetal
14
See Marder, Plant-Thinking, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), and Coccia, Life of Plants.
15
See Marder, Plant-Thinking, 56–57; J. B. Skemp, “Plants in Plato’s Timaeus,” Classical
Quarterly 41 (1947): 53–60, here 55.
16
Nealon, Plant Theory, 36. See also Coccia, Life of Plants, 78–9.
17
existentiality,” marked by radical openness to and dependence on others,

iterative and non-teleological growth, lack of a unified self, subjectivity, or
identity, and thus also disinterestedness or indifference—to one’s “own”
individual survival, for example. For Marder, vegetal existence is, further-
more, fundamentally temporal (or spatio-temporal) and characterized by
both exuberant freedom and an intensely contextual, non-conscious
knowledge or wisdom. Like Marder, Jeffrey Nealon retrieves the concept
of the vegetal soul, taking it in similar, if perhaps more radical, directions.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, he argues that “life is not housed
exclusively in living animal or human beings and their potential-saturated
worlds; rather, life names a distributed, inorganic swarm of emergent sin-
gularities that has often gone by the name of the ‘vegetable soul.’” Plant-
soul, for Nealon, “connects everything to everything else, an ecological
mesh that forms an intense territory for living,” defined by “the practices
of emergence and transformation.” He concludes, “What we share with
other entities, in other words, is less an abstract world of possibility than a
territory for living.”18 Similarly, for Emanuele Coccia, the vegetal soul “is
a place shared by all living beings,” a space of reciprocal inherence or
mutual breathing generated first and foremost by plants.19
Humanly imagined worlds of possibility, however distinctly our own,
strongly impact the territories of immanence in which we are always
breathing and co-emerging with our others. The concept of the vegetal
soul did not receive universal endorsement among ancient and medieval
readers of Greek philosophy, whether Christian or non-Christian.
Tertullian is a rare case of an ancient Christian writer who explicitly
upholds the notion of plant-soul. In an effort to demonstrate that all
human souls are created good, that is, rational, he uses the example of
trees to show that even plant-souls possess not only vitality but also a kind
of intelligence proper to their nature. Trees “know from the same source
that they live, by a property as much of living as of knowing, and certainly
this is also from their own infancy.” Only knowledge that suffuses a tree’s
whole life and being could explain its capacity to engraft branches, form
leaves, sprout buds, adorn itself with blossoms, and make sap. “Why
18
Nealon, Plant Theory, 100, 106–7.
19
Coccia, Life of Plants, 9.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
should I not affirm the wisdom and knowledge of trees?” Tertullian

demands (On the soul 19).20
Other early Christian writers stopped short of asserting that plants were
ensouled beings but nonetheless seemed to leave the possibility open.
Origen of Alexandria invokes the Stoic definition of soul as “an impres-
sionable (fantastike )̄ and motivating (horme t̄ ike )̄ substance,” but while
the Stoics denied soul to plants, distinguishing physis or the power of
growth from soul, Origen’s position appears to be more flexible. Genesis
1:20–21 suggests to him that creatures of sea and sky, as well as earth, are
ensouled, living beings—endowed with psyche and zoe. These include
beings as lowly as fish, bees, wasps, ants, oysters, and snails, all which have
souls, Origen specifies. Leviticus 17:14 asserts that “the soul of all flesh is
its blood,” and since it is obvious to Origen that creatures of sea and sky
do not all have blood as such, he interprets this to mean that soul is a kind
of vital substance that can take on a range of colors and forms in different
creatures. Although he does not draw the conclusion, it seems reasonable
to ask whether sap, for example, might not be understood as a kind of
blood, ensouling trees (On First Principles 2.8.1). A century and a half
later, Basil of Caesarea will return to Genesis 1:20–21 to worry explicitly
over whether plants are living and ensouled, like the creatures of water and
sky. Splitting hairs, he explains that while plants are alive (ζῆν) and possess
the power to take nourishment and grow, they are not therefore animals
(ζῷα, or “living beings”), nor are they ensouled (ἔμψυχα) (Hex. VII
1.25–27). But even where Christian theology has difficulty making an
explicit place for ensouled plants, it harbors spaces of fertile ambiguity, not
least in Basil’s own thought, as we shall see. And in many other realms,
ancient and medieval Christians retained an openness to and sense of con-
nection with vegetal life, and especially tree life, that sometimes far
exceeded the strict limits of their theological orthodoxies. As tenacious
and irrepressible as tiny saplings emerging from the cracks in the pavement
of an ancient church, those arboreal excesses constitute the focus of our
thought in the following chapters.
As we have already begun to see, Byzantine Christians are rooted in the
mingled soils not only of ancient philosophy but also of both classical and
biblical literature and visual arts. Classical literature and art instilled strong
20
For further discussion of Tertullian on trees, see Thomas Arentzen, “Some Early
Christian Trees,” Studia Patristica, forthcoming. See also the commentary of J. H. Waszink,
Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani De Anima (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 268–80.
aesthetic sensibilities with respect to treed and watered landscapes that

embodied peaceful and harmonious coexistence amidst blossoming fecun-
dity—growth within the measured bounds of a human-oriented beauty.
Such sensibilities left a strong and direct imprint on the literary, artistic,
and garden cultures of Byzantium.21 This was all the more the case because
Byzantine Christians could discover in biblical literature similarly aestheti-
cized landscapes that were, moreover, imbued with distinct theological
significance.
From a biblical perspective, all creation, including trees, is suffused and
animated by love of and for its divine creator. This erotic saturation is most
potently on display in the memories and anticipations conveyed by land-
scapes that both recall the lavish beauty of Paradise and await its restoral at
the end of time. Indeed, the Bible is book-ended with such temporally
displaced visions. According to Genesis 2, God puts the newly created
humans in a garden in Eden: “Out of the ground the Lord God made to
grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of
life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it
divides and becomes four branches” (Genesis 2:8–10).22 The end of the
apocalyptic book of Revelation circles back to a similar, but now urban-
ized, scene: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through
the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of
life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the
leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1–2).
Some biblical trees take on a mythical or symbolic status, such as the tree
of life planted in the Paradise of both Genesis and Revelation. Divine
Wisdom is likewise called “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her”
(Proverbs 3:18), and in the Psalter, whose hymns saturated Christian wor-
ship, the righteous are said to be “like trees planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither” (Psalm
1:3). Jesus proclaims, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who
abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” He warns, “Whoever does not
abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers” (John 15:5–6). The
21
See, for example, the essays in Byzantine Gardens and Beyond, ed. Helena Bodin and
Hedlund Ragnar (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2013).
22
In general, in this book we follow the New Revised Standard Version, if we do not offer
our own translations of the biblical text.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
apostle Paul suggests that the gentiles are like wild olive branches grafted
onto the cultivated olive tree that is Israel (Romans 11:17–24). Still other
trees became iconic by association not with divine figures but with hal-
lowed places, people, or events, such as the cedars of Lebanon, the oaks of
Mamre, Moses’s burning bush, or Aaron’s budding almond rod.23
In addition to the aesthetic and theological aspects of biblical trees, the
techniques of biblical reading meant that any arboreal figure in the scrip-
tures, no matter how seemingly minor or incidental, could become the
focus of exegetical attention and significance, its presence and power
amplified. Alongside the more famous or symbolically charged biblical
trees, we encounter a range of more ordinary trees, all of which invite pos-
sible exegetical engagement and elaboration—acasia, balsam, frankin-
cense, cedar, myrrh, cypress, ebony, fig, ash, walnut, juniper, bay, apple,
mulberry, olive, date palm, pine, plane, poplar, willow, apricot, almond,
oak, and tamarisk.24 Populated by such trees, the scriptures are themselves
a kind of forest that is always emerging and growing in the fertile environ-
ment of reading.
Indeed, there is something arboreal about biblical exegesis itself. The
text branches, leafs, and flowers in a process that is both intensely iterative
and radically open-ended; it receives constant grafting from other texts as
well. The scriptures thereby engage in a kind of self-writing that is neces-
sarily always also the work of a collectivity. Humans are but a part of the
ecosystem that sustains scriptural flourishing, a growth that often seems
excessive indeed, sometimes taking on a life of its own, bursting forth in
song, ritual, and visual image as well as writing. Byzantine bishops such as
Basil of Caesarea preached about the divine command that brought trees
into being: “Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass generating seed
according to its kind and according to its likeness, and the fruit tree pro-
ducing fruit whose seed is in it, according to its kind on the earth” (Gen.
1:11). Congregants hymned the trees of Paradise:
Perhaps that blessed tree, the Tree of Life,

is, by its rays, the sun of Paradise;
its leaves glisten, and on them are impressed
23
See also Kari Zakariassen, “My people consult their tree…”: Human–Divine Interaction in
Arboreal Spaces in the Ancient Levant (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oslo, 2019).
24
See Kim D. Coder, “Trees of the Bible: A Cultural History,” Warnell School of Forestry
& Natural Resources Outreach 43 (2016): 1–7.
the spiritual graces of that Garden.

In the breezes the other trees bow down as if in worship
before that sovereign and leader of the trees. (Ephrem, Hymns on
Paradise 3.2)25
As they did so, they gazed on mosaics lavishly adorned with arboreal fig-
ures, also celebrating the lush profusion of biblical landscapes (Fig. 1.1).
The aspect of Byzantine tree encounters that is most difficult to access
is also the most mundane, that is, the interactions that ancient and medi-
eval Christians had with actual trees in their own daily lives. Such relation-
ships reach like a hidden root system nurturing what is for us the more
visible efflorescence of cultural production. Trees grew in church yards
and monastic complexes as well as private orchards and gardens. They
Fig. 1.1 Apse mosaic, sixth century, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy.
(Photograph courtesy of José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro/CC BY-SA 4.0)
25
St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, trans. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997).
1 INTRODUCTION 13
were encountered in both the town and the countryside, growing singly,
in clusters near a water source, or in the greater density and expanse of
forested terrain. Their shade would have been noticed and valued, in con-
texts where dwellings were relatively small and people spent much of their
time outdoors. And Byzantine people would have been sharply aware of
all the other ways that they depended on trees. Orchards yielded fruits and
nuts, including such major products as olives and grapes. Woodlands and
scrublands also played an extremely significant role in the Byzantine econ-
omy, as Archibald Dunn chronicles. “Every part of every tree or shrub,
wild or cultivated, was useful in some way.” Trees were felled for timber.
They were coppiced and pollarded for firewood, charcoal-making, light
building materials, and leaf-fodder. Resins and gums were extracted for a
wide range of applications. Leaves, bark, roots, and parasites were used for
dying cloth and tanning and dying leather. Leaves, shoots, seeds, and ber-
ries yielded medicinal, aromatic, dietary, fumigating, and cleansing sub-
stances. Pigs were pastured in woodlands, which also supported the
hunting and trapping of animals.26
Beyond trees’ concrete uses to humans, Byzantines acknowledged a
more complex relational and affective dimension. Trees could be both
welcoming and threatening: their shade in town or in a grassy meadow
enticed, but the darkness of forests carried special menace. We do not have
a Greek equivalent to the Celtic literary tradition of threatening and bel-
licose trees, but we can posit similar perceptions of forest as a space of
otherness—ancient, boundless, and (it was feared) ultimately uncontrol-
lable.27 The ascetic turn in late antiquity meant that some Christians
26
Archibald Dunn, “The Exploitation and Control of Woodland and Scrubland in the
Byzantine World,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992): 254–57. Dunn’s study
was a significant advance in scholarship on the subject. See now Alexander Olson,
Environment and Society in Byzantium, 650–1150: Between the Oak and the Olive (Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
27
For the western tradition, see Rebecca Armstrong, Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants,
Humans, and the Divine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 70–92; Aneta Kliszcz and
Joanna Komorowska, “Glades of Dread: The Ecology and Aesthetics of loca horrida,” in
Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, ed. Christopher Schliephake (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 45–60; Michael D.J. Bintley, Trees in the Religions of Early
Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2015); Francesco
Benozzo, Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies
Publications, 2004), 109–21; and “Il Cad Goddau del Llyfr Taliesin dai cataloghi di alberi
all’epica del paesaggio,” Quaderni di Semantica 19, no. 2 (1998): 309–25. The work of
Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca-London:
sought out remote places to pursue lives away from most other humans,
not just unafraid of but actively drawn to such uncanny landscapes; they
often had trees for shelter, nourishment, and companionship. Indeed,
trees became an iconic feature of the ascetic landscape. A source of won-
der, as was every aspect of the divine creation, trees also served as “natural
pedagogues” in what Patricia Cox Miller refers to as the “ethically thera-
peutic” processes of ascetic formation.28 Some ascetics even took to living
in trees. We glimpse these arboreal humans in the Lives of Saints and on
painted icons.
Our own relationship to trees is currently haunted by deforestation and
the awareness this has engendered regarding the crucial role that forests
play in our planetary ecosystem: such belated recognition is the mournful
reality of the Anthropocene moment. Does it finally constitute an
unbridgeable gap between ourselves and Byzantine Christians, with
respect to our feelings for trees? Some have argued that the eastern
Mediterranean already experienced significant and irreversible deforesta-
tion in the premodern period, while others are skeptical. The evidence is
scattered and sometimes contradictory, and the conclusions that scholars
draw may appear colored by their own histories and positions on trees and
deforestation in the present.29 That “the Greeks, Romans and other peo-
ples of the Mediterranean … used and destroyed great quantities of trees”
Cornell University Press, 2002), allows some of these attitudes to emerge for us through her
examination of long Hellenism, from antiquity to the twentieth century.
28
Patricia Cox Miller, In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient
Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 104. Miller’s work on
animals in many ways serves as a model for our own consideration of the arboreal imagina-
tion in ancient Christianity.
29
See Alain Touwaide, “Botany,” in A Companion to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros Lazaris
(Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020), 322. Oliver Rackham suggests that Russell Meiggs, one of the
strongest proponents of a theory of ancient Greek deforestation, was misleadingly condi-
tioned by his own experience in securing timber supplies during World War II. See Oliver
Rackham, Trees, Wood, and Timber in Greek History. A Lecture delivered at New College,
Oxford, on 10th May, 1999 (Oxford: Myres Memorial Lectures, 2001); Oliver Rackham,
“Land-Use and Native Vegetation in Greece,” in Archaeological Aspects of Woodland Ecology,
ed. Susan Limbrey and Martin Bell, BAR S146 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports,
1982), 177–98; and A.T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe:
An Ecological History (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2001), 175–9. Others
suggest that Rackham himself is prejudiced against any theory of human-caused deforesta-
tion. See J. Donald Hughes, “Ancient Deforestation Revisited,” Journal of the History of
Biology 44 (2011): 43–57.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
is nonetheless certain.30 Agricultural need drove the clearing of arable

land, and the demand for fuel wood, timber, and other tree products was
extremely heavy, especially in the Roman imperial period and then again in
the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. The degree to which woodlands
could and did renew themselves remains debatable and must have varied
across times and regions, according to population density and use. That
climate change also played a role is becoming increasingly clear: in the
eastern Mediterranean, a dry phase circa 350–470 C.E. seems to have
been followed by a wetter period that lasted some two hundred years and
was succeeded by another dry period beginning around 670 in the Levant
and 730 in Anatolia.31 Higher levels of precipitation corresponded with a
surge in the growth of trees and other vegetation between the mid-fifth
and mid-seventh centuries. But it is hard to say how such shifts would have
been experienced—or indeed whether there would have been any aware-
ness of them at all—in specific times and places or by specific individuals
or groups. Writing near the beginning of the first dry period, Gregory of
Nazianzus complains that his friend Basil has criticized his family home for
its mud (Ep. 2), which does not necessarily suggest the drought condi-
tions we might expect. However, in other cases, correlations may seem
suggestive. For example, in the early Byzantine period (loosely, from the
seventh to tenth centuries), church architecture undergoes a profound
change from basilicas with wooden roofs to stone-vaulted, domed church-
es.32 Some assert deforestation as a reason for a shift in materials from
wood to stone, and indeed, the shift does take place around the time of
the second posited dry period, although other reasons are equally plausi-
ble for the new style in church architecture in the Byzantine world.33
Regardless of the degree of deforestation experienced in the eastern
Mediterranean, or the reasons for it, scholars generally agree that human
30
W. V. Harris, “Defining and Detecting Mediterranean Deforestation, 800 B.C.E. to 700
C.E,” in The Ancient Mediterranean Environment Between Science and History,
ed. W. V. Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 173–94, citation at 174.
31
Adam Izdebski, Jordan Pickett, Neil Roberts, and Tomasz Waliszewski, “The
Environmental, Archaeological and Historical Evidence for Climatic Changes and Their
Societal Impacts in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity,” Quaternary Science
Reviews 136 (2016): 189–208.
32
See Sabine Feist, Die byzantinische Sakralarchitektur der Dunklen Jahrhunderte
(Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2019).
33
Charles A. Stewart, “The First Vaulted Churches in Cyprus,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 69, no. 2 (2010): 162–89, is very good on the range of possibilities
for the change.
practices and attitudes toward trees remained broadly exploitative in antiq-

uity and the Middle Ages.34 At the same time, trees always exceeded their
mere utility. For Byzantine Christians, as for us, treed landscapes are
haunted by memories of lost paradises and anticipation of worlds to come.
Our own anticipation is most often marked by grief and fear rather than
hope and joy. And yet trees have more to teach us than ever, not least
about what it means to persist and grow and entwine our still-greening
selves in the midst of our always-shared finitude, and to live with the thick-
ness of memory radiating out from our collective core, knowing that when
the last ring of growth has archived itself, the record will be neither com-
plete nor incomplete. Perhaps this is a more Byzantine sensibility than we
might once have imagined. Whether or not they experienced or were
aware of the dangers of deforestation, Byzantine Christians knew how to
look at a treed landscape and hold loss and joy together. They knew how
to live rooted in place, how to inhabit time that was not strictly linear, and
how to recognize themselves as interdependent members of a larger com-
munity. They knew, finally, what it was to live as humans with account-
ability for sin, both collective and individual; to live with humility regarding
their own capacity to fix, alone, the destruction they had wrought; and to
respond to the call of life and love nonetheless.
The three essays that follow offer a set of focused studies exploring tree
life as it flourishes in the literary and artistic artifacts of late ancient and
medieval Christianity. They are meant to be evocative more than definitive
or authoritative, and they make no pretense at full coverage of a topic.
Rather, these are essays in the strict sense of experiments or trials in arbo-
real thinking, undertaken in the strange and elusive company of Byzantine
Christians.35 While we are interested in the biblical and theological reso-
nances of our sources, we have gravitated toward texts and images that
allow us to glimpse human-and-tree relations and encounters, whether
34
For example, the rhetorical position and conclusions in Matthew P.J. Dillon, “The
Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 118 (1997):
113–27, here 114, “Exceptions, however, prove the rule: in general, the environment was
not sympathetically managed but rather exploited.” Medieval and Early Modern states were
able to manage forestry resources, however. See, for example, Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the
Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2009), and Paolo Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts,
Economy, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
35
For another set of such experiments, see Thomas Arentzen, “Arboreal Lives: Saints
among the Trees in Byzantium and Beyond,” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies 5 (2019): 113–36.
1 INTRODUCTION 17
real or imagined, rather than trees functioning primarily as theological

symbols. Most of all, we have wanted to capture the otherness of trees, in
part by bending our thoughts toward that otherness as best we could.
Byzantine literature and visual art draw us not because they offer a trans-
parent window onto ancient and medieval woodlands but because they
give us a new way of framing and focusing our view of the trees before us
now. We might conceive of this as something like Kelly Akashi’s “A Device
to See the World Twice” (2020), a forest-scape installation at the Clark
Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, that consists of a large, round
double-concave acrylic lens framed by a bronze ring and supported by
several cast bronze branches (Fig. 1.2).
Fig. 1.2 Kelly Akashi, “A Device to See the World Twice,” 2020, The Clark Art
Museum, Williamstown, MA. (Photograph courtesy of the Artist; François
Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and The Clark Institute)
Standing before the artwork, we behold the forest through the lens and
also with our naked eye, as we are immersed in it. The view through the
lens may seem frozen, just as its bronze branches are static, in comparison
with the entropic forest all around, and yet it tethers us to the place and
the moment in a powerful arresting of attention. Akashi’s “Device” helps
us see the trees by making us conscious of the act of seeing them, of the
choices we make in how we gaze upon the world around us and attend to
it—including how we attend to the fact that it too is attending to us.36
Three themes have particularly drawn us, as signaled at the outset. Each
chapter deals primarily (but never exclusively) with one of these. The hos-
pitality or generosity of trees is foregrounded in “Writing on Trees,”
which focuses on a series of textual and artistic trees that provide shade,
shelter, and healing for humans. Beginning with Plato’s Phaedrus and the
plane tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus famously sit to discuss
desire and discourse, the chapter explores how trees move from back-
ground figures to become active players in the scenes that unfold. Circa
300 C.E., the Christian writer Methodius takes his cue from the Phaedrus
when he places his own Symposium in a rural setting. However, he selects
a different tree, namely, the chaste tree, from Plato’s text, to give shade to
the virgins who gather to engage in arboreal exegesis, or what we might
also call textual tree-magic. Later in the fourth century, the Cappadocian
theologian Gregory of Nazianzus attempts a more literal transplanting
from Platonic to Christian setting, cultivating a plane tree in the ascetic
retreat that he shares with his beloved friend Basil. This tree too attracts
biblical as well as classical figures and becomes an agent of transformation
in Gregory’s text. But no image of tree and human is better known in late
antiquity than the image (both textual and pictorial) of Jonah lounging
under the shade of the gourd tree, and that is where the chapter ends.
When a new biblical translation threatened to change the tree from gourd
to ivy, Christians protested out of love for the tree they knew so well, mir-
roring the love that Jonah himself learned to feel for the gourd.
Second, the play of affinity and difference between humans and trees is
foregrounded in “Trees, In the Beginning,” which returns us to the figure
of Basil of Caesarea. Focusing especially on Basil’s treatment of trees in his
Hexaemeron, a commentary on the creation account in Genesis, this
36
On the attention of trees, see Natasha Myers, “Are the Trees Watching Us?” Spike 65
(Autumn 2020): 64–5.
1 INTRODUCTION 19
chapter explores trees as primordial creatures and also as images of divine

incarnation—potent figures in the theological landscape, no longer con-
signed to the background. Here trees are above all sources of wonder, in
their diversity, their beauty, and their exceptional generation from Earth
itself. As such, they are also exemplary, and humans are encouraged to take
trees as their models in pursuing lives of virtue. Among the characteristics
that trees model are relationality, love, and even desire. What might seem
mere projection of human traits onto trees becomes a mutual reading car-
ried out between humans and trees: if trees are rendered more humanlike,
so too are humans rendered more treelike, and both are united in a sym-
pathy that does not undermine difference.
Third, intimate and transformative encounters of humans with trees are
foregrounded in “Becoming-Tree,” which focuses on the radical experi-
ments in tree-living of dendrite saints who were left treed in their own
identities. It starts with the insight of a small number of painters who
imagined the sixth-century dendrite St David of Thessaloniki as half tree
and half man. The hagiographical texts give support to this reading of the
deep interconnection between tree and man. David lives in an almond tree
for three years and is fundamentally transformed by the experience, not
literally, say, like Daphne of ancient myth and poetry, but in a remaking of
his human nature as graft to tree. And subsequently, he is miraculous
human and wood both. This chapter argues for wide ramifications for the
remaking of this woody saint in seeing new possibilities for sanctity in the
Byzantine world and for trees’ roles in its formation and growth.
Each of these themes—tree-hospitality, tree-affinity, and tree-
transformation—also cuts through all three essays and complicates the
other themes. We want to explore the deep, indeed inextricable, connec-
tions between humans and trees, not just as symbiosis, but also as twin-
ning, interlocking, and mutualizing—that profound relationality we strive
for sometimes, but all too frequently neglect or deny for our convenience
and for shoring up our sense of exclusive mastery of this world. As Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, “Entanglement bursts categories and upends
identities.”37 We aim to make trees protagonists of these histories and not
second-order players in the supposedly more important games humans
37
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life
in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 137.
play. But we see them as part of larger assemblages, not merely as discrete
actors. Such assemblages are performances of livability, as Tsing also
writes, and our stories from the Greek Christian world of Late Antiquity
and Byzantium are verbal and visual means to express that livability en
route to paradise. So we work to keep an eye on trees and humans as they
each live into their mutualizing convergences.38
Virginia was the primary drafter of Chap. 2, Thomas of Chap. 3, and
Glenn of Chap. 4, but all of us have left our touch on the book in its
entirety. Arboreal thinking cannot be done alone.
38
Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 155–63, here 158, “To appreciate the
assemblage, one must attend to its separate ways of being at the same time as watching how
they come together in sporadic but consequential coordinations.”
CHAPTER 2
Writing on Trees
Eucritus and I and the handsome lad Amyntas happily laid ourselves down
on deep couches of sweet rush and newly cut vine leaves. Many a poplar and
elm murmured above our heads; trickling down from a cave of the nymphs,
a sacred spring plashed nearby; on the shady branches the dusky cicadas
worked hard at their song; far off in the dense brambles the tree frog kept
up its crooning; linnets and finches sang; doves were cooing, and humming
bees were flying around the spring. Everywhere was the smell of rich har-
vest, the smell of gathered fruits. Pears rolled plentifully at our feet and
apples by our side, and the branches weighed down with sloes were bent to
the ground.
—Theocritus, Idyll 7.131–1461
Trees are a crucial feature of the landscape of a “pleasant place” (locus

amoenus) as ancient Greek and Roman writers typically imagined it, along
with a meadow and a spring or brook; birdsong, flowers, and a breeze
could also grace the scene.2 As the pastoral poetry of Theocritus
1
Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1912), 131.
2
Ernst Curtius first introduced the locus amoenus as a technical term in literary studies
(European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1953; German original 1948], 195–200). He focused on “the
period from the Empire to the sixteenth century” (195). Others have traced the beginnings

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5_2
Fig. 2.1 Edwin A. Grosvenor, “Men Sitting Below the Tree of the Janissaries,”
1909. (Photograph courtesy of the National Geographic Image Collection)
2 WRITING ON TREES 23
demonstrates, the aesthetic effect of these trees registered across the sen-
sorium: they appealed not only to the eyes but also to the ears, with their
rustling branches; their shade cooled the skin and the fragrance of their
blossoms and fruits pleased the nose. Written over a century earlier, Plato’s
philosophical dialogue Phaedrus offers another well-known example of
this literary topos, describing a “beautiful resting place” carpeted in thick
grass, watered by a flowing spring, and shaded by a towering plane tree
and a blossoming chaste tree. Lured to the site by Phaedrus’s “spell,” as
he puts it, Socrates protests that neither rural places nor trees will teach
him anything, in contrast to the humans of the city. Despite this stated
ambivalence, he is content to lie under their canopy, so long as Phaedrus
will indulge him with a discussion of love and rhetoric (Phdr. 230b-d).
The plane tree and the chaste tree will reappear in settings for conversation
between other learned men in the literature of antiquity and beyond.3
Indeed, they come to form part of the anticipated idyllic backdrop of elite
discourse on desire (Fig. 2.1).
In classical antiquity, the pleasant place is consistently represented as a
setting for encounters between humans, whether those encounters be
amorous or philosophical or a bit of both, as in the Phaedrus. However, as
Karin Schlapbach has argued, that representation shifts in late antiquity,
when the pleasant place increasingly becomes the backdrop not for human
sociality but for human solitude. She identifies two distinct developments.
On the one hand, Athanasius’s Life of Antony (c.357) inaugurates a tradi-
tion of describing the dwelling places of Christian hermits as pleasant
places, in the classical sense. Thus, the locus amoenus becomes a site for
practicing monastic life, largely retaining its positive affective associations
as it depicts the hermits’ “relationship with nature in a rather harmonious
way.” On the other hand, “even outside the context of monasticism, the
pleasance is now perceived as a place of solitude.” In addition to housing
hermits, it provides temporary refuge for inwardly turned poets seeking to
contemplate the wonders of creation or, alternatively, to wrestle with
themselves regarding the very distractions and temptations that creation
may present. In this version, the emotions that the place evokes are more
of the topos back to earliest Greek literature (G. Schönbeck, Der locus amoenus von Homer
bis Horaz [Dissertation, Heidelberg, 1962]; Petra Hass, Der locus amoenus in der antiken
Literatur: Zu Theorie und Geschichte eines literarischen Motivs [Bamberg: Wissenschaftler
Verlag, 1998]).
3
For example, the plane tree in Cicero, On the Orator 1.28–29, and Achilles Tatius 1.2.3,
the chaste tree in Plutarch, Dialogue on Love 749a.
ambivalent. The opening lines of Gregory of Nazianzus’s soliloquy On

human nature (c.381–390) offer a prime example, repurposing the dia-
logical space of Plato’s Phaedrus for the agonies of solitary reflection:
“Yesterday I sat far from others, worn out by my sorrow, in a shady grove,
consuming my heart ….”4
But trees are never mere scenery, whether soothing or distracting. They
provide more than a shady spot for strictly human encounters, whether
with others or self. Trees (and their places) do have something to teach.
Like the arboreal chorus that opens David Powers’s Pulitzer-winning
novel The Overstory, they call out to us, “Listen. There’s something you need
to hear.”5 In this chapter we will revisit the scene of Plato’s Phaedrus,
interrogating Socrates’s claim that he learns nothing from places or trees.
From there, we will explore later Christian texts by Methodius of Olympus,
Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, and their interlocutors. Each
of these examples in its own way takes us further in translating the classical
pleasant place from a static backdrop or a pretty view into an ever-emerging
field of relations in which trees as well as humans exert force and agency.
Methodius’s Symposium (c.300 C.E.) cleaves closest to the Platonic
corpus, translating the philosopher’s all-male Symposium on desire into an
all-female dialogue on sexual purity, while also transporting the gathering
to the scene of the Phaedrus. Whereas the male symposiasts had convened
at the home of the tragic poet Agathon (“Goodness”) in the city of Athens,
the young women deliver their speeches in praise of virginity on the
grounds of the rural estate of one Arete (“Virtue”) under the shade of a
tall chaste tree. But this tree, transplanted from the Phaedrus, offers more
than shelter from the sun. Harnessing the power of allegorical exegesis,
the maidens’ speeches activate the therapeutic power of the chaste tree,
with its special applications for female fertility and ritual. Paradoxically (as
it may seem to us), it is when a literary tree becomes an allegorical tree that
its tree-agency is more fully realized. A kind of sympathetic magic based in
cosmic affinities is at work in the transformations of both the biblical text
and the virginal body, and the chaste tree is crucial to both. The young
4
Karin Schlapbach, “The Pleasance, Solitude, and Literary Production: The Transformation
of the locus amoenus in Late Antiquity,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 50 (2007):
34–50; see also Karin Schlapbach, “Locus Amoenus,” Reallexikon von Antike und
Christentum 23 (2010): 231–44. On the locus amoenus in Athanasius’s Life of Antony and
other saints’ Lives, see Virginia Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints,
Things (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 99–106.
5
David Powers, The Overstory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 4. Emphasis added.
women must “hear each other into speech,”6 but the primary encounter
that takes place in this pleasant place is arguably biblical and botanical as
much as intrahuman.
Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter 6 (c.360), addressed to his friend Basil,
refers more concretely to an actual plane tree under which he and Basil
once sat during a period of monastic retreat. Shared solitude complicates
the dichotomy of social versus solitary, just as tree encounters do. They
know the tree well, moreover, as Gregory claims that he himself planted it
and Basil tended its growth. However straightforward the autobiographi-
cal reminiscence may seem, it is woven from the threads of an intertextual
web that includes not only Plato’s Phaedrus but other classical and biblical
texts as well. The plane tree and its pleasant place draw us not only to the
early correspondence between Gregory and Basil but also to other late
ancient descriptions of hermitages or monastic retreats that both evoke
and transform the classical locus amoenus. There we glimpse a kind of tree-
human companionship emerging in translated landscapes at once literary
and embodied in flesh and wood.
Augustine’s Letter 71 raises the issue of translation in the linguistic
sense, as he famously debates with the biblical scholar Jerome about how
to render the name of the plant that shaded the prophet Jonah from the
heat of the sun. Jerome opts for hedera or ivy as the best Latin approxima-
tion of the Hebrew qiqayon that appears in Jonah 4:6 (identified by mod-
ern interpreters as the castor bean plant). For his part, Augustine finds no
problem with the familiar translation cucurbita or gourd, both because it
has the authority of the familiar Septuagint Greek translation and because
generosity toward his fellow Latin-speaking Christians argues for its accep-
tance: “ears and hearts have become accustomed to listen to that version”
(Ep. 71). What Augustine does not say is that eyes have become accus-
tomed to it too. Christian art had long since made Jonah resting under a
tree one of the most popular figures depicted in catacomb frescoes, sar-
cophagus carvings, and elsewhere, and that tree was unmistakably the sep-
tuagintal gourd tree (κολοκύνθη). Jonah’s translated cucurbita had thus
taken root in the visual as well as linguistic imaginations of Latin speakers.
This biblical tree owes nothing to Plato but does resonate with the locus
amoenus in its late ancient guise as a shadowy arbor for a solitary human.
However, that human is not merely turned inward. As both Jonah and his
Christian readers are faced with its loss, the tree under which Jonah rests
6
As the twentieth-century Christian feminist Nelle Morton used to put it.
can no longer be taken for granted in the particularity of its beauty or its
hospitable shade. As in the biblical story, the gourd teaches Christians how
to love a plant and thus to love the world as God does.
Places and Trees: Plato’s Phaedrus

Tellingly, the first line of Plato’s Phaedrus is a query about place: “where
to, then, and where from?” Socrates addresses the question to his friend
Phaedrus, who answers that he has been with the speech-writer Lysias and
is now off for a stroll “outside the walls”; walking on the country roads is
said to be more refreshing than walking on the city streets, he observes
(Phdr. 227a).7 Expressing agreement, Socrates asks whether Lysias was
“in the city,” and Phaedrus confirms that he was (227b). The initial ques-
tion has been clearly answered, then: Phaedrus has come from the city and
is going to the countryside. Socrates accepts his invitation to come along,
on the condition that Phaedrus tells him about the speech that Lysias has
shared that morning. Now it is Phaedrus who asks, “where to?” (228e).
Socrates suggests that they walk along the river Ilissus and find a suitable
spot for reading, for it happens that Phaedrus has a written copy of the
speech in his cloak. Phaedrus agrees that the river will feel cool on their
feet in the middle of a hot summer day. “Lead on,” Socrates urges
Phaedrus, “and keep an eye out for where we might sit.” “Do you see that
very tall plane tree [πλάτανος]?” Phaedrus asks (229a), adding that the
spot offers shade, a breeze, and grass. As they walk toward it, already con-
versing, Socrates interrupts himself to ask, “Wasn’t this the tree toward
which you were leading us?” (230a). They have reached the Platonic plat-
anos or plane tree.
Socrates’s first act upon arrival is to deliver a little speech in praise of the
plane tree and its surrounding spot. “By Hera, a beautiful resting place
[καλή γε ἡ καταγωγή]!” he enthuses, invoking an unusual oath that typi-
cally accompanies ironic exclamations of admiration, in Socrates’s usage.8
His language here calls attention to itself in more than one way. It is
showy, even over the top, “marked not only with elements of a generally
7
The Greek text of Plato’s dialogue is conveniently available in Plato. Euthyphro, Apology,
Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, LCL 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1914), 412–578. Translations are our own.
8
Cf. Apology 24e; Gorgias 449d; Greater Hippias 287a, 291e; Theaetetus 154d. See also
the discussion of Alan H. Sommerstein, “Swearing by Hera: A Deme Meme?” The Classical
Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2008): 326–31.
sophisticated and elevated style, but by those two typical features of rhe-
torical praise: exhaustiveness and exaggeration,” as G. R. F. Ferrari notes.9
He first lauds the plane tree for its size: it is both wide-spreading and high-
reaching. He comments next on the height of the nearby chaste tree
(ἄγνος), as well as the beauty and density of the shade that it casts and the
intensity of its blossoms and fragrance: he and Phaedrus have arrived just
as the tree’s blooms are at their peak. He goes on to add still more items
to the verbal catalogue of sensuous delight—a spring flowing under the
plane tree, sacred to river god and nymphs; a fresh breeze blowing through
its leaves; singing cicadas in its branches; and grass growing thickly in its
shade. Socrates’s senses are dazzled and he seeks to dazzle his listener in
turn with his lush description, closing his ekphrasis with a flourish by
thanking Phaedrus for having been such an excellent travel guide, in lead-
ing them to this place (230 b-c).
It is an odd performance and Phaedrus comments on it as such, with
apparent amused perplexity, referring to Socrates as someone “very
strange”—more literally, “very out of place” (ἀτοπώτατός). “You do sim-
ply appear, as you say, like a foreigner being guided and not like a native
[ἐπιχωρίῳ]” (230c). As Phaedrus notes, Socrates comports himself as if he
were a stranger to the countryside, not epichōrios—of the cho ̄rion or place.
And yet he also betrays his knowledge of the region outside the walls at
several points; it is he as much as Phaedrus who serves as guide. As we
have seen, when he first agrees to join Phaedrus on his walk, Phaedrus
urges him, “Lead on, then” (227c). When they are ready to sit and read,
Phaedrus asks him, “Where to?” (228e). In response, Socrates suggests a
path along the Ilissus river (229a), and as they walk he corrects Phaedrus
regarding the location of the spot where the god Boreas was said to have
raped the girl Orithyia (229b-c). Finally, it is Socrates who notices when
they have reached the plane tree; however seemingly lost in discussion, he
has kept an eye on the landscape, to which he seems in fact to be no
stranger. Why, then, go to such lengths to present himself as alien with
respect to the place?
Commentators have frequently wondered how to interpret Plato’s
attention to the setting of the scene in the Phaedrus, where “topography
becomes the topic of conversation in a highly intrusive manner,” and “the
9
G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 16.
background will not stay where it belongs.”10 One possibility is that the
physical beauty of the place helps make a philosophical point: Socrates’s
exaggerated expression of amazement at the charms of the countryside are
meant to signal his susceptibility to the divine mania of Eros about which
he will later speak.11 If so, we should take note of the fact that it is not just
beautiful boys but also beautiful trees that cause the soul to grow wings
and soar. And no wonder! As Socrates describes it later, in a strange and
striking passage, the soul itself seems to be a kind of plant, as well as a kind
of (phallic) bird: “For when the stream of beauty is received through the
eyes, it [the soul] is warmed, whereby the originating power [φύσις] of
the wing is watered and the warmed parts around the outgrowth [ἔκφυσιν],
which were long closed up from hardness and prevented from sprouting,
are softened and, as nourishment flows, the stem of the wing swells and
rushes to grow from the root over the whole form of the soul; for each one
used to be winged” (251b). We may imagine that the sight of the trees
and their place waters and warms Socrates’s plant-soul, causing a surge of
growth from its root that softens and opens its formerly hardened and
closed shoots and stems. Moreover, this is no tentative unfurling but a
full-on burst of midsummer growth, it would seem. For that is what a
plant is—a phyton, or growing thing. And, conversely, every growing thing
is, at some level, a plant, manifesting its nature—physis—as a kind of grow-
ing power—again, physis—that is at once immemorial origin, unknown
destiny, and sheer capacity to persist.12 Stimulated by the beauty of the
trees and their place, Socrates swells and reaches for the earth and the
heavens at once (root and branch!), and in so doing he himself becomes
beautiful (cf. 279b) and also learns more about his own hybrid nature
(cf. 230a).
That is one reading, and it is a reading that draws us. However, it is also
possible to understand Socrates’s outburst of praise not as a sincere (if still
stagy) expression of the soaring of his soul but as a deliberate parody of the
superficial idealization of “nature” embodied in the literary topos of the
locus amoenus. As such, his little speech functions as a critique of Phaedrus,
10
Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 3.
11
Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 18.
12
See, for example, Michael Marder: “The plant is not just a thing in nature, but the min-
iature mirror of phusis, a synecdochic instantiation of universal growth and its refinement in
the faculty of the vegetal soul, the ‘lowest’ and at the same time the most encompassing
potentiality of all living beings” (Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life [New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013], 120–1).
who goes to the countryside merely to be refreshed from his urban labors
or to find a picturesque background for the city-centered performances
that he encourages and publicizes in his self-designated role as “impresa-
rio” of Athenian speech-making.13 By forcing the background into the
foreground, Socrates exposes both the excess and the insufficiency of
Phaedrus’s regard for the spot, which he at once fetishizes and overlooks
in its distinctiveness. Just so, Phaedrus fetishizes language while overlook-
ing its substance. This reading tugs in a different direction from the first,
but the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they may converge rather
precisely, if we understand interpreting the speech as parody to imply that
Phaedrus should not relegate the countryside to the background but
engage it attentively and interactively.
Of course, there is another possibility, namely, that Phaedrus should
give up his extramural ramblings altogether, taking Socrates as his model
and making himself a stranger to the countryside. As described by
Phaedrus, Socrates is like one who does not “go abroad,” “out of the
city,” or “over the border”; indeed, he does not seem to go “outside the
walls” at all (230d-e). Appearing to accept this characterization, Socrates
explains that he is a philomathe ̄s—a lover of learning. This is the context of
his striking declaration that “rural places [χωρία] and trees [δένδρα] will
teach me nothing, but the humans in the city do” (230d). It might seem
that he follows the teachers, then, but it would perhaps be more accurate
to say that he follows the fools: any reader of Plato knows that his Socrates
learns by unmasking the ignorance of those who seem wise; this dialogue
will be no exception. Yet does the nonhuman world have no role to play
at all? Is it only humans who can offer him opportunities to learn, if only
from their bad examples?
Socrates suggests that if Phaedrus has drawn him outside the city walls
it is because the latter has discovered a pharmakon—a drug or magic charm.
Socrates explains this by way of analogy: “just as people lead hungry ani-
mals by waving a branch or some fruit, so you will lead me all around
Attica and anywhere else you please by holding speeches in books [βιβλίοις]
in front of me” (230d-e). Discourses inscribed on leaves of papyrus
[βίβλος] are like leafy branches or fruit, for Socrates—or so he claims.
They have lured him out of the city and under the tall trees, where he now
lies down on the grass, apparently eager to submit to the seduction of
Lysias’s words (228d). But what kind of pharmakon is this speech that has
13
Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 4–9.
drawn Socrates out? Does it heal or harm? Later (and famously), Socrates
will tell Phaedrus the story of the god Theuth, who offered the Egyptian
king Thamus the gift of writing, describing it as “a pharmakon of memory
and wisdom.” The king refused the gift, on the grounds that it was “a
pharmakon not of memory but of reminder,” at best bringing to mind
what one already knew, at worst fostering forgetfulness and a mere sem-
blance of wisdom (275a-b). The story launches Socrates’s final argument
in favor of speech that is written not in books but “in the soul of the
learner,” “a living and ensouled discourse,” attuned to the needs and
capacities of its hearer (276a). If writing is weak or even potentially harm-
ful medicine or magic, living speech, at its best, can be both powerful and
beneficent in its transformative effects.
The story of Theuth reflects back on what has, by then, already unfolded
in the dialogue under the plane tree. After Phaedrus has read Lysias’s
speech aloud, with great enthusiasm, and Socrates has, predictably, criti-
cized it, Phaedrus insists that Socrates make a speech of his own, taking up
Lysias’s topic of love—more specifically, of the superiority of the non-
lover to the lover. Socrates resists. Phaedrus warns him that he has some-
thing to say that will surely force Socrates to speak—a pharmakon perhaps?
Socrates begs him not to utter the words. Phaedrus delivers on his threat
nonetheless, making a remarkable appeal to the plane tree: “Oh, but I will
speak, and my word will be an oath. For I swear to you—but by whom, by
what god? By this plane tree? Unless you make a speech to me in its very
presence, I will never share or report on another speech by anyone!”
(236d-e). Is the plane tree itself a kind of god, capable of holding Phaedrus
to his word? As Michael Marder notes, there is “an unsettling intimacy
between the philosophical idea of the gods, who are least prone to be
affected from the outside, and the alleged indifference of plants.”14 No
longer merely part of the backdrop, the tree asserts its agency. Faced with
such implacable force, Socrates capitulates, but the initial speech that he
delivers, seeded by Lysias’s words, proves to be a false start. Finding him-
self launching into poetic verse (under the possession of the local nymphs,
as he claims), he breaks the speech off abruptly and attempts to leave the
place. However, as he is about to cross the river, he hears the voice of his
guardian spirit saying that he should not depart until he has cleared his
conscience. He now realizes that the speech he has just delivered is an
offense to the gods, and he sets out to rectify it by delivering a palinode or
14
refutation (241e–243b). Socrates’s second speech, in praise of love, is one

of the most famous in the Platonic corpus. And it is delivered in the pres-
ence of the plane tree. He cannot leave the spot until he has gotten it
right. He addresses the eager Phaedrus, as well as the god Eros himself
(257a), but a tree is his witness.
The pharmakon of writing may have lured Socrates outside the city and
provoked his first speech, but in the meantime, other powers have come
into play. He avows that he has delivered his second discourse in a state of
inspiration (τὸ ἐνθουσιαστικóν), suggesting that it is the nymphs, daugh-
ters of Achelous, and Pan, son of Hermes, who speak through him, and
with considerably more skill than Lysias, son of the metic Cephalus
(263d). Socrates has noted that the spring under the plane tree is sacred
to the nymphs (230b), and earlier he has feigned fear that their voice
might possess him (241e). Now, however, having delivered a discourse on
the divine mania of prophecy, the mysteries, poetry, and love, he seems
ready to embrace their inspiration. As for Pan, Socrates’s final act in the
dialogue is to deliver a prayer to the rural god (279b-c). These are the
deities of this chōrion, and under their influence, Socrates appears to have
gone native—epicho ̄rios. In crossing a border, he has turned the tables,
then. Formerly he claimed that the city was the place of learning, the
countryside bereft of teachers. He now aligns the city with static represen-
tations of empty rhetoric, written on paper, the countryside with the living
word of divinely inspired philosophy, written on the soul. By the end of
the dialogue, however, the spatial binary, along with the binary of orality
and writing, begins to deconstruct.15 It does so in part through the intro-
duction of what we might think of, in the presence of the plane, as a kind
of tree-thinking.
It is in his concluding discussion of the myth of Theuth that Socrates
turns to plants in order to further his argument about fruitful (and fruit-
less) discourse. “If an intelligent farmer [γεωργός] were caring for some
seeds and wished them to be fruitful, would he with serious purpose plant
them in the summer in a garden of Adonis and rejoice to see them become
beautiful in eight days …? Would he not, if he were serious, follow the art
15
In this context, we can only give a nod to Jacques Derrida’s influential and much dis-
cussed deconstructive reading of the Phaedrus, in which the pharmakon is understood as
constitutively undecidable, “the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and
the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into
the other” (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981], 127).
of farming, sowing where suitable, and welcome it when what he sowed

reached maturity in eight months?” (276b). Merely clever and well-
adorned speeches, whether written (like Lysias’s) or delivered orally (like
Socrates’s first attempt), are like the little container gardens that Athenian
women grow on their rooftops during Adonis’s midsummer festival, in
celebration and mourning of the beautiful but short-lived god, Socrates
suggests. The quick-growing plants wither as quickly as they sprout—par-
odies of agricultural fertility, as well as procreative sexuality.16 The idea of
a (rural, male) farmer planting a garden of Adonis seems patently absurd,
but Socrates generously allows that a farmer might do so in a spirit of
amusement or festivity. Just so an Athenian gentleman (Plato, say?) might
sow his thoughts in “gardens” with writing, whether for amusement or
self-reminding or “for all who follow the same path”; “and he will take
pleasure in seeing the tender plants growing” (276d). Are the tender
plants the writings themselves or the souls of the like-minded readers in
whom they have sowed their seed?17 Either way, the gardens of Adonis
seem to be overflowing their containers. Socrates redirects our attention
to more sober pursuits. As with serious farming, a serious speech—that is,
one that bears actual fruit—must not only reflect real understanding of its
subject but also be planted in the right kind of soil—the soul of a learner—
and cared for with patient attentiveness. Only then will it flourish and, in
the ripeness of time, give rise to more fruitful speeches in turn.
Whether Socrates has discovered in Phaedrus the soul of a learner and
whether he has found the right sort of discourse to take root in his soul
remain open questions. While agreeing with Socrates at every turn,
Phaedrus seems nonetheless remarkably unchanged by their encounter.
Nor is Socrates himself to be taken at his word when he sends Phaedrus
back to Lysias with a stern message from the nymphs (278c-d) and deliv-
ers his own enigmatic prayer to Pan (279b-c). Knowledge does not simply
come from authoritative external sources, whether they be gods or texts.
So why come outside the walls at all?
Is it for the plane tree?
16
Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
17
Kenneth Sayre suggests that the “tender plants” represent what happens “when the writ-
ing of the dialectician happens to inseminate the mind of a subsequent reader with the vital
discourse conducive to learning” (Plato’s Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue
[Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], xv).
Marder suggests as much when he proposes that the plane tree—plata-

nos—is Plato—Platōnos. This is Plato’s party, after all; he is the real impre-
sario. However, Marder does not develop the insight much beyond the
“irony” that “Plato has literally overshadowed Socrates and Phaedrus” in
his seemingly modest role as scribe; “Plato’s shadow has turned out to be
broad enough to shelter the rest of Western philosophy.”18 That particular
irony is perhaps more ours than Plato’s. How else might we understand
the writer’s choice to sign himself as a very particular tree in a very particu-
lar place, in a work in which Socrates proclaims that places and trees teach
him nothing and that writing is not a serious discursive practice? How do
these two gestures interpret one another? Plato and his Socrates are not
the same, but they are equally elusive. Their tones can be hardest to read
when their (partly blended) words are at their most decisive and extreme.
Socrates’s suggestion that writing is a kind of sowing is as much a cliché
as is his overblown admiration for the pleasant place in the countryside,
and it is a potentially problematic one at that, not least in its gendered
economies.19 But his introduction of vegetal figures at a crucial, indeed
culminating, point in his argument is intriguing nonetheless, not least
because it brings us back to the plane tree. The plane presents an even
more dramatic contrast with the festive, short-lived gardens of Adonis
than the farmer’s unspecified plants do—though we should also keep in
mind that the “literary gardens” may be Plato’s other signature in this
text. Plane trees typically reach one hundred feet in height, rising to the
heavens even as they remain firmly rooted in the soil, thus linking both
realms. They can live for hundreds of years: like Tolkien’s Ents, they are
serious trees, with long memories, not “hasty.” Especially happy next to
rivers, they shelter other creatures, such as cicadas, in their spreading
branches; their unusually large leaves breathe freshness into the air; their
copious shade protects grass and humans alike from the beating sun. And
they shed sheets of bark like paper, often in mid-summer.
Perhaps the plane tree is the real pharmakon in this text, if we allow it
to emerge from the background. Socrates lets himself to be lured by
Phaedrus’s written copy of Lysius’s speech so that he can lure Phaedrus in
turn with his own living discourse. In the end, neither seduction exactly
18
Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York City:
Columbia University Press, 2014), 5.
19
See Page duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women,
Women in Culture and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
succeeds. Still, something seems to have happened. Some magic has been
worked. In an inspired gesture, Phaedrus binds Socrates by an oath sworn
on the plane tree, and the plane tree stands witness as Socrates’s plant-soul
swells and sprouts. But before Phaedrus’s oath, the tree had already drawn
the two humans, welcomed them into its place, offered its hospitality:
even wandering philosophers need connection, grounding, shelter, a con-
text in which to thrive and grow with others, according to the rhythms of
the seasons—some kind of city. Plato ̄nos-platanos: unlike Socratic speech,
with its focused targets and crackling erotic tension, the Platonic tree-
writing disseminates indiscriminately. Only a few of its seeds will take root,
but that is all that is needed. Some of them grow in surprising directions.
Under the Chaste-Tree: Methodius’s Symposium

When the Christian Methodius sets out to write a Platonic-style dialogue
some seven hundred and fifty years after the Phaedrus was penned, he
takes a closely related text as his primary model. Plato’s Symposium
famously relates the story of a (relatively restrained) drinking party at
which six Athenian men deliver speeches in praise of Eros. The first speech
is delivered by Phaedrus, the last by Socrates. The heart of Socrates’s
speech claims to be a reperformance of a speech originally delivered by the
prophetess Diotima, seemingly reproduced by Socrates without benefit of
a written script; it resonates strongly with Socrates’s own speech in the
Phaedrus. A seventh speech supplements the six planned discourses, when
a drunken Alcibiades interrupts the party to deliver an encomium of
Socrates in the guise of Eros. Basing itself on this model, Methodius’s
Symposium also departs from it in crucial ways; indeed, it becomes a study
in carefully constructed contrasts. For starters, the Christian author femi-
nizes the entire cast of characters, from the interlocutors in the framing
dialogue to the host of the dinner party and the ten young women who
present speeches in praise not of Eros but of Chastity—the goddess in the
text, one might say. Of primary interest to us, however, is Methodius’s
decision to set his dialogue not indoors and in the city, as in Plato’s
Symposium, but in the countryside under the shade of a tree.
Theopatra, one of the symposiasts, describes the setting, a garden on
the estate of the host Arete, or Virtue, reached by a rugged and difficult
uphill path (Symp. prol.5). “It was an exceedingly [ὑπερφυῶς] beautiful
place [χωρίον],” she begins her description, already calling attention to a
certain vegetal superabundance: hyperphyōs (“exceedingly”) might be
more literally translated as “overgrowingly”; the growing power of plants

is the very essence of excess. Theopatra goes on to describe the place as
peaceful, suffused with a gentle light. There is a spring in the very middle,
flowing with sweet, clear water—indeed, not just flowing but overflowing
into separate streams, so that the whole area is lushly irrigated. There are
diverse varieties of trees laden with fruit, meadows blossoming with fra-
grant flowers. Finally, “there was nearby a tall chaste tree, under which we
rested, thanks to it being very wide-spreading and well shaded,” Theopatra
concludes (prol.8).20
The woman listening to this description declares that the place sounds
like a second paradise (prol.8), and indeed, Methodius’s emphasis on the
varieties of trees and the division of the rivers evokes the description of the
garden of Eden in Genesis 2, while the reference to flowering meadows
draws on depictions of the afterlife typical of both Christian and non-
Christian literature. However, the chaste tree is clearly transplanted from
Plato’s Phaedrus, where it originally stands alongside the plane tree, as we
have seen (Phdr. 230b). Although Socrates praises it not only for its stat-
ure and shadiness but also for its sweet-smelling blossoms, the chaste
tree—smaller, more feminine—takes second place in relation to the tower-
ing plane tree in Plato’s text. Methodius will give it a much more promi-
nent role, stripping it of its flowers with ascetic austerity, while ignoring
the plane tree all together. After all, the chaste tree’s very name—agnos—
associates it with what is pure or chaste—hagnos. What better arboreal
shelter for a gathering of virgins speaking in praise of female chastity? And
it has other virtues beyond its name, as we shall see.
The chaste tree does not remain confined to the setting or background
of Methodius’s text. More explicitly than in Plato’s Phaedrus, the tree is
foregrounded by being made a subject of discourse in the dialogue that
takes place in its shade. As in the Phaedrus, the most significant introduc-
tion of plant figures occurs near the culmination of the text: it is the dis-
courses of the last two virgins that feature the chaste tree prominently. The
virgins have been asked to deliver speeches in praise of virginity, and their
arguments are primarily (though not exclusively) exegetical. Thus, when
Plato’s chaste tree appears in these virginal discourses, it is through its
20
For the Greek text of Methodius’s Symposium, see Méthode d’Olympe. Le Banquet, ed.
Herbert Musurillo, SC 95 (Paris: Cerf, 1963). For an English translation, see St. Methodius.
The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity, trans. Herbert Musurillo (New York: Newman Press,
1958). While we have consulted Musurillo, for the most part the translations are our own.
translation into a biblical figure, however improbably so. And having been
biblicized, the tree’s presence and agency are intensified, in ways that par-
allel and mime the potent role of the tree in ancient medicine and ritual—
as pharmakon, then. For Christian readers did not turn to the gardens of
scripture merely for amusement or reminding. They read for the third
reason that Plato hints at—to learn and to grow, to be transformed. Their
intent was utterly serious, and so (it would seem) was the pleasure that
they took in making the scriptures yield ever new interpretive fruits—liter-
ary gardens indeed.
Although the chaste tree does not make its appearance until the last two
speeches, almost all of the speeches introduce vegetal figures of some sort.
Virginity is described as the “flower” of the church (Symp. 1.1.10, 2.7.50,
7.1.150–1), the church as a meadow full of the blossoms of chastity
(2.7.50), and, similarly, the blessed afterlife as a blossoming meadow
(8.2.173–4, 8.11.198). Willow trees are introduced by the fourth speaker,
Theopatra, foreshadowing the later discussions of chaste trees. Arguing
for the transformative power of chastity, Theopatra cites Psalm 136
(137):1–2 (LXX): “Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept,
when we remembered Sion; upon the willows [ἰτέαις] in its midst, there
we hung up our instruments [ὄργανα]” (4.3.98). Theopatra—or rather
her script-writer Methodius—follows Origen of Alexandria in interpreting
the rivers of Babylon as “this water-girt life,” whose “rivers of wickedness”
constantly assail “the pure and unblemished souls,” while identifying the
willows with the salvific virtue of virginity or temperance (Symp. 4.3.98–99,
4.4.100–101).21 Here the topos of the locus horridus, or horrible place, is
invoked as a this-worldly counterpart to the other-worldly pleasant place
represented as a blossoming meadow.22 In the midst of the dashing waves,
the singers have hung their “instruments” or “organs”—that is, the fleshly
“dwellings” (σκηνώματα) of their bodies—on the willows, “fastening
them to the wood [ξύλου] with the ropes of chastity [πεισμάτωτῆς
21
On Origen’s interpretation of the Psalm, see Hugo Rahner, “Die Weide als Symbol der
Keuschheit in der Antike und im Christentum,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 56, no. 2
(1932): 234–5.
22
On the locus horridus, see Mark J. Edwards, “Locus Horridus and Locus Amoenus,” in
Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, and
Mary Whitby (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 267–76, and Aneta Kliszcz and Joanna
Komorowska, “Glades of Dread: The Ecology and Aesthetics of Loca Horrida,” in
Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, ed. Christopher Schliephake (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 45–60.
ἁγνείας]” (4.3.98). The image might suggest Odysseus lashed to the mast
of his ship while the Sirens sing or, alternatively, the passions of the flesh
being crucified with Christ, elsewhere described by Methodius as donning
the “instrument” of humanity (3.7.66). More immediately, however it
suggests boats that have been safely moored: the most common meaning
of peismata, with which the virginal bodies are said to be tied, is ships’
cables, but a peisma can also be a rope woven from brush and supple
branches of either willows or chaste trees (Odyssey 10.166–7).23 That is to
say, the word peisma evokes both the mooring of boat-bodies with ropes
tied to willow trees and the use of willow and chaste tree branches to
weave the ropes. Theopatra has very nearly managed to find a chaste tree
in her Psalm. Indeed, she goes on to refer to the willow by which the vir-
ginal body is moored as the “tree of chastity” (φύτον τῆς ἁγνείας). As if
carried away by her own exegetical success, she declares, “The divine writ-
ings everywhere take the willow as a type of virginity [παρθενίας]” (Symp.
4.3.99).
In fact, the scriptures nowhere say this, and Theopatra backs up her
claim with what may seem to us a surprising reference to the use of willow
as a kind of pharmakon: willow flowers steeped in water, we learn, serve as
a decoction to extinguish sexual passion and prevent or abort pregnancy.
Theopatra follows this bit of botanical lore with a supporting Homeric
citation—willow is “fruit-destroying” (Odyssey 10.510)—and a seem-
ingly opposing biblical one—“they shall spring up … as willows on the
banks of running water” (Is. 44:4) (Symp. 4.3.99–100). The recipe, with
some variations (e.g. use of the seeds or leaves rather than the flowers), is
widely attested in Hellenistic and Roman literature, and like many other
herbal remedies appears to sit on the border between folk tradition—per-
haps more specifically, women’s folk tradition—and medical science;
Homer’s phrase was attached to the recipe elsewhere as well.24 Such medi-
cal and folk traditions may well account for Origen’s original association
of the biblical willows with chastity25; however, unlike Origen, Methodius
chooses to introduce the supposed anaphrodisiac and contraceptive prop-
erties of willows explicitly into his exegesis. Is this in part because his
speaker is a woman, transmitting women’s lore? Two other features of his
23
Pliny the Elder twice comments that willow and chaste tree branches are the best for
wicker work (NH 24.38.9, 16.77.209).
24
Rahner, “Die Weide.”
25
As argued by Rahner, “Die Weide.”
reference to the willow pharmakon stand out and seem to affirm this pos-
sibility. First, unlike others who transmit this tradition, Methodius does
not distinguish gender-specific applications, with the extinction of desire
targeted at men, the thwarting of fertility targeted at women.26 Rather, the
applications seem to be gender-neutral and oriented primarily to “the gen-
erative organs” (Symp. 4.4.101) of ascetic women in whose bodies the
extinction of sexual desire and lack of fertility coincide as an active choice.
Second, Methodius’s somewhat elaborate vocabulary is not exclusively
human-centered. With Theopatra as his mouthpiece, he suggests that the
willow drink extinguishes what “bubbles up” for the purpose of “fertiliza-
tions” (ὀχείας), a term that can refer either to a male animal impregnating
a female one or to plant fertilization, and “provocations” (έρεθισμοúς), a
term that is not explicitly sexual; it renders the drinker entirely “barren”
(στεῖρος) and “unfruitful” (ἄγονος), the latter in particular a term that can
be applied to humans, animals, and plants alike (4.3.99). Thus, word
choice allows slippage between humans, animals, and plants, while the
tree’s associations also allow slippage between infertility and fertility: vir-
ginity is a willow because it is fruit-destroying (willows were thought to
drop their fruit before it was ripe)27 and also because it flowers and leafs
out luxuriantly, watered with “the most gentle streams of Christ”
(4.3.100). Weaving the passages together like supple boughs, Theopatra
insinuates a non-reproductive but still fertile eroticism that is specifically
vegetal. Both the virgin and the tree to which she is tethered, are trans-
formed: in the process, the locus horridus has become a locus amoenus or
pleasant place.
Theopatra’s discussion of the willow, which she dubs a “tree of chas-
tity,” sets up the discussions of the chaste tree in the last two speeches. The
ninth speech, delivered by Tusiane, offers a reading of Leviticus 23:39–43;
the crucial verse is the following: “On the first day you shall take ripe tree
fruit and palm fronds and leafy tree branches and branches of the willow
and the chaste tree [ίτέας καὶ ἄγνου] from beside the rushing waters”
(Lev. 23:40 [LXX]) (Symp. 9.1.234). Here the Greek Septuagint inserts a
chaste tree where the Hebrew text has only a willow, possibly because the
two water-loving trees were already so closely associated in ancient
Mediterranean thought.28 As Pliny, the first-century Roman compendiast,
26
See, for example, Pliny N.H. 24.37.9 and 16.46.110, respectively.
27
See, for example, Pliny, N.H. 16.46.110.
28
Rahner, “Die Weide,” 236–7.
observes, the willow and the chaste tree resemble each other in both their
use for wickerwork and the appearance of their leaves; he further notes
that the chaste tree can be used to inhibit sexual desire, a property that he
also attributes to the willow, and that Athenian matrons strewed the leaves
of the chaste tree on their beds during the festival of the Thesmophoria
“in order to preserve their chastity” (NH 24.38.9; cf. 24.37.9). Tusiane,
however, focuses less on resonance with uses of the chaste tree in broader
Greco-Roman culture than on distinctions between Christian and Jewish
interpretations of its role in the biblical festival of Sukkot.
During Sukkot, which takes place at the end of the harvest, the Israelites
are commanded to dwell for seven days in temporary shelters constructed
from the branches of trees, in commemoration of the Exodus. Tusiane
suggests, however, that the meaning of the festival lies not with remem-
bering the past, as Jews assume (and as scripture states), but with antici-
pating what is yet to come. Much as Theopatra interpreted the
“instruments” hung on the willow trees in Psalm 136 (137): 1–2 as bodily
“dwellings” (σκήνωματα) moored by virginity in anticipation of their ulti-
mate transformation, Tusiane understands the ephemeral structures
(σκηναί) erected for Sukkot as foreshadowings of bodies reconstructed in
the resurrection, “when all the fruits of the earth will have been harvested,
and humans will no longer beget or be begotten, and God will rest from
the labors of creation” (Symp. 9.1.236). To build shelters out of tree
branches is to begin to construct one’s resurrection body by grafting holy
virtues onto the mortal flesh that will soon pass away.
Tusiane works her way through the verse of Leviticus 23:40, branch by
branch. What is the “ripe fruit of the tree?” It is the fruit of faith, pro-
duced by the tree of life that grew in paradise, that flourished as wisdom,
the first-born of creation, and that blooms again in Christ, whose words
are his fruit (Symp. 9.3.245–7). And what are the “palm fronds”? Ascetic
practice that sweeps the soul clean (9.4.247–8). “Leafy tree branches”?
The lush extravagance of agapic love (9.4.249). Willow branches? Justice,
because Isaiah proclaims that the just “will spring up … like willows beside
running water” (Is. 44:4) (Symp. 9.4.250; cf. 4.3.100). And finally, what
are the branches of the chaste tree (ἄγνος)? Here Tusiane has reached her
climax. “And after all of these, he exhorts them to bring chaste tree
branches as additional adornment for the dwelling, because by its very
name, it is the tree of chastity [τὸ δένδρον τῆς ἁγνείας], with which the
aforementioned things are to be adorned” (9.4.250). Already an “addi-
tional adornment” added by the Septuagint’s translators, the chaste tree
branches—chastity itself—offer the dwelling place of the body its finishing

graft. Now Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, merges with the wedding
feast that the virgins will celebrate with Christ their bridegroom: “For how
can they enter into the feast with Christ if they have not adorned their
tabernacle with the branches of chastity, with the divinizing and blessed
plant with which all those who hurry to the nuptial gathering should bind
and cover their loins?” (9.4.251). Those who live a virginal life “especially
cultivate [γεωργοῦμεν]” chastity. Whereas those who practice chastity
within marriage produce “little shoots from the crown of the root” of
chastity, the virgins’ growth reaches high enough “to touch upon its
mighty branches” (9.4.251–2). Thus chastity—the goddess in this text, as
we have suggested—is, like Christ, a tree. Its branches are grafted onto the
virginal body, making that body divine. Alternatively, its root gives rise to
new trees—appropriately enough, a non-sexual form of vegetal
reproduction.
The tenth and final speech, delivered by Domnina, continues the tree-
centered discourse by introducing an unusual biblical passage from Judges
9:8–15, known as Jotham’s parable of the trees. In this story, the trees
collectively decide to appoint a king. First, they approach the olive tree,
but the olive sees no reason to give up the wealth of its fattiness in order
to rule. Then they approach the fig tree, which similarly sees no reason to
give up the pleasure of its sweet fruits in exchange for kingship. Next, they
approach the vine; it too prefers to keep its particular gift, namely the
good cheer of its wine, rather than be made king. Finally, they approach
the thorn tree (ῥάμνος), which replies somewhat enigmatically: “If you do
indeed anoint me to be king over you, come, trust in my shelter; if not, let
fire come from the thorn tree and devour the cedars of Lebanon.” It
would appear that the thorn tree’s gifts—a thick canopy and high combus-
tibility—do not or cannot compete with its ambition to rule over the oth-
ers (Symp. 10.2.260–1).
Domnina points out quite sensibly that the trees here stand in for
human creatures, “for inanimate (ἄψυχα) trees would not come together
to appoint a king, since they are fixed in the ground by their roots”
(10.2.262). But rather than identify the individual trees with individual
humans or types of humans, as the biblical context invites, she turns the
parable into a series of allegories of Christian salvation history. The most
remarkable thing about her interpretation is that she makes a savior out of
the thorn tree, which the Bible identifies with the evil king Abimelech. She
achieves this by identifying it with the chaste tree. “Now the thorn tree
represents chastity. For the thorn tree and the chaste tree are the same
tree, being called thorn tree by some, chaste tree by others” (10.3.265)—a
dubious claim, but one that serves her theological purpose well. “The tree
of chastity blossoms as a resting place and a shelter, ruling over humanity
since the arrival of Christ the arch-virgin,” Domnina asserts (10.3.266).
Those who reject the tree receive not shelter but the fire of judgment:
after the failures of Adam (associated with the fig), Noah (associated with
the vine), and Moses (associated with the olive), Chastity ushers in the
final dispensation of God; there will be no other. Moreover, under the
reign of the chaste tree, the other trees will finally fulfill their promise.
Chastity completes the virtues.
Domnina’s speech, an allegorical interpretation of an already allegorical
text, may seem to have taken us very far indeed from “trees growing in the
earth” (10.2.262). But unlike Plato’s Phaedrus, which makes no further
mention of the plane tree after Phaedrus’s oath, Methodius’s Symposium
circles back in the end to the chaste tree in whose shade the young women
were said to rest at the beginning. After delivering a concluding speech of
her own, Arete their host “asked everyone to rise and, standing under the
chaste tree, to send up to the lord a suitable hymn of thanksgiving”
(11.284). And so they did. To be sure, the chaste tree under which
Methodius’s virgins rest and sing is an entirely fictional one, transplanted
from one literary garden to another. And unlike Plato’s plane tree, which
may have had a life outside the text (indeed, its exact location is still the
subject of scholarly study),29 Methodius’s chaste tree never existed outside
the imagination of the writer and his readers. Its transformation into a
figure of biblical allegory—one that “means other,” referring beyond
itself—may seem to distance it still further from “trees fixed in the ground
by their roots.”
But if trees do not take root in the imagination, our own capacity as
humans to enter into relationship with the arboreal world is limited.
Moreover, the materiality of the chaste tree and its therapeutic efficacy and
agency, as humans have historically experienced it, arguably reemerge in
its very allegorization as a biblical figure. In the speeches of Theopatra,
Tusiane, and Domnina, allegorical exegesis conjures the chaste tree in its
material potency so as to harness its transformative power with respect to
female bodies. This conjuring is particularly striking, given that the chaste
29
See Eustathios Chiotis, “Springs, Sanctuaries and Aqueducts in the Ilissos Valley, Attica,
and the Enchanting Scenery in Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus,” Conference paper (2016).
tree is not native to the biblical text: it is introduced through its affinities
to willow and thorn tree, in the latter case quite assertively pushing against
the grain of the biblical text. We could say that Methodius himself intro-
duces the tree into the biblical text, with a little help from the Septuagint
translators, or (better yet) that the virginal exegetes whom he has conjured
to do so. We could also say that the chaste tree inserts itself into the bibli-
cal text, utilizing human knowledges and desires. The chaste tree is a phar-
makon. It works a kind of sympathetic magic as it transforms both the
biblical text, through allegorical interpretation, and the virginal body,
through asceticism. At the center of both transformative processes, the
chaste tree is also where they converge: to read the tree otherwise is to
become other to oneself.
Ancient medicobotanical tradition attributed anaphrodisiac properties
to the leaves of the chaste tree, as to the leaves (and flowers) of the willow.
Pliny relates this to two customs: first, the practice of spreading chaste tree
leaves under the bed to repel the attacks of venomous creatures such as
tarantulas, whose bite was said to excite the sexual organs; and second,
“the fact that the matrons of Athens, during the Thesmophoria, a period
when the strictest chastity is observed, are in the habit of strewing their
beds with the leaves of this tree” (Pliny, NH 24.38.9; cf. 24.37.9). Other
sources suggest that Athenian matrons slept not just on the leaves but on
the branches of the chaste tree during the three days of the Thesmophoria,
a festival of Demeter celebrated exclusively by married women and appar-
ently concerned with their fertility as mothers.30 Methodius does not men-
tion the Thesmophoria explicitly, though one passage may hint that he has
it in mind. Immediately after citing the verses from Leviticus that refer to
“branches of the chaste tree,” Tusiane contrasts the exegetical practices of
Jews negatively with those of Christians: the former, “flying around the
mere letter of the writing, just as those [butterflies or moths] called psychia
fly around the leaves of vegetables,” imagine that scripture commands
them to build actual shelters of tree branches; the latter understand how
to interpret the text figuratively, flying around “the flowers and fruits like
the bee” (Symp. 9.1.235). Bees were typically figures for virtuous women;
in particular, the women who celebrated the Thesmophoria were referred
to as “bees.” Like their Athenian predecessors, Methodius’s virgins are
30
For other ancient sources on the use of chaste tree leaves or branches in the Thesmophoria,
see Eugen Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen: A. Töpelmann,
1910), 137–54.
bees, then, extracting the pollen from the text. They sleep on beds (or in
bodily dwellings) of chaste tree boughs not just a few nights a year, but
every night.
The Thesmophoria has famously been contrasted with another Athenian
festival, namely, the Adonia, during which women planted ephemeral gar-
dens of lettuce or fennel on their roofs, seemingly in celebration of the
exuberant, if short-lived, pleasures of non-procreative eroticism.31 As we
have seen, Plato’s Socrates associates those gardens ambivalently with
writing; perhaps they are the kind that attract frivolous butterflies rather
than industrious bees. For the virgins of Methodius’s text, the
Thesmophoria and Adonia do not contrast so much as coincide, however.
Singing and circling under the chaste tree, which may be blossoming after
all, they celebrate Christ, their collective bridegroom; they also celebrate
the fertility of their own virginity and the fruitfulness of their scriptures.
They are themselves like trees springing up on the banks of a river. Quick-
growing, they also live long: their love stretches into eternity.
Under the Plane Tree: Gregory of Nazianzus’s

Letter 6 to Basil of Caesarea
In the late 350s, two young Cappadocians exchanged letters about a
remote spot in Pontus. Formerly fellow students in Athens, where they
had formed a close, if somewhat fraught, friendship,32 they now engaged
in a playful competition of eloquence and erudition. However light-
hearted the exchange, serious issues were at stake, involving a mutual
commitment they had made a few years prior. As one of them recalls, “I
had already vowed at Athens, at the time of our friendship [φιλίας] and
growing together [συμφυΐας] there (for I have no more suitable word for
it), to live with you [συνέσεσθαί σοι] and philosophize together
[συμφιλοσοφήσειν]” (Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 1).33 Gregory, the
author of the letter, piles on still more words—companionship (ἑταιρεία)
and intimacy (συνήθεια)—to describe the closeness of his connection to
31
Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, 78–81.
32
For an account that brings out the fraughtness, see Raymond Van Dam, Families and
Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2003), 155–84.
33
For the Greek text of Gregory’s letters, see Gregor von Nazianz. Briefe, ed. Paul Gallay,
GCS 53 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1969). For an English translation, see NPNF, ser. 2, vol.
7. Translations here are our own.
his friend Basil, but it is the vegetal language of “growing together” that
comes closest to capturing their erotically charged friendship, in his esti-
mation. Where should they plant themselves now, after having returned to
Cappadocia? Their divergent responses to this question reveal much not
only about their differing personalities and the tug of family loyalties and
career ambitions but also about changing relationships to the natural land-
scape. The locus amoenus becomes a site of contestation and creative rei-
magination, when wielded by men educated in both classical and biblical
literature, at a point when ascetic lifestyles were very much in flux.
Sometimes, this process of reimagining spills well beyond the literary
arena—in the planting of a plane tree, for example.
Gregory’s first letter, in which he refers to his vow to share his life with
Basil, appears to respond to a lost letter from Basil inviting Gregory to join
him on his family’s estate in Pontus; there, in a remote spot, he had appar-
ently already begun his experiments in ascetic life.34 “I confess that I broke
my promise,” Gregory begins: he was not able to join Basil full-time, due
to his obligation to care for his aging parents. “But I will not break it
entirely,” he adds, making a counterproposal, namely, that the two of
them split their time between Basil’s home and his own Tiburina, “so that
all things will be in common, and the friendship on equal terms” (Ep. 1).
Basil does not appear to have responded positively to this seemingly fair-
minded suggestion: Gregory’s next letter complains that his friend has
criticized him for the area where he lives “and its mud and winters” (Ep.
2). Perhaps the suggestion came too late, for Gregory had lagged behind
Basil in returning from Athens, leaving Basil to go to Pontus without his
friend, seeking rest from his wandering, as he puts it. As he recalls in a let-
ter to Gregory, “For having only just renounced those vain hopes which I
once had in you, … I left for Pontus in search of a dwelling [κατὰ βίου
ζήτησιν].” His search was not in vain. “There indeed the God showed me
a spot [χωρίον] exactly suited to my temperament [τρόπῳ]” (Basil,
Ep. 14).35
Place and the life to be lived in it were intimately connected in Basil’s
mind, and the landscape that he encountered in Pontus matched his
34
For a tentative chronology of the letters, see Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, The
Transformation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of
California Press, 1994), 66.
35
The Greek text of Basil’s Ep. 14 is conveniently available in The Collected Letters of Saint
Basil, vol. 1, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, LCL 190 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1926), 106–10. Translations here are our own.
fantasies quite precisely, he asserts. As he embarks upon a lengthy descrip-

tion, the reader too experiences a convergence of the perceived and the
imagined place. Distinctive and somewhat forbidding features—“a high
mountain [ὄρος … ὑψηλóν] covered with a thick forest,” ravines, cliffs,
rapids, and whirlpools—seem to merge with stock elements of the locus
amoenus—a tree-encircled plain (πεδίον), streams, breezes, flowers, and
song-birds—spiced with bits of mythic landscape—Kalypso’s island, the
Thracian river Strymon. Having thus insinuated the place’s idyllic charac-
ter, Basil pronounces himself largely immune to its charms. “The most
pleasing to me of all the fruits it nourishes is the stillness [ἡσυχίαν],” he
insists. The solitude that the place affords is very nearly complete, at least
with respect to humans; only invited guests are able to find their way to
Basil’s isolated dwelling, along a single narrow path. He ends his letter as
he has begun, with a jab at Gregory: how foolish he was ever to have taken
his friend’s proposal seriously and even to have considered trading such a
spot for Gregory’s Tiburina, “that pit of the whole world,” populated not
by the gentle (and edible) deer, goats, and hares of Pontus but by fierce
bears and wolves (Basil, Ep. 14).
Basil’s tone is difficult to read here, and evidently Gregory found it so
too. Was the mockery “playful or serious”? he wonders aloud in a return
letter. He answers his own question by dismissing it. “It does not matter:
only laugh, and be filled with learning, and enjoy our friendship!” he urges
his companion. He insists on interpreting Basil’s jeering as a kind of flirta-
tion, intended to attract rather than repel. “It is just like those who block
streams in order to divert them elsewhere” (Ep. 4). By this point, Gregory
has himself spent time at Basil’s Pontic retreat and is well able to respond
to Basil’s letter in kind, matching his locus amoenus with a locus horridus.
Delivered in two installments, Gregory’s “diatribe” mercilessly mocks
Basil’s Pontic retreat and—even more—Basil’s idealizing description of it
(Ep. 4 and 5). Pulling out all the stops, Gregory is clearly having fun while
also exacting a kind of revenge. He expresses confidence that Basil accepts
the two letters in the jocular spirit in which they are intended (Ep. 5).
Gregory’s two playful epistolary discourses on Pontus are followed by
a third, this one explicitly marked as “serious.” Now he longs for his time
in Pontus, with the hardships, psalmody, prayer, vigils, and study, the
growing together (συμφυΐα) and single-mindedness (συμψυχία) of the
“brothers,” the daily routines and chores. He concludes his litany of long-
ing with a striking reminiscence: “O for the golden plane tree, more pre-
cious than that of Xerxes, under which sat not an enervated king but an
emaciated monk, which ‘I planted and Apollos’—your most honorable

self—‘watered, but the god made grow’ [1 Cor 3:6], to our honor, so that
a memorial might be preserved among you of our diligence, just as ‘the
rod of Aaron that budded’ is read and believed to be in the Ark [Heb 9:4;
cf. Num 17:8]” (Ep. 6). The Platonic plane tree has returned, but now
other stories have been grafted on to it.
The reference to Xerxes’s golden plane tree evokes and partly conflates
two well-known passages from book 7 of the Histories of the fifth-century
BCE historian Herodotus. The first refers to a plane tree made of gold
that the wealthy Lydian Pythius gave to King Xerxes’s father Darius, of
which Xerxes was reminded when he himself met Pythius in Phrygia years
later (Herodotus 7.27). The second refers to a living tree that Xerxes him-
self encountered on the road to Sardis, near the Lydian town of Callatebus:
“he found a plane tree, which he adorned with golden ornaments because
of its beauty, and he assigned one of his immortals to guard it” (7.31).36
Gregory’s allusion to Xerxes’s golden plane tree allows him to make a joke
out of Basil’s name: it is no luxury-loving Persian king (βασιλεύς) but a
monk named “kingly” (βασίλειος) who sat under the (improbably fast-
growing) plane tree that Gregory planted in Pontus (Ep. 6). The allusion
also allows him to emphasize the preciousness of the tree that he has left
behind. But is the plane tree precious because it is made of precious mate-
rials, as in the first story, or because its own greening beauty has inspired
one who beholds it to bestow precious gifts and protective care, as in the
second? Perhaps Gregory’s words hint that Basil should honor the living
plane tree as Xerxes did. The early third-century Roman rhetorician Aelian
mocked the Persian king for decking the tree’s branches with necklaces
and bracelets “as if it were a woman he loved” (Various Histories 2.14).
How deep does the joke go? How deep the desire? Does Gregory want his
kingly friend to fall in love with the plane tree that he has left behind in his
stead? “To pray for these things is easy, to attain them, not easy,” he
observes. His own symbiotic longings are distinctly treelike: “Breathe with
me [σύμπνει] …. I breathe you [σὲ πνέω] rather than air,” Gregory writes
to Basil, at the end of this “serious” letter (Ep. 6). After all, humans and
plants are always breathing each other through the air: Gregory just wants
the direct contact of leaf-to-mouth resuscitation.
36
On this passage, see Frank H. Stubbings, “Xerxes and the Plane Tree,” Greece and Rome
15, no. 44 (1946): 63–7.
Gregory does not only play the plane tree to Basil’s Xerxes; he also
plays Paul to his Apollos, another configuration that potentially places him
in the superior position. He has planted, and now Basil waters the tree.
But as soon as it is established, the hierarchy is leveled: it is the god who
causes the plant to grow, and both planter and waterer “are one”; they are
“co-workers,” in the language of Paul’s letter (1 Cor 3:8–9). “Work with
me [συνεργάζου],” Gregory urges his friend, evoking intimacy as he
laments the distance between them (Ep. 6). He supplements the Pauline
citation with another image that cuts across both Old and New Testaments:
the tree that he has planted and that Basil is watering is a memorial, like
Aaron’s miraculously budding almond staff, inscribed with his name and
placed in the ark of the covenant as a reminder to the Israelites to honor
him (Ep. 6). Similarly, the plane tree is a memorial of Gregory and his hard
work, or alternately, a memorial of the hard work that he and Basil accom-
plished together. Either way, a trace of his presence is left behind in Basil’s
special dwelling place. As a reminder, a present absence, the plane tree is
like writing. It is a kind of signature by which Gregory has written himself
into the landscape. It is a pharmakon.
For this is Plato’s plane tree too. Gregory may be an unlikely gardener,
and the famously shady plane tree an unlikely plant for a place that is,
according to Gregory, already so deep in shadow that he can jokingly dub
Basil and his companions “Pontic Cimmerians” (Ep. 4), a Homeric refer-
ence to a people “who live enshrouded in mist and darkness which the rays
of the sun never pierce, … the poor wretches liv[ing] in one long melan-
choly night” (Odyssey 11.14–19). Nonetheless, that Gregory should have
planted a plane tree in Basil’s monastic retreat makes all the sense in the
world. As one scholar puts it succinctly, “Basil and Gregory had different
goals for this retreat. Basil wanted to establish a new life of asceticism and
renunciation …. Gregory had gone to Pontus hoping to recreate their
experiences at Athens.”37 Basil had arrived in Athens later and left earlier
than Gregory; the city and the classical education that they received there
does not seem to have captivated him as wholly as it did his friend, to say
the least.38 While Gregory lingered in Athens, Basil toured ascetic com-
munities in the eastern Mediterranean and fell under the influence of the
ascetic teacher Eustathius of Sebaste.39 For Basil, Pontus was to prove a
37
Van Dam, Families and Friends, 157–8.
38
See the account of Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 27–60.
39
Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 72–6.
point of transition to the future, a place to pivot to a career as a bishop and

builder of monastic foundations. For Gregory, it was the hoped-for fulfill-
ment of Athenian promises. The plane tree was a marker of those hopes.
It was meant to be a constant reminder to Basil, but perhaps also a chal-
lenge of sorts: Gregory had planted it; now Basil must water it, if their
vows were to be filled, even partly. With both his tree planting and his
serio-comical letters, Gregory was playing Socrates to Basil’s Phaedrus,
sowing seeds of possibility. As with Phaedrus, it is not clear that his seeds
fell on fertile soil. Perhaps the Pontic retreat remained, as Gregory joked
it was, “gardenless gardens without produce,” despite all their labors,
from his perspective (Ep. 5).
And yet, intriguingly, Anna Silvas, a recent scholarly visitor, believes
that she may have found descendants of the plane tree on the site of Basil’s
retreat: “Down on the river flat was a strange outcrop of plane tree trunks,”
she reports (Fig. 2.2).
Fig. 2.2 Anna Silva with possible descendants of Gregory’s plane tree, 2006.
(Photograph courtesy of Carmel Silva)
Other plane trees in Turkey date to the fifteenth century, testifying to

the trees’ longevity in that region; they also exhibit the striking growth
pattern of new trunks generating on the edges of the massive trunks of
dying trees. She acknowledges, “It may be too much to believe that we
could have a living botanical relic of Gregory’s tree-planting some
1700 years ago. Still, it would be highly desirable to have a botanist’s
assessment of the curious form of growth at the site.”40 Indeed, the very
possibility of such vegetal persistence is an uncanny reminder of the radi-
cally different temporalities at play in the intertwining lives of humans and
trees—as well as the mysterious and unpredictable effects of the hopes and
desires of both humans and trees.
In their Pontic letters, both Gregory and Basil invoke the classical locus
amoenus in order to yoke emerging ascetic ideals to conventional philo-
sophical ones. The pleasant place becomes a location not for transient
conversations, as with Plato and Methodius, but for the establishing of an
enduring bios or way life among like-minded Christian friends. As it hap-
pens, the experiment in Pontus proved relatively short-lived, and both
men would go on to active lives as bishops and theologians, while carrying
their literary and ascetic aspirations in diverging directions already marked
out in Pontus. Whereas Basil continued with the project of drafting “writ-
ten standards and rules” for monastic life, Gregory developed a deeply
classicizing yet also distinctly innovative poetics of the inner life, foreshad-
owed in the image of the solitary ascetic sitting under the plane tree
(Ep. 6).
Their ascetic translations of the locus amoenus are part of a larger con-
text. At the same time that Gregory and Basil were exchanging letters
about Pontus and beginning to create monastic rules, Athanasius of
Alexandria was writing the first biography of an ascetic saint—the Life of
Antony (c. 358). Here the topos of the pleasant place is not only adapted
to solitary habitation, as Karin Schlapbach has emphasized, but is also
translated to “the innermost desert” of Egypt (Life of Antony 49.4). As
Athanasius describes it, Antony’s arrival at his own pleasant place is accom-
panied by a sense of recognition and delight similar to Basil’s, and it too
features a plain (πεδιάς) at the foot of a high mountain (ὄρος ὑψηλὸν),
watered by a spring-fed stream. However, instead of “a forest of varied,
many-colored trees growing around” the plain (Basil, Ep. 14), there are
40
Anna M. Silvas, “In Quest of Basil’s Retreat: An Expedition to Ancient Pontus,”
Antichthon 41 (2007): 88.
merely “a few untended date palms [φοίνικες]” (Life of Antony 49.7),

whose fruits afford Antony “some meager and paltry comfort” (50.4).
Instead of an overgrown garden (Gregory, Ep. 5), there is a barren land-
scape: after procuring some tools and some seed, Antony is just barely able
to find enough arable soil to grow grain for his bread and a few herbs for
his occasional visitors; wild animals, drawn to the spring, trample his crops,
adding to the challenge (Life of Antony 50.6–9). Nor does Antony need
to dismiss the distraction of river breezes, flowers, or singing birds, as Basil
claims he does (Basil, Ep. 14); instead, he hears the howling of demons
(Life of Antony 51.3–5). This is a place of fragile sufficiency rather than
lavish abundance; it provides not a backdrop for philosophical discourse
but hard-won sustenance for bare life. And yet “Antony, as if divinely
moved, fell in love with the place …. He remained alone in the mountain,
no other living with him. Recognizing it as his home, henceforth he stayed
in that place” (49.7–50.2). Here Athanasius has gone further than Gregory
or Basil in transforming the pleasant place: his Antony embraces the harsh
and uncanny aspects of the stereotypical locus horridus that the
Cappadocians hurl at each other like (playful) insults. The hagiographical
text thus renders the locus amoenus distinctly ambivalent, yet (paradoxi-
cally) perhaps even more pleasurable as a result. An ascetic aesthetics is
emerging.
The desert topos, with its date palms, is quickly picked up by the Latin
writer Jerome. It appears in his earliest hagiographical work, the Life of
Paul of Thebes (c. 377), in which he depicts the hermit Paul living for
ninety-seven years in a rocky enclosure at the foot of a mountain under an
ancient date palm (palma) that “formed a ceiling with its spreading
branches.” A spring bubbles up at the foot of the palm, which provides
Paul with both food and clothing: he not only eats the palm’s fruit but
also weaves tunics from its leaves (Life of Paul 5–6, 16). The topos appears
again in Jerome’s Life of Hilarion (c. 390), in which he narrates the holy
man Hilarion’s pilgrimage to Antony’s hermitage, located at the foot of a
mountain where a stream flows and “countless palm trees grow” (Life of
Hilarion 31). If he makes Paul’s single palm tree more impressive in its
great age and spread, Jerome here augments the quantity of the “few
untended” palms found in Athanasius’s text; he also renders Antony’s gar-
den significantly more prolific, relating that the Egyptian holy man planted
vines (vites), small trees (arbusculae), and vegetables (holera) in a small
plot (areola), garden (hortulum), or orchard (pomarius), watered by a
pond that he had dug himself (31).
In his descriptions of Paul’s and Antony’s dwelling places, Jerome

seems to have given in to the temptation to mitigate the harshness of
Athanasius’s desertscape, drawing his descriptions a bit closer to the tradi-
tional locus amoenus. However, in the same work, as he describes Hilarion’s
dwelling place, he not only translates the ascetic hermitage into the topo-
graphical idiom of Cyprus but also emphasizes its uncanny aspect in ways
that resonate not only with Athanasius’s text but also (unwittingly) with
Basil’s description of his own place of retreat. Tucked away “among
remote and harsh mountains that could scarcely be climbed by crawling
on hands and knees,” Hilarion’s hermitage is “an exceedingly frightening
and withdrawn place,” Jerome relates. “It was surrounded on all sides by
trees [arboribus] and there was also water flowing down from the brow of
the hill, a most delightful little garden [hortulum] and many fruit trees
[pomaria].” Although Hilarion lived among the fruit trees, “he never
consumed their fruit as food.” Here trees, stream, and garden are located
not in a valley but on a mountaintop, an isolation further accentuated by
the inwardness that the island topography affords. Adding to its menacing
aspect is the fact that Hilarion’s home is haunted by the clamorous voices
of demons residing in the ruins of a nearby temple; indeed, it is this that
especially delights the holy man (Life of Hilarion 43). Whether in deserts
or forests, holy men’s happy places are difficult to access and more than a
little spooky.
Examples could of course be multiplied and extended, but these texts
by Gregory, Basil, Athanasius, and Jerome, all written in the second half of
the fourth century, are revealing of the range of emergent possibilities for
ascetically translated landscapes, at once lived and imaginary. Inscribed
with so much literary memory, both classical and biblical, Gregory’s plane
tree seems to be suspended in an ambiguous transitional moment. Is the
tree shelter and site for an exchange between two philosophizing men—
Socrates and Phaedrus, Gregory and Basil—or for the introspective medi-
tations of one—Basil, but ultimately Gregory himself? Paul’s single palm
tree (which Jerome plucks from the landscape of Athanasius’s Life of
Antony) both translates the plane tree into a more austerely ascetic land-
scape and clarifies the possibilities that its inherited ambiguity offers.
Providing a permanent home for the solitary monk Paul, the palm also
becomes the site for his brief but charged encounter with the younger
Antony, who visits him shortly before his death. Thus, the seemingly end-
less stretch of monastic solitude enfolds interludes of intense exchange in
this treed landscape of transformed desire.
At the same time, the shadowy, forested landscape of Basil’s Pontic

mountain retreat, into which Gregory inserts his somewhat incongruous
plane tree, seems to anticipate Hilarion’s Cypriot hermitage; the latter is
also haunted by the demons that inhabit the Athanasian Antony’s dwelling
place. Such places can harbor monastic communities like those that Basil
creates or guard the solitude that Hilarion craves. Liminal spaces, they
incorporate elements of both forests and orchards, of both wild and
domesticated, dreadful and delightful trees and places.41 Their inbetween-
ness allows humans to enter into a place of their own wilding, to learn how
to be rooted. “In [Pontus] sometime soon, god willing, I shall cease
roaming,” writes Basil (Ep. 14). According to Jerome, it was rumored that
Hilarion “was unable to stay for long in the same place,” but he finally
planted himself in an orchard in Cyprus (Life of Hilarion 31). The life of
a holy man involves living with trees, becoming part of a landscape, learn-
ing the wisdom of plants.
Under the Gourd Tree: Augustine’s Letter 71

to Jerome
Gregory’s image of Basil under the Pontic plane tree is striking, not least
given its Platonic resonance. However, another image of a human under a
tree, this one primarily biblical rather than classical, was far more familiar
to late ancient Christians from both liturgy and art—namely the image of
Jonah under the Ninevite gourd tree. That image was drawn from the
Septuagint translation of chapter 4 of the biblical book of Jonah, which
depicts its protagonist in a distinctly disgruntled frame of mind. Twice in
the course of less than ten verses, Jonah declares, “it is better for me to die
than live” (Jonah 4:3, 8). In the first case, Jonah is angry because God has
forced him into the role of false prophet: harassing him until he finally
proclaims that the city of Nineveh is to be destroyed for its sins, God sub-
sequently changes his mind when the population repents of its evil ways.
Deeply aggrieved, Jonah leaves town. He makes himself a shelter and sits
in its shadow, close enough to the city to observe its fate but far enough
to avoid further involvement. In the meantime, God causes a gourd tree
to grow over Jonah’s head, shading him from the sun. “So Jonah was very
happy about the gourd,” we read (4:6). Content with the simple pleasure
41
On the enfolding of “wilderness” into urban contexts, see Emanuele Coccia, “What is
the Wilderness?” Spike 65 (Autumn 2020): 32–3.
afforded him by the gift of this plant, the resentful prophet seems to let go
of his anger. But the very next day (and with apparent perversity), God
causes a worm to attack and kill the gourd and makes the sun beat down
on Jonah’s head with renewed strength. Now, for the second time, Jonah’s
temper flares and he declares his desire to die. Ignoring the prophet’s his-
trionics, God brings the lesson home: Jonah cares for a single gourd tree;
can he not, then, understand how God cares for all the vulnerable people
and animals of Nineveh? And there the story ends. Jonah has learned to
love a plant. Perhaps he can learn to love a whole community of living
things. Perhaps he can also embrace a mode of prophecy that leaves room
for improvisation, a narrative whose ending remains open and uncertain
but not without hope.
The depth of Christian devotion to Jonah’s tree became evident at the
end of the fourth century when that tree came under threat. The source
of that threat was the same Jerome who gave us Paul’s palm tree and
Hilarion’s orchard. Jerome was not only a writer of Saints’ Lives but also,
and more famously, author of a new Latin translation of the Bible. He
innovated, methodologically, by translating directly from the Hebrew text
rather than from the authoritative (and purportedly miraculous) Greek
Septuagint, or translation of the Seventy. This approach resulted in a
change in species for the plant that sheltered Jonah from the sun. Linguistic
translation thus resulted in a translated landscape, and this change excited
enormous controversy. In that context, the North African bishop and
theologian Augustine became the champion of the septuagintal gourd.
In 403, when Augustine sits down to write Jerome, the two men have
already been engaged for some eight years in what has been aptly described
as a “star-crossed” correspondence.42 Personality differences and rivalry
42
Jennifer Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s
Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 113, 133. This particular correspon-
dence has been much studied: see Carolinne White, The Correspondence (394–419) Between
Jerome and Augustine of Hippo, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity (Lewiston, NY:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990); Ralph Hennings, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und
Hieronymus und ihr Streit um den Kanon des Alten Testaments und die Auslegung von Gal.
2,11–14, VChrSupp (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Alfons Fürst, Augustins Briefwechsel mit
Hieronymus, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungs Band (Münster:
Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999); see also Virginia Burrus, “Augustine’s
Bible,” in Ideology, Culture, and Translation, ed. Scott Elliott and Roland Boer (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 69–82. For the Latin edition of Jerome’s letters, see
CSEL 54–56; for Augustine’s letters, CSEL 33, 44, 57, 58. For an English translation of the
correspondence, see White, Correspondence. Translations here are our own.
fuel a contentiousness exacerbated by a series of failed, delayed, and mis-

directed letter deliveries. But despite such evident tensions, Augustine
doggedly returns to a topic initially raised in his first, undelivered letter to
Jerome (Ep. 28 [394/5])—namely, Jerome’s mistake in using the Hebrew
text as the basis for his biblical translations. Augustine states his objections
bluntly. If Jerome’s Hebrew-based translations begin to be widely used, a
breach will open between Latin- and Greek-speaking Christians. Moreover,
when disagreements arise, the Greek-speakers will have the advantage.
The Septuagint is, after all, widely authoritative: “who will submit to have
so many Latin and Greek authorities pronounced in the wrong?” Augustine
asks. The Septuagint is also relatively accessible, in comparison with the
Hebrew text. “It will be found difficult, if not impossible, to get at the
Hebrew documents by which the version to which exception is taken may
be defended,” he points out. And whereas Greek is a language widely
known even in the west, Hebrew is not. Christians may, then, find them-
selves dependent on Jewish scholars, who may themselves disagree with
Jerome’s translation choices, producing further confusion. This will ren-
der Jerome himself virtually indispensable in his singular authority as
Christian Hebraist, observes Augustine drily (Ep. 71.2.3).
It quickly becomes apparent that Augustine’s concerns are not merely
hypothetical. He continues: “A certain bishop, our brother, having intro-
duced the reading of your translation in the church over which he pre-
sides, came upon something in the book of the prophet Jonah rendered
very differently by you from what was deep-rooted in the senses and mem-
ory of all and had been chanted for so many successions of generations
[quam erat omnium sensibus memoriaeque inveteratum, et tot aetatum suc-
cessionibus decantatum]” (Ep. 71.3.5). According to Augustine, a riot
breaks out in the church of Oea (Tripoli) when Jerome’s new translation
of the book of Jonah is read. The congregation is outraged because his
rendering is at odds with longstanding and widely shared knowledge,
knowledge that is lodged in “the senses and memory,” as Augustine puts
it. This embodied habitus is tethered to a familiar pattern of words. The
Christians of Oea have heard these words chanted or sung over and over,
across generations, the sounds imprinting not just their thoughts but their
sensual imagination. Moreover, that imprinting draws them together
across linguistic differences, in what is apparently a multilingual congrega-
tion and community: all of their Bibles read the same, whether Latin,
Greek, or Hebrew, Christian or Jewish; only Jerome’s interpretatio
diverges. The very bishop who has introduced Jerome’s translation is
compelled to “correct” it, “as if false” (quasi mendosiatatem). Augustine

confesses that even he has to wonder whether Jerome could have made a
mistake: he may have made himself seem indispensable, but he is surely
not infallible. Indeed, Augustine’s story suggests that one man, however
erudite, not only should not but cannot prevail over a translation that has
become incarnate in an entire chanting, listening, imagining community.
In showcasing this incident at Oea, he does not merely present Jerome
with a practical pastoral problem arising from an unfamiliar translation; he
also, and more importantly, offers him an alternative understanding of
biblical materiality.
But what exactly is it about Jerome’s translation of Jonah that so dis-
turbs the people of Oea? Augustine does not specify, leaving an irritated
Jerome to guess. The complaint, he suggests wearily in his letter of
response (Ep. 112 [404]), is surely one he has heard and addressed before,
namely that he “translated ‘ivy’ [hedera] instead of ‘gourd’ [cucurbita]” in
designating the plant that God caused to grow to give shade to Jonah.
Drawing on his philological expertise, Jerome notes that “where the
Septuagint renders ‘gourd’ [cucurbita; i.e., κολοκύνθη] and Aquila and
the rest translate ‘ivy’ [hedera], that is, κίσσος, the Hebrew manuscript has
‘ciceion’ [‫]קִיקָיֹון‬, which is ‘ciceia’ in the Syriac tongue as now spoken.” At
this point, his display of erudition moves beyond the strictly textual: where
a “word for word” exchange yields only a mystifying transliteration, he
must swap the Hebrew term for botanical description. The ciceion, he
explains, “is a kind of bush [virgultum] having large leaves like a vine
[pampinus], and when planted it quickly springs up to the size of a small
tree [arbuscula], standing upright by its own stem, without requiring any
support of canes or poles, as both gourds and ivy do” (Ep. 112.7.22). In
his Commentary on Jonah (c. 396), Jerome has specified further that the
ciceion “casts a large shadow … and often is found growing in Palestine,
especially in sandy areas.” This is a plant with which the Bethlehem resi-
dent has personal familiarity, then, a plant found in Palestine and in
Hebrew and Syriac but not in North Africa or in Latin. It resists trans-
planting or translating. Thus, he will follow the example of Aquila and
other Greek translators who rendered it as ivy “because they had no other
word to use”; Latin likewise “does not have a word for this kind of tree,”
Jerome asserts (Commentary on Jonah 4.6). Lacking an exact equivalent
for ciceion, Latin interpretations of Jonah 4 thus grow a veritable garden
in its place—not only “gourd” and “ivy” but also (through resort to
botanical description) “bush,” “vine,” and “small tree.”
Jerome’s insistence that Latin has no word for ciceion is, however, curi-
ous, given that Pliny the Elder mentions a cici tree that grows especially
abundantly in Egypt; “it reaches the height of an olive tree, with a stalk
like fennel, the leaf of a grape vine [vitis], the seed of slender, pale grapes;
our people call it ‘tick’ (ricinus) from the similarity of the seed” (NH 15.7;
cf. 23.41). (Note that in current usage, both the Linnaean Ricinus com-
munis and the Hebrew ciceion refer to the castor oil plant, native to the
southeastern Mediterranean but now widespread in tropical regions and
used extensively by landscapers in parks.) Is it possible that Jerome, an
admirer of Pliny’s Natural History,43 is ignorant of the term ricinus as a
name for the cici or castor oil plant? He claims that he opts for ivy as a
familiar plant that at least has precedent in prior translations. Perhaps he
deems ricinus, like the transliteration ciceion, too exotic; but if so, is it the
exoticism of the word or of the plant that concerns him? He returns to the
argument that the gourd plant is not found in the Hebrew text, willfully
ignoring the fact that, on his own account, ivy is not found there either.
Determined to eradicate Jonah’s tenaciously rooted cucurbita, he imag-
ines that the Jews of Oea secretly validate his own translation: if they are
not simply ignorant, they must be spinning lies “in order to mock the
gourd-planters [cucurbitarios]” (Ep. 112.7.22). Mocking gourd-planters
is a cause that Jerome can support.
When Augustine writes again, he repeats his concern. Jerome’s transla-
tion is troubling to “Christ’s congregations, whose ears and hearts [aures
et corda] have become accustomed to listen to that translation that was
approved by the apostles themselves.” Again, his language points to
embodied habitus, steeped in sensation and emotion and accrued across
time. As for “that bush [virgultum] in Jonah,” Augustine wonders reason-
ably enough why it cannot just as well be called gourd as ivy, “if in the
Hebrew it is neither gourd nor ivy, but something else which stands erect,
supported by its own stem without other props.” He reiterates his trust in
the Septuagint: “for I do not think that the Septuagint would have ren-
dered it thus for no reason, unless they knew it to be something similar to
this” (Ep. 82.5.35).
Augustine may have perceived in the spontaneous consensus of the
people of Oea an echo of the spontaneous consensus of the seventy inter-
preters who produced the legendary first translation of the scriptures. It is
43
On Jerome’s familiarity with Pliny’s Natural History, see Emil Lübeck, Hieronymus quos
noverit scriptores et ex quibus hauseret (Leipzig: Teubner, 1872), 210–2.
an agreement that arises from the senses and memory, having entered
through the ears and hearts. The people of Oea inhabit a shared biblical
landscape, and among its cherished features is a plant, a very particular
plant—gourd, cucurbita, κολοκύνθη, ‫קִיקָיֹון‬. That plant—Jonah’s plant—
binds their multilingual Bible together just as it binds them together as a
community, “correcting” any deviation. Augustine seems to have hoped
that his epistolary exchange with Jerome would produce a similar inter-
pretive consensus, through a process of shared study and mutual instruc-
tion. Jerome, not surprisingly, resists the younger man’s corrective
interventions.44 But he also resists Augustine’s model of interpretation.
For Jerome, the Bible is encountered not in the liturgical practice and
embodied memory of a living congregation but rather in the solitary
scholarly study of languages and manuscripts.
Thus, for Jerome, the materiality of the text resides not in the commu-
nal practices that give it voice and imagination but in the manuscript pages
that preserve the history and diversity of texts and translations. That is
where corrections are made and recorded as such; it is also where differ-
ences inevitably leave their traces. Every text critic knows that no text is
perfectly stable and no word is perfectly translatable. Perhaps Jerome
objects so strongly to the gourd-planters not because their translation is
incorrect but because they cling to it too fiercely. He offers them ivy in
exchange not because it is more correct but because it clearly is what it
is—a translation. Where the Septuagint’s familiar gourd seems to promise
too much, a translation without difference, the exotic castor oil plant
might give too little, nothing but untranslated difference. Ivy offers a
landscape that partly but only partly closes the gap between North Africa
and Palestine, Latin and Hebrew. It makes the Bible accessible but pre-
serves its aura of difference. And, yes, it makes Jerome and succeeding
generations of scholarly experts virtually indispensable as the mediators
who replace the Septuagint, no longer the miraculous guarantor of perfect
translatability.
As it happens, Augustine was not the only one upset by Jerome’s
replacement of Jonah’s gourd with ivy. Jerome’s erstwhile friend Rufinus
rails against the contempt for the authority of the Septuagint demon-
strated in this capricious change. “When the world has grown old and all
things are hastening to their end, let us even now engrave the tombs of the
ancients [scribamus etiam in sepulcris veterum], so that those who had
44
See Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians, 101–50.
here seen [legerant] otherwise may know that Jonah did not have the
shade of a gourd but of an ivy plant; and when our legislator pleases, not
of an ivy plant but of some other bush” (Apology against Jerome 2.35
[401 CE]). Here Rufinus proposes sarcastically that existing tombs be
recarved to replace biblical gourd plants with ivy, following Jerome’s dic-
tum. His language (scribamus … legerant) suggests the correction of
inscribed text but also allows for the possibility that it is images rather than
words that need correcting. Such an imagined defacement of the memori-
als of the dead resonates with the violence of the change enacted on the
liturgical body of the Christians of Oea. Moreover, Rufinus’s reference to
what is seen on tombs calls attention to the fact that Jonah’s bush was
familiar to Christians not only through oral recitation but also through
visual representation. Indeed, Jonah resting under the plant was the single
most popular biblical scene depicted in early Christian art of both the pre-
and post-Constantinian periods, appearing in numerous sarcophagus
reliefs and catacomb paintings. And there the plant was inevitably and
unmistakably a gourd plant, sometimes supported by a simple structure
(Fig. 2.3), sometimes barely rising from the earth before descending
across Jonah’s naked, languid body, its bulbous fruits drooping volup-
tuously (Fig. 2.4).
Whether by using the built shelter referenced in Jonah 4:4 as a prop
(common in catacomb art) or by showing the prophet lying prone on the
ground (common in sarcophagus reliefs), the artistic tradition had solved
the problem identified by Jerome in his commentary: how could either a
gourd plant or ivy, which “creep along the ground by their nature, and if
they have no restraints or ladders as support do not try to climb,” offer
shade to Jonah (Commentary on Jonah 4.6)?
The artistic tradition had also condensed Jonah’s narrative into a series
of vivid images charged with symbols of resurrection and a blessed afterlife
drawn from both Jewish midrash and pagan myth. The former inspired
the narrative sequence familiar from early Christian art (and perhaps deriv-
ing from lost Jewish exemplars),45 whereas the latter introduced visual
elements that evoked specifically sepulchral contexts. According to
midrashic tradition, the scene of Jonah reclining under the gourd tree
immediately follows the episodes of Jonah being swallowed and then
spewed out naked by a sea monster. It is no longer framed by the story of
the Ninevites, but instead, it represents Jonah in a newly reborn state.
45
Bezalel Narkiss, “The Sign of Jonah,” Gesta 18, no. 1 (1979): 63–76.
Fig. 2.3 Floor mosaic of Jonah in repose under an arbor, fourth century, Basilica
of Theodore, Aquileia, Italy. (Photograph courtesy of Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/
Art Resource, NY)
Such a depiction could easily be aligned with Christian expectations of a

paradisal afterlife following the resurrection of the dead—the “sign of
Jonah” according to Matthew 12:39–40.46 Moreover, scholars have long
since recognized that artistic depictions of Jonah cite the image of the
46
We should note that Giovanni Bazzano detects in the image of Jonah under the gourd
tree distinctly millenarian ideas and suggests that this is the primary reason for Jerome’s
insistence on retranslating the word (Giovanni B. Bazzano, “Cucurbita super caput ionae:
Translation and Theology in the Old Latin Tradition,” Vetus Testamentum 60, no. 3 [2010]:
309–22).
Fig. 2.4 Sculpture of Jonah Under the Gourd Vine, 280–290 CE, Asia Minor,
Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1965.239. (Photograph cour-
tesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art)
eternally youthful, sleeping Endymion, a popular figure in sarchophagus

art and a fitting symbol of everlasting life.47
What we want to stress again is the power of the sensuously embodied
imagination in which Jonah’s gourd tree had taken such firm root. Not
only did the Christian ear expect the familiar Latin cucurbita; the Christian
eye also anticipated its arching shape and dangling fruits, framing Jonah’s
repose. Indeed, the gourd plant and the resting prophet take shape
together as two necessary, interdependent parts of a single visual thought.
They seem almost to emerge from the same source, as Jonah’s feet join
with the trunk of the plant. The withering of the plant is held in eternal
abeyance: the image suggests a bursting vitality, as supple stalk sprouts
luxuriant leaves and distinctly phallic fruits. (According to Pliny, gourds
47
The first to suggest this was V. Schultze, Archäologische Studien über altchristliche
Monumente (Vienna: Braumüller, 1880), 81.
could attain a length of nine feet [NH 19.24]). Just so is Jonah’s awaken-
ing held in abeyance. The moment is one of pure potentiality.
According to the biblical text, Jonah had to learn to love a single plant
whose life had entwined closely with his own, in order to appreciate God’s
love for the whole community of living things, distant as most of them
seemed to Jonah. Early Christians followed Jonah in falling in love with a
plant, a very particular plant. Yet they encountered that biblical plant
in locales that differed both botanically and linguistically, and thus they
encountered each other in and through botanical and linguistic transla-
tions that could make them seem very distant to each other. The plant that
these early Christians had fallen in love with both was and was not the
same one. They both were and were not inhabiting the same biblical
landscape.
Jerome saw the problem and he fixed it to his own satisfaction: like so
many text critics and translators, he felt both the lure of a unified text and
the pleasure of multiplying differences, and he understood that it was his
job to manage the latter on behalf of the former; textual unity was the
highest goal. As it turned out, however, the Bible exceeded and evaded
the control of the scholar, wildly so. It could not be confined to the mate-
rialities of manuscript pages, however carefully collated and corrected. It
materialized as well in the media of sound and image, in chanting and
painting and carving, and thus, it was dispersed across contested transla-
tions not only within but also between textual, sonic, and visual media.
When Jerome tried to eradicate Jonah’s gourd, it became evident just how
firmly rooted it was. Differences in translation would prevail, and Jerome’s
efforts in fact added to bibliobiodiversity. But the gourd would remain a
prominent part of the scriptural landscape, delighting the ears and eyes of
Christians who knew what it was to love a plant.
Trees and Places, Again

From Plato to Augustine, trees shape and define places, offering hospital-
ity to wandering humans. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates initially claims
to have nothing to learn from “places and trees.” He makes the same
claim about writing, but neither seems to hold. The iconic plane tree
under which Socrates and Phaedrus conduct their conversation is not only
the host for their gathering but also a stand-in for the writer of the dia-
logue. This role is conveyed first through pun: the platanos-tree is the
signature of the Platōnos-author. It is further hinted at when Phaedrus
invokes the tree as a guarantor of his oath: who else could have stood as
witness to his and Socrates’s words? Who else could have written this dia-
logue? It is, finally, also suggested by crucial affinities of plants and writ-
ing. Both sow their seeds widely and indiscriminately; for this reason and
others, they are marked simultaneously by extreme vulnerability and an
extraordinary capacity to persist. Writing, according to Socrates, is a phar-
makon, with transformative properties, for better or worse; while it is
capable of reaching many readers, it has no defense against falling into the
wrong hands or being misused and misunderstood. The plane tree is a
pharmakon too, not only because, like most plants, it has recognized
medicinal properties—Pliny records no less than twenty-five (NH
24.29)—but also because, like writing, it offers a mute wisdom that can be
replicated and distributed endlessly. As Marder notes, a tree’s capacity for
signification is found “not only in the seed but also in the iterations of the
leaf, the presumed support for inscription, which is, at the same time, the
content of the plants’ proto-writing.”48 Indeed, writing and tree-being
may begin to seem virtually indistinguishable, as in Italo Calvino’s novel
The Baron in the Trees: “That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth,
minute and endless, […] was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of
ink which I have let run on for page after page, […] bursting at times into
big clear berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then
twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks
of leaves and clouds […] until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless
cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”49 But who will read the
tree’s messages of exuberant and open-ended growth, of orientation to
the other, and of dispassionate generosity? Does the Platonic plane tree,
like plants more generally, remain merely part of the backdrop for most
who encounter this text?
Writing, the writings, scripture, the scriptures: for Christians, the Bible
is the pharmakon par excellence. Every word is potentially healing, for the
skillful reader. Methodius’s virgins gather under the chaste tree that Plato
introduced and then ignored, and here too there is a kind of pun at work,
lost in the simple identification of the English: the agnos-tree is the signa-
ture of the one who is hagnos (chaste), of Hagneia (Chastity) herself. The
virgins conjure the chaste tree by reading it into and out of the scriptures,

48
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random
49
House, 1959).
and in so doing they harness its particular pharmaceutical powers to redi-

rect erotic desire and fecundity. Whereas in Plato’s dialogue we encounter
a tree that is both actual and literary, or so we are able to imagine, in
Methodius’s dialogue the tree grows in purely literary soils, rooted in both
Platonic and biblical texts. Paradoxically, the allegorization of this literary
tree seems to intensify rather than detract from its arboreal being: it is not
merely a sign pointing to something else—Chastity—but a potent materi-
alization of Chastity’s healing power. To read the chaste tree—to discover
the tree in the text—is both to transform the scriptures and to be trans-
formed by them. It is to encounter a tree agency that is, as always, highly
dependent on an ecosystem—in this case, not soil and water and sun but
readers and texts and their contexts.
Gregory offers a striking case of a tree that is (like Plato’s) both actual
and literary, shuttling between these different materialities. He knows this
tree well: it is a plane that he planted himself, and he intends that his
beloved Basil will water and care for it. He leaves it as a personal signature
not only in a text but, more importantly, in a living landscape layered with
memories and hopes. It is meant to remind others of his diligence—not
least as a planter—after he is gone. We may still visit the place, view the
plane trees in the landscape, and remember Gregory. This is a living,
breathing tree, or so we may imagine, but it is also a literary tree planted
in soil as richly mixed as that of Methodius’s chaste tree. It is a literary tree
not only because Gregory writes it and we still read it but also because his
entire description is plucked from other writings—Plato, Herodotus, the
Bible. This tree links places—Pontus and Athens, in particular. It also links
a densely layered past to a present in such a way as to shape a new future,
in which an ancient habit of pursuing philosophical dialogue in the coun-
tryside gives way to the solitary dwelling of monks in remote places with
and under trees. This plane tree, transplanted from Plato’s text and grafted
with branches from other tree-writings, transforms the landscape and is
transformed by it as well.
Augustine’s defense of Jonah’s gourd tree completes this chapter of our
tree story. It shifts us onto primarily scriptural terrain, leaving Plato’s trees
behind (if not Endymion’s). It brings us into the larger world of lay piety,
in which the scriptures were more likely to be heard and seen than read,
stimulating the senses. Finally, it allows us to consider how the scriptures
cultivated the love for a particular (biblical) tree through liturgy and art.
It was because of their devotion to Jonah’s tree that conflicts arose among
Christians shaped by different languages and landscapes; too much could
be lost in translation. A virgin might sit under a chaste tree and a monk
under a plane or a palm, but what kind of plant gave Jonah shelter? This
was a matter of shared biblical concern and therefore of shared debate.
God taught Jonah to love the world by teaching him to love a plant, and
one plant was simply not the same as another. Gourds bore fruit, and ivy
did not. Ivy crept, the ciceion stood erect. Vine or bush or tree? The sheer
diversity of plants continues to defy classification; just so the multiplication
of options defied consensus regarding the identity of Jonah’s plant.
Perhaps we can now celebrate that openness.
This chapter has followed a narrative arc, but in so doing, it runs coun-
ter to the non-teleological processes of trees and other plants. Growth has
no clear beginning and no predetermined end. It is omni-directional,
repetitive, and responsive. Each splitting of root and branch opens new
paths of possibility; each iteration of leaf creates new surfaces of exchange
with others; each circling of the seasons adds another layer of girth,
another round of death and regeneration, never exactly the same as before.
The trees tell their stories differently, according to their own pace and
rhythm, their own silent and largely invisible processes. This is our story,
not theirs, and we should be mindful of the difference. If we were able to
write it more treewise—if we were to become wiser in the way of trees—
we might allow it to branch in more directions, to repeat itself more, to
lose some dead wood, to send out new shoots, to be grafted onto, and to
let the patterns emerge willy nilly—to lose our heads and let the writing
write itself, our own selves merely its instruments.
CHAPTER 3
In the Beginning, Trees
If on a given day you stroll along a familiar road, you may, as one often
does, be looking straight ahead, not paying much attention to the trees
that line your path. You know them, but you do not look at them intently.
The oaks or the birches, the willows or the pines, are all there and shape
your view, and were someone to ask whether you had passed a great
spruce, you might be able to answer—or maybe you wouldn’t—but as you
are walking, such questions hardly occupy your mind. The trees are dis-
creetly molding your outlook, with the delicate trembling of leaves, their
rustle in the wind, the shaping of the sunlight that seeps through their
branches, and as with so many things in life, they add color and texture to
your daily routines yet escape your direct perception (cf. Fig. 3.1).
If the trunks along your way were chopped down the next morning,
however, leaving the landscape bare and sore, you would most certainly
miss them—perhaps even mourn them.1 As we have already observed,
much human thought since Socrates, at least in the Byzantine and pre-
Byzantine parts of the world, thinks with trees in that way: they provide
1
Adam Goldwyn has discussed Byzantine and modern ecological grief in his paper “Did
Byzantines Feel Ecological Grief? Mourning the Natural World in Medieval Greek
Literature” (2020).

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5_3
Fig. 3.1 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, “Palm Tree near the Church of
Sts. Theodore, Athens,” 1842, daguerreotype, 23.5 × 18.2 cm. (Photograph
courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France [EG7-750])
3 IN THE BEGINNING, TREES 67
context for human activity, as the shade under which conversations occur,
for example.2
Against that background, the Christian Hexaemeron tradition of com-
mentary on the creation account in Genesis stands out as an odd graft.3 It
offers an unexpectedly direct gaze at the arboreal and larger vegetal world.
Historically, such musings resonated with both their made and natural
environs. Early Byzantine church buildings were lush with depictions of
flora and fauna, trees and vines; remains of mosaic floors attest to the sheer
vastness of living shapes among which the Christian faithful would per-
form their rituals. Striking examples include the Great Basilica at Herakleia
Lynkestis (Fig. 3.2) and the Church of SS Lot and Procopius at Khirbat
al-Mukhayyat.
Fig. 3.2 Floor mosaic of animals and trees, sixth century, Great Basilica,
Herakleia Lynkestis, North Macedonia. (Photograph courtesy of Carole
Raddato/CC)
2
Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014).
3
For an important early study, see Frank Egleston Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A
Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1912). For early Christian engagements with Genesis, including Basil’s own Hexaemeron,
see the various essays in Archè: A Collection of Patristic Studies, ed. J. den Boeft and D. T. Runia,
VChrSupp 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
Under sanctuary vaults like the one in San Vitale (Ravenna), churchgo-
ers might encounter an abundance of birds, mammals, and vegetal forms
if they chose to look up. Pillars—themselves reminiscent of tree trunks—
featured acanthus leaves in many holy buildings, including Constantinople’s
own Hagia Sophia. The constant presence of visual representations of
trees and other lifeforms meant that prayers took place in virtual forests,
fields, and gardens, turning the interior toward the outdoors, and hence,
churchgoers would encounter diversities of the living world both within
and beyond. Some early Christian authors—not least the learned fourth-
century Cappadocian bishop Basil of Caesarea—decided to turn their
attention to the trees. Or—if we are inclined to grant plants that kind of
agency—the trees decided to grasp their attention, inclining them to
observe with an involved sympathy.4
“I consider a tree,” writes Martin Buber some one and a half millennia
after Basil had considered his, and he points out that considering can mean
many things: “I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its struc-
ture and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly
that I recognise it only as an expression of law.” There are numerous ways
to analyze trees, numerous ways to assume an objectifying gaze. But for
Buber there is more to engaging with trees. “It can, however, also come
about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become
bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It [but Thou]. … It
is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it—only in a
different way. Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the mean-
ing of the relation.”5 Innocent of Buber’s phenomenological vocabulary,
Basil adopts a similar pose, as he comes to trees with the expectation of
enmeshment. A premodern, Basil will not conceive of anything entirely
irrelationally. Trees relate to him, to his listeners, to each other, and even
to their mother, the Earth.
To Begin With
Anyone who wishes to speak of beginnings must begin with the begin-
ning, says Basil, as he begins to preach his first sentence, transforming his
own authorial self, in the image of the Genesis author, into a herald of
4
For one discussion of trees in relation to the wider theoretical topic of agency, see Owain
Jones and Paul Cloke, Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Places (Oxford:
Berg, 2002), 47–71.
5
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1937), 7–8.
beginnings (Hex. I 1.1–3).6 And so we too, following Basil’s own lead,

shall start from the beginning.
To ponder the nature of things, many ancient thinkers turned to ori-
gins. The beginning, the unearthing, the shaping, and the birthing, they
hoped, might reveal important aspects of the engendered phenomenon.
Yet, they would not always find what they sought; beginnings remain chal-
lenging terrains to traverse. “In the beginning is hermeneutics,” submits
Jacques Derrida.7 Where do origins begin? How does it all start? The
molding of an earth, a forming of beings, the unspoken presence of a
word … in the end, things may begin in so many ways. And Basil’s world
too begins in various ways. Beginning after the beginning, he says, God
created; other beings and realms had already come into existence, for the
beginning in question concerns visual things, and a beginning is only the
beginning for that which begins. Basil does not discover a seed, yet he
keeps digging up roots.
When Genesis begins (or rather when we begin to read Genesis), it is
time itself that begins, suggests Basil. How can that be? Time (χρόνος) is
hardly a visual thing, and indeed other invisible things were already cre-
ated before this beginning (Hex. I 5). Nonetheless, he insists that with
this beginning God created time, for beginning (ἀρχή) seems to suggest
sequence to Basil in this instance. Folded into a sequence, that which is
becoming turns sequential—only “the beginning of time is not yet time,”
since “it is entirely ridiculous to think of a beginning of a beginning”
(Hex. I 6.21–26). And this undecidedness lingers on for a while. Even
when time has begun, Basil ducks explicit chronological progression; God
did not call “the beginning of time … a ‘first day,’ but ‘one day,’ in order
that from the name it might have kinship with eternity” (Hex. II 8.50–56).
Not even the first day, then, bursts into the flow of time, but remains, like
6
Basile de Césarée: Homélies sur l’hexaéméron, ed. S. Giet, SC 26 bis, 2nd ed. (Paris: Cerf,
1968); trans. adapted from Agnes Clare Way, Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies, FC 46
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963) and NPNF II, vol. VIII. For
a study of Basil’s engagement with beginning, see J. C. M. van Winden, “‘An Appropriate
Beginning’: The Opening Passage of Saint Basil’s In Hexaemeron,” in Archè: A Collection of
Patristic Studies, ed. J. den Boeft and D. T. Runia, VChrSupp 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
116–23; see also Virginia Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 187–8.
7
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 67.
the beginning itself, something only partially begun. The leap into becom-
ing very gradually feeds into history.
Summing up his initial musings on beginning, the Cappadocian sub-
mits: “As other interpreters … have put it, ‘In summary (Ἐν κεφαλαίῳ)
God created’—that is to say, condensed and in short” (Hex. I 6.31–33).
The introduction transpires as a summary conclusion. Putting this Genesis
of text composition in others’ mouths, Basil commissions its help without
subscribing to it. After all, the metaphor fits his own vision rather awk-
wardly, and although he may want to signal closure, he also realizes that
these need to be someone else’s words. What such a beginning-as-
summary ignores, Basil knows, is that the beginning is unfinished. Much
is missing—as we shall see, not least the trees (II 1.20–26). The beginning
is in the making.
Basil does have to navigate between various accounts. In the biblical
ones, the world first appears to the reader in its process of being made, and
Jesus Christ is similarly identified in the prologue to the Gospel of John as
the birth or enfleshment of the Logos, with the Logos in turn being rec-
ognized in terms of primordial divine cohabitation. In Greek antiquity,
Hesiod narrated the origins of the world in his Theogony; Plato philoso-
phized with the universe’s coming into being in Timaeus. Ovid knew of a
primeval golden age when the pines had not yet been felled (Metamorphoses
I 89–96). Thinking about the constitution of cosmos involved paying
attention to the advent of its elements, the creation of the world. And
while beginnings may have been more complicated than sometimes
assumed,8 they whispered of origins and natures.
Humans have always known that if we are to grasp beginnings, we must
search beyond ourselves; whether one speaks in the idiom of natural evo-
lution or religious myth, there is no way to avoid trees. “The life of plants
is a cosmogony in action,” says Emanuele Coccia, “the constant genesis of
our cosmos.”9 Their trunks and branches emerged from the misty woods
of dawn long before humans were conceived of. According to Hebrew
scriptures, plants burgeoned as the firstborn of the earth. Once God had
separated the dry land from the sea, vegetation appeared:
8
For a thorough, deconstructing reading of primeval unity in the figure of khora, see
Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 9–77; for a theological vision read on the face of the
abyss, see Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York:
Routledge, 2003).
9
Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari
(Medford, MA: Polity, 2019), 10.
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one
place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land
Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God
saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation:
plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit
with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation:
plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with
the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and
there was morning, the third day. (Gen. 1:9–13)
Trees sprouted out of the naked soil on the third day. Animals, birds, and
fish had not yet entered the scene. The first fruit of the earth, the first
thing on God’s mind, the first creatures, were plants. Indeed, God seems
deeply involved in plant thinking, separating land from water and irrigat-
ing the fertile soil, before greenery sprang abundantly from the earth.
Mammals and humans appeared later—not from the womb of someone
resembling themselves but like vegetal beings they came from the ground.
In the second creation account, the narrator points out that earth was
formed before the plants: “God made the earth and the heavens, when no
plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet
sprung up” (Gen. 2:4–5). Then the human, too, not entirely unlike the
trees, emerged from the ground, kneaded from the soil rather than in any
human womb. Initially the human seems monoecious—hermaphroditic,
as so many plants are. Before the human became fruitful, however, God
planted it among the other trees in the garden—to till them, it is true, but
also to live among them, in this garden of tree life (Gen. 2:8). Only later
did animals appear, and the human was divided into gendered beings.
Posterity had its issues. Beginning is vegetal. Or, to be more precise and to
follow Basil again, beginning is that which comes before that, for nothing
begins with the beginning; not even time begins where it starts—and no
less trees—for as it has begun, beginning is already undone, and begin-
nings cannot begin. The temporal realm to which Basil took his audience
was after all not the beginning itself, but the natural world already divided
up and stretched out on a timeline of weekdays.
Basil himself, whom we have already met in the previous chapter, was a
cultured Cappadocian. He had studied in Constantinople and Athens
before he became bishop and finally earned a saintly reputation and the
epithet “the Great.” Like most other writers dealt with in this book, Basil
represents an elitist attitude toward the arboreal, and his writings convey
the learned views of an early Christian intellectual in the form that he

wished to transmit them to his flock. Having already become a mature
church leader, he may not have climbed many trees or picked many olives
at the time when he wrote his famous sermons on Genesis 1. Unfortunately,
those who did rarely wrote about it. However, the episcopal homily on the
third day of creation lends us a precious vantage point from which to gaze
at late ancient trees.
To Basil, suggests Philip Rousseau, the “ancient culture was the ‘not
unlovely’ covering that offered ‘protection’ to Christian fruit.”10 The
Hexaemeron, his sermons on the six days of creation, explores the materi-
alization of the world. They weave a dialogue between the Book of Genesis
and philosophical insights pertinent to the Cappadocian preacher. He
attempts to place the more mythological and poetic worldview of scripture
in conversation with what we may call natural science. Basil drew on all his
knowledge of Greek culture, not least from his time in Athens; without
identifying his opponents by name, he argued with or against pre-Socratics,
Aristotle, Stoics, and Plotinus, to mention but a few of the figures whose
doctrines and systems the Hexaemeron contests.
He also challenged the outstanding Christian philosopher Origen of
Alexandria (ca. l85–254), who otherwise influenced Basil so much that he
and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus decided to collect pieces of his work
into a compendium called Philokalia.11 It was common in Basil’s day to
read the six days of creation in figural ways, and Origen wrote:
For who possessed of understanding will suppose that the first and the sec-
ond and the third day, evening and morning, happened without a sun and
moon and stars? And that the first day was as it were also without a sky? …
And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the afternoon, and Adam to hide
himself behind the tree, I do not think that anyone doubts that these figu-
ratively indicate, through apparent narratives and through things that did
not happen bodily, certain mysteries. (On First Principles 4.3.1)12
The Cappadocian, however, could not overlook what happened bodily, for
he wanted to pay attention to all those wholly physical beings that God
had created. Experimenting with an almost literal interpretation, he
employed the stylized story of Genesis, not so much in an unravelling of
10
Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52.
11
Rousseau, Basil, 11.
12
Origen: On First Principles II, ed. and trans. John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 519–21.
“certain mysteries,” but in an attempt to explore, in the prism of the cre-

ation account, the vast variety of the created beings in their concrete
embodied expressions in the world. “When I hear ‘grass,’ I think of grass,”
Basil exclaimed confidently and polemically (Hex. IX 1.19–20).13 As easily
deconstructable as seductively simple, his phrase bears the perhaps unin-
tended potential of greening theology, in the sense that he shies away from
the natural world qua (merely) signifiers.
Arguing against monistic philosophical systems that would ultimately
collapse all differences, he clarifies from the outset that his interest lies
beyond “any nature devoid of qualities,” for an elemental nature without
sensuous properties is absurd to him. “Take away black, cold, weight,
density, the qualities which concern taste … and the phenomenon itself
vanishes” (Hex. I 8.20–28).
Already early writers like Origen and Hippolytus of Rome had taken a
keen interest in the topic of creation, but it was with Basil that the genre
came into full fruition. Through its popularity Basil’s work came to pass on
significant cues to posterity, and his work remained highly influential
throughout the Byzantine period.14 His younger contemporary Ambrose
of Milan (ca. 340–397) wrote a conspicuously similar Hexaemeron in Latin
only a short time after, clearly dependent on the Greek antecedent; it is
usually assumed that Ambrose preached his sermons in the late 80s and
Basil a decade earlier.15 Subsequently Augustine of Hippo composed
Genesis commentaries in North Africa, and Severian of Gabala (d. before
430) probably preached a series on the topic in Constantinople around the
turn of the fifth century. In Syria a century later, Jacob of Serugh (ca.
451–521) wrote his memre on the creation. Already Basil’s older contem-
porary, Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–373), had written a cycle of madrasha
hymns On Paradise, but these are composed in a register quite different
from the Hexaemeron sermons. Even monastic figures like Bede the
Venerable and Anastasios of Sinai later authored commentaries on the cre-
ation of the world, and the Constantinopolitan poet George of Pisidia
penned a long poem that often goes under the name of Hexaemeron
13
This does not mean, of course, that Basil does not read figuratively nor imagine that he
can read entirely literally. For a helpful study, see Richard Lim, “The Politics of Interpretation
in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron,” VC 44, no. 4 (1990): 351–70.
14
Arnaud Zucker, “Zoology,” in A Companion to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros Lazaris
(Leiden: Brill, 2020), 261–301, at 276–80.
15
Alexander H. Pierce, “Reconsidering Ambrose’s Reception of Basil’s Homiliae in
Hexaemeron: The Lasting Legacy of Origen,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 23, no. 3
(2019): 414–44.
during the seventh century. In what follows, we shall focus on Basil’s ver-
sion, keeping Ambrose and Jacob in our peripheral vision. Ambrose repre-
sents an early reception of the Greek hexaemeral tradition further west,
while Jacob’s version amounts to a much more independent rendering in
the east.
The sermons by Basil loom at the beginning of this body of literature,
and they stand out through their enthrallment—in ways that eschew sym-
bolic interpretations—with the more-than-human world. While he never
shuns the theological, his interest lies beyond introspective meditation or
any mystical reading of the budding creation. It is possible to describe his
amazement at the created world as an indirect way to praise its Maker, and
this may seem to detract from the inherent preciousness of the world, as
every created being merely hints at its own origin beyond being.
Nonetheless, Basil’s fascination and appreciation for the living world
around him point past a simple sketching of the invisible Maker’s hand;
trees can no more than humans be reduced to evidence for the skillfulness
of God. “There is not one [plant] without worth, not one without value,”
Basil says (Hex. V 4.23–24).16 The world appears as an awesome abun-
dance of structured variety with an intrinsic significance, but without an
apparent hierarchy:17 “In the rich treasures of creation it is difficult to
select what is most precious” (Hex. V 4). Basil’s fifth sermon considers the
third day: the day of the trees. Among the living creatures, trees are not
the least precious. Let us follow them from cradle to craving.
The Word Made Wood

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. Not unlike
human parturition, divine creation yields new life, and new forms unfold.
Unlike parturition, however, the growth that appears from the primeval
ground in Genesis does not resemble the parent, nor does flesh resemble
the divine Logos. And Basil never turned to beginnings in order to look
for identity and primeval unity. He devoted his sermons to the multiplicity
of lifeforms and an existential awe before the variety of created shapes.
16
For a reappraisal of inherent teleology in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, see
Andreas Nordlander, “Green Purpose: Teleology, Ecological Ethics, and the Recovery of
Contemplation,” Studies in Christian Ethics 34, no. 1 (2021): 36–55.
17
See Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 193.
Fig. 3.3 Mosaic of the personification of Earth (Ge), sixth century, Bishop
Sergius Church in Umm Ar-Rasas, Jordan. (Photograph by Michele Piccirillo,
courtesy of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Photographic Archive, Jerusalem)
While the Book of Genesis avoids maternal metaphors for the earth and
prefers gardening language for the event of creation, Basil does not. From
his text Earth appears as a personal maternal figure, as she had to ancient
minds at least since Hesiod, and as she is shown also in early Byzantine
mosaics, such as on the floor of the Priest John church at Khirbat al-
Mukhayyat or in the Church of Bishop Sergius at Umm al-Rasas (Fig. 3.3).18
Rina Talgam, Mosaics of Faith: Floors of Pagans, Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and
18
Muslims in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2014), 210–12; for a broader treatment,
“Do you say that Earth reposes on a bed of air?” Basil asks his listeners
rhetorically (Hex. I 8.32–33).19
Initially, the Earth was invisible and unfinished:
What was the unfinished condition of the Earth? And for what reason was
she invisible? Surely, the perfect condition of the Earth consists in her state
of abundance: the budding of all sorts of plants, the issuing forth of tall
trees, both fruit-bearing and fruitless, the fair complexion and sweet fra-
grance from flowers, and all those [plants] which, at the initiative of God,
were going to spring forth from Earth a little later, to adorn their mother
(τὴν γεννησαμένην). (Hex. II 1.20–26)
The beautification of the Earth, as she emerges from obscurity, consists of

floral adornment and perfume, yet the most important part for Basil is her
fertility. She is about to give birth. He continues this thought later in
the homily:
Even today excessive moisture is a hindrance to the fertility of the Earth.

The … proper and natural adornment is her completion: her cavities swell-
ing with crops, meadows (λειμῶνες) sprouting green and bursting in many-
colored blossoms, fertile valleys and hill-tops shaded by forests. She had
none of these as yet; the Earth was in travail (ὠδίνουσα) with the birth of all
things through the Power (δύναμιν) by which the Maker had filled her. But
she was waiting for times to be due when, at the divine command, she her-
self could bring forth into the open her conceived offspring (τὰ κυήματα).
(Hex. II 3.31–42)
The sprouting forth of plants is spoken in a language evoking the imagery

of Earth as mother: her hollow parts are swelling, the ground is fertile, and
see Henry Maguire, Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art
(University Park, PA: PennState University Press, 1987) and his Nectar & Illusion: Nature
in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In James of
Kokkinobaphos, Homily V 16 (PG 127.676), the Earth cries out in joy, praising her own
greenery, which ultimately represents the Virgin Mary.
19
To emphasize the slight personification of the Earth, we capitalize the word and use the
feminine pronoun as in Greek, rather than the (in English) more conventional inanimate
“it.” Although less obvious, the Earth in Gen. 1 may also be read as a person: “God called
the dry land Earth” (1:10) and said “‘Let the Earth bring forth (βλαστησάτω) vegetation’ …
The Earth produced (ἐξήνεγκεν) vegetation” (Gen. 1:11–12 [adjusted trans.]); for the veg-
etal and possibly human meaning of the Greek terms, see LSJ s.v.v. βλαστάνω A 1, 2 and
ἐκφέρω II 1).
while λειμών primarily means meadow, it was also used for the outer
female genitals.20 From these lighter hints, Basil turns to the language of
birth-pangs. The Maker has fertilized her with his potency or Power. This
Power now rests in her, and she can give birth by herself to her offspring,
the plants, after her pregnancy period.
Basil struggles with how to locate the fertile power—is God making
Earth give birth or is plant birth issuing from the Earth by itself? He wants
to make sure that the Earth does not produce offspring by some other
force than God’s own. Later, in the eighth homily, therefore, Basil speci-
fies that God “did not bring out what was stored in [the Earth], but he
who gave the command also bestowed upon her the power to bring forth”
(Hex. VIII 1.7–10). And elsewhere he says: “That [tiny] imperative [to
bring forth], which still to this day is inherent in the Earth, impels her in
the course of each year to display all her power to give herbs, seeds, and
trees birth” (Hex. V 10.4–7). Rousseau comments thus: “It was not …
that the earth produced something it already possessed: it witnessed the
creation from within itself of something it did not possess, because God
gave it the power (so, yes, it did have the power) to be active in that
way.”21 Ambiguous? Unquestionably. But Basil’s theological point is clear
enough: there was indeed no other “father” than God, and the “mother”
Earth could not have given birth without the divine stimulation:
When the Earth heard, “Let her bring forth vegetation and fruit trees,” she
did not give birth to plants which she had kept hidden; nor had the palm or
the oak or the cypress been concealed down below in her bowels somewhere
and were [simply] released to the surface. But it is the divine Logos that is
the φύσις of those that are created. (Hex. VIII 1.10–15)
Plants were not pre-conceived in an earthly womb before the begin-

ning. The untouched Earth conceived through aural attention to the
divine voice, the imperative that came to dwell in her like divine sperm.
Early Christian authors would say precisely the same regarding the Virgin
Mary; she conceived, as it were, through her ear.22 And the Virgin often
reminded Byzantine authors of the Earth. “The nurse of our souls: the
20
LSJ s.v. λειμών II; this double meaning is difficult to render in English.
21
Rousseau, Basil, 339.
22
For the early Byzantine conceptio per aurem tradition, see Nicholas Constas, Proclus of
Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and
Translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 273–314.
grain, the Earth, the Virgin,” writes Manuel Philes in an epigram.23 There
was a resemblance in how they gave birth. The Theotokos brought forth
on her own, authors would emphasize, without man, relying only on her
own fertile force, spurred by the divine Power. According to the Gospel of
Luke, “the Power of the Most High” overshadowed Christ’s human
mother (Luke 1:35). It was the same divine Power that made the Earth
pregnant in Basil’s creation. Whereas the earth is portrayed in female
terms, the divinity, or rather the divine voice, is envisioned in male; the
creation of beings came about through an intimate encounter between the
male voice of the divine and the female limbs of the Earth.
A similar entanglement of the Virgin Mary, earth, and tree, can be
found in the much later Byzantine author, John Geometres. In his enco-
mium to the oak tree, he claims that the oak is unique among the “off-
spring of the Earth,” and “[the oak] rightly boasts that [the Earth] alone
is its mother, so that she most of the time requires neither sowing nor care
from the outside … but [the Earth] herself, having opened her womb,
brings forth.”24 Plants are mothered by the Earth and can count her as
their sole parent. She has no material husband, and no intercourse is
required.
We are left, however, with a puzzling statement at the end of Basil’s
text: “the divine Logos … is the φύσις of those [plants?] that are created.”
What does he mean? In philosophical and theological discourse, physis
tends to signify nature, but the Greek term physis is as slippery as the mod-
ern English term nature. As we have seen, it can also be translated “ori-
gin,” “growth,” or “the natural form or constitution of a person or thing
as a result of growth”; it is closely related to the verb phyo, “to grow,” and
23
Manuel Philes, Epigram on a stone panagiarion, 3.115 (our trans.); Carmina. Ex codici-
bus Escurialensibus, Florentinis, Parisinis et Vaticanis, ed. E. Miller, 2 vols. (Paris: Excusum
in Typographeo Imperiali, 1855–57; rp. Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1967), II: 157–58; for
more on this, see Maguire, Nectar & Illusion, 66, and for a broader cultural backdrop of
virgins, earth, and forest, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19–30. An early Byzantine example of identi-
fications between the Earth and the Virgin can be found in the first two lines of Romanos the
Melodist’s famous Christmas hymn; see Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the
Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 95;
the Akathistos hymn also associates the Theotokos with the earth, if in a different way; see
Thomas Arentzen, “The Chora of God: Approaching the Outskirts of Mariology in the
Akathistos,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 4, no. 2 (2021) [in press].
24
John Geometres, Encomium on the Oak 1; The Progymnasmata of Ioannes Geometres, ed.
Antony R. Littlewood (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1972). Translation is ours.
through it to the word for plant, phyton.25 Should we interpret the divine
Logos as the nature of all trees, and other plants?26 Perhaps. Plotinus used
plant language when he discussed the ultimate nature in which all others
participate: “one nature rules over all natures (φύσεις), and they keep to
it, are attached to it and hang from it, growing out (ἐκφῦσαι) of it, so to
speak, as the natures in branches grow out of that of the whole plant
(φυτοῦ)” (Ennead IV 4.11.9–11).27 Maximus the Confessor was later to
describe the Logos as a grain (Centuries of Theology II 10). If we take
physis to mean the power to grow in this instance, Basil’s sentence makes
more sense.28 The Logos is in the growth; it desires growth. Does it
embody the origin of the growth? Or rather the growing forth of created
buds and twigs? Basil gives us few cues, except that the Logos, later to be
made flesh, is deeply entwined in the growth of the new creation, not just
as a divine Fashioner, but—to speak with Scripture—filling all in all (Eph.
1:23, cf. Col. 1:16–17). In the beginning, Logos buds in branches and
yields fruit.
In the same century, another Christian bishop, Ambrose of Milan,
allowed similar echoes to resonate in his ruminations on Paradise: in the
primordial garden, he says, “flourishes a tree of life which is called Wisdom”
(On Paradise 1.6).29 Early Christian writers such as Basil knew Wisdom—
who often goes by her Greek name Sophia—to be identical with precisely
the Logos.30 She was “a tree of life to all those who embrace[d] her”
(Prov. 3:18). Surely Sophia/Logos chooses different paths for stretching
25
LSJ s.v. φύσις (esp. I 2, II, and V b).
26
It should be noted that τῶν γινομένων (the things/beings that have come to be) may
not be restricted to plants, but since Basil is discussing plants both before and after this sen-
tence, it seems plausible to assume that he has the vegetal in mind here.
27
Trans. adapted from Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 55. For the general influence of
Plotinus on Basil, see N. Joseph Torchia, “Sympatheia in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexameron: A
Plotinian Hypothesis,” JECS 4, no. 3 (1996): 359–78.
28
Rousseau takes physis in the Hexaemeron to mean “the hidden presence of God’s creative
word, initiating constantly the … movements of the observable word” (Basil, 339), but in
the current example, it clearly implies growth more than presence, and (as Rousseau also
allows for) it seems to be inherent to and immanent in particular plants or beings.
29
Sancti Ambrosii opera I, ed. Karl Schenkl, CSEL 32 (Prague: F. Tempsky, 1896), 267;
trans. John J. Savage, Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, FC 42
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), 289 (slightly adjusted). For
more on the theme, see Mark Edwards, “The Tree of Life in Early Christian Literature,” in
The Tree of Life, ed. Douglas Estes (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 217–35.
30
See, for example, Basil, On the Holy Spirit 8.17.
into the vegetal in these excerpts, but they share the sense that the preex-
istent one may branch out into plant growth.
In the fifth homily, Basil returns to the notion that plants, and especially
trees, emerged as offspring from the womb of the maternal soil. “The cold
and barren Earth suddenly had birth pangs and was stirred up to bear
fruit, as if she had cast off some dark and dismal vesture to don a more
brilliant robe, taking delight in her proper adornment and displaying the
countless broods of plants” (Hex. V 2.30–35). Excited by the voice, she
had embraced its powerful presence, and the pristine soil turned fertile.
Suddenly she went into labor. Relieved of the burden of the water (τὸ
βάρος τοῦ ὕδατος), she reclined and rested before she brought forth herb-
age and trees (Hex. V 1.3–6). These bedfellows, Father God and Mother
Earth, bred a third (no less strange) kind: the plants.
Once the Earth had received the voice, Basil reiterates, she acquired the
ability to give birth to plants constantly: “The voice … remained in the
Earth, giving her the power to give birth (γεννᾶν) and bear fruit for all
ages to come” (Hex. V 1.7–10). Fertility resided in her (Hex. V 1.1–18
and 2.30–33). While the first initiative is clearly taken by the “father,” the
maternal Earth does soon gain generative agency. “Let the Earth bud
forth by herself, needing no assistance from the outside!” (Hex. V
1.16–18). Plants, then, issue from a kind of virgin birth, fathered only by
divine power. The status of plants as the (for the time being) only begot-
ten children of these two parents cast them as unique, budding forth from
the loins of the Earth, sprouting from the untouched womb of creation.
They have become stuff—not flesh but wood.31
The early sixth-century bishop Jacob of Serugh also saw trees on the
third day. Even more explicitly than Basil, he came to think of marriage,
intercourse, and parturition when he contemplated this event of genera-
tion. His narrative is different, but his imagination resembles that of Basil.
Trees materialized as the Creator’s “nuptial gifts for the Earth” (gifts,
mind you, that she herself must produce) (Jacob, Hex. III 245–46).32 As
a bride and a “new womb,” the Earth now “began to give birth with great
power” (Jacob, Hex. III 200). Interestingly, the Odes of Solomon—a very
early source for Christian notions about Mary—know of a Virgin who
31
See Antony R. Littlewood, “A Byzantine Oak and Its Classical Acorn: On the Artistry of
Geometres, Progymnasmata I,” Jahrbuch der österreichsichen Byzantinistik 29 (1980): 133–44.
32
Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron, ed. and trans. T. Muraoka (Leuven: Peeters, 2018); trans-
lated text adapted with slight adjustments.
“acquired according to the Great Power” and “brought forth like a strong
man with desire.”33 The echo of the ode continues to ring as Jacob goes
on to describe the moment of conception: “The hidden Power had a pas-
sionate intercourse with her … and she conceived, gave birth to all trees
with all sorts of seeds” (Jacob, Hex. III 223–32). The marriage between
God and the Earth yielded an exceptional and beautiful race, the arboreal
one. Their love affair engendered trees. Even Jacob suggests a resem-
blance between the birth of trees and the incarnation of Christ, for the
intercourse with the hidden Power does not depart entirely from Mary’s
conceiving with “the Power of the Most High,” whether in Luke or in the
Odes. Again, trees were born as the offspring of a divine father and a fer-
tile terrestrial mother.
Toward the end of the fifth century, Ambrose of Milan marveled at the
sudden outburst of trees on the third day. Rather than their earthly con-
ception, he focuses on their arrival:
Suddenly the earth was adorned with groves as formerly it had been decked
with flowers and with the verdure of the grass of the fields. The trees were
assembled; the forests arose and the peaks of the hills were clothed with
leaves. Here the pine and there the cypress raised aloft their towering heads;
the cedars and the pitch-pines gathered in groups. The fir tree also advanced
in procession … The laurel, too, gave forth its scent as it rose, a shrub never
to be denuded of its foliage. There arose, also, the shady evergreen oak,
destined to preserve its shimmering even in wintertime. … [N]o wind may
despoil [the evergreen oak and the cypress] of the adornment of their locks.
(Ambrose, Hex. III 11 [47])34
All feminine in grammatical gender in Latin, these trees emerge as a host

of young and sweet-smelling creatures. As a parade of fair maidens gather-
ing in ever greater numbers, their heads adorned with the beautiful locks
of green leaves, they are reminiscent of the delightful angels that mince
between the trees in the fifth-century Cotton Genesis (Fig. 3.4).
What the trees lack in noble origin, as Ambrose tells the story, they gain
in aesthetic quality; to the Latin bishop, their augustness arises not from
being highborn, but from their comely appearance.
33
Odes of Solomon 19.10; trans. James H. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon: The Syriac
Texts (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), 82.
34
Schenkl, Sancti Ambrosii opera I, 90–1; Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain
and Abel, 102 (translation adapted with slight adjustments).
Fig. 3.4 David Rebel, “Third Day of Creation,” Copy of the Cotton Genesis
(Cotton Otho B.VI; burned 1731), fr. 9530, fol. 32r, 1622. (Photograph courtesy
of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
Beauty interests Jacob, too. When the arboreal offspring has been pro-
duced, he switches imagery and envisions plants as tokens of attractive-
ness. Basil had thought of the Earth as veiled in the sea (Hex. IV 2.14–16);
Jacob similarly imagines an unveiling of the young Earth. Regarding Earth
from afar, he glimpses a bride veiled in all sorts of vegetal beauty, fully
spruced up, dressed in trees and flowers:
at [the Master’s] command [the Earth] wore a glorious robe which she had
never worn,
and the mountains as well as the plains filled with all kinds of flowers,
and the heights and the valleys with diverse seeds of every variety,
and in all corners all kinds of trees with their fruits,
vineyards and olive groves, splendid cypress trees, and towering cedars,
and they flourished, rose high, gave a shade to mountains, and the Earth
became enriched.
…
and her face brightened up and she unveiled it to see the light,
and she wore majesties and excellent glories of all kinds of trees. (Jacob,
Hex. III 250–55, 262–63)
Jacob’s presentation does not deviate too far from the “fertile valleys and
hill-tops shaded by forests” that Basil described, but the distance from
which Jacob perceives the Earth is quite remarkable, as if he were watch-
ing from the moon, or soaring over like an eagle. Seen from this perspec-
tive, plants largely serve as terrestrial embellishment, although Jacob takes
care to highlight diversity and abundance as he goes, lushness and splen-
dor. While he appears more absorbed by the Earth herself than by her
plants, Jacob makes sure she is dressed in the finest of bridal adorn-
ments: trees.
Basil is also overwhelmed by the budding forth of lush trees, and he
visualizes the process of arboreal generation:
All the dense woods appeared; all the trees shot up, those which are wont to
rise to the greatest height, the firs, cedars, cypresses, and pines; likewise, all
the shrubs were immediately clothed with thick foliage; and the so-called
garland plants—the rose bushes, myrtles, and laurels—came into existence
in one moment, each one with its distinctive peculiarities. Most marked dif-
ferences separated them from other plants, and each one was distinguished
by a character of its own. (Hex. V 6.3–12).
As these theologians witness the growth of trunks and leaves, they all take
note of trees’ splendor, directing their own and their listeners’ gaze toward
arboreal beauty. Basil is not least struck by vegetal diversity. Every arboreal
kind, every little plant, features its own unique characteristic trait, some
quality that separates it from the other kinds. Commenting upon the bibli-
cal text, he emphasizes the variety and notes that “each plant either has
seed or there exists in it some generative power. And this accounts for the
expression ‘of its own kind (κατὰ γένος)’ [in Gen 1.11, LXX]. For the
shoot of the reed does not produce an olive tree, but from the reed grows
another reed, and from one sort of seed a plant of the same sort always
germinates” (Hex. V 2.22–27). Diversity, beauty, and exceptional nais-
sance characterize these newborn beings. Inscribed in a mammalizing
language of parenting, they do not sprout as the seedling of a divine gar-

dener, but as offspring of Earth and God made strange. No less a proper
“mother” than God is a proper “father,” the Earth carries herself in mater-
nal ways in these texts, giving virginal birth to the arboreal. Between a
seedless conception with a divine father and an earthly birth, trees come to
resemble the incarnate Logos, if only strangely so—as wood is grafted into
the event of divine embodiment. Ultimately, catching Basil’s breath,
branches and boughs wave toward the Son of Man as the creation of trees
becomes an anticipation of the incarnation.
Marveling at Trees
Lured into a maze of logical aporia, Theaetetus’s head starts to spin. He
exclaims: “By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all
these things!” Plato has the young man struck with wonder. Socrates, in
turn, replies with a sense of delight: “This feeling of wonder shows that
you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy”
(Theaetetus 155 c–d).35 In the beginning of thought—wonder.
Wonder describes a complex effect, mixing pleasure with surprise and
awe at the unexpected or even unbelievable. Both a miracle and a startling
spectacle, what is exceedingly delightful and what is exceedingly strange,
are designated by the Greek word θαῦμα, and, as in Plato, the word
encompasses the whole encounter between the beholder and the beheld,
the effect and the effecter. “Wonder wonders at the strangeness of the
most familiar,” observes Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “at the opening in which
all determinate thinking takes place.”36 It destabilizes and prompts new
reflection. Philip Fisher points out that wonder shares family resemblance
with the sublime and with shock. All three come with a sort of awakening.
“There is a lively border,” he notes, “between an aesthetics of wonder and
what we might call a poetics of thought.”37 Thinking aside, however, we
may appreciate wonder as a spontaneous way to relate to what we do not
understand and cannot objectify or clearly grasp. It overwhelms us,
addresses itself to us, without therefore conveying any cognitively available
35
Plato: Theaetetus. Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler, LCL 123 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1921), 55.
36
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of
Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 8.
37
Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6.
meaning. It leaves us, one might almost say, as plant-thinkers—reacting

without necessarily grasping, feeling as much in our skin as in our minds.
Philosophy may begin here, but the beginning itself precedes philosophy.
Basil approaches trees with a tone of wonder. He invites his audience to
share in the marvel that the arboreal realm may incite, to participate in the
precognitive relationship as affected and touched, and to appreciate in the
familiar something strange and extraordinary. “The tree which moves
some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands
in the way,” William Blake once wrote. “As a man is, so he sees.”38 The
Cappadocian wants to train eyes to be joyful, to help his audience to see
more than merely a green thing.
The ecopoet Gary Snyder has suggested that “eating is a sacrament …
A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and
flavors from earth, air, water.”39 Every little vegetable is a wonder. Basil
would agree, but he turns to the flipside of eating: “Shall we not reflect
that everything has not been created for the sake of our bellies?” (Hex. V
4.9–10).40 The rhetorical question is addressed to the listeners, suggesting
that they bracket their own needs for a moment. Fully aware that humans
grow trees for fruit and utilize their timber, the Cappadocian wishes to
engage with trunks and boughs and fruit and bark on a more intimate
level and let them make an impression beyond their usefulness. Does the
soil not sprout more mysteriously than human hunger may be willing to
admit? “First wood existed, and then [only later] carpentering took up the
material and shaped it according to the needs of the circumstances” (Hex.
II 2.45–47). Are trees not more than objects of human desire, servants of
our use and pleasure? In Basil’s beginning, carpenters have not yet been
created. Philosophy begins with the arboreal, prior to human hands,
before the felling of trees, the grafting of branches, or the picking of fruits.
Vegetal complexity fills him with wonder:41
Ask yourself why [God] has made some trees evergreen and others decidu-
ous; why, among the first, some lose their leaves, and others always keep
them. Thus the olive and the pine shed their leaves, although they renew
38
William Blake, Letter to Reverend Dr. Trusler, August 23, 1799, British Library, Add.
MS 36498.
39
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 184.
40
Italics added. For Basil and marveling at created diversity, see also Burrus, Ancient
Christian Ecopoetics, 186–95.
41
For a list of the plants Basil mentions, see Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 190.
them insensibly and never appear to be despoiled of their verdure. The palm
tree, on the contrary, from its birth to its death, is always adorned with the
same foliage. (Hex. V 9.29–34)
The rich diversity of their life forms sets trees apart from the human race
and puzzles the human gaze. Exclaiming with Theaetetus, “when I regard
them it really makes my head swim” (Theatetus 155c), the spectator is on
the verge of philosophy, glimpsing behind the foliage an evergreen God.
Having established that the value of trees exceeds their ability to satisfy
human hunger or be grasped by human comprehension, Basil exclaims:
“What variety there is in bark!” (Hex. V 7.14). And he continues: “Some
plants have smooth bark, others rough, some have only one layer, others
several. What a marvelous thing!” (Hex. V 7.15–17). Evoking a sensory
tangibility—that light touch before any carpenter sets foot on the scene—
he addresses arboreal interaction and invites his audience to imagine the
delicate or less delicate skin of these beings with wonder. Feel the bark!
Ambrose similarly provokes imaginary touches and speaks to the fingertips
as he describes branches and foliage: “In the older [trees the branches] are
strong and gnarled; in the [younger] the leaves are smoother … ; in the
[older] the leaves are rougher and more shriveled” (Ambrose, Hex. III 13
(54).42 Ambrose explores with a less amazed tone. His observations none-
theless serve to emphasize human experiences of tree intimacy and incite
a keener attention to the arboreal perspective.
Attention wavers between primeval beginnings and what is always
already unfolding, in medias res. Basil’s audience may have consisted of
city dwellers, and although the area was not the most fertile, the agricul-
tural realm and the work of farmers was surely familiar, at some level, to
everyone in the inland region of Cappadocia; the bishop assumes a rela-
tively extensive botanical knowledge from his listeners.43 Without neglect-
ing the endeavors of agriculturalists, he draws attention to the fact that a
farmer cannot by his or her own power make seeds grow and full-grown
plants bud forth. The fertile power of the Earth and the life force in the
plant evade the grasp of human technology. Cultivators may sow in a fer-
tile soil, water the seed, and support the growing seedling, but they will
nonetheless remain ignorant of how it sprouts. The whole multifaceted
existence of trees, their unruly diversity, bursts with a kind of hidden
42
Schenkl, Sancti Ambrosii opera I, 97.
43
Cf. Rousseau, Basil, 133–4.
intentionality, which we may be at ease with not understanding. “Can the

human mind make an exact review, remark every distinctive property,
exhibit all the differences, unveil with certainty so many mysterious rea-
sons?” Basil asks (Hex. V 8).44 Despite human cohabitation with plants,
their life stays a mystery to us. Plants’ “vegetal exuberance … escapes
capture and taming by philosophical conceptuality,” notes the contempo-
rary philosopher Michael Marder.45 He describes vegetal vitality as “a rid-
dle buried in the folds of Western metaphysics. The crude solution to the
problem of plant life, interpreted as qualitatively weak and as verging on
inanimate existence, forces this life into retreat.”46 As soon as human
minds want to grab hold of plant vivacity in objectifying metaphysical
categorization, it slips away, like the feeling of joy under a microscope lens,
spurring a different sort of gaze. It is not that we must avoid talking about
it, but Marder seems to agree with Basil that the life of plants is shrouded
in a measure of obscurity; there is something about their growth and life
that simply does not lend itself readily to our understanding of the world.
Accepting their secretive alterity makes for a better venue of appreciation
than objectifying categorization.
Basil makes his point by a detour via the gospel parable of the growing
seed. To the author of Mark, this pericope illustrates the character of
God’s kingdom; it is a growth incomprehensible to the farmer’s mind and
ultimately uncontrolled by his hands: “The kingdom of God is as if some-
one would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and
day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how” (Mark
4:26–27). Neither sleep nor wakefulness gets the slow secretive germina-
tion. It branches out into ever new shapes, perhaps extending ever new
rhizomes. The uncontrollable exuberance of the seed, waxing vibrantly
and vividly, growing beyond human grasp and knowing, may allude to the
way the divine works. Again, Basil identifies an affinity between what is
godly and what is vegetal. The parable suggests to the Christian audience
that divine life forces associate with stalks and sap.
The Cappadocian preacher, for his part, does not speak in parable, nor
does he propose that plants do. He remains grounded, down to earth, in
conversation with the soil: even a human sower does not know how seeds
44
Basil, Hexaemeron V 8.
45
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013), 22.
46
grow, for “Earth produces by herself” (Hex. V 5.34–35; cf. Mark 4:28).
Humans never bring plants to life. Like the Kingdom of God, they are
deeply rooted in the Earth, their growth stretching out of her soil. Farmers
should not imagine that they produce fruit. It is the plants themselves,
together with the Earth, that bring forth sprouts.
From these questions of vibrancy and vitality, Basil turns to their ele-
mental composition. Whereas their growth is ungraspable, their life
depends upon the element of water. But how can one and the same ele-
ment produce such various substances in trees:
The same water, pumped up through the root, nourishes in a different way
the root itself, the bark of the trunk, the wood and the pith. It becomes leaf,
it distributes itself among the branches and twigs and makes the fruits
swell—it gives to the plant its gum and its sap. Who will explain to us the
difference between all these? There is a difference between the gum of the
mastic and the juice of the balsam, a difference between that which distils in
Egypt and Libya from the fennel. Amber is, they say, the crystallized sap of
plants. And for a proof, see the bits of straws and little insects that have been
caught in the sap while still liquid and imprisoned there. In one word, no
one without long experience could find terms to express the virtue of it.
How, again, does this water become wine in the vine, and oil in the olive
tree? (Hex. V 8)
Although Basil may be familiar with more botanical literature, his pose is
not that of a scientist but that of a marveling spectator, backward leaning
rather than forward bending. Differences interest him, as they spell out
variety. Water runs through the whole multifaceted vegetal realm, bursting
into an innumerable myriad of forms. This variety does not yield analytic
explanations in the Hexaemeron; it evokes wonder. Plants shape a world of
transformations and metamorphoses.
The marvelous transformation of water also produces the most diverse
varieties in taste and scent, as well as in color:
in the same fig tree we have the most opposite flavors, as bitter in the sap as
it is sweet in the fruit. And in the vine, is it not as sweet in the grapes as it is
astringent in the branches? And what a variety of color! Look how in a
meadow this same water becomes red in one flower, purple in another, blue
in this one, white in that. And this diversity of colors, is it to be compared
to that of scents? (Hex. V 9)
Trees constitute more than exploitable fruit and timber to Basil. He draws
his audience in, allowing them to come closer to the arboreal realm—not
to embrace trunks, but to immerse themselves in a range of delicate sensa-
tions, distinguishing in trees the tiny miracles that dot every leaf and every
branch, glittering with the mysterious complexity of the living world.
Being finely attuned to the aesthetic qualities of trees, Basil inspires a sense
of awe and amazement and thus saves a space for difference. Whereas a
deep affinity holds the pieces of the cosmos together, the trees remain
distinctly different from us humans. Approaching the arboreal other with
a keen gaze, open nostrils, attentive taste buds, and perceptive fingertips
suggests sensory receptivity toward their presence. And as he acknowl-
edges the marvelous complexity of plants’ life, he avoids reducing them to
idols of his own desire, safeguarding simultaneously the mystery of arbo-
real otherness.
Lessons in Tree Hugging

Humanity emerged from the same primeval soil as trees did in Genesis.
On some level, then, the descendants of Adam and Eve are related to
those of the Tree of Life and the other plants of Eden—or so some early
Christian writers think.47 The world that begins in Basil’s Hexaemeron
concedes compatibility between plants and humans, despite their differ-
ences, and thus, it makes perfect sense that the species may learn from
each other. The conduct of trees may provide lessons for humans; they are
fit to serve in ethical comparisons, metaphors, and similes crafted by two-
legged beings.
Already the Christian gospels feature numerous examples of arboreal
exemplarity. Trees behave like the kingdom of God, as we have already
seen, or in ways that may evoke it. Sometimes they stray. The Gospel of
Mark lets a hungry Jesus encounter a fig tree, and without any direct mes-
sage to humans (be it human characters in the story or human readers), he
addresses the tree directly and reprimands it—presumably for its lack of
productive generosity (Mark 11:12–14). In the Gospel of John, Christ
proclaims that he himself is a vine (John 15:108).48 Basil, too, mentions
this and adds that “each and every one of us [are] engrafted branches”
47
See, for example, Mark 8.22–26; Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise XII.10.
48
Other New Testament examples include Luke 6.43–45, 21.29–30, Matthew 7.15–20,
24.32–35, and Col. 1.6.
(Hex. V 6.45–47; cf. Rom 11:17–24). Arboreal proverbs, fables, and par-
ables—present, of course, in cultures throughout the world—attest to the
intimate coexistence between humans and trees.
Trees communicate with humans, and we may learn from them. When
Ambrose looked at the fig tree, he noted that farmers often plant wild
trees next to the domesticated ones, binding them together somehow,
since this helps the domesticated trees keep their larger fruit from falling
to the ground. Basil had already made a similar observation (Hex. V
7.48–51), as had Aristotle before him (History of Animals 557b.25–31).
Basil found that by looking at fig growth, the different kinds clinging to
each other, Christians could learn to
borrow, even from those who are strangers to the faith, a certain vigor to
show forth good works. If you see outside the Church, in pagan life, or in
the midst of a pernicious heresy, the example of virtue and fidelity to moral
laws, redouble your efforts to resemble the productive fig tree, who by the
side of the wild fig tree, gains strength, prevents the fruit from being shed,
and nourishes it with more care. (Hex. V 7.52–61)
Ambrose similarly, but somewhat more laconically, remarked regarding

the fig example: “From this mystery of nature we are admonished not to
shun those who have been separated from our faith and from association
with us” (Ambrose, Hex. III 13 [55]).49 The church leaders derive the rel-
atively contentious recommendation to mingle with people of other con-
fessions or faiths from an observation of arboreal behavior. Even if mixing
with the others is controversial, the trees show that such conduct makes
perfect sense. Rather than trees learning from Christians, Christians ought
to learn from them.
When Basil warns against hylomania—the overgrowth of branches
instead of a strong trunk and richness of fruit (Hex. V 6.71–72)—he does
not suggest turning away from matter/wood (hyle). It is overconsumption
he worries about. Certain trees do this. Basil proposes to learn from the
other trees that wisely cling to moderation. Overindulgence leads to the
accumulation of stuff or flesh in the human body similar to the hylification
of an unhealthy vine. Certainly, Basil’s gaze may be anthropocentric here;
he is neither able to adopt the vine’s point of view nor able to ask whether
the vine may have good reasons for running to wood rather than bearing
49
Schenkl, Sancti Ambrosii opera I, 91–4.
in abundance. On the other hand, Basil pays far more attention to trees
than to humans in his Hexaemeron.50 His underlying conviction that plants
and humans are closely related allows him to understand the vegetal in
terms of himself, or vice versa, treating arboreal plants as kinfolk.
Although Basil does interact with biblical metaphors and comparisons,
the sermons never revert into symbolic or spiritualizing readings of plants.
Trees are tangible, physical creatures sharing the earthly as well as textual
space with humans and animals. From the more generic trees of the previ-
ous examples, Basil turns to an intimate encounter. Humans and trees
have several features in common: “You may find that the traits of youth
and old age in humans resemble those in trees; in those that are young and
vigorous, the bark is tight; while in those that grow old, it is rough and
wrinkled” (V 7.17–20). Here, between arboreal maturing and human
aging, bark and skin seem almost—in their similarity—to touch each
other, the preacher’s own wrinkles matching the rough bark of a wizened
tree or the congregation’s young hands miming the smooth skin of sap-
lings. Even though trees generally live much longer than people and never
stop growing, the adult human conveys a shared sense of aging, a recipro-
cal empathy between bark and skin.
By the aid of biblical allusion, Basil develops the idea that humans are
like vines—or the other way around. Having planted apostles, prophets,
and teachers as vine-props (χάρακα) for the members of the Church (Hex.
V 6.56–58), the homilist says, God “wishes that, like [the vines’] twining
windings, with love we [humans] cling to our neighbors and rely on them,
so that, in our continual aspirations upwards, we may imitate these vines
that raise themselves to the crowns of the tallest trees” (Hex. V 6.61–65).
The interaction between the two plants, the vine and the tall tree, is to
function as a model for humans. They show people how to cooperate in
neighborly love.
Ambrose picks up Basil’s proposal:
Would that, man, you could imitate the example of this species of plant, so
that you may bear fruit … The vine fondles the tree by embracing and bind-
ing it with vine leaves, and crowns it with garlands of grapes.
…
The vine holds in the embrace of love, by means of those tendrils and
bonds of which we spoke, all that are near and finds rest in being joined with
50
Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 189.
them. That is love, therefore, which binds us with things on high and plants
(inserit) us in heaven. (Ambrose, Hex. III 12 [49–51])51
Learning to hug trees, Ambrose seems to be saying, we who listen may

discover how to grow closer to our true selves. Although he employs con-
ventional metaphors like fruit bearing, and although the hugging of trees
works as a metaphor for embracing our neighbors, an interweaving of
human and plant in this paragraph ultimately leads to our re-planting or
re-grafting in the heavenly realm, like new trees, perhaps, in Paradise.
Dates in Love
“The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree” (Psalm 92.12)
Palm trees and humans go way back. At least since the fifth millennium
BC, humans have cultivated palm trees in the Middle East, and they con-
tinue to do so today. In 2005, a seed came to life in Israel after a sleep that
had lasted for two millennia.52 It is almost too good to be true. This is
neither a religious myth nor a popular legend, however; scientists call it an
“orthodox seed,” a seed that will be able to sprout after a period of drying.
This particular seed belonged to a date palm, what modern classification
knows as Phoenix dactylifera Linnaeus. Perhaps a person in the first cen-
tury AD ate the date, and today a palm tree grows again, born of a very
ancient parent,53 a parent whose branches may have greeted Christ as he
rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (John 12:12–14). Date palms, and their
reproductive life, continue to astonish and puzzle humans, as they fasci-
nated ancient and Byzantine people.54 Date palms are often depicted in
early Byzantine churches (Fig. 3.5).
51
52
Sarah Sallon, Elaine Solowey, Yuval Cohen, Raia Korchinsky, Markus Egli, Ivan
Woodhatch, Orit Simchoni, and Mordechai Kislev, “Germination, Genetics, and Growth of
an Ancient Date Seed,” Science 320, no. 5882 (2008): 1464; Burrus, Ancient Christian
Ecopoetics, 111–16.
53
M. Tengberg, “Beginnings and Early History of Date Palm Garden Cultivation in the
Middle East,” Journal of Arid Environments 86 (2012): 139–47.
54
For visual images of date palms, see Gábor Kalla, “Date Palms, Deer/Gazelles and Birds
in Ancient Mesopotamia and Early Byzantine Syria: A Christian Iconographic Scheme and
Its Sources in the Ancient Orient,” in Across the Mediterranean—Along the Nile: Studies in
Egyptology, Nubiology and Late Antiquity Dedicated to László Török on the Occasion of His
Fig. 3.5 Mosaic fragment depicting a pair of goats and palm trees, ca. 535/6,
Khirbat al-Mukhayyat (City of Nebo), Jordan. (Photograph by Michele Piccirillo,
courtesy of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Photographic Archive, Jerusalem)
In truth, date palms run through human lives as we run through theirs.
Their history runs through our bodies in a very literal way.
The impressive character of trees does not stop at the bark or their
“twining windings” for Basil. The fruit is no less sensuous:
Plants reproduce themselves in so many different ways … As to fruits them-

selves, who could review their varieties, their forms, their colors, the peculiar
flavor, and the use of each of them? Why do some fruits ripen when naked
in the sun, while others swell up although covered in shells? Trees of which
the fruit is tender have, like the fig tree, a thick covering of leaves; those, on
the contrary, of which the fruits are harder, like the nut, are only covered by
a light shade. (Hex. V 8.1–9)
75th Birthday, ed. Tamás A. Bács, Ádám Bollók and Tivadar Vida, 2 vols. (Budapest: Institute
of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and
Museum of Fine Arts, 2018), II: 863–99; cf. Robert Grunenberg, “Poetics of the Palm
Tree,” in Paradise is Now: Palm Trees in Art, ed. Robert Grunenberg (Berlin: Hatje Cantz,
2018), 12–18, for a broader and astonishing historical sweep.
Again, variety overwhelms. The Cappadocian pays intimate attention to

fruit and nuts, leaves and skin. Although there is a divine plan present in
creation, the impenetrable complexity perplexes and excites him. And yet,
there is more going on. With the language of nudity and fig leaves—the
latter being the sort of foliage that Adam and Eve used to cover their
naked genitals (Gen. 3:7)—he exposes listeners, very gently, to a realm of
arboreal sexuality. Seeds—part of the reiterative cycle of birth and rebirth
in the bosom of the fertile Earth—drop: “When the seed, having become
spongy and really porous, falls into the Earth, which is duly wet and hot,
it grasps the Earth that lies ready” (Hex. V 3.10–13). Porously open and
receptive to the permeation of soil, the seed embraces by dissolving, grasp-
ing by moldering.
From friendly hugs of arboreal co-striving and the more panoramic
views of the treescape, then, let us move on to the trees that desire. Plato
had explicitly reckoned trees among the desiring beings (Timaeus 77b),55
but a philosophical statement is one thing, a narrative exemplification is
quite another.
Both Basil and Ambrose pondered date palms’ (φοίνικες) amorous fon-
dling in small anecdotes. From later writers, we learn that a palm tree bent
down to feed the mother of Jesus with dates as she was about to give
birth.56 In fourth-century texts, palms were more interested in each other.
The Cappadocian describes the agricultural setting and the arboreal
embrace with a sense of empathy, as if he relates—with a tender sensibil-
ity—something he has witnessed:
[The gardeners] distinguish male from female in palm trees. Sometimes we

see those which they call female lowering their branches, as though with
passionate lust (ὀργῶσαν)57 and desire for the intimate intercourse (τῆς
συμπλοκῆς) with the male. Then, those who attend to these plants shake
over the branches some sort of seeds from the males—the ψήν as they call it;
the tree is thus able to share pleasures of enjoyment and then to raise its
branches again, and to resume its usual plant-form with the foliage. The
same is said of the fig trees. (Hex. V 7.37–48)
“Sometimes we see those which they call female …” Basil does not call
them so himself—he is not the expert—but he has watched their longing
movements, and he has identified in their gestures something resembling
55
Cf. Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 11–5.
56
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 20; Quran 19.16–26.
57
The word may also be translated as “ripe/swelling with moisture.”
passionate lust and craving for the intimate intercourse. At certain times,
as if in heat, a sexual urge overcomes the females, and they swell. The she-
trees strut with sexual desire.
Basil acknowledged that date palms could be divided into two are-
cacean sexes, “the males (τῶν ἀρρένων) … and … the females (τῶν
θηλειῶν).” Modern botanists call date palms dioecious, meaning that there
are separate male and female trees. Other species, like beech and birch
(monoecious), apple and pear (cosexual), have both male and female parts
on the same tree. Although not a gardener himself, Basil was apparently
well aware of this distinction. The division of certain trees into male and
female should not surprise us; already Theophrastus had claimed that a
“distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’ may, according to the woodmen,
be said to be common to all trees” (Enquiry into Plants III 9.3),58 and
what woodcutters knew to be true some 2300 years ago seems more or
less true to us today, although less categorically so. Basil’s interest in the
sexual life of palms may perhaps catch us by a greater surprise.
Ambrose describes the palm encounter in a similar way. He sums up
how the female tree reaches the sweetness of “a desired sexual intercourse
(expetiti concubitus gratia).” “You may notice how the palm tree which
produces dates often lowers its branches and succumbs to that tree which
country children call the male palm, yielding thus the view of an erotic
embrace. That palm tree is female” (Hex. III 13 [55]).59 With the author-
ity of country people, Ambrose secures his point.
Basil did not invent this story. Although he may, of course, have
engaged with palms himself, as we are led to believe, he seems to have
relied on a broad tradition of storytelling, for narratives about such erotic
intimacy were deeply rooted in the botanical lore of the ancient world.
Tapping into a long history of arecacean eroticism, Basil and Ambrose
represent two significant, but far from unique, episodes in the historical
web of narrations about dates in love.60
58
Theophrastus: Enquiry into Plants, Volume I: Books 1–5, trans. Arthur F. Hort, LCL 70
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 212–3. For a discuss of plant sex, both
in Greek antiquity and in modernity, see Lin Foxhall, “Natural Sex: The Attribution of Sex
and Gender to Plants in Ancient Greece,” in Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-
Representation in the Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (London-New
York: Routledge, 1998), 57–70.
59
60
For a broader survey of this tradition going back to Herodotus and Assyrian mythology,
see John Hilton, “Erotic Date-Palms in Ammianus Marcellinus (Res Gestae, XXIV, 3,
12–13),” Listy Filologické 138 (2015): 213–29.
Just around the time when someone spat out the date pit that sprouted
in 2005, Pliny the Elder was working on his Natural History, perhaps
chewing on a date himself. He was not the first writer to take an interest
in palms and their desires,61 but he constitutes one early example. Although
eschewing the distinction between mono- and dioecious, Pliny (like mod-
ern botanists) understood plants to be divided into male and female. He
noted that
all trees, or rather all plants … belong to either one sex or the other; a fact
which it may be sufficient to notice on the present occasion, and one which
manifests itself in no tree more than in the palm. The male tree blossoms at
the shoots; the female buds without blossoming, the bud being very similar
to an ear of corn. (NH 13.7)62
No tree is as explicitly gendered as the palm, Pliny thinks,63 and they dis-
play it in explicit sexual interaction. As John Hilton has noticed, the
Roman author “blends erotic innuendo with technical agricultural meth-
ods” in a “playfully erotic … tone.”64 Here is how Pliny imagined
palm love:
In a forest of natural growth, the female trees will become barren if they are
deprived of the males, and … many female trees may be seen surrounding a
single male with downcast heads and a foliage/hairs (comis) that seems to be
bowing caressingly towards it; while the male tree, on the other hand, with
leaves all bristling and erect, impregnates (maritare) the others by his exha-
lations and glances and also by his pollen. If the male tree should happen to
be cut down, the female trees, thus reduced to a state of widowhood, will at
once become barren and unproductive. (NH 13.7)
Female palms engage in a courting behavior as they circle the male tree,
and the excited male—erect to the tips of his leaves—breathes and spreads
his seeds in his harem. Theophrastus notes that in spreading their seed
around, the male date palms resemble fish (On the Causes of Plants IX
9.15). In contrast to later authors, Pliny envisions arecacean polygyny.
61
Already Herodotus paid the issue of palm sexuality a visit; Herodotus, The Histories
I 193.5.
62
The Natural History of Pliny. Vol. 3, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London:
H. G. Bohn, 1855), 171.
63
Theophrastus makes similar remarks in On the Causes of Plants IX 9.15.
64
Hilton, “Erotic Date-Palms,” 218.
Not much later, Achilles Tatius relates a different and much more
monogamous version of date love in his novel Leucippe and Clitophon. An
air of fictitious inventiveness wafts through this conversation about the
powers of Eros:
“Has then Eros,” said [Satyrus], “such mighty power that he is able to
inflame even birds?” “Not birds only,” I answered; “that would be no mar-
vel, for you too know that [Eros] is winged himself, but creeping snakes and
plants too, and I believe even stones as well: at least the loadstone loves the
iron, and if it may but see it and touch it, it attracts it towards itself as though
possessed of the passion of love. May this not be the kiss of the loving stone
and the beloved metal?” (Leucippe and Clitophon 1.17)65
Attraction holds the world together, as Basil also holds (Hex. II 2.58–60).66
In Satyrus’s deeply animist vision, the forces of passionate desire apply not
only to human subjects, not only to birds and reptiles and vegetation, but
even to various minerals whose magnetic attraction draw them to each
other in a metal kiss.
It applies not least, however, to date palms. What Pliny treated in a
more naturalist manner, Achilles Tatius transmits in romantic terms, as a
tale of partly unfulfilled longing:
As for plants, the servants of wisdom say—and I should deem it a fable if not
the farmers’ servants said the same—this is what they say: Plants fall in love
(ἐρᾷν) with one another, and the palm is particularly susceptible to the pas-
sion: there are both male and female palms; so the male falls in love with the
female, and if the female be planted at any considerable distance, the loving
male begins to dry up. The farmer understands the tree’s suffering and goes
to some elevated place with a view, observing in which direction it is droop-
ing, for it always inclines towards the object of its passion. And when he has
discovered this, he is soon able to heal its disease: He takes a shoot of the
female palm and grafts it into the very heart (καρδίαν) of the male. This
refreshes the tree’s soul (ψυχὴν), and its body (σῶμα), which seemed on the
65
Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. S. Gaselee, LCL 45 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1969), 51.
66
See Thomas Sharkie and Marguerite Johnson, “Eroticized Environments: Ancient Greek
Natural Philosophy and the Roots of Erotic Ecocritical Contemplation,” in Ecocriticism,
Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, ed. Christopher Schliephake (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2017), 71–90.
point of death, is again aroused and erect, delighting in the embrace

(συμπλοκῇ) of the beloved: and this is a plant marriage (γάμος φυτῶν).
(Leucippe and Clitophon 1.17)
Achilles Tatius also knows the palm trees as male and female. The narrator
does not present himself as someone who knows the trees firsthand; he has
heard about their erotic desire from wise people and country folks.
Compared to Pliny and the later bishop of Caesarea, however, he switches
the gender of the desirous palm. The details of the entanglement are quite
particular and puzzling too, conveying the sexuality of grafts, where the
ancient technology of grafting transpires as a most intimate event: the pas-
sionate male experiences a female penetration into his heart. Even with a
spatial distance, the intercourse is carried out, soothing the agony of long-
ing rather than leading to fertilization. The male’s heartache is healed,
both in body and in soul, as he receives a little piece of the female tree into
himself. Gender-grafting fulfills his desire.
The tenth-century farming manual Geoponika gives a version ascribed
to the third-century author Florentinus. It tells of a similar erotic longing:
One date palm loves another date palm; loves it bitterly, in fact. To be pre-
cise, the female palm loves the male, so Florentinus says in his Georgika, and
her desire is only soothed by the presence of her beloved. The tree may be
observed to stoop, and to bow her head, and to fail to produce fruit. The
farmer is aware of this: it is evident that she is in love, but it is not clear with
which tree. He therefore touches many trees, returns to the one that is in
love, and touches her with his hand. She appears to respond as if to a kiss
and indicates the tree with which she is in love by nodding her spathes or, as
one may say, her “arms”: she looks towards it and turns herself wholly, as if
in eagerness, towards it. Satisfaction for the female is found when the farmer
then touches the male and brings its “arms” close to the female; in particu-
lar, he takes the flower from the spathe of the male and places it in the
“brain” of the female. This satisfies her love, and the female tree now flour-
ishes and bears the finest fruit. (Geoponika 10.4)67
Again, the farmer must help the lovesick palms. Note that scare quotes are
added by the translator not to scare modern readers.
A final example is the military officer and historian Ammianus
Marcellinus, Basil’s contemporary. He gave an account of the interesting
67
Geoponika: Farm Work. A Modern Translation of the Roman and Byzantine Farming
Handbook, trans. Andrew Dalby (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2011), 203.
things he experienced in the east during the Persian expedition of Julian.

Among them were vast palm groves in the Persian Gulf, where Ammianus
reportedly learned about palm embraces:
In this region many fields are planted with vines and fruit-trees of different
sorts. Immense palm groves also cover a wide expanse and extend as far as
Mesene and the Great Sea [i.e. the Persian Gulf]. Wherever you go you see
branches cut from palms, some with their fruit, from which honey and wine
are made in great quantities. We are told that palms themselves mate (mari-
tari), and that the sexes may easily be distinguished. It is said too that
female trees conceive when they are smeared with seeds of the male, and
people say that the palms take delight in mutual love, and that they lean
towards each other and cannot be separated even by a strong wind. If the
female is not smeared with the seed of the male in the usual way, she miscar-
ries and loses her fruit before it is ripe. If it is not known with what male tree
a female is in love, her trunk is smeared with her own nectar, and another
tree naturally senses the sweet smell. This is the evidence on which belief in
a kind of copulation is based. (Res Gestae XXIV 3:12–13)68
Ammianus also knows of two palm genders, but like Pliny he focuses on
the union and the fertilization rather than the emotional longing. Is he
perhaps uncomfortable with the traditional terminology of palm copula-
tion? Or does he merely want to give his readers an explanation? Although
the whole description suggests that he has seen and learned this, the final
sentence in the quotation may go either way.
Basil, on the other hand, made no excuses. Which of these texts he
knew is beside the point; clearly an attention to and a history of date love
existed long before he decided to give his account, and he transmitted the
knowledge that palm trees—especially the female ones—exercise sexual
agency. Like his Latin colleague, Basil encouraged the Christian audience
to think erotically when they encountered palm trees or ate a sweet date,
as they may indeed already have done.
Is there something slightly disturbing about Basil’s description? Pliny,
who claimed to describe a wild forest, had noted in passing that “so well,
indeed, is this sexual union between [the male and female palm] under-
stood, that it has been imagined even that fecundation may be ensured
through the agency of man” (NH 13.7). Human intervention in the
68
Hilton, “Erotic Date-Palms,” but we have made some adjustments.
sexual life of palm trees may be neither desirable nor needed, but is at least
considered possible by the Roman naturalist. It might serve the process of
fertilization. Basil adopts a different attitude. In depicting the (cultivated)
trees’ intimacy and amorous desires, he portrays a love-life which appar-
ently has little to do with fertility. Sexual gratification and the trees’ “pas-
sionate lust and desire for the intimate intercourse” is at the heart of his
description. Into his text, however, he grafts the account of manual polli-
nation. Humans assist as the palms experience their climax, helping the
trees fertilize their pleasure. Basil leaves the interaction between the
human and the arecacean uncommented, but assuming the palms’ per-
spective, he seems to imagine that the ψήν enhances the pleasurable
sensation.
Does this mean that the Cappadocian father preferred the cultivated
over the wild, the farmed and controlled over the free and unhindered
growth? Not necessarily. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Basil
exhibits unadulterated amazement at a wild idyll that human hands have
not tilled.69 In one of his letters to Gregory of Nazianzus, he lauds the
natural beauty of the dwelling place he found for himself in Pontus: “There
is a high mountain, covered with a deep forest, watered on its northerly
side by cool and transparent streams. At its base is outstretched an evenly
sloping plain, ever enriched by the moisture from the mountain” (Ep.
14).70 And he continues: “A forest of diverse and multifarious trees, a
spontaneous (αὐτομάτως) growth surrounding the place, acts almost as a
fence to enclose it” (Ep. 14).71 Wild and free-growing trees encircle him.
It is not some human refinement of these trees and their natural beauty
that excites Basil; on the contrary, he notices how magnificent the trees
appear just as they are growing by themselves, αὐτομάτως, without cultiva-
tion. Happy that the forest has chosen to girdle his abode, he does not
merely appreciate the trees as valuable resources for his own exploitation;
Basil clearly delights in their wild appeal and the wondrous created beauty,
the untamed verve in and among arboreal beings. More or less accessibly
69
Others have noted this already; see D.S. Wallace-Hadrill, The Greek Patristic View of
Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), 87–91; Bruce V. Foltz, “On the
Beauty of Visible Creation,” in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian
Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 324–36, at 329.
70
Saint Basile: Lettres I, ed. Yves Courtonne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957); Saint Basil:
The Letters I, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (London: William Heinemann, 1926), 107, slightly
adjusted.
71
Trans. Deferrari, Saint Basil, 107–9.
to the Cappadocian and his contemporary humans, date palms engage in

a social life of their own.
Concluding the tree discussion in the Hexaemeron, Basil exhorts his
listeners to glimpse wonders in arboreal details: “When you see the culti-
vated [trees], [or] the wild ones, those that love water, [or] those on dry
land, those bearing flowers, or those without flowers, try to recognize the
grandeur in what is small!” (Hex. V 9.25–27). Basil believes that trees
possess an innate value, whether they be wild or disciplined by humans.
Out of His Tree

The orchard of the Lord, the trees of life, are his devout. (Psalms of Solomon 14.3)
Is Basil not out of his tree here? Can he possibly have imagined palm
intercourse? And does not this long tradition of lustful date palms, or
Basil’s whole sermon for that matter, surrender trees to utter humanizing?
In an early Christian text, which goes under the title On the Origin of
the World, Eve in Paradise turns into a tree in order to escape evil power of
the archons.72 Such a metamorphosis, which also happened to Daphne
and other mythical women, is suggested in part by similarities of human
and arboreal forms. Humans and trees were thought to share a certain
compatibility. In his second-century novel A True Story, Lucian of
Samosata writes about the “Dendrites” (δενδρῖται) he met when he lived
on the moon. This race emerged from human testicles that were cut off
and sown in the ground:
Exsecting a man’s right testicle, they plant it in the ground. From it grows
a very large tree of flesh … it has branches and leaves, and its fruit is acorns
a cubit thick. When these ripen, they harvest them and shell out the
humans. Another thing, they have additional private-parts that are some-
times of ivory and sometimes, with the poor, of wood, and with these they
copulate and have intercourse with their spouses. (Lucian, True
Story I 22)73
72
Untitled [On the Origin of the World] NHC II.5.116. This reference was generously
proposed by Paul Linjamaa.
73
Lucian: Phalaris. Hippias or The Bath. Dionysus. Heracles. Amber or The Swans. The Fly.
Nigrinus. Demonax. The Hall. My Native Land. Octogenarians. A True Story. Slander. The
Lucian’s fantasy is pretty exotic. Nevertheless, it exposes an idea lurking in

the undergrowth of the Greco-Roman world: trees and humans are not all
that dissimilar. The nuts may be different, but wooden tissue runs through
human bodies as human flesh cuts through their boughs. Trees may grow
from human testicles, as acorns may hide humans.
Lucian met other arboreal creatures, too. At one point he and his com-
panions came across special grapevines:
We found something wonderful in grapevines. The part which came out of

the ground, the trunk itself, was stout and well-grown, but the upper part
was in each case a woman, entirely perfect from the waist up. … Out of their
finger-tips grew the branches, and they were full of grapes. Actually, the hair
of their heads was tendrils and leaves and clusters! … They even kissed us on
the lips, and everyone that was kissed at once became reeling drunk. They
did not suffer us, however, to gather any of the fruit, but cried out in pain
when it was plucked. Some of them actually wanted us to embrace them,
and two of my comrades complied, but could not get away again. They were
held fast by the part which had touched them, for it had grown in and struck
root. Already branches had grown from their fingers, tendrils entwined
them, and they were on the point of bearing fruit like the others any minute.
(True Story I 8)74
Vines and women grow into one another—or rather, perhaps, this race is
half vine, half human. And the mélange even contagiously spreads to other
humans, opening an (apparently one-way) path from human to
dendro-human.
This path remained open throughout the Byzantine period. A millen-
nium later, Nikephoros Basilakes, who taught at the Patriarchal School in
Constantinople in the twelfth century, transmits an ancient story where
human tissue runs through wood: the beautiful Myrrha fell in love with
her father Theias; crazed by desire and aided by considerable amounts of
wine, she seduced him. After their intercourse, however, fear assailed the
girl, and she began praying to the gods to be altered:
Consonants at Law. The Carousal (Symposium) or The Lapiths, trans. A. M. Harmon, LCL 14
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 274–7 (slightly adjusted).
74
Lucian, trans. Harmon, 256–9.
The gods took pity on the girl and transformed her into a myrrh tree. But
Eros did not go away empty-handed, even if the girl had been changed into
a tree. For when the time for giving birth arrived, her bark split open and
out flashed Adonis, an impossibly beautiful creature who soon became the
darling of Aphrodite.75
Myrrha’s story is told by many authors, the most famous being Ovid, who
gives a more elaborate description of the dendrification:
as [Myrrha] spoke the earth closed over her legs; roots burst forth from her
toes and stretched out on either side the supports of the high trunk; her
bones gained strength, and, while the central pith remained the same,
her blood changed to sap, her arms to long branches, her fingers to twigs,
her skin to hard bark. … But the misbegotten child had grown within the
wood. (Metamorphoses X 489–503).76
Eventually the tree gives birth to a human baby. Although the entire
transformation is a violent process, the author is able to see correspon-
dences between tree and woman; blood resembles sap as much as arms
branches.
As Michael Marder points out, “modern systems of biological classifica-
tion, formalized at the time of Carl Linnaeus, were foreign to the ancients”:
“A noble human (e.g., Odysseus), a noble animal (e.g., a lion), and a
noble plant (e.g., bay laurel) had more in common with one another than
two members of the same ‘kingdom,’ such as laurel tree and a stalk of
corn. Nor were the boundaries between biological kingdoms set in
stone.”77 In their wild fancies, these tales of human wood and arboreal
75
Nikephoros Basilakes, Progymnasmata 16; The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros
Basilakes: Progymnasmata from Twelfth-Century Byzantium, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Beneker
and Craig A. Gibson, DOML 43 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 56–9;
trans. adjusted.
76
Ovid: Metamorphoses, Volume II: Books 9–15, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold,
LCL 43 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 99–101.
77
Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 7. For Marder, traditional notions of kinship become
problematic; they inevitably lead to a hierarchization, where the rational human being is
placed on top and the plant ends up at the bottom, since plants can neither boast any form
of cognition that we are aware of nor the ability to move around. This prompts him to argue
bodies illustrate a Byzantine and pre-Byzantine sense of human kinship

with trees.
Basil flourished in a period that sensed affinities between species, even
if their kinships, as Marder would highlight, were often framed in hierar-
chical models. Policing the difference between species more zealously
than Lucian, Basil allows no explicit transformation between human and
arboreal flesh, yet other kinds of similarities unravel in his text when he
discusses various lifeforms.
The ancient descriptions of palm erotics have been dubbed
“anthropomorphic.”78 And it is true, the palms do follow gender roles
that resemble human ones: whereas the female appears subdued and flirta-
tious, the male actively spreads his seeds. Already Pliny’s portrayal of arbo-
real sexuality may seem colored by his own human experience, for the
language of hair and erection and breathing and looking feels less relevant
for these large trees than for an encounter between two aroused people.
And yet, none of these writers seems to find this problematic.
Modernity has, on the other hand, contracted a certain amount of anxi-
ety about anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphic expressions, it is
thought, may threaten to elide difference, remaking the other in the
human image. With their sheer disregard for clear categories, anthropo-
morphisms early became problematic to the Cartesian worldview, for
which animals and plants are so drastically divorced from human cogitat-
ing that the danger of confusion threatens human exceptionalism.79 The
Anthropocene was not built on empathy with other species.
To some extent, of course, Basil projects his own concerns onto the
trees’ bark. And to a degree this is unavoidable for any human tree-thinker.
that we must not interpret plants as deficient animals/humans, but rather as beings with
entirely different modes of existence—a mode deeply entangled with the immediate environ-
ment, a mode of receptivity and of flexible and decentralized growth.
78
Hilton, “Erotic Date-Palms,” 218.
79
Anthropologist Stewart E. Guthrie’s lament exemplifies this attitude: “Most scholars
since the time of the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) have agreed that the
tendency to anthropomorphize hinders the understanding of the world, but it is deep-seated
and persistent.” (Guthrie, “Anthropomorphism,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.
britannica.com/topic/anthropomorphism accessed 09.07.20). Contemporary thinkers are
more likely to harbor the opposite concern, namely, that anthropomorphism reflects a pro-
found self-absorption, through which the entire world is reduced to a mirror for the human;
see for instance Patricia Cox Miller’s discussion in her In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological
Imagination in Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018),
80–1 et passim.
Even such a sensitive interpreter as Michael Marder will have to admit that
he makes plants think for him when he affirms that “plants quietly subvert
classical philosophical hierarchies and afford us a glimpse into a lived (and
growing) destruction of Western metaphysics.”80 When we extend empa-
thy to trees or open ourselves to be taught by them, we necessarily allow
the possibility of human-tree likeness.
Contemplating the vibrancy of matter and tactics for cultivating a sen-
sitivity toward it, Jane Bennett makes some observations that may be
worth quoting in full:
One [tactic] might be to allow oneself, as did Charles Darwin, to anthropo-

morphize, to relax into resemblances discerned across ontological divides:
you (mis)take the wind outside at night for your father’s wheezy breathing
in the next room; you get up too fast and see stars; a plastic topographical
map reminds you of the veins on the back of your hand; the rhythm of the
cicadas reminds you of the wailing of an infant; the falling stone seems to
express a conative desire to persevere. If a green materialism requires of us a
more refined sensitivity to the outside-that-is-inside-too, then maybe a bit
of anthropomorphizing will prove valuable. Maybe it is worth running the
risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of
nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocen-
trism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above
or outside a nonhuman “environment.” Too often the philosophical rejec-
tion of anthropomorphism is bound up with a hubristic demand that only
humans and God can bear any traces of creative agency. To qualify and
attenuate this desire is to make it possible to discern a kind of life irreducible
to the activities of humans or gods. This material vitality is me, it predates
me, it exceeds me, it postdates me.81
Anthropomorphizing is not necessarily the ally of anthropocentrism;

indeed, it can work against it. Relaxing into resemblances, then, Basil has
taken the earth for a virgin mother, her vegetal offspring for divine incar-
nations, and the arboreal race for lovers. If we believe these interpretations
to incline toward anthropomorphism, Basil is guilty. But he can hardly be
accused of superstition, the divinization of nature, or romanticism. And if
we take him to incline or tilt, he does this in the manner of a so-called
80
81
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 219–20.
drunken forest. Where does it begin? Who is leaning? Where does human
start and arboreal end?
Humanizing palm sex, Basil makes rhetorical love with dates. Being
able to discern, in the non-human, what he might apply to himself, he is
unable to divorce himself entirely from the arboreal race. And thus, Basil’s
speech renders humans open to dendromorphization. We are invited to
imitate the trees’ difference or to see our own selves differently through
them. This anthropomorphizing, if we still wish to call it that, is not merely
a rhetorical strategy on Basil’s part, but emerges from a widely shared
sense of affinity between people and trees in his world, a sense which may
be expressed in metaphors and similes, as well as in metamorphoses and
corporeal engraftments. It is deeply imbedded in the lexicon of the Greek
language. Indeed, language itself branches out from the arboreal realm,
for if we take human language to be those words uttered by human
mouths, voiced by way of breath, we realize that the air we breathe,
exhaled by trees in photosynthesis, carry the words we speak, and hence
trees are intrinsically involved in our speech as their oxygen flows into our
lungs, enabling us to respire. Rather than a deviation, then, dendrization
is at the heart of human language, even when this language is not carved
into bark or inscribed on dead wood.
As Basil negotiates resemblances and differences between the human
and the arboreal, he searches for ways to interact with trees discursively.
For in the end, as we saw in the beginning, all parts of the created realm
reach toward one another, in a web of sympathy. “The whole world, with
all its various parts, [God] bound together by some unbreakable law of
attraction into one fellowship and harmony; thus even those [parts] far-
thest away from each other in position, it seems, are united through their
affinity (συμπαθείας)” (Hex. II 2.58–61).82 Throughout Basil’s fifth ser-
mon, we catch him looking at the flourishing of trees, stretching his head
back in wonder, noticing the movement of their crowns, as they are grow-
ing into figures of theological sagacity, as teachers of virtue in their own
treeness, embodying, in their shyly fleshless trunks, shades of another
incarnation.
82
For the broader philosophical theme of sympathia, see Torchia, “Sympatheia in Basil.”
CHAPTER 4
Becoming-Tree
Tree-sitting was not a common ascetic vocation in the Byzantine and

Eastern Christian world, but a handful of strange and wondrous men
found their way into the branches, where they encountered the resistant,
stubborn otherness of trees. The trees accepted the humans into their
folds, but without accommodation, unlike the carved and fashioned stone
of their cyborg twins, the stylite saints. The arboreal endured and re-made
its new inhabitants. The humans in turn endured their own remaking, but
only for so long.1
The most famous of the dendrites, David of Thessaloniki, climbed an
almond tree outside a church in his adopted city, and he lasted several
years before retiring to a cell, where he revealed his newly miraculous,
wooden body. He burned bright without harm, and he held fire in his
hands without being scorched, until he found his way back fully to wood,
in his plain coffin. He had become othered as tree flesh immune to the
dangers to both human and trees, and his miracle-making capacities
emerged through this hybrid remaking: he became more than he was
before he climbed into the overstory.
1
In this chapter, the pronoun for tree and trees is they, them, their, in order to stay clear
of the neutered form of “it.”

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5_4
Fig. 4.1 “To Sinai via the Red Sea, Tor, and Wady Hebron. Almond Tree in
Blossom at the Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai,” 1910–20. (Photograph cour-
tesy of the American Colony, Jerusalem, Photo Department)
4 BECOMING-TREE 109
A very small number of paintings imagine and explore this new hybrid
man of wood, leaf, blossom, and fruit. And from these hagiographic tradi-
tions, the icons fashion a new type of cyborg out of those two natures:
from the gatherings of brush emerges a long-bearded old man, his torso
melded with the elegantly twisting trunk of a tall tree. The painters pres-
ent St. David as cyborg by extending his human nature and amplifying it
in the encompassing tree. David reveals a divergent path from his stylite
confreres in which tree nature subsumes human nature, like a seemly
Christian version of Daphne’s flight from Apollo. David is stately stasis, in
contrast, and permanently tree-human now. This cyborg is the painter’s
imagining of the metamorphosis of the human who leaves the earth for
the canopy.
This chapter takes seriously the reading of the dendrite tradition in the
painterly assertion of tree-becoming and -transformation. David’s image is
a particular, sensitive imagining of asceticism in, under, and within nature,
and it points us to our own tree futures.
Cyborg Images
A Late Byzantine icon of the stylite saint Symeon and the dendrite saint
David now resides in a captivating modern museum at the Vatopaidi
Monastery on Mount Athos (Fig. 4.2).
Its history is not known, but it has probably always resided in the Holy
Monastery, under the care of many generations of monks. We know very
little about the icon. No bibliography exists for it. Even those of us fortu-
nate enough to have visited the Holy Monastery and to have had the
museums there opened to us—in keeping with the cherished ideals of
monastic hospitality—even we have only glimpsed this icon among seem-
ingly innumerable treasures. However, its image circulates on the internet.
Likely imagined and made for an exclusively male gaze, in this way it is
available to a large number of people. Its materiality in eyewitness and in
browser-viewing is ghostly, insufficiently substantial. But the icon needs
and repays careful and extended contemplation, at least in this photo-
graphic capture, for it is a unique composition. No other icon like it exists.
The painter (and whoever else took part in this visual exercise of hagio-
philic devotion, such as patron, advisor, designer, the community of
monks who were to receive it) arrived at an arresting vision of saint, plant,
and stone. The iconographic strangeness needs recognizing. Only then are
Fig. 4.2 Icon of Saints Symeon and David, Late Byzantine, Vatopaidi Monastery,
Mount Athos, Greece, 30 × 43 cm. (Photograph courtesy of Nick Thompson,
Theological and Religious Studies, University of Auckland)
4 BECOMING-TREE 111
we able to see it for it was and is, an extraordinary rendering of two

humans merging with and becoming with their ascetic prostheses.
The icon has other mysterious properties. After the period of Iconoclasm
of the eighth and ninth centuries, icons were always inscribed with the
names of the saint as a verbal guarantee of orthodox authenticity; identity
had to be clear and unambiguous in the visible language of Byzantine
painting. But the inscriptions here give little information: Symeon is
hagios, and David is a saint from Thessaloniki. We don’t know, then, if
Symeon is the elder or younger by that name, and each achieved sainthood
on account of the extended periods of time each man by that name perched
himself on top of a column. Likewise, David is simply stated to be from
the second city of the Byzantine world. The verbal descriptions are mini-
mal, barest assertions of identity and credentials of these holy figures.
The visual description of these two figures expands, extends, and dis-
torts their human bodies, which are lofted well above the icon’s ground
line into the upper third of the icon field. On the left-hand side, Symeon
tapers into a white-veined black-marble column set on a base on the
ground line of the composition. He is contained by a basket-like enclosure
placed on top of an unarticulated capital. Some sense of depth of field is
given by rendering of the encircling parapet for the saint. The parapet rises
to near-shoulder height behind the saint, and it grants a sense of pulpit
and sermon, as he holds a cross in his right hand and, with his left, gestures
perhaps in speech (his mouth is closed, and his eyes cut to his left). On the
right-hand side, David of Thessaloniki provides a visual balance to the
strongly vertical companion-saint to his right. His hands are empty: his left
is held up and the palm faces out, while his right gestures to Symeon.
Their hands almost touch in a sign of mutual regard and recognition, per-
haps even in conversation as signaled by this mirroring gesture.
Whereas Symeon’s lower body might be understood to be accommo-
dated, standing or seated, within the basket-like form enclosing him, the
limits of David’s human body, by contrast, are not clearly described nor
inferred. David is submerged in tree below his chest. Unlike the solid and
distinct architecture surrounding Symeon, the branches of this slender
tree have grown up and around David, who is also mandorla-ed by the
greenery holding him. His body and beard strengthen the verticality of his
support, in the position of his arms, as the color of his habit lends chro-
matic consistency with the trunk of the tree below. Moreover, his hair
holds formal continuities with the leaves, branches, and trunk, with the
complexity of this plant form. David is not wearing a cowl, as Symeon is,
and his hair and beard spiral and cascade downward; the bright highlights
underscore the echoes of form in tree and human. The beard, in particu-
lar, corkscrews remarkably like the gnarled and twisting trunk of the tree
descending below and out of his body. The distinctions between human
and tree are blurred on the right-hand side of the icon, comparable to the
absorption of man and stone on the left. Inscriptions gave us only bare
clues to identity, but the major work of the icon in its exploration of hybrid
creatures is done visually, mutely, with all the self-evident, pre-existing
naturalness the pictorial can possess.
If the stylites are half architecture, in which marble is carefully delin-
eated, framing flesh as cyborg human, then the dendrite saint in this form,
nested in foliage and branches, and scioned to his almond tree, is a sacred
graft. Not that both saints don’t share qualities. In texts, David’s tree
comes to be his kathedra, his throne of authority, an authority granted
him by his capacity to live on the throne itself, the tree. Symeon’s body
also has planty potentials, particularly in the ways in which he subjected his
body to vegetal meldings with palm rope that embedded in him and
emplanted him.2 Both saints explored borders of their humanness, in their
receptivity to stone and tree. And both saints in the course of their lives
passed back and forth into icon-states. Symeon allowed himself to be
replicated, and his icons proliferated and dispersed his person and power.3
Likewise, David becomes icon in his tree, that stationary and enframed
form, which became a re-presentation of his formerly earthbound self. As
the Late Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologus (r. 1391–1425) wrote
in his encomium on the saint,
Like a statue made of lifeless material he sets his body upon a tree, exposing
himself to the heat of the summer, to the bitterness of the cold, to violent
rainstorms, to the pelting of hail, to freezing by snow, to numberless storms
of evils.4
2
Virginia Burrus, “Hagiography without Humans: Simeon the Stylite,” in Classical
Literature and Posthumanism, ed. Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel (London:
Bloomsbury, 2020), 237–44, 387, here 239–40.
3
Burrus, “Hagiography without Humans,” 240, and see Glenn Peers, “Byzantine Things
in the World,” in Byzantine Things in the World, ed. Glenn Peers (Houston-New Haven: The
Menil Collection-Yale University Press, 2013), 21–84, here 74–6.
4
V. Latyshev, “O Zhitíyahb Prepodoónago Davida Solunskago,” Imperatorskoe Odesskoe
Obshchestvo Istorii I Drevnosti. Zaspiski 30 (1912): 244 (11); Valentin Rose, Leben des heiligen
David von Thessalonike griechisch nach der einzigen bisher aufgefundenen Handschrift (Berlin:
4 BECOMING-TREE 113
David will revert to his human, lively body, and he will descend the tree
different again, in another state, more than human, but still so: a power-
ful cyborg.
The precise location(s) of the Vatopaidi icon in its pre-museum life is
no longer known, but the icon’s display on the saints’ feast days is highly
likely.5 In this tradition, then, the icon would be placed on a stand in a
central part of the katholikon for veneration by monks and pilgrims.
Therefore, one can imagine the viewing and interaction with the icon in
space, without knowing exact details of its disposition. The depictions of
stylite and dendrite here are dynamic unfoldings, each saint caught mid-
way in his metamorphosis, like Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Daphne in her
escape from Apollo’s pressing lust (Fig. 4.3).
That comparison might seem inappropriate on account of the story,
although Daphne retained her chastity in the end: tree-becoming is not
unseemly in either case. The comparison might also appear inappropriate
on account of the divergent formal and experiential qualities of Baroque
sculpture and Byzantine icon. And yet the spatial dimensionality of an icon
or fresco shares certain qualities with a sculpture in space that magnify the
sense of presence and interaction. And while the Baroque example is a
fast-paced, highly theatrical presentation of tree-becoming, the midway
passage of the dendrite saint to tree is tree-paced, slowed to their arboreal
rate of growth. The icon shows the saint in a full flow of otherness, with-
out yet tipping headlong into tree state as Daphne irrevocably does. David
is in perfect equilibrium, wood and man, poised on the edge of divinity.6
Artistic treatments of St. David were not common, and they sometimes
portrayed him as conventional monastic exemplar, as in this relief probably
Asher, 1887), 5 (6); trans. Alexander Vasiliev, “Life of David of Thessalonica,” Traditio 4
(1946): 131.
5
David’s feasts are 26 June and 16 September for the translation of his relics, while
Symeon’s are various since we don’t know if this Symeon is the Elder or the Younger.
Respectively, the feasts are 1 September and 5 January.
6
See Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013), 133–4, on the plants and gods, here 133, “But for now let us now pause to
consider an unsettling intimacy between the philosophical idea of the gods, who are least
prone to be affected from the outside, and the alleged indifference of plants. From the dia-
metrically opposed ends of sheer difference and self-sameness, but also material and ideal
being, plants and gods present counterparts to human (and indeed, animal) desires and
involvements in the world.” From this position, it’s evident that David and Daphne are
divinizing toward plant.
Fig. 4.3 Gianlorenzo Bernini, “Daphne and Apollo,” 1622–25, marble, height:
243 cm. (Photograph by Luciano Romano, courtesy of Ministero per i Beni e le
Attività Culturali e per il Turismo—Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy)
from the Late Byzantine period (though it has also been dated ca. 900)
and in Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki.7
No particular qualities were used to identify his special accomplish-
ments, except perhaps the emphasis placed on his hands, which are sources
of wonder and, as the inscription implies, means of wonder, too. Tree is
absent from this image, and David is fully human, while his hands and face
have been subjected to chiseling in an attempt to maim the saint.
7
Andreas Xyngopoulos, “Anaglyphon tou osiou David tou en Thessalonike,” Makedonika
2 (1941–52): 143–66.
4 BECOMING-TREE 115
Of a very small set if images to work from, only one other Byzantine
example of the iconography of man and tree is extant to our knowledge,
but it is also in a high-profile monastery of the Byzantine world, the Kariye
Camii, or the Church of the Chora.8 This extensively decorated complex
in Constantinople (Istanbul) was the result of the patronage of the states-
men/intellectual Theodore Metochites (1270–1332); the mosaics and
frescoes date to the years 1315–21. Here again, David is depicted as a
monk, half-man/half tree, but the spatial qualities of the representation
are more readily experienced (Fig. 4.4).
He is painted on his own piece of wall (no encroaching marble-saint) at
ground level and in a narrow, vertical, corner passage abutting a window.
Once again, he is identified by an inscription that only gives his name and
adopted city.
The iconography is generally similar, with differences of presentation
according to the imaginative exploring of the interface between saint and
tree by this painter in Constantinople (he is not the same as the icon
painter, in any case). In the funerary chapel (parekklesion) adjacent to the
main church of the Chora, the neighboring window provides a way to
imagine the unfolding of the saint’s presence in space and under particular
light conditions. The light from outside falls from right to left, and the
vertical opening for the window echoes the framing of the elongated
saint’s portrait beside it. The decorative design of the window enclosure
likewise rhymes the leafy patterning of the tree canopy, which is also part
of David’s body.9 The play of light and forms, and the nearness to the
gardens of the monastery signaled by the window and its floral patterning,
resonate for worshippers the liminal figure before them.
David is settled in the canopy, a basket-like bustle of leaves, while the
rather long, attenuated trunk rises to meet their overstory. The trunk
8
Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami. Volume 1: Historical Introduction and Description
of the Mosaic and Frescoes (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 258–60.
9
Contemporary artists have similarly been exploring the experiences and meanings of
bringing nature, particularly trees, inside—for them, museums, but for Byzantine visual cul-
ture, perhaps a similar augmentation of signifying power by displacement of trees into
churches. On the history of such moves in modern art history, see Mark A. Cheetham,
Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s (University Park, PA: PennState
University Press, 2018), 27–48. And the visual rhymes of floral and arboreal patterning in
relation to the cross, for example, have been noted by scholars, for example, in Pippa
Salonius, “The Tree of Life in Medieval Iconography,” in The Tree of Life, ed. Douglas Estes
(Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020), 297–300, and Michael D.J. Bintley, Trees in the Religions of
Early Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2015), 58–66.
Fig. 4.4 Fresco of St. David the Dendrite, 1315–21, Parekklesion, Kariye Camii,
Istanbul. (Photograph courtesy of The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks
fieldwork records and papers, circa late 1920s–2000s, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees
for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.)
appears to have been pruned, since a stump is visible on the left-hand side
of the trunk. The tree is a cultivated plant, as they would be presumably
since they lived in the churchyard of that church in Thessaloniki. Byzantine
trees in art have merited a close, sympathetic study for some time, but they
are often consigned to conventional genre details, if considered at all. But
trees are among the most difficult thing to draw and paint, and re-pay
attentive looking. John Ruskin wrote of the inimitability of trees that pro-
duced in artists “a more hopeless state of discouragement—a more
4 BECOMING-TREE 117
freezing and fettering sensation of absolute impotence.”10 The compari-

son between the human and arboreal forms is a strong challenge accord-
ing to Ruskin’s judgments of artistic skills, and plausible renderings of
trees in paintings demand study not only of trees but also of the human
form. Muscle and skin in both need careful observation and skillful ren-
dering.11 One might say that David’s muscle and skin are largely merged,
submerged, in the passage with tree, since those elements of his human
self are underplayed with his hair and garment coverings. But Ruskin
argues, justifiably, that techniques of painting tree and man are equivalent,
and those techniques of making themselves recapitulate this very cybor-
gian rendering here.
David is inside the parekklesion, and yet is of the green world on the
other side of the wall; he is ascendant as holy man of treetops, and yet is at
the level of mortal worshippers witnessing him there; and not chased by an
ardent god, he is yet choosing to leaf, bark, trunk, and root himself to the
limits of our recognition and understanding.
Stone, Wood, and Animism: Prehistories

The differences between the stylite and dendrite on the Vatopaidi icon are
not great, despite the apparent divergence in the marmoreal and arboreal
appendages of the saints. They both describe a relational animism that was
deeply woven into Byzantine attitudes and behaviors. That kind of ani-
mism, particular to this culture but sharing aspects with most (if not all)
human cultures, is predicated on a spread of agency throughout the mate-
rial world. Humans share with all things (a democratic designation we use
to include humans, too) life, though each life is different in intensity, pace,
showing. It is, in this way, a transformative world of meeting and merging
10
See Modern Painters, 1, section VI, “Of truth of vegetation,” chapter 1 (London:
George Allen, 1903), 574–605, 574 n2, and Charles Watkins, Trees in Art (London:
Reaktion, 2018), 7–8.
11
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, ed. and ab. David Barrie (New York: Knopf, 1987), 165
(585), “Generally, I think the perception of the muscular qualities of the tree trunk incom-
plete, except in men who have studied the human figure; and in loose expression of those
characters, the painter who can draw the living muscle seldom fails; but the thoroughly
peculiar lines belonging to woody fibre can only be learned by patient forest study.” And “…
for the bark is no mere excrescence, lifeless and external, it is a skin of especial significance in
its indications of the organic form beneath …”
of entities, things, matter.12 The merging of entities and emerging of new

bodies are reflective and generative of an animist viewpoint, in which all
entities circulate, inflect, and transform one another. Here we have a dis-
tinct register within which approaches to the divine are modeled for
Byzantine Christians; trees and stone are such pervasive and necessary
entities in that lived world. These figures can also stand for the ways all
humans can find amplification and even surplus selves.
Wood and stone from early points in human history were subject to
particular attention by humans, who found in them facets of power of the
more-than-human. They were shown respect, given gifts, had rituals
devised for them.13 Similar attitudes are still with us today, if effaced to a
large degree from the monotheistic religions that originated in the Middle
East. Particular attention to trees, wood, and stone is, nonetheless, present
in most practices, if frowned on at the elite level (among Byzantine
Christians, at least).
Wood and stone share a long history as materials and beings. An under-
standing of the essential relations between column and tree dates to some
of the earliest writings about prehistoric religion. Historians of religion
and archaeologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued
that stone columns in temples or precincts were monumentalizations of
sacred trees; early columns may well have been trunks purposed for devo-
tional focus, as well as architectural support. For example, explanations for
the prominence of pillars and trees in the prehistoric art and culture of
Crete, which Arthur Evans named after the legendary king Minos, focused
on just these questions of the prominence of trees in narrative religious art
and of wooden columns. Like others in the nineteenth century, Evans
presumed that religion and art moved “naturally” to monotheism and
figuration from polytheism and afigural representation.14 The Minoans
were a transitional culture, in the sense that they had a well-developed
12
See Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel?
(Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021).
13
Examples and further discussion below. But see also the excellent treatment of the his-
tory of animism and trees in David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern
India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Priscilla Stuckey, “Being Known by a
Birch Tree: Animist Reconfigurations of Western Epistemology,” Journal for the Study of
Religion, Nature and Culture 4 (2010): 182–205.
14
See the recent treatment of this historiography in Ailsa Hunt, Reviving Roman Religion:
Sacred Trees in the Roman World (New York-Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016), 29–71. And see now Marte Zepernick, “Heilige Bäume” in der antiken griechischen
Religion (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2020).
4 BECOMING-TREE 119
tradition of figuration directed at divinities, but that they also maintained

a childlike adoration of trees and columns. Now justly discredited, this
progressive view of the history of religion saw the Ancient Greeks as a
further step in the move of the human to its achievement and perfection
in the modern western European man, who was able to go beyond mate-
rial props altogether and achieve truly spiritual understandings of a
single god.
One of Evans’s key arguments for this model was predicated on wooden
columns in Minoan architecture and art deriving from trees.15 In other
words, the columns were trunks taken from trees treated as holy, contain-
ing or channeling the divine. As such, the sanctity of holy trees carried
beyond their lives as trees and continued to imbue the remnants of these
trees after their milling and into their deployment as architecture. This
ongoing presence of sanctity in vertical, wooden columns was simply a
step on the way to the figurative stage of Greek art and religion, again, a
transition to the more “fully developed” stage of “civilization” represented
by Greeks and Romans. For Evans, tree worship was an essential compo-
nent of Minoan religion and built environment, and his lengthy 1901
article was a strong assertion of the validity of his argument, which is,
indeed, still resonating in scholarship on Minoan culture. Evans depicted
the relation of tree and column to the divinity in highly persuasive terms:
The same religious idea—the possession of the material object by the numen
of the divinity—is common to both. The two forms, moreover, shade off
into one another; the living tree, as will be seen, can be converted into a
column or a tree-pillar, retaining the sanctity of the original. No doubt, as
compared with the pillar-form, the living tree was in some way a more real-
istic impersonation of the godhead, as a depositary of the divine life mani-
fested by its fruits and foliage. In the whispering of its leaves and the
melancholy soughing of the breeze was heard, as at Dodona, the actual
voice of the divinity. The spiritual possession of the stone or pillar was more
temporary in its nature, and the result of a special act of ritual invocation.16
And he ended his extended argument with an account of visiting a column

shrine in Macedonia, shared among Muslims and Christians, and of his
participating in the “primitive” ritual. This sense of (and indeed not quite
entirely suppressed appreciation for) the divine presence in stone and
15
Arthur J. Evans, “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and Its Mediterranean Relations,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies 21 (1901): 99–204.
16
Evans, “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult,” 106.
wood was comprehensively described with evidence from antiquity to the

early twentieth century. Many still follow his explanations for cult and
religion in Minoan culture, and perhaps even implicitly his biased account
of human history.
However flawed that model turns out to be, the religious role and affin-
ity of trees and columns is impossible to ignore, and in a recent work,
Caroline Jane Tully has continued to argue for integral connections
between pillars and trees in Ancient Near Eastern religion.17 In her view,
the evidence does not allow one to see historical trajectories from ani-
conism to figuration along the line of Evans’s model. This progressive
view, of course, is not held by contemporary scholars. Rather, Tully
attempts to update, as it were, the particular kind of animism that drove
Minoan culture.18 Part of that updating is straightforwardly accepting
animism as a viable, sophisticated mode of thinking about and being in the
world, a position someone like Evans was not able to take. “New ani-
mism,” according to Tully and colleagues, asserts “that the landscape was
not merely an inert backdrop to ritual performance, but was rather sen-
tient, numinous and contingent, functioning as a politicized, active agent
in the enactment of power.”19 The frequent presence of trees and
17
See Caroline Jane Tully, The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant, Egypt,
and Cyprus (Louvain: Peeters, 2018).
18
Albert Henrichs, “‘Thou Shalt Not Kill a Tree’: Greek, Manichaean and Indian Tales,”
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16, nos.1–2 (1979): 85–108, here 95–7, for
example.
19
Sam Crooks, Caroline Jane Tully, and Louise A. Hitchcock, “Numinous Tree and Stone:
Re-animating the Minoan Sacred Landscape,” in Metaphysis. Ritual Myth and Symbolism in
the Aegean Bronze Age, ed. E. Alram-Stern et al. (Leuven-Liège: Peeters, 2016), 157–64,
here 157, and further, “In contrast with this primitivist evolutionary epistemology, animism
drawn from cultural anthropology posits a relational ontology, in which a reflexive related-
ness exists between human agents and elements within the natural environment, perceived as
being sentient. This animistic ontology is newly conceived as focusing not upon the question
of whether an object is alive, but upon how it is related to.” And see also Vesa-Pekka Herva,
“Flower Lovers, After All? Rethinking Religion and Human-Environment Relations in
Minoan Crete,” World Archaeology 38, no. 4 (2006): 586–98.
For a divergent position, see Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore
and Landscape (Woodbridge, Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2010), 5, who holds that tree
reverence was not “part of an animistic belief that the trees themselves were embodiments of
the spirits of dead ancestors,” but it was more likely due to “the fact that [trees] were the
dwelling places of deities whose ‘hidden presence … is seen only by the eye of reverence’.”
The last is a translation from Tacitus, Germania, 9, which might also be rendered, “They
4 BECOMING-TREE 121
goddesses in Minoan art, from this perspective, has to be understood

within an active constellation of trees’ powers and abilities in areas of
human life such as fertility, death, regeneration, order, and stability. In this
world, trees, columns, and deities are found, mobilized, and made present
in forms like a tree or a vertical shaft (wooden or stone). These elements
form a sophisticated constellation of “sentient, numinous and contingent”
entities, and such premises will guide this discussion of Byzantine culture,
as well.
Another historian of ancient religion, Martin Nilsson, had been skepti-
cal of the claim that trees, let alone wooden and stone pillars, could have
power, except as supporting members for a building, but he also adduced
a number of examples from Hebrew scripture in which freestanding pillars
are named, the presumption being that a certain numinous power was
believed to adhere to those objects.20 For example, the brazen columns
before Solomon’s Temple were called Jachin and Boaz, meaning the
Stabilizer and In Him Is Strength, respectively, and the dimensions of the
pillars were likewise recorded (I Kings 7:15, 21).
Evans had likewise been able to produce proof texts in the same tradi-
tion for the animation and holiness of trees, and he cited 2 Samuel 5:24,
in which the poplar trees communicated the presence of the Lord before
the army of David as they advanced toward the Philistines. Other sacred
trees are also extraordinarily active in scripture, like the oak at Mamre and
the bush at Sinai, to mention just two.21 In the Greek tradition, trees
consecrate woods and groves, and they apply the names of deities to the abstraction which
they see only in spiritual worship” (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseu
s%3Atext%3A1999.02.0083%3Achapter%3D9).
20
Martin P. Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion,
2nd ed. (Lund: Gleerup, 1950), 236–61.
21
Evans, “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult,” 113–4, where he also writes, “What gives the
tree and pillar cult of the Semitic world and its borderland such a special value as an illustra-
tion of the distant records of the Mycenaean worship is its long continuous survival. While
the aesthetic sense of the Greeks transformed their rude aniconic idols into graceful human
shapes and veiled the realities of tree-worship under elegant allegories of metamorphosis, the
conservative East maintained the old cult in its pristine severity. The pillar or cone, or mere
shapeless block still stood within the sacred grove as the material representative of the divin-
ity. In the famous black stone of Mecca, Islam itself has adopted it, and the traditions of
pre-Islamic Arabia maintain themselves in the shape of countless lesser Caabas and holy pil-
lars throughout the Mohammedan world. In how unchanged a form this ancient pillar cult
of the Semitic races still survives—even upon what was once counted as Hellenic soil—will
be seen from a striking illustration given below from personal experience.” He vividly
describes that encounter with a pillar cult in Macedonia at the end of his long study.
continued to have a central ritual and prophetic importance, as Nilsson

and Evans agreed, and cult centers like Dodona in Epiros continued to
function until the late fourth century C.E., when the great oak of Zeus
was cut down.
These examples reveal the possible movement of signification among
these elements of wood and stone that derives from belief in the inherent
power in these entities so vividly present and active in the natural world.
We recognize the complexity of the distinct histories of stylites and den-
drite saints, of course, and we do not want to suggest confusing and sim-
plifying them to the point of identity. And yet, maybe they are not so
different at an important, basic level either. This icon is precious (and
indeed unique, to our knowledge) evidence of how tree, column, and
human come to form holy assemblages that transcend natural and human
discrete forms. Their eco-powers as saints are intensified in this cyborgian
state in which they are shown. And their strange hybrid natures are then
magnified and also distilled in these new bodies. Finally, the pairing of the
two is not accidental, and it cannot be explained by a shared feast day or
common place of activity—although dendrite saints are frequently said to
have come from the east. Rather the pairing here was determined by the
special conditions of their bodied assimilation to their mode of asceticism,
their move to a shifting border of their own otherness, which shows to us
their superhuman and human claims to becoming other, an othering that
is open to any human, potentially. And one might say open to trees, too,
for the tree perched on the inverted tree in Giuseppe Penone’s “Le foglie
delle radici,” is also a tree occupying a stylite position. Here, a tree can
imagine themself into a merging and supplanting roost in metal, which is
also tree upside-down.
The icon is not the only evidence that the Byzantines recognized the
affinities of pillar and trees saints. In the twelfth century, Eustathios, arch-
bishop of Thessaloniki (ca. 1115–95/6), drew metaphorical connections
between the two vocations, “But this generation sprouts the stylite race
like trees in a forest, and these are not trees of life, nor trees of knowledge,
but puny little trees indeed.”22 His likening of the great pillar-standing
saints to trees was obviously not complimentary. And yet he also spoke of
22
Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula, ed. T.L.F. Tafel (Frankfurt am Main:
Beerenverlag, 1832; rp. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1964), 97 (XIII, 38); trans. Alice-Mary
Talbot, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800–1453 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre
Dame University Press, 2019), 155–6.
4 BECOMING-TREE 123
the ladders to heaven the great stylites of the past had employed, and we
want to take seriously the positive valences that wood and trees have in
both his appreciative reading of the past and negative reading of the cur-
rent crop of saints. Moreover, traditionally, the very bodies of those stylite
saints were said to be like trees in their essential form, as Jacob of Serugh
(451–521) eloquently described, for example, “While a branch of his body
was cut from its tree, his face was exuding delightful dew and comely
glory.”23 The comparisons could also travel the other direction, when
Joseph the Hymnographer (816–86) praised David, “O God-illuminated
stylos of ascetics.”24 We might think of dendritism as apprentice work to a
higher calling in stylitism, for John of Ephesus (ca. 507–ca. 588) tells us
of Maro the Dendrite who went from his tree, reluctantly, to his brother’s
pillar after that sibling’s death. In other words, the connections between
stylitism and dendritism were played out in various ways by Byzantine
ascetics and churchmen, but the loftiness of the calling, in both senses, is
common to them, as were the transformative potentials (for human and
tree) in growing closer to God.
St. David the Dendrite and His Tree-Totaling

No Byzantine texts or images match the Minoan situation, except the
Vatopaidi icon. It is a highly unusual rendering of these two vertical forms
completed by bearded, elderly men. The column shaft and the tree trunk
parallel each other, and each is topped by a kind of capital or overstory that
encloses or subsumes the men. This form of the stylite merging with his
ascetic prosthesis is not entirely unusual, but the dendrite is, certainly. The
combination of these forms on the one icon is, as well, and it intensifies
the elements shared between the ways of practicing their spiritual
athleticism.
These assemblages that constitute their bodies are indeed strange,
although just above Jacob and Eustathios give us some ways to under-
stand their affinities to each other. We are sometimes able to overlook the
weirdness of medieval images and see emblems that we know to read alle-
gorically. But there is nothing obvious about these two assemblages. These
23
“Homily on Simeon the Stylite,” in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A
Sourcebook, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush, trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1990), 22.
24
Latyshev, “O Zhitíyahb Prepodoónago Davida Solunskago,” 227.
figures merit close consideration, because they reveal to us human poten-

tial in wood and stone, and vice versa. The two are in an image-frozen
form of becoming-other, one stone, the other plant. We might think of
them as inert tools, a column and a tree, but the icon (and we argue texts,
too) reveals these nonhuman elements to be inseparable from the saints’
bodies themselves. The icon experiments with the boundaries we so often
assume separate us from the world and shows a godly alternative to our
discretion in the thoroughgoing relationality here.
The icon makes a visual case for seamless and totalizing absorption of
stone, wood, and flesh. The phenomenon of the stylites has been exam-
ined with particular rigor and insight in recent years, but scholars have
written only intermittently about, and without much probing of, the
unusual figure of David the dendrite saint. Aligning the saint’s life with
recent work on plant theory, this chapter now attempts to come to terms
with some of the meanings of the icon and with some broader issues about
plants and humans in the Byzantine world. Byzantines were not early
champions of plant parity between vegetal and human, for example, and
David struggled with life in and among plants. The dendrite saint’s life
tells a story of partial accommodation, of incomplete assimilation, while
the icon models an ideal: the successful achievement of this particular
asceticism that looked to plants for transformative approaches to the divine.
The hagiographic traditions of David stand for possible sources of
inspiration for these painters, who were not following in a clear tradition;
this iconography has no series beyond these examples. They did offer rich
possibilities, and these painters explored some facets that that form of
asceticism offered. However, the divergences between verbal and visual
need noting. In the hagiographic tradition, dendritism is described, told as
encounter, but it is a transition, a means to a higher level of asceticism that
transforms fundamentally, and yet trees are left behind.25 Comparable to
the lack of plant parity in the hagiographies, out of the three images
treated here, two explore the tree potentials of the saint. The transforma-
tion is at the forefront in the Chora and Vatopaidi examples, that saint-tree
hybrid unmistakable. The images see the heart of this asceticism, where
25
Marder, Plant-Thinking, 134, “like that of the gods, the freedom of plants (from con-
sciousness and from self-relatedness, from need and from the conatus) is not purely negative;
if it appears to be so, this is due to the insufficiency of language, be it rigorously conceptual
or raw and colloquial, but in any event hopelessly mired in anthropocentric references and
projections.” Hagiographies simply can’t process what images can.
4 BECOMING-TREE 125
edges of human-plant blur and merge. And yet their small number and the
counter-example of the relief in Thessaloniki show reserve, hesitation, and
uncertainty, before tree life and love.
The hagiographic tradition, like the iconographic, is not extensive. In
1887, Valentin Rose published the then-sole-surviving text describing the
wondrous mission of David, a saint from the east who settled in
Thessaloniki, met Justinian and Theodora, brought about miracles, and
for his ascetic expression, climbed an almond tree and sang like a song-
bird.26 That text was written, it seems, between 707–15, and Rose gave
the saint’s life span between about 450 and about 530. It was by no means
the only treatment of this unusual monastic exercise of tree-climbing, and
David was the subject of a small number of other treatments, including an
encomium by the Late Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologus in a typi-
cally baroque style. John Moschus (ca. 550–619) tells the story in his
Pratum Spirituale of a monk Palladius, who had committed to the monas-
tic life on account of hearing of David’s life, but more importantly wit-
nessing his fire miracles many times in Thessaloniki (69).27 Evidently, these
ascetic feats of David of Thessaloniki maintained a hold on the imagina-
tion of Orthodox Christians throughout the Middle Ages.
In the next chapter of Pratum Spirituale (70), Moschus tells the story
of another tree-living saint in Thessaloniki, a certain Adolas, a recluse, who
“confined himself in a hollow plane tree in another part of the city. He
made a little window (μικρὰν θυρίδα) in the tree through which he could
talk with people who came to see him.” During an invasion, some barbar-
ian tried to kill him, but was “rooted” to the very spot—the suggestive
term used by the translator. The original reads like a description of a tree,
arms extended and motionless: ἔμεινεν ἐκτεταμένην ἔχων τὴν χεῖρα καὶ
ἀκίνητον. He himself was treed, in other words, with his hand stuck up in
the air like a branch. Adolas only relented after the man realized he was
subject to a miracle and asked for forgiveness; then Adolas “healed” him,
26
See Rose, Leben des heiligen David, and Latyshev, “O Zhitíyahb Prepodoónago Davida
Solunskago,” 217–51, Vasiliev, “Life of David of Thessalonica,” Raymond-Joseph Loernertz,
“Saint David de Thessalonique: Sa vie, son culte, ses reliques, ses images,” Revue des Études
Byzantines 11 (1953): 205–23, and Constantine P. Charalampidis, The Dendrites in Pre-
Christian and Christian Historical-Literary Tradition and Iconography (Rome:
Brentschneider, 1995).
27
PG 87.3.2921a-2924a; John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum Spirituale), trans.
John Wortley (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 52–3.
he was un-treed, and he left.28 Out of all the edifying tales Moschus col-
lected on his lengthy travels, these are the only two tree-related figures.
Both in their different ways lived in trees, and again in different ways, those
trees extended their own subjecthood to saints and those around them.
David is not unique, nor was he the first Christian dendrite, but he was
going against the grain, to some degree, in his assertion of tree-hugging
as askesis. John of Ephesus stated that holy men uprooted altars, destroyed
shrines, and cut down trees.29 Trees were potentially threatening powers,
and they offered lairs for malevolent demons and focus for idolatrous wor-
ship. Historians like Lynn Townsend White, Jr., have been strong critics of
Christian eco-sensitivities (or lack thereof):
To a Christian, a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole con-
cept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West.
For nearly two millennia, Christian missionaries have been chopping down
sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.30
Some truth might reside in that accusation, and dendrites were not com-
mon and were perhaps even a little sensitive regarding the idiosyncrasy of
their choice of a tree for a dwelling. Something of caution over being too
closely associated with trees comes through in a tale about an unnamed
dendrite, who denied his calling. In this Syriac text, the holy man descends
from his tree and goes to Jerusalem. While he is recognized later in Tripoli
for his dendritism, he denies being that man in the tree. Only after he
28
PG 87.3.2924ab, The Spiritual Meadow, 53. See Vasiliev, “Life of David of
Thessalonica,” 125–6.
29
Kyle Smith, “Dendrites and Other Standers in the ‘History of the Exploits of Bishop
Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa’,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 12, no. 1
(2009): 128, and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus
and The Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 99. See
also Paolo Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts, Economy, and
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–6.
30
Lynn Townsend White, Jr. “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155
(10 March 1967): 1203–7, here 1206. On White’s legacy, see inter alia, Nicolas Howe,
Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space (Chicago-London:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11–15, and Ellen F. Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape:
Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3–15.
4 BECOMING-TREE 127
enters a monastery does he tell his story about having stood in a tree, and
he is then received among his brothers.31
The eastern origins of the dendrite in that Syriac text is an indication of
the region out of which tree-climbing asceticism originated.32 And in the
Middle Byzantine hagiography of Nicholas the Younger of Voinaina, the
saint is said to come from the east.33 David, too, was from the east, out of
Mesopotamia, though the exact location of his native land is not men-
tioned, nor other details of his early years. But his eastern origins and his
achievements in the west were celebrated, for in the short biography in the
Menologion of Basil II (ca. 1000), David is likened to a star that rose in
the east but set, brilliantly, in the west, having illuminated all with his vir-
tues.34 Like a star, the text says, he rose into the tree top and made his
throne (kathedra) there, which he sat in.
The positive aspects come through sufficiently well in these sources that
the virtue and value of dendritism appear to have gained a purchase on a
small corner of the Byzantine religious imagination. Strangely, perhaps,
since few forests could be found in the east, tree-sitting asceticism was first
imagined there; it came west to a region of greater tree density, if not
greater popularity. But for those drawn to the treetops, the challenges are
clear, and so the reward greater, one might say. The anonymous dendrite
already mentioned lived on a cypress, but he was constantly being knocked
from his perch by the devil; he asked for God’s help, so he wouldn’t keep
falling, and was sent an angel to watch over him and keep the devil away.35
David sought a special immersion into sacred and natural history for his
withdrawal from the world, and an almond tree he found outside a church
in Thessaloniki was for him not an object of aggression and destruction,
but a site of relation, immersion, and tree totalization. Even if he felt some
ambivalence, for he was not to spend his entire career there (unlike the
Baron of Italo Calvino, who committed his entire life to the overstory;
31
F. Nau, “Opuscule maronites: Histoire d’un bienheureux qui demeurait sur un arbre à
Ir’enin,” Revue de l’Orient Chrétien 4 (1899): 337–40.
32
Smith, “Dendrites and Other Standers,” 119.
33
Saints of Ninth-and Tenth-Century Greece, trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Ioannes Polemis
(Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2019), 5.
34
PG 117.512–3, Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 16, and Vasiliev, “Life of David of
Thessalonica,” 129.
35
Nau, “Opuscule maronites,” Hippolyte Delehaye, Les saints stylites (Brussels-Paris:
Société des Bollandistes-Auguste Picard, 1923), CLXXIV–CLXXVI, and Smith, “Dendrites
and Other Standers,” 120.
we’ll come back to him). For David, this otherwise unnoted, unnotewor-
thy almond tree was the site of his remaking, where he found the lofty
means God had selected for him to work miracles on the surface of
the earth.
The early section of the hagiography describes, after professions of
unworthiness of the narrator, David’s first steps in his monastic vocation.
He spends time in the monastery of the Koukouleotoi, dedicated to Sts.
Theodore and Mercourius, performing laudably as a monastic model,
which means reading scriptures constantly and meditating on the great
men of those holy texts. And the narrator runs through many of them,
from Abel to Jesus himself.36
However, as the vita states, David was irresistibly guided by a mission
of eponymous worthiness. In one sense, his drive and achievements were
already determined by his identity; his name retromotivated his decision
and subsequent action. Such predeterminations by language were not
uncommon, for the Archangel Michael was likewise called on to create a
healing site called Chonae, or “funnels,” in western Asia Minor (also
known as Colossae, where one of the Pauline letters was sent); his epiph-
any there had its outcome already selected when he then struck the rock
and created the funnels for the water, and the place-name could subse-
quently live up to its designation.37 In like fashion, David had a model to
aspire to, a model built into his own name, to which, in the logic of the
hagiography, he had no resistance. He asked himself, as he sought out the
terms of his vocation, how he was to be deserving of his namesake, the
great Hebrew king and prophet. Tree-sitting was not the obvious answer,
and the almond tree was not specifically inspired by God. But his heart was
gripped by terror at divine judgment, and David first sought a delay, a
reprieve for his soul’s habilitation:
King David, the servant of God, asked three years in order to learn good
judgment and knowledge, and after three years God heard his prayer. It is
necessary also that I sit in this tree for three years so that my Lord Jesus may
reveal himself to me and take notice of my lowliness, and then grant me
knowledge and humility to serve him in fear and trembling.38
36
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 3–4 (1–3).
37
See Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001), 164–5.
38
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 4.28–33; trans. revised from Vasiliev, “Life of David of
Thessalonica,” 121.
4 BECOMING-TREE 129
Now, climbing the tree was David’s choice and is not sanctioned by the
Psalm he cited in the hagiography, “Teach me knowledge and good judg-
ment, for I trust your commands” (Psalm 119:66).39 But likening the
ascent to the almond tree to David’s defeat of Goliath, the new David
took his place in the tree after many hours of prayer. The text does not
make clear if this comparison of tree and Goliath is a generalized meta-
phor, or if the tree was in some way his enemy at this point. But the text
also doesn’t hide the fact that the tree contest was challenging for David.
He had surely chosen a difficult vocation with few direct models to guide
and sustain him. The closest parallel the narrator can fasten onto is the
cross and Christ’s sacrifice on it:
[T]aking up humility and crucifying himself on the tree, [he] put the devil
to confusion and rendered him powerless, observing the word of the Lord,
‘In your patience you shall win your souls’ (Luke 21:19).40
How David settled into the tree, except for extensive prayer, is never
described, and the general state was not comfortable: he stayed in the tree,
frozen, burnt, buffeted by winds, and all the while his angelic countenance
was untroubled, unchanged, just like a rose to those who spied him among
the branches. Indeed, that rose-like visage was only part of the planty
transformation that the patience given him by God allowed. The images
take a different visual strategy, not putting David’s face in the middle of
leaves, but supplanting the tree—not hidden, submerged within, but with
the saint in full metamorphosis. For the hagiographer makes clear in an
extended song of praise that David was interwoven with tree in all his
growths and fruitions:
39
There is a remote possibility that David was also gaining inspiration from Song of Songs
1: 6 (“they made me keeper of the vineyards”) and from the watchman of Isaiah 21: 6 (“Go,
post a lookout, let him report what he sees”), very common and quite specific motifs to
North African sources and iconography, according to Brent D. Shaw, “Go Set a Watchman:
The Bishop as Speculator,” in Leadership and Community in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honour
of Raymond Van Dam, ed. Richard Kim and A.E.T. McLaughlin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020),
63–89. (This reference was suggested by the ever-generous Barbara Crostini.)
40
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 5.11–14. See, now, Barbara Crostini, “Resolving
Humbert’s Crux: Anti-Greek Polemics and the Question of Crucified Saints,” in Contra
Latinos et Adversus Graecos: The Separation between Rome and Constantinople from the Ninth
to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Alessandra Bucossi and Anna Calia (Leuven: Peeters, 2020),
153–82, on the eleventh-century stylite, Lazarus of Mount Galesius, who was displayed as
crucified after death—an example of the assimilation of stylites to crucifixion also.
O earthly angel and heavenly man, for so in you is it fulfilled, blessed one,
the prophetic words, that state that it is [in you] just as the date palm flowers
and as the cedar of Lebanon abounds. For in this way, blessed one, the date
palm bursts forth in flowers in life. For while the tree in which you sat put
forth leaves, you, blessed one, brought forth virtue. And again the tree
brought a multitude of flowers, so you, blessed one, marvelous deeds. And
the splendor of your face and the gladness toward all make dim the pleni-
tude of flowers. The tree is filled with fruits for those watching in gladness,
and so you, blessed one, praise, carrying the fruits of godly knowledge. In
time, the tree gives forth fruit to humanity, and you, blessed one, pray and
beseech with your tears, given out from your pure heart to Christ our Lord,
singing the Psalms knowingly and saying, “I will extol the Lord at all times;
his praise will always be on my lips. Glorify the Lord with me; let us exalt his
name together. Those who look to him are radiant …,” and the rest of the
Psalm (cited here 34:1, 3, 5).41
His virtue put him in great demand, and we would think location in an
almond tree next to a church made him most conveniently accessible, so
he was sought after to return to earth, to protect his flock from the wolves
ravening those followers below. But he was fixed to his tree, “I shall not
come down from the tree until three years have elapsed, when our Lord
Jesus Christ will show me that he has accepted my prayer.”42 In due time,
an angel of the Lord told him that his three years had been deemed wor-
thy for descent.
So, he came back to that understory, the between roots and leaves,
where most of us live. But once you have aligned yourself with tree, cruci-
fying yourself to them, your discretion is altered, your nature wilded,
wooded, fruiting to the benefit of humanity. When David is taken down
from his kathedra, he is escorted by bishop and crowds to a waiting cell:
the often-asserted quality of these dendrites that distinguishes them from
their stylite cousins is that they are anti-social, but this trait is not consis-
tently described.43 And anyway how does one understand such a thing in
41
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 5.30–6.17. See Psalm 92:12–13, “The righteous flourish
like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the
Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God.”
42
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 6.28–31.
43
An assertion made by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Dendrites,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide
to the Postclassical World, ed. Glen W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge,
MA-London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 407, and Michael Whitby, “Maro the
Dendrite: An Anti-Social Holy Man?” in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed.
4 BECOMING-TREE 131
texts, and how many Byzantine saints (stylites, for example!) can be
described as social? In any case, David continued to work miracles: his
cell’s windows poured out flames, but when those seeing the fire came to
his rescue, he was untouched, a miracle that happened frequently, accord-
ing to Abba Palladius, who related the story to John Moschus. In this way,
David took on not only tree but also miraculous tree, a burning bush that
refused to be consumed before the appointed hour. That ability to with-
stand fire won him acclaim in the capital, when he undertook an unwanted
journey to intercede with the imperial couple, Justinian and Theodora.
Impressively, he was able to hold burning coals in his hands without any
harm coming to him. But in the end, he foresaw his death and was placed
in a wooden coffin for interment.44 From wood, we are reborn; to wood,
we shall return.45
From Trunk to Branch to Advent

This argument draws some of its terms and structures from the writings of
the recently deceased French philosopher Michel Serres, especially his
book Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent.46 In this work, the
arboreal becomes the fundamental framework within which we experience
time, happening, and meaning. Serres describes the trunk as format, an
accounting or countability, standardization, repetition, a generalized mea-
sure; “formats succeed without inventing, imitate without innovating.”47
The event is its opposite; it is the branch that realizes the possibilities of
the format and exceeds it,
Michael Whitby, P. Hardie and Mary Whitby (Oak Park, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers,
1987), 309–17.
44
Rose, Leben des heiligen David, 13.32–14.2.
45
We find this passage by Caitlin DeSilvey, from her excellent Curated Decay: Heritage
Beyond Saving (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 33–4, to be
highly evocative of this postmortem state of David, “Eventually the trees began to draw the
snarl of iron and steel into their generous vegetal embrace. The edge of a studded wheel
fused into gray bark; a branch thickened and lifted over the binder’s mass, carrying with it,
and gradually consuming, a loose length of chain; roots twined around steel tines. The
binder—designed to cut, gather, and fasten sheaves of grain—became bound in place … The
hybrid tree-machine works away at a perennial chore binding iron and cellulose, mineral and
vegetable.”
46
Trans. Randolph Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
47
Branches, 9.
[a]s that bomb whose contingent newness interrupts a state of affairs that
has been formatted for a long enough time to make people believe in its
perenniality … Rare, news of this type astounds when it is told; it tears apart
the old formats.48
And yet the event is not sufficient in itself, for it is possibly a sterile, dead-
ending extension of the trunk (or format), albeit in a new direction. What
changes everything is the productive, generative possibility of event
becoming advent:
tearing up a monotonous format, the event emerges as an exception to a

rule, a deviation from a habitual equilibrium, an interruption of a sequence;
the head of a sequence, for its part, an exit, the advent causes, in addition,
an existence to emerge, causes subjects, a history … to be born.49
Each of these elements in Serres’s generative framework form David’s

story, both in narrative and in metaphor, and they describe his transforma-
tions in the overstory. His history only begins when he climbs the tree,
which was the event that shifted the sequence of ground-hugging ascetic
practices available to him. In this decision, David went from trunk to
branch, from format to event. However, when he accepted the challenge
of the tree-living life, an advent occurred that made a new subject out of
him. The old format was torn up, discarded, when he branched into the
tree, and in the emergence of a new existence in David, now the dendrite,
he was re-born as a subject. Not entirely arboreal by the end—he managed
a few years and didn’t return—that self was re-made woody, leafy, branchy
in the full sense that allowed him to be a thavmatourgos, a miracle worker.
The advent was the new subject or history, and its symptom was this won-
derworking capacity newly acquired in the overstory by David.
Serres’s insights allow us to understand David’s emergence from the
hard, the exact, the laws of the trunk (the predictable, however hard-won,
sanctity of the monk), in order to be realized by his re-worked subject-
hood as holy branch: “pointed and piercing, [it] causes the unpredictable
to surge up, in which newness appears, in which, in addition … the indi-
vidual is substituted for the schema.”50 Just as the icons do not belong to
a series (we have only two like them, and we need a minimum of three for
48
Branches, 98.
49
Branches, 127 [ellipsis in text].
50
Branches, 176–7.
4 BECOMING-TREE 133
a rule, a format), so David cannot be a serried saint: he is a singular advent,

newly born as wondrous, wonder-making subject, branching into the
upper reaches of his almond tree.
But what is David? He climbs into the tree, like a bird and a rose, and
he speaks from his churchyard arbor, as he presumably interacted with
those who came to the church and visited the inhabited almond tree next
to it. He must have shifted around the tree, but he was always available for
view, for privacy in an almond tree cannot have been possible for him. We
can follow his transformation indirectly in the text, as we read our way
from his scriptural formation and ascent (his format leading to event), to
his advent as saint and new subject, able to invert the character of wood,
no longer susceptible to fire, like the Burning Bush. That visual form of
the saint emerging from the treetop echoes the iconography of the Virgin
Mary in the Bush before Moses, it’s true, but flames are not shown with
David. The saint is able to withstand flames too: he is advented as miracu-
lous man-tree.
Advent and Budding

We can try to understand David’s descent and departure to his cell (and
empire-wide fame) in the first place as a failed transplant or graft. In the
course of his book, Serres took several pages to allow another voice to
grow into his meditation on branches, that of Charles Péguy writing about
Ferdinand Brunetière.51 Péguy’s excursus on trees and genre is not
addressed directly by Serres, but coming midstream in his argument, the
change in tone and perspective is arresting, and it allows him to move trees
fully into his discussion of event and advent. And one way the extended
passage assists our reading of the David history is that it shifts our perspec-
tive a little toward the transforming tree and to generative image, away
from hard text and narrative and format. Try it another way: the almond
tree has offered shelter and site for David’s chosen withdrawal, but they
are rejected after the angel tells David his gift of three years there has been
acknowledged in heaven. So, the advent of sainthood occurs on account
of the tree’s eventfulness.
The tree accepts their new additions, their graft (to which we will return
below), advents David, and to the text the tree is henceforth dead. But in
51
Branches, 90–3, excerpted from Péguy’s Oeuvres en prose complètes, 3 vols. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1987–92), II: 576–641, here 583–5 (originally published in 1906).
their adventing, the tree created new life, subject, history in him. As Péguy
writes, a tree pours precious resources into a new bud, the beginning of a
new branch, rather than attempting to resuscitate a dead limb, and here,
a new bud is born, under the first one, often very far under, as far under the
first one as is necessary to reach the sources of sap that have remained alive;
a new bud lower, a new bud silently pierces the hard bark, a bud comes from
the interior and the profound, from the enduring insides of the tree. A
secret emissary. ‘From the Nymphs that lived under the hard bark,’52 a new
branch is being born at the axil of the abandoned branch, a new treetop is
being prepared. In this way and only in this way do trees restore themselves
and continue.53
The tree has their format, their innate processes that allow them to sustain
themself, to nourish and grow and reproduce. “From the formatted stem,
a branch will be reborn.”54 That format—the grown, healthy tree—allows
David to enter, live among them, and from the treeness, their interior,
their enduring insides, their perennial budding and flowering, comes a
new David (not only an heir to a biblical name, but a new version of the
self that first grabbed a branch and pulled up onto it).
The new branch, the new treetop, the new genre is not from the old branch,
the old treetop, the old kneaded, filtered, triturated, manipulated genre.
Redone, reprised, corrected, revised, augmented, diminished. No, it’s new.
Quite simply a new genre. It’s a new thing.55
This emergence of the new thing is possible because of the ability of tree
to remake, as well as to be re-made. The tree is transformed, even if the
text never returns to them, never states that they were acknowledged and
remembered as a host for David’s sanctification and miraculousness. The
text appears to have its agenda, and it follows its logic to guide David to
sainthood via his now fiery nature, so persuasive even of the emperor and
empress. The images “get” this newness, however. They see and show the
“new thing” that emerged from David’s story, not the quasi-independent
fireproof saint, but the strangely wooded nature that is at David’s core. So,
let’s keep the woody icons in sight, attend to the different lessons to be
52
Péguy quotes Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), “Elegy against the Woodcutters of Gâtine.”
53
Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes, II: 583; Branches, 90.
54
Branches, 10.
55
Péguy, Oeuvres en prose complètes, II: 584; Branches, 92.
4 BECOMING-TREE 135
learned from living in trees, and witness the relational intensity that comes
over one in the overstory.
Ubiquitous Grafting
For David is surely also a graft. The assemblage we see on the icon, of man-
tree indistinguishably together, is due to binding of branch to trunk (or
event to format, one might also say). Perhaps David here is an emblem or
symbol, a thing standing for some other thing, but if (and only) so, he is
surely a “new genre” of human and a “new thing” of nature. The graft took,
after a year or two, and not without some discomfort; it produced holiness
through “secret emissaries” that “prepared a new treetop.” The advent is
this remarkable new creature equipoised in their perfect, ramifying vertical-
ity, a human-i-tree. When the graft forks with new strength from the root-
stock, that fork-point, the newness of event, pushes up from the rule, the
base—now, we have the miraculous advent of saintly arborescence.
Grafting has a deep history in antiquity and in the middle ages as both
a practicality and a metaphor, and it is difficult always to separate them
fully as such, in the way that trees themselves are always at once “matter
and construct.”56 The process of tree-grafting was widely practiced
throughout the Roman and Byzantine worlds, and it has changed little
since then.57 The practice was demanding of skill and experience with
trees, while armchair-agriculturists’ texts (such as Palladius’s and Pliny’s)
on the process often projected a fantasy world of human dominance over
nature.58 For a graft to take, healthy rootstock and the scion, which is the
branch or shoot from another tree, must fuse together, with the tissue of
each healing for the trauma to be overcome and for a new unity of two
56
Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy, 1, and 4, “trees were simulta-
neously physical, botanical facts, and cultural artifacts.” His discussions of grafting at 45–6,
93–4, and 157–9, are highly useful.
57
Various mentions in Geoponika: Farm Work. A Modern Translation of the Roman and
Byzantine Farming Handbook, trans. Andrew Dalby (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books,
2011), 209–30, including almonds.
See the photograph from 1887, by Peter Henry Emerson, in Martin Barnes, Into the
Woods: Trees in Photography (London: Thames & Hudson-Victoria and Albert Museum,
2019), 115, for a view into that traditional knowledge.
58
See Squatriti, Landscape and Change, 94, and Michael Decker, “Agriculture and
Agricultural Technology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth
Jeffreys, John Haldon and Robin Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
397–406, here 400.
previously distinct entities to be achieved. The new union will make a new
tree, with the leaves, branches, and nuts or fruit above the graft genetically
identical to the scion, while the other portions of tree retain, of course,
their own genetic identity. But from grafting comes a new assemblage.
Some knowledge of the practicalities had to have informed the wider
cultural meanings of grafting in that world, however much wishful think-
ing went into writings about agriculture. The deployment of the meta-
phor by Paul in Romans (11:17–24) depended on it, surely. For him,
grafting is a way of explicating all of sacred history. The scion is supported
by the rootstock or trunk, and proper humility is due: “It is not you that
support the root, but the root that supports you” (18). God is the great
grafter, who chose branches to cut and branches to add in, and God’s skill
is such that even cut branches can be reintroduced. God is expert, stern,
and judgmental in tree husbandry according to Paul, and grafting then is
deep formatting for Christianity, as Michel Serres has it.
The word used by Paul for graft (κλάδος) was not employed by David’s
hagiographer, and again the textual translation of David’s story and its
meanings diverges from the visual version. While Serres has often cele-
brated the non-verbal and castigated those who presume that only words
truly capture experience and meaning, he does sometimes fall into the trap
he set himself,
La Fontaine evaluated [narrative] by recounting that an orator transformed

the listeners’ attention by himself recounting the ramification I have
described: in the spot where the stem breaks off, he placed a graft. He
grafted. The strange power that creates miracles lies in the branch. Narratives
stage it. How? At least by speaking.59
Speaking and writing give us a certain version of things, as we are doing

here, but they are not prior to event or experience, and they are not the
only or best ways of discovering what things mean or can mean. The visual
exploration of David’s nature and achievement on the icon and fresco is
not the same as the textual explorations, however much the texts help us
to make sense of them. There is always a surplus or excess in images, and
it is in that extra unsaid that rich and transformative elements can be
found, if we open ourselves to them. In the cyborgian assemblage of David
59
Serres, Branches, 119.
4 BECOMING-TREE 137
in these images, we might still find, Orthodox Christian or not, some

planty truths for humans.
In the icon and fresco, David is grafted as scion: “The branch doesn’t
kill the stem but is supported by it, even if it leaves it.”60 Both tree and
graft are thriving, and even if the scion should leave (as David did, of
course), the trunk continues to sustain them. Even after David descends
and departs, he continues to ramify in relation to the almond he left. And
we see that moment of first graft and ramifying in these images, the healthy
graft taking and flourishing, newly contingent to a newly plant-ish self.61
This process of grafting is deeply embedded in nearly every aspect of
making and creating in this world. For Paul, in one way, it was the manner
of creating a “family tree” of faith from old rootstock and new scions,62
but it was a rich process of writing and composing, too. Cornelia Vismann
explores some stimulating implications for writing, family relationships,
and law in a particularly thoughtful way.63 Her premise is that grafting is
one of the most primary cultural techniques. Grafting is like a medium, in
fact, in that it precedes different facets of human doing and understanding
(in the way that fire precedes cooking etc.), and it becomes a multi-faceted
cultural technique.64 Indeed, it is one example of an epistemological a
priori, one of the very technological conditions of possibility for percep-
tion and knowledge for humans. In other words, grafting is a technology
that is also constitutive of its meanings in its worlds. So, grafting exists as
a procedure, but it also determines and is informed by cultural meanings
brought to bear on it.
For Vismann, grafting is fundamental for understanding, for following
the basic cultural logic of, the Roman and Byzantine worlds. For example,
Roman practices of adoption exist as a composite process, where one piece
60
Serres, Branches, 67.
61
Serres, Branches, 105–6, “strong and keen, on the contrary, interest suddenly springs up
when the newness of the event shoots up from the rule …, [sic] when the graft diverges from
the rootstock … This book celebrated the waking at the fork-point between the stem and the
branch because these days we are living on this double point of tangency, from the which the
word contingency was derived.”
62
Serres, Branches, 105, “When Saint Paul announced the Good News, he grafted the
Christian branch onto the Jewish tree and its Pharisean bough’ the graft was born on the
rootstock … In the shape of a ramification, each … presents a stem, stable, and a branch, new.”
63
“Genealogische Ordnung und ungeschlechtliche Vermehrungsweise,” in Pfropfen,
Impfen, Transplantieren, ed. Uwe Wirth (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 51–63.
64
See Till A. Heilmann, “Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism,” in Classics and Media
Theory, ed. Pantelis Michelakis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 29–51, here 33.
is cut and added to another larger entity, and genealogical order results
along an arboreal model (the family tree, to wit). It is both a reality of a
tree technique, a chain, and a symbolic act, a resultant concept, that makes
grafting real within human relations, too. Vismann also discusses the law
codes of Justinian I (r. 527–65), the Institutiones published and promul-
gated in 533, which was self-professedly grafted onto the second-century
Institutiones of Gaius. Gaius’s originary document, the rootstock, was cut,
wounded, cropped, by the sixth-century revisors, who also added the
imperial preface to mask the graft. Originating in the agricultural tech-
nique, the law code, including family roles and adoption, was an imitation
of nature’s relationships in the medium of text.65 Textual practice is, at
root, grafting. And in this way, scripture, codes, family relations, among
other cultural techniques, originate in that basic technology of arboreal
propagation.66 David’s graft to that almond doesn’t need to be verbally
explicit in order to originate in that process, which was so common as to
be considered natural.
If grafting is so deeply embedded in Roman and Byzantine culture as to
be everywhere and invisible (in other words, a cultural technique), it also
reveals the vegetal qualities of our bodies. Michael Marder writes about
grafting as plant life’s “constitutive capacity for symbiosis and metamor-
phosis, its openness to the other at the expense of fixed identities.”67 And
it should be noted that trees are able to graft without human intervention,
and they do so for their own reasons. Marder also points out that grafts are
not restricted to plant bodies, but through surgical procedures, grafting is
a sometimes necessary part of our human survival,
of flesh proliferating on flesh, of skin breathing through its porous superfi-

cies like a leaf, of the entire body put together thanks to additions and
superimposition, not as a closed either/or totality but as a potential infinity
of and, and, and…
65
Vismann, “Genealogische Ordnung,” 60.
66
We might extend this notion of arborial propagation to trees who are told to write them-
selves. In the Geoponika, one is told how to produce almonds with writing, “Break open the
almond neatly, keeping the kernel undamaged. Open it, write whatever you wish on the
kernel, fasten it together with papyrus; plant it, plastering it round with mud and pigs’ dung,
and cover it with soil” (Geoponika: Farm Work, 222 [10.60]). In the case of the fig, the goal
is even clearer: to produce figs with writing. “Write whatever you choose on the eye of the
fig tree when it is about to come into leaf, and it will produce figs with the writing on them”
(Geoponika: Farm Work, 218 [10.47]). The goal of such alphabetic-grafting is not made
clear, but such trees and fruit produce and display mimetic writing.
67
Michael Marder, Grafts: Writings on Plants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2016), here 15–6.
4 BECOMING-TREE 139
Of course, such procedures are far from David’s world, and yet they allow
us to look back and see, too, how profoundly both our worlds are made
by them, how our bodies have always been open to the arboreal remaking
and re-pairing by means of the other. The new David is like Justinian’s law
code, a composite creature of new authority, power, clarity, and meaning.
And all of that is like Marder’s run-on conjunction, that potential infinity
of a simple and.
And that and is a means for the tree to survive, to carry on their living.
Out of a trunk, a new branch will grow, an event becomes an advent, and
David can go forward. As Stefano Mancuso has argued, plants are truly
dividuals, in the sense that “plants are so divided that their subsequent
subdivision is used as method of propagation.”68 They are not discrete,
unbreakable entities (so, the opposite of individuals), but indeed thrive on
distributed parts, as “metameric organisms,” that is, a body made up of a
set of unitary parts, or as a colony of modular parts. Mancuso asserts
plants’ perfect modernity, but in the sense that we have never been mod-
ern, so Byzantines could also know the value and beauty of creatures that
are “modular, cooperative and distributed structure without command
centers.” Modernity doesn’t have to enter into it. Grafting and tree propa-
gation are ways in which the dividual can continue their existence. Paul
even makes it evident that God is grafter, cutter, expert tree-husband.
David can carry on, branching holier now; grafted and cut; dividuated to
his new woody self, which is visible in images as tree-man, but textually
made clear through his miraculous fire-withstanding treeness. The root
and branch systems of his almond tree bore him forth. And.
And the Almond, After All

The collection of the American Colony, Jerusalem, contains a remarkably
beautiful photograph of an almond tree in the monastery of St. Catherine’s
at Mount Sinai, taken between 1910 and 1920 by an unknown photogra-
pher (see Fig. 4.1). The tree is in full bloom, and the blossoms carpet the
entire scaffolding of the tree; they are apparently an ancient tree, indicated
in part by the transparency of the foliage that allows branches and trunk to
68
Stefano Mancuso, “Plant Intelligence,” in Trees, ed. Pierre-Édouard Couton, trans.
Vanessa Di Stefano (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019), 48–57. And
see also Francis Hallé, “A Life Drawing Trees: Interview with Emmanuele Coccia,” trans.
Emma Lingwood, ibid., 32–47.
be seen, and in part by the struts, visible at the right-hand side of the pho-
tograph, that support the sagging structure. The terrain appears in the
upper portion of the photograph, as the mountain rises screen-like behind
the tree and wall. The sun is at the photographer’s back, and the sense of
epiphany, of a sensational explosion of blossoms, is strong. An early sign of
spring, the almond on this sacred land is also halated by light and bloom,
a fire that will leave the ancient tree untouched and ready for another
spring, possibly.
The branches sit low, and the tree looks especially accommodating,
even enticing, at this moment a century and more ago. Unlike David’s
almond tree, they are alone. After reading and looking at David’s work in
trees and its traces in art and text, it’s difficult not to try to find the tree’s
human complement among the leaves. The low-lying branches, and the
struts, make it a climbing tree. Someone could get up into this tree with-
out too much effort. Children could surely romp among their branches, if
they weren’t in a monastery, and the joy and excitement trees occasion and
participate in was not foreign to Byzantines, even Byzantine churchmen,
we’d hazard. This Late Byzantine icon in The Menil Collection, Houston,
of the Entry into Jerusalem manifests tree joy: within the branches and
directly over Christ’s head, six children chase, play, fight, dangle a little
dangerously; it is a multiplication and a ramification of the one person per
tree rule of David (Fig. 4.5).69 The tree is alone in the landscape, and
they’ve clearly been pruned; white highlights were applied to the green
foliage, perhaps in order to describe springy blossoms accompanying the
appearance of the Messiah.
These two images allow our imagination to roam around David’s voca-
tional choice, and in a way, these are the only ways into the tree that
changed David so fundamentally. While the almond tree is a consistent
feature of the hagiographic tradition, they are not developed into a strong
motif within the texts. The narrator of the first hagiography is clear that
David climbed an almond tree outside a church, perhaps like the Sinai
example, and that element is followed in later versions, too. The detail is
too specific to be incidental, and it may have been part of local tradition,
lending a certain realism in that way. Yet nothing is really made of it in the
69
Annemarie Weyl Carr, Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from The
Menil Collection (Houston: The Menil Collection, 2011), 56–9. The array of tree-climbing
people in Barnes, Into the Woods, 119–27, gives some sense of the longterm attraction of this
activity.
Fig. 4.5 Icon of the Entry into Jerusalem, Late Byzantine, Tempera and gold
leaf on canvas mounted on wood, 48.9 × 35.6 × 1.9 cm, The Menil Collection,
Houston, TX (1997–16 DJ), Tenth Anniversary purchase, with funds provided by
The Brown Foundation, Inc.; The Wortham Foundation, Inc.; Mr. and Mrs.
James Elkins, Jr.; Shell Oil Company; and Houston Endowment, Inc. (Photograph
by Paul Hester, courtesy of The Menil Collection)
course of the text. No special qualities of the tree’s growth, blossomings,

or fruit are ever mentioned; David lives in them, but he seems largely
indifferent (on the narrative level in that textual passage) to their particu-
larity as almond. Nor was that tree mentioned in other extant accounts of
dendrites. So, they likely have some documentary value, and perhaps they
were even still remembered almost two hundred years after David’s death
when the hagiography claims it was written. As we’ll see, Orthodox
Christians have deep attachments to and long memories about trees.
Our historical knowledge about the almond tree is limited. Almond
trees were certainly cultivated for fruit by the Late Byzantine period.70
Archaeology has begun to pay more attention to remains of plants on
sites, and evidence of almond use has been noted at the stone age site at
the Francthi Cave in Greece and in the tomb of Tutankhamun.71 Are such
remains noteworthy in themselves, that is, would we pay attention to them
as things, and not only as archaeological data? Giving the almond their
due might look something like the inclusion of six carbonized chestnuts,
dated to the sixth century and coming from Monte Barro in northern
Italy, in the recent book Fifty Early Medieval Things: Materials of Culture
in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.72 These entirely unassuming
objects, “things,” stand in for an important economic shift in the early
Middle Ages to foodstuff that demanded less labor and land than grain
does.73 The modest thingness of these dried and shelled nuts is affecting.
And attentiveness to that quality opens ways almonds and their trees could
also reveal to us the there- and thisness that David climbed into.
70
Angelike Laiou, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic
Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 30. And it was also a source of fire-
wood; see Oliver Rackham, “Land-Use and Native Vegetation in Greece,” in Archaeological
Aspects of Woodland Ecology, ed. Susan Limbrey and Martin Bell, BAR S146 (Oxford: British
Archaeological Reports, 1982), 192.
71
See, for example, Daniel Zohary Ehud Weiss, and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants
in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the
Nile Valley, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 212–40, and specifically 220.
And museological developments also highlight the importance of trees for past and pres-
ent cultures, such as the Museum of the Olive and Greek Olive Oil in Sparte, established by
the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation, which administers a consortium of museums
on the environment, natural resources, and Greek culture throughout that country.
72
Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti, Fifty Early Medieval Things:
Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca-London: Cornell
University Press, 2019), 80–3.
73
Squatriti, Landscape and Change.
4 BECOMING-TREE 143
The domestication of almond trees is attested in human prehistory, but

the process by which it took place is not knowable, precisely. The occur-
rence of sweet nuts is not common, and the normal yield is bitter and
poisonous to humans even in relatively small quantities. One can know if
a tree produces sweet fruit by tasting nuts after growth to maturity. Means
of selection and cultivation, historically, for the sweet nut are still debated
by scholars.74 Evidence for the scale of their cultivation in the Roman and
Byzantine periods is scant. Romans were very fond of almonds as dessert
nuts, and almonds were also used for oil in the Byzantine period, though
the degree of their exploitation for this purpose is not known.75 They were
in Pompeian kitchen gardens and orchards.76 But, given the difficulty of
their cultivation for sweet, non-lethal nuts, the almond appears to have
been used as an ornamental tree more frequently than for fruit-bearing in
the Roman period, which may account for their status as delicacy.77
In other words, it seems unlikely that David was drawn to perfect his
David-ness by climbing a tree that would also nourish him with their har-
vests. The tree to the right of the church in Thessaloniki was likely orna-
mental. At least, no mention of their bearing edible fruit is found in the
texts. The almond tree was no easy host for this ascetic quest. Indeed, they
were quite inhospitable to him, as the earliest hagiography makes clear.
The choice of almond for ascent to the overstory may have been con-
venience, since they could have been the first tree available, and close to
the church, they met his needs for a degree of sociability (pace those who
claim dendrites are anti-social). Unlike more commonly used wood-trees
in the Roman and Byzantine worlds, almond has no real history of wood-
working; we don’t know the wood of David’s coffin, either. Elemental
properties were attributed to varieties of wood that gave them their par-
ticular qualities; though it worked in reverse, so judging the properties
74
G. Ladizinsky, “On the Origin of Almond,” Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 46,
no. 2 (1999): 143–7.
75
See Andrew Dalby, Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece (London-
New York: Routledge, 1996), 81, and also his Flavours of Byzantium (Totnes: Prospect
Books, 2003).
76
Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, “Produce Gardens,” in Gardens of the Roman Empire, ed.
Wilhelmina F. Jashemski et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 121–51.
77
Emilia Allevato, Antonio Saraceno, Silvio Fici, and Gaetano Di Pasquale, “The
Contribution of Archaeological Plant Remains in Tracing the Cultural History of
Mediterranean Trees: The Example of the Roman Harbour of Neapolis,” Holocene 26, no 4
(2016): 603–13, here 609.
came from knowing what the wood was able to do and how it aged.78
According to Vitruvius (2.9), for example, oak is strong in the element of
earth, with little water, air, and fire, and so oak lasts a very long time, even
underground. Wood from watery places are pliant and bendable, because
of the aqueous content of their fibers, as in trees like elm and ash. The
almond doesn’t appear in Vitruvius’s discussion, and so whatever their
woody properties were, they don’t seem to have entered into David’s
decision to climb one. Byzantines left little original in their written culture
about plants, but that paucity of sources does not mean they had little
knowledge.79
Scriptural resonances may have guided his path to and up the tree. David
might have chosen a cypress, since they were often found in sacred pre-
cincts and had associations with immortality.80 Yet, the tree is not hospita-
ble, and they caused an anonymous dendrite lots of trouble, to the point of
needing to tie his ankle to them in order to stay aloft.81 The almond tree is
relatively safe, even though the hagiographies make a point of underlining
David’s discomfort. However, the almond has other valences in scriptural
history that David would surely have been aware of, given his careful atten-
tion to living up to his great namesake. The tree does not appear often in
scripture, but they come at highly significant moments. The miracle of the
budding staff in Numbers (17:8) is a sign of God’s particular favor for the
tribe of Levi, which was led by Aaron (see also Hebrews 9:4). And in the
event, the staff “had sprouted. It had put forth buds, produced blossoms,
and bore ripe almonds.” And in Exodus (25:31–6), the almond is again
chosen by God, this time as the model for the lampstand, among the
divinely designed objects carefully described in this book,
78
See, for example, Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Wordworking (New Haven-London: Yale
University Press, 2007), 239–62, and Sabine R. Heubner, Papyri and the Social World of the
New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 65–86.
79
See Alain Touwaide, “Botany,” in A Companion to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros Lazaris
(Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020), 302–53. And on the use of plants, including trees, for their
astrologically determined healing properties, which were also intensified or altered by the
location of harvesting and use, see the description in Maria K. Papathanassiou, “The Occult
Sciences in Byzantium” ibid., 464–95, here 482–4.
80
See Salonius, “The Tree of Life in Medieval Iconography,” 300–1, and Federica Borilo,
“A Dome for the Water: Canopied Fountains and Cypress Trees in Byzantine and Early
Ottoman Constantinople,” in Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium, ed. Brooke
Shilling and Paul Stephenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 314–23.
81
Nau, “Opuscule maronites,” Delehaye, Les saints stylites, and Smith, “Dendrites and
Other Standers,” 120.
4 BECOMING-TREE 145
Three cups shaped like almond blossoms, each with calyx and petals, on one
branch, and three cups shaped like almond blossoms, each with calyx and
petals, on the other branch—so for the six branches going out of the lamp-
stand. On the lampstand itself there shall be four cups shaped like almond
blossoms, each with its calyxes and petals. There shall be a calyx of one piece
with it under the first pair of branches, a calyx of one piece with it under the
next pair of branches, and a calyx of one piece with it under the last pair of
branches—so for the six branches that go out of the lampstand. Their calyxes
and their branches shall be of one piece with it, the whole of it one ham-
mered piece of pure gold (33–6).82
The divine favor for the almond shown in these passages reveals some of
the further retromotivation at play in this hagiography. Not only is David
vying with the first, great David, but he is also made flower of God; golden
and like a statue; budded, blossomed, and generative in his newly made
almond-self.83 His tree-formed perfection as miracle-working saint was
never in doubt. As David was waiting to make him, so was the almond.
Other Dendrites: John and Paul

David came from an unspecified region east of Byzantium, and we have a
small number of descriptions of other dendrites and their habitats in
Mesopotamia. The romance of bishop Paul of Qentos (said to be a place
in Italy) and the priest John of Edessa contains compelling evidence of
dendritism and the ways trees insinuate holiness and God-grafting. The
romance is thwarted from the outset, though the two holy men travel a
great distance together, all the way to Sinai and back to Edessa and beyond.
But Paul says to John when they first meet, “When you permit me to
attend to my former ways, I will be your beloved.”84 It is a cryptic state-
ment that only becomes clear once Paul disappears for the last time and
John stops searching for him. Paul’s ways are indeed solitary, and the
82
Similarly, see Exodus 37: 19–20.
83
These types from Hebrew scripture, including the staff and ritual implements of the Ark,
also extended to the Burning Bush, as already noted, and David shares these types with a
greater “illuminator of Hebrew shadows,” the Panagia.
84
Hans Arneson, Emanuel Fiano, Christine Luckritz Marquis, and Kyle Smith, The History
of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias,
2010), 44 (19), and see Smith, “Dendrites and Other Standers,” and Thomas Arentzen,
“Arboreal Lives: Saints among the Trees in Byzantium and Beyond,” Scandinavian Journal
of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 5 (2019): 119–23.
earthly bond between the two men is finally broken when John finds Paul
again. Then, Paul promises to go with him, only to escape a last time, to
John’s heartloss—the transitions from third-person to first-person plural
and then to first-person singular only make the story more wrenching. But
along the way, the holy men meet an unnamed dendrite when they came
to a mountain with a high tree on it and “there was a shadow of a man
standing in it.”
As you live, my brothers, I have stood in this position, lo, for thirty-five years
and no man has noticed me except the two men who come to me from time
to time to bring me provisions of bread and water. For a journey once called
me, too, to pass by this place just like you. And I saw a man standing on top
of this tree, a man heavy with white hair whom they called Abraham, head
of the mourners. When he saw me, he kept me with him for three days and
told me about the struggles he had had with the defiled spirits and about the
serenity his soul had received from God after his struggles. After three days,
he surrendered his spirit to God, and I brought him down and buried him.
Because my soul longed for the serenity of his soul, I climbed up and stood
in his place, and, lo, I await God’s deliverance. By your lives, then, my
brothers, because of the love of our Lord, stay with me three days as well,
and you will see a miracle. For the God who sent me to the blessed Abraham
also sent you at this time.85
Like a long-familiar tale, the dendrite dies, and likewise, we expect the two
holy men to take his place, as Maro did for his brother, going from tree to
pillar in that case.86 But they resist, apparently without much sense of loss,
for when he dies, “We then resumed our journey. The blessed man’s basket
and water pitcher we took with us as a blessing. And our Lord provided
great healings from this water through the prayers of the blessed man.”87
The two men’s sense of mission might seem to be antagonistically posi-
tioned against dendrites, but they have had some tree experiences before
their encounter with that anonymous dendrite in his last days above earth.
On their way to Sinai, Paul and John were kidnapped on the Arabian
Peninsula by a tribe of Himyarites, who nab the men and enslave them.
85
The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa,
58–62 (31–2).
86
See Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis, 28–9, 50–2, and Whitby, “Maro the
Dendrite.”
87
The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa, 62 (32).
4 BECOMING-TREE 147
As for the blessed men, they cruelly tied them up and brought them out of
the camp where there were many palm trees, from which the entire camp
was fed. Amidst the palm trees, there was one tall palm, very lush in branches
and fruits. They brought them under the tree in order to sacrifice them …
The king said to the blessed one, “It is the god of the camp.” John chal-
lenges their god to a battle, and he waved his hand at the palm, and said,
“Our Lord, Jesus Christ, fruit of mercy, you who by your will make all the
cedars of Lebanon grow, send your wrath upon this tree and utterly uproot
it so that the many will not worship it in error!” At once, a wind struck it
and pulled it up from its roots deep in the earth. Its branches and fruit
immediately withered away, and all of it was consumed by fire.
The holy men won, and the king conceded before he lost all his palms.88
Here is a story, then, of tree over tree, the righteous silviculturalist who
lords over all (God here in their cedar) versus the simple pragmatists, who
choose the tall, lush, and fruitful palm.
The holy men’s deep identification with trees (cedars) is in their choices
while among the Himyarites, even though they don’t take on the mission
of the dendrite at his death. David’s treeness endured, too, after leaving
his almond tree, as we’ve argued. Paul and John’s treeness is in their souls
and makes their vocations, even if those vocations are destined to part the
men before they find themselves together in paradise. On Sinai, their pil-
grimage was given no focus in the text, but in another latent Burning
Bush possibly, they now identify more directly with trees than before their
tree battle and pilgrimage:
Paul said to John, “Let us go, my brother, let us go to Edessa, the blessed
city. For, lo, of the twelve brothers in the cave, seven have passed away.
Indeed, I saw twelve shoots sprouting up in the cave, and men in magnifi-
cent raiment entered in and cut seven shoots from among them. And they
went and planted them in the paradise of God.”
Here is the way holiness regenerates itself, through tree planting, grafting,
rooting, and replenishing paradise. Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–73) had
already formed such views of trees of paradise and earth, and their links
become ours,
88
The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa,
50–6 (23–8).
Because Adam touched the Tree, he had to run to the fig; he became like
the fig tree, being clothed in its vesture: Adam, like some tree, blossomed
with leaves. Then he came to that glorious tree of the Cross, put on glory
from it, heard from it the truth that he would return to Eden once more.89
If assimilation of trees to salvific figures and humans, too, was possible, tree
was also a way to understand and experience the Trinity: the tree is the
Father, wood is Son, and shadow the Holy Spirit.90 In the Physiologus tradi-
tion, the peridexion tree frightens dragons, who then cannot catch the
dove that nests in the tree. The moral holds that the tree is like God the
Father, who overshadows creation and protects it (as Gabriel told Mary at
the Annunciation).91 Trees stand at the heart of creation and are it, too.
Other Dendrites: St. Nicholas the Younger

of Voinaina
In Byzantine hagiography, that spread of the divine through and in trees

is also present if we read through the genre with this kind of sympathy.
The recent appearance of a translation with facing text of the life of St.
Nicholas the Younger of Voinaina in the Dumbarton Oaks series reveals
deep connections among human, forest, and God. Now, Nicholas is not a
dendrite in the sense of choosing tree climbing as an ascetic vocation, but
he finds union with the divine there. A soldier, he escaped a lost battle
with companions and made his way to a mountain called Ternvon, which
was inhabited by ascetics, “a somewhat remote and quiet place, priding
itself on its forests and woods.”92 The enemy caught up with them, and
they hanged some of his companions from trees and impaled the others,
while Nicholas escaped: he “virtually outran himself and, soaring like a
bird, escaped quickly and reached the mountain of Vounina. [And] the
place he inhabited was wooded and had a cave in the shade of a tall oak,
89
St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, trans. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 164 (Hymn XII.10).
90
Charalampidis, The Dendrites, 60–1. See also Alfred K. Siewers, Strange Beauty:
Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2009), 61.
91
Massimo Bernabò, Glenn Peers, and Rita Tarasconi, Il Fisiologo di Smirne. Le miniature
del perduto codice B.8 della Biblioteca della Scuola Evangelica di Smirne (Florence: SISMEL
edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998), 43.
92
Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece, 13, and see also Arentzen, “Arboreal
Lives,” 123–30.
4 BECOMING-TREE 149
which formed a pleasant habitat for the athlete.”93 He met his end there,
speared in the side, in imitation of Christ. The remains of the saint are
undiscovered for an unspecified period of time, but the local governor,
suffering from leprosy, is visited by God in a vision who tells him he can
be cured if he finds the body and gives it its due honor:
You will discover a tall oak in the midst of a dense forest and a spring with
clear water nearby. Inside that tree you will discover the long-suffering body
of the martyr Nicholas. Clear away the thick underbrush there and build a
church for the martyr.94
The governor finds the body from these directions, and he finds the spring
and sees the great oak:
Inside the oak lay the long-suffering body of the martyr, emitting a spiritual
fragrance. The body lay there intact, complete. It was in perfect condition,
so that even the trees around it were sanctified—whether they were pine,
oak, or cypress.95
That oak had transformed itself into living, embracing reliquary or coffin,
and its sacred mission of patient care and waiting allowed the sanctity of
the saint’s body to emanate, soak, and charge that grove. Biologists talk of
the “wood-wide web,” a network of root systems and airborne elements
that allow trees to communicate danger and to share resources. That web
works in forests’ saturation and spread of sanctity: as he lived in the recesses
of the oak during his life (not above ground, but in and through the tree),
so that oak kept him after death, and merged with and shared his holi-
ness.96 The noses of the discovery party told them that the forest was thus
sanctified, “Looking up and down, they discovered that very tall oak. As
soon as they came near the oak, their nostrils were filled with the fragrance
that the tree emitted. They also saw the body of the saint …”97 The odor
came first, the suffusing smell of holiness, and then they saw the tree,
which was also the saint.
93
Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece, 15.
94
95
96
97
Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece, 63–5.
Holy Trees
The tradition of sacred trees goes back, as stated above, for millennia.98
Ancient sanctuaries very often included trees, and they comprised an inte-
gral component of the holy ecosystems of areas dedicated to the gods.99
The almond tree on the grounds of the church in Thessaloniki was not
given similar status in the hagiographic tradition, but they certainly belong
to the tradition of trees growing at communal sites of worship and devo-
tion. Such trees provide beauty, shade, perhaps fruit, but as living crea-
tures, they frequently come to take on deep relations to saints, including
Christ and the Panagia. Almonds are not among the most favored, in
stories of sacred trees, but their appeal for planting on church grounds is
understandable, in their relatively quick growth, their early and lovely
blossoming, and even the possibility of edible fruit. But some legends do
exist about the tree as a marker of the numinous, such as the almond tree
outside a cave near the monastery of Kykkos, the most famous monastery
of Cyprus.100 This almond tree grew at the mouth of a cave in which an
icon was found, and the tradition developed whereby cuttings from the
tree were taken by pilgrims. Once planted and established, they are known
as trees of the Panagia, and they ward off difficulties of mortal life. But
they also comprise a widespread almond grove across the island, a tree-
wide-web that allows the presence and protection of the Panagia to
98
For another overview, see Watkins, Trees in Art, 108–30.
99
See, for example, Jennifer Larson, “Nature Gods, Nymphs and the Cognitive Science of
Religion,” in Natur-Mythos-Religion im Antiken Griechenland/Nature-Myth-Religion in
Ancient Greece, ed. Tanja Susanne Scheer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019), 71–85,
Margaret M. Miles, “Birds around the Temple: Constructing a Sacred Environment,” in
Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination,
ed. Jeremey McInerney and Ineke Sluiter, Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 393 (Leiden: Brill,
2016), 151–95, and Matthew P.J. Dillon, “The Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary,” Zeitschrift
für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 118 (1997): 113–27.
Those holy trees were mysterious entities, divinized or acting as conduits, and their power
traveled with their constituent pieces. For example, the Argonauts used a beam made from
the sacred oak at Dodona in the keel of the Argo, and that beam spoke, guided, and warned
the adventurers. See Esther Eidinow, Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 67.
100
Anthimos Panaretou, E dendrolatria apo archaiotaton chronon mechri simera, 2nd ed.
(Nicosia: Filodasikos Syndesmos, 1979), 20–1. Panaretou also describes the trees of Cyprus
bowing down to welcome the miraculous icon of the Panagia and Christ to the island from
Constantinople. See, also, Henriette Gorter, Centuries Old Trees in Cyprus (Epe: University
of De Boschgeest, 1997).
4 BECOMING-TREE 151
transmit across her island. Her connection to and through forests is also
asserted on Mount Athos, which is still (though less) heavily wooded,
possibly the most wooded part of Greece today. But it is known as her
Holy Forest by many.101
Cyprus was once a heavily wooded island, and even into the period of
the British colonial administration of the island, bounties were being paid
for the clearing land of trees. And many beliefs and rituals developed
around trees, too.102 They often focused on trees growing at sanctuaries or
shrines, like the Kykkos example just noted, and they very often generated
strong affirmation of sacred protection. A saint, but primarily the Panagia,
had an interest in a particular tree, and their power and protection were
present in and channeled through their trees. Actions against a tree were
considered an action against the saint themselves, so deeply was the rela-
tional intensity perceived between tree and saint. Trees have often guarded
Christians of Cyprus from attack and destruction, such as the fifteenth-
century story of the oak of the Panagia Theoskepastis that hid her church
from Ottoman Turks bent on complete erasure of Christian presence from
the area.103 And the benefits of such trees were widely cherished, such as
the almonds of the Panagia from Kykkos, for example. As Irene Dietzel
notes, this reliance on trees for protection and healing is based on tradi-
tional, but sophisticated “ethno-pharmacological knowledge.”104
Cyprus is not the only Orthodox region where trees are treated with
reverence and respect. Orthodoxy often claims an ecologically aware posi-
tion, in relation to creation, and such sensitivity for ecologically important
components is integral to Orthodox Christians, according to folklorists
like Anthemios Panaretou. And it’s evident that other parts of the
Byzantine and Greek Orthodox worlds have well-established traditions of
tree veneration. In his study of the cult of trees in contemporary Crete, for
example, Peter Warren describes tree veneration at the monastery of the
Panaghia Myrtidiotissa, where a column capital is associated with the
101
Veronica Della Dora, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to
World War II (Charlottesville-London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 203 and 218.
And see Oliver Rackham, “Our Lady’s Garden: The Historical Ecology of the Holy
Mountain,” in Encounters on the Holy Mountain: Stories from Mount Athos, ed. Peter
Howorth and Chris Thomas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020).
102
Besides Panaretou, E dendrolatria, see Irene Dietzel, The Ecology of Coexistence and
Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the Religion, Nature, and Culture of a Mediterranean Island
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 124–9.
103
Dietzel, The Ecology of Coexistence and Conflict in Cyprus, 128–9 n126.
104
Dietzel, The Ecology of Coexistence and Conflict in Cyprus, 128.
sacred tree, and so we might glimpse here that ancient connection of tree
and column that continues to exercise scholars of Minoan culture. And at
the Monastery of the Panaghia Palianes, an icon folded into the trunk of a
tree on which it had been hung, and the tree was then considered identical
with the Virgin herself.105 This tradition of icon-enveloping trees is not
uncommon on Crete, and given the near identity, one might say, of sacred
figure, tree and icon, the strength of presence of the divine is firmly rooted.
In other east Christian traditions, trees are also focal points of sanctity
and active presence. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus,
it is not uncommon to see threads or small pieces of cloth tied to trees as
votives to a saint, the Panagia or Christ.106 The use of tree at Christmas is
a widespread tradition, but among Armenians, an uprooted tree is placed
before a church for the feast of Palm Sunday, and they are decorated with
fruits or flowers for marking the joyous entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.107 In
the Armenian tradition, the walnut is a potentially evil tree, because they
can contain electricity, so that an image of a person could be captured in
the walnut’s bark and thereby perish. Only the elderly could then plant a
walnut tree, it’s said.108 Likewise, in Georgia and Ethiopia, sacred trees are
deeply embedded in their cultures.109
105
Peter Warren, “Tree Cult in Contemporary Crete,” in Loibe eis mnemen Andre
G. Kalokairinou (Heraklion: Etairia Krêtikôn Istorikôn Meletôn, 1994), 261–78, where he
also writes at 275, “Yet, practices once established and beliefs once formed, and sustained
over long periods, are likely to build up memory banks and to become part of the conscious-
ness of how things are always perceived and done, aided by the permanence or long-lived
nature of features of an environment, such as trees.” And see Lucy Goodison, Holy Trees and
Other Ecological Surprises (Dorset: Just Press, 2010), 8–11.
106
For Armenia, for example, see Sylvie L. Merian, “Protection against the Evil Eye? Votive
Offerings on Armenian Manuscript Bindings,” in Suave Mechanicals: Essays on the History of
Bookbinding, ed. Julia Miller, 4 vols. (Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2013–15), I: 42–93, here
56, Susie Hoogasian Villa and Mary Kilbourne Matossian, Armenian Village Life before 1914
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 129, and Hripsime Pikichian, “Festival and
Feast,” in Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity, ed. Levon Abrahamian and Nancy
Sweezy (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 217–34, here 222.
107
Pikichian, “Festival and Feast,” 283 n6.
108
Villa/Matossian, Armenian Village Life, 129–30.
109
Cornelia B. Horn, “St. Nino and the Christianization of Pagan Georgia,” Medieval
Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998): 242–64, here 256–7, and from the short film The Church Forests
of Ethiopia, dir. Jeremy Seifert (accessed 3.xii.19), a priest says, “Every plant contains the
power of God, the treasure of God, the blessing of God. So, when someone plants a tree,
every time it moves, the tree prays for that person to live longer.”
4 BECOMING-TREE 153
Trees have long found themselves objects of veneration and of invoca-

tion, and their natures have been explored and speculated on over many
centuries. A middle Byzantine agricultural manual, the Geoponika, is a way
into these Byzantine (and more ancient) attitudes. In this text, we learn of
the emotional life of palms, in fact the “bitter love” of the female palm tree
for the male (see the previous chapter, too); we are told of the deep har-
monies of trees to cycles of sun and moon, for when any plant is planted
while the moon is waxing, they will grow rapidly, while waning, they will
grow low but strong; and plants reveal their transformable natures, like
rosemary, which was once a young boy loved by the gods, “Although he
changed his nature, he did not abandon his devotion to the gods. Hence
one pleases the gods much more by offering incense than by dedicating
gold to them.”110 Not all trees are benevolent, as any gardener or farmer
knows, and the walnut has a not entirely likable nature, unlike rosemary,
say, in their pleasingness to humans and gods.111
The availability of trees to romantic notions of perfect beings is a danger,
since such notions take away the complexity and independence of trees.
They don’t especially need us humans, but they make the best of the situ-
ation; they almost always thrive when we leave them alone. In Underland:
A Deep Time Journey, the British landscape writer Robert Macfarlane
interviews a biologist, Merlin Sheldrake, whose position on trees’
multifacetedness is a useful corrective to idealistic anthropomorphization:
Why should we expect fungi and plants to behave as humans started to

behave economically in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of lim-
[ h t t p s : / / w w w. n y t i m e s . c o m / v i d e o / p l a y e r s / o f f s i t e / i n d e x .
html?videoId=100000006808736] See, also, Fred Bahnson and Jeremy Seifert, “The
Church Forests of Ethiopia: A Mystical Geography,” Emergence Magazine (accessed 13.
viii.20) [https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia/?fbclid=IwA
R0yDyV3rh4lvI_Y_6nrUzAM1RMvaOXKxJjijA5MIMWiMm84Ara_QkWKCSY]
110
See Geoponika: Farm Work, respectively, 203 (10.4), 201 (10.2), and 239 (11.15). See,
also, Jacque Lefort, Géoponiques: Traduction (Paris: Monographies. Centre de recherche
d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2012); Carlo Scardino, “Editing the Geoponica: The
Arabic Evidence and its Importance,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 58 (2018):
102–25; and Christophe Guignard, “L’agriculture en syriaque: L’Anatolius Syriacus
(‘Géoponiques syriaques’),” in Les sciences en syriaque, ed. Émile Villey, Études syriaques, vol.
11 (Paris: Geuthner, 2014), 215–52.
111
See Michel Pastoureau, “Introduction à la symbolique médiévale du bois,” in L’arbre:
Histoire naturelle et symbolique de l’arbre, du bois et du fruit au Moyen-Âge, 2 vols. (Paris: Le
Léopard d’or, 1993), II: 25–40, here 37–8, who also mentions alder and yew.
ited liability companies? … But I’m also skeptical of the socialist dream of
fungi as sharing and caring, a rose-tinted vision that sees trees as nurses,
every tree a carer to every other, with ‘mother trees’ recognizing and talking
with their kin, and ‘injured trees’ selflessly passing on their legacies to neigh-
bours before they die … The forest is always more complicated than we can
ever dream of. Trees make meaning, as well as oxygen.112
It’s worth restating that the almond tree that re-made David into a den-
drite miracle worker is also potentially a killer. Trees give so much, and we
need them, but they’re not without risk.113 And yet, that riskiness is just
incidental; the almond tree is not trying to protect themself with their
potentially poisonous fruit. As Marder argues in another work, “vegetal
being revolves around non-identity, understood both as the plant’s insepa-
rability from the environment wherein it germinates and grows, and as its
style of living devoid of a clearly delineated autonomous self.”114 Trees’
senses of identity and self-interest are just fundamentally divergent from
our own.
How Alive Are These Trees?

The debate over this question is fraught. What makes plants alive, likewise
determines what animals mean, and so where humans fit biologically and
ethically into the world. The understanding of plants as having thoughts,
consciousness, abilities to communicate, and so on, very like humans, has
gained followers in recent years.115
So, Nicholas’s merging with his oak and David’s embrace of the almond
and their woody nature belong in our opinion to a long tradition not of
anthropomorphizing trees, but of recognizing and acknowledging the
special and powerful nature of trees and forests. Other ancient modes of
112
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York-London: W.W. Norton,
2019), 110–1, interviews a biologist, Merlin Sheldrake, whose statement as quoted is
given here.
113
See Haberman, People Trees, 106–31, for the menace of trees that accompanies
benevolence.
114
115
A strong version of this argument can be found in Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the
Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters
with Plants (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018), as well as Monica Gagliano, Charles
Abramson I, and Martial Depczynski, “Plants Learn and Remember: Let’s Get Used to It,”
Oecologia 186, no. 1 (2018): 29–31.
4 BECOMING-TREE 155
explaining trees and human connections to them have bearing on this

discussion, too. For example, Aëtius, compiling his studies in the first or
second century C.E., wrote that Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philoso-
pher (ca. 490–ca. 430 B.C.E.), had argued
that trees were the first animals to grow up from the earth, before the sun
was around it, and before night and day were separated; because of the sym-
metry of their blend, they include the nature of male and female. They grow
by being raised out by the heat in the earth, so that they are part of the
wombs. And fruits are excesses of the water and fire in the plants.116
The nature of trees’ life is always mysterious to us, and this explanation of
trees as animals, sexual and alive, even to the degree of having souls them-
selves, was not an isolated view and worked itself out in thinkers, worship-
pers, and agriculturists in various ways, as we’ve seen.
The philosopher Jeffrey Nealon has made the case in his book Plant
Theory from 2016 that Aristotle had made a strong argument for our cir-
culatory system being perfectly plantlike.117 The system corresponds to the
root system of plants in that spread of the soul of growth and nourishment
throughout organisms. In short, in Nealon’s view, Aristotle has always
asserted that we are not only rational animals—we are also walking plants.
One might go so far as to say plants, like us, are also conscious crea-
tures, and many miracles stories of Late Antiquity have been shown to
reveal that deep-seated assumption.118 And to carry the notion of transfor-
mation and the spread of consciousness forward to the early modern
period, the French botanist Claude Duret (ca. 1570–1611) believed in the
transmutation of species so that a fallen log turns into a fish if in water and
a bird on land, that insects are generated from the rotting wood of trees,
116
Brad Inwood, The Poems of Empedocles, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2001), 186.
117
Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2016), 34.
118
See, for example, Stephen J. Davis, Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and
Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 111–52, Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Taking Place: The Shrine of the Virgin Veiled by
God in Kalopanagiotis, Cyprus,” in Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium
and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: NP, 2006), 388–408, and Jens Fleischer,
“Living Rocks and locus amoenus: Architectural Representations of Paradise in Early
Christianity,” in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and
Modification, ed. Nils Holger Petersen, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Jeremy Llewellyn and Eyolf
Østrem (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 149–71.
and also that pollen is the same as sperm, so that a male tree impregnates
its spouse “by his breath and glance.”119 However, one understands and
explains them as living, ambiguity and mystery are trees’ métier.120 Jacques
Brosse wrote, for example,
Trees are not mysterious simply because of their timelessness, or because

they appear to undergo cycles of death and rebirth. They are mysterious
because they communicate with the deepest elements, their roots within the
earth, their cymes into the sky, which they seem to unite, hence making pos-
sible the communication between the two invisibles, above and below.121
He also points out that many of Carl Jung’s patients revealed their inner
states as drawings or paintings of tree, and in this way, trees are also
self-portraits.
In the Hellenic tradition from antiquity to modernity, trees have played
roles as surrogates and betters to their human counterparts, and they have
also shared many traits with them, like bleeding. Margaret Alexiou has
discussed the deep roots running through the Hellenic tradition, and she
treated trees, likewise, not only for the active roles they have played in
articulating human emotions and aspirations but also for their spread and
experience of commensurate life in the world around humans.122 The
Erysichthon myth is an example of this tree presence and life. Treated by
Callimachus and Ovid, this myth of the greedy, vindictive woodsman has
a history extending some millennia now. In Callimachus’s Hymn to
Demeter, the tree is cut by the heedless Erysichthon:
There was a certain poplar, a great tree reaching to the sky;

near this, the nymphs used to play around noontime.
When it was first struck, it cried out an ill note to the others.
Demeter sensed that the holy tree was suffering … (6.37–40)
119
George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the
Present (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68.
120
See Laura Rival, “Trees, from Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts,”
in The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, ed. Laura Rival
(Oxford-New York: Berg, 1998), 1–36.
121
Jacques Brosse, “Postface: The Life of Trees…,” [sic] in The Social Life of Trees, 300.
122
Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (Ithaca-
London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 257–65.
4 BECOMING-TREE 157
Ovid gives the tree the ability to curse her attacker, after the wound
inflicted by him begins to bleed. The nereid in the trunk is fully identified
with the tree, but hasn’t the agency to move and escape, nor to exact
revenge on the human before her death. That role is filled by Demeter
who curses the man with insatiable hunger and thirst, a condition that led
in the end to his self-consumption.123
This story structure is found in post-Byzantine tales of tree violence,
and Alexiou notes the reoccurrence in Modern Greek tales collected by
Richard M. Dawkins, for example. Dawkins recounts many such tales,
including the story of The Three Oranges, in which an evil queen does
violence against a tree, but a tree with some agency of their own:
As people coming from the palace passed through the garden, the tree
showed no movement, but scarcely did the queen, the young one I mean,
make to pass by then the tree showed as it would cleave her in two and put
out her eyes.
The tree was cut down, a voice came from the wood, and a beautiful girl
revealed herself.124
Alexiou is persuasive in her arguments concerning the reintegration of
motifs into this long literary life of the active tree of suffering and life.
Trees are embedded radically, fully as ways humans traverse creature forms
and states:
Throughout Greek culture, there is scarcely a more powerful symbol of the

sanctity of life, death, and rebirth than the tree. The tree is bisexual, self-
engendering, and polysemic. While its inner spirit may be female, its juice is
sperm…Sap gets virgins pregnant; the trunk protects the soul of life, as in a
womb, tomb, or chest…Nuts and dried fruits have regenerative and
protective powers; yet it depends on human cultivation to give forth its
123
Larson, “Nature Gods, Nymphs and the Cognitive Science of Religion,” and Hunt,
Reviving Roman Religion, 52.
124
See Richard M. Dawkins, Modern Greek Folktales (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1953), 2–6, and 13, which has a similar passage of an active, vengeful tree against a wicked
mother-in-law, but here the orange tree grows into the sky and become the star of dawn and
the pleiad. Another tree, a bay-tree, was a girl who lived in or was tree herself; for example,
“At midnight, the branches of the bay-tree parted, and out came a girl: never from mother
earth had come a girl as fair as she was. She came quietly and ate a little from all the dishes
and turned to go back into the bay-tree” (Dawkins, Modern Greek Folktales, 137–8).
produce: girls lick sap and bring forth heroes, boys lick the trunk to double
its size.125
Moreover, Alexiou traces the deep cultural and linguistic roots in Hellenism
of the exclamation of a widow before the corpse of her husband brought
into their home during the Greek Civil War—she cried, “my pine tree
(pefko mou),” simply, starkly, hauntingly, that took her back to Homer
and Romanus and the rich insights of Greek folk tales.126 These moments
and stories reveal the thresholds that human and trees traverse as they
travel back and forth to find their common natures.
Calvino’s Baron and Other Novels of Trees

Italo Calvino was one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, and
his novel The Baron in the Trees, published as Il barone rampante in 1957,
was a profound and whimsical fable of a young aristocrat who decides to
commit to trees. Calvino’s parents were both botanists, and so he was very
knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the plant world. Set during the
eighteenth century, the novel describes the young baron passing his life in
trees, after he revolted against a snail dinner made by his sister when he
was a boy. He never came down again, and he ate, slept, hunted, prayed,
studied, made love, and kept current of politics and events. He even trav-
eled all the way to Spain to see a whole community of dendrites, non-
religious sorts:
In Olivabassa, a double row of elms and plane trees crossed the town. And
my brother, as he came nearer, saw that there were people up on the bare
branches, one, two, or even three to each tree, sitting or standing in grave
attitudes. In a few jumps, he reached them. There were men in noble garb,
plumed tricorns, big cloaks; and noble-looking women too, with veils on
their heads, sitting on the branches in twos and threes, some embroidering,
and looking down on to the road now and then with a little sideways jerk of
the bosom and a stretch of their arms along the branch, as if at a window sill.127
125
Alexiou, After Antiquity, 260–1.
126
Alexiou, After Antiquity, 326–7, and also her The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 198–201.
127
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York:
Hartcourt, 1959), 125. And see Shelley Saguaro, “‘The Republic of Arborea’: Trees and the
Perfect Society,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 17, no. 3 (2013): 236–50, and Giulia
4 BECOMING-TREE 159
His time in the trees he likens to writing, “this cluster of branches and
leaves are just like this line of ink.” And the trees and he come to a kind of
symbiosis in which the trees welcome and allow his presence, and indeed,
they are the ways that allow his meaning as an ethical being to emerge and
be realized (and written). He is a much better steward of the lands that he
inherited than was his pretentious father, and his moral position is that his
living in the trees was inherently good.
So David was not as straightforwardly assimilated to tree-life as the
baron, who committed to life in the branches and never wavered. The
hagiography, of course, has David descend by God’s will after three years,
and certainly, the discomforts were listed vividly in the hagiography. Life
among the branches is not easy, as other fictional accounts also relate. The
American novelist Richard Price’s The Overstory (2018) was a highly suc-
cessful, large-canvas treatment of human degradation of forests and activ-
ist attempts to prevent or slow it. It also gives trees a cosmic relation that
lifts the story into morality fable, not so far, in one reading, from Calvino’s
story of the baron. But the inhospitable, difficult, and dangerous qualities
of tree life come through vividly when two of the characters spend a peril-
ous year in the upper reaches of a giant redwood. Not only do the human
“nesters,” who are protesting logging degradation of the forest, struggle
with living aloft, but the peril also comes from the ground up, as loggers
decimate this stand of redwoods and put the protesters, consequently, at
mortal risk.
These imaginative renderings of life among the branches, among which
we have to include the hagiography of David too, reveal to us just how
much trees keep to themselves and how little they accommodate them-
selves to our needs and desires. But we also make them more like us than
they are. We bring them under control with language, say. In the Canadian
writer Michael Christie’s Greenwood (2019), one of his characters notes
the limiting our language does to trees, while stating clearly how much
more than language they are:
They stand. They reach. They climb. They thirst. The drop their leaves.
They fall … We make them human. With our verbs. But really, we shouldn’t.
Pacini, “Arboreal and Historical Perspectives from Calvino’s Il barone rampante,” Romance
Studies 32, no. 1 (2014): 57–68.
Because they’re our betters. Our kings and queens. (We gave them crowns,
didn’t we?) And they are the closest things we have to gods.128
To return to Michael Marder’s arguments about gods and plants, by way

of this quotation, we can interpret trees’ aloofness, their indifference to
human life. We enact verbal and physical violence on them to subjugate
and exploit them, and yet they remain in flux, indifferent, above and below
our lives.129 The textual accounts here, historical saints’ lives, philosophy,
and modern novels, are inevitably caught up in capturing trees’ meanings
and actions, but like the characters, they all somehow come up short
before those creatures. Only Calvino’s baron comes close to accepting and
being accepted by trees.
It is we who must make ourselves treelike for them to show fully what
they do and possess. And in this way, David’s images and texts give ways
to read him as Byzantine tree. Images are overt in that identification of the
saint with his expanding and transforming almond tree. The text gives a
sense of resistance to David by the tree and of David’s struggles to main-
tain his life aloft. The hybrid figure of David-tree on the icon bypasses
language and manifests woody change.
David climbed in imitation of and in competition with his namesake, to
find his specific ascetic vocation, and the motivation for most of these
dendrites is not clear, unless they were drawn to replace a felled predeces-
sor. But he found his calling there, singing like a bird beside the church,
and his fame only amplified afterward as he carried his newly woody, fire-
proof nature to earth among humans. The icon from Vatopaidi demon-
strates their hybridity, now with submerged limbs both enmeshed and
twiggy, and flesh and emerging, calling out? The stylite who climbed his
ladder, the wooden ascent, is also in transition, like a man emerging from
a stony base. Michel Pastoureau has argued that medieval sources describe
the passage from wood to stone as progress of a socio-economic kind, and
technological too, but it can also represent a regression symbolically. He
cites stories of wooden statues that are punished for not fulfilling their
function by being turned to stone. In that view, to change from wood into
128
For poetic ventriloquism of plants, see Steven D. Smith, “Art, Nature, Power: Garden
Epigrams from Nero to Heraclius,” in Greek Epigrams from the Hellenistic to the Early
Byzantine Period, ed. Maria Kanellou, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey (Oxford-New York:
Oxford University Press, 2019), 346–9, on speaking gardens in sixth-century epigrams.
129
4 BECOMING-TREE 161
stone is degradation and a deprivation of life.130 In our extraction-based

economies, we see forests and mineral reserves as exploitable; we manage
them, not well, but we trust in our abilities. This icon gives a way into
another mode of thinking was also possible, where the holy and human
meet and mingle in other modes of life, stone and wood, where gaining
proximity to God is followed by becoming-other.
And yet we’re subject to what is called a “species loneliness.”131 We
know and are limited to this human nature alone, it seems; such an icon is
aspirational, you might say. David lasted only so long in the almond tree,
even though it advented him into a kind of burning bush figure, which
came to be a cognate to the Virgin and Christ Child in the Bush, a com-
mon iconography of Late Byzantine programs.132 He left the tree, even as
he ended in wooden coffin. John and Paul meet the “shadow in the tree,”
the dendrite who promptly dies; rather than taking his place, they move
along. Maro unwillingly leaves his tree to take his brother’s place, it’s true.
But trees are difficult to live with and in. Even while they permit a kind of
becoming, they remind us of our limiting discretion. As al-Tabari (839–923
C.E.) wrote about the saintly Faymiyun, who was walking with Salih close
behind, somewhere in Syria, when he passed by a tree from which some-
one called out Faymiyun’s name, “I have been continuously awaiting you
and have kept saying, ‘When is he coming?’”133 The loneliness of the tree
is maybe too much and too strange.
We should keep our ears open for this call so that trees might totalize
us, too. But we probably need new language to understand theirs, as
Robert Macfarlane recently wrote in Underland:
130
Pastoureau, “Introduction à la symbolique médiévale du bois,” 26.
131
See Macfarlane, Underland, 111–3.
132
Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment
of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), makes compelling arguments for
interpreting the burning bush as the vegetal embodiment of God, and such views further
expand the sacred reach of trees across multiple sacred entities.
133
C.E. Bosworth, The History of al-Tabari (Ta’rikh al-rusul wa’l-muluk). Vol. 5. The
Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999), 198 (921), “On one occasion, he was walking somewhere in Syria and passed
by a large tree. A man called down to him from the tree, saying, ‘Is that Faymiyun?’ The
latter replied, ‘Yes.’ The man said, ‘I have been continuously awaiting you’ and have kept
saying, ‘When is he coming?’ until I heard your voice and knew that you were its owner.
Don’t go away until you have prayed over my grave, for I am now at the point of death.”
Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest’s underland is a new

language altogether—one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own
use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors
by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-
human world.134
One thing about the tree-man images of David is that they provide “lan-
guage” for our understanding and becoming in the absence of words. This
visual grammar allows a kind of animacy, as visual metaphor is also too
vivid and literal to be something else (it can be, but in the first regard, it
just is what it is and what it says it is). In these ways, the icon provisionally
allows us to witness those becomings of David. Trees and columns go a
long way back together. They are too uncanny, perhaps. But these saints
manifest that emergence and submergence into things that only the cho-
sen few can.
134
Macfarlane, Underland, 111.
CHAPTER 5
Three Leaves: A Theopoetic Epilogue
From a bud on a stem of a tree called Knowledge, amidst the first folia
filled with words, hangs a green leaf among leaves. It watches a serpent
speaking with a human—in the beginning, humans went from tree to tree.
Behind its margin, half covered, bulges a glistening fruit.
“The fruit (ὁ καρπός) of your ardor exposes your ears’ satisfaction”
(Hom. 15 on Genesis), one John Chrysostom was later to tell his congrega-
tion.1 Who would not want to speak fruitily of Eden? The preacher gave a
series of sermons on Genesis and the humans and the trees in the Garden.
His reference to fruit might be read as a compliment congratulating the
audience’s attention or as an indirect exhortation to listen and bear fruit.
They had become juicy, or maybe they should be juicy?—it was up to those
ears to decide. At another point during the same series, he asked rhetori-
cally: “What use, tell me, is a tree stretching to a great height and growing
abundant leaves, if it is devoid of fruit? So, too, with the Christian: right
doctrines are of no benefit if one neglects the practice of living” (Homily
13 on Genesis).2 It all came down to fructifying. Clearly, John, like Eve,
kept his eye on the fruit. Like many of his friends, he appreciated tallness
in trees. Foliage was fine. Fruit, however, was what did it for the resolute
1
PG 53.118c; our trans.
2
PG 53.110b; trans. adapted from Robert C. Hill, Saint John Chrysostom: Homilies on
Genesis 1–17, FC 74 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 178.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5_5
preacher. Fruit was what folded Christians into arboreal metaphors and
similes, led them into tales of delectation and gustation. And as the leaf of
Knowledge knows, fruits not only form from floral ovaries in the drama of
plant reproduction; they can also provide humans and other animals with
nutrition and the pleasures of taste, turning the legged ones into vehicles
of vegetal procreation.
The plan was for humans to dwell in the Garden “and by fruition reap
the fruit (καρποῦσθαι) of much pleasure,” the preacher confirmed.
Working up an appetite, he exclaimed: “Consider how great a thrill it was
to see the trees groaning under the weight of their fruit!” (Homily 14 on
Genesis).3 Hello on the other side of the fall! Greetings at the end of sum-
mer. One may safely assume that the thrill overwhelmed the groan. Trees
tend to speak softly.
It is hard to escape the feeling that the Antiochian’s human gaze was—
presumably inadvertently—reenacting the primeval fall. Consider the
thrill! He looked past the leaves, for the lustrous fruit. We are always
already heading for fruit. “When the woman saw that the tree was good
for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be
desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen 3:6). Eve
looked past the leaves too. She went for the fruit and bit into its sweet-
ness—that fatally delightful sensation of consumption. And in that instant,
she saw herself naked. She yearned for wisdom and was—transformed by
the tree—granted the ambivalent knowledge of her own desire. Glossy
fruit would never be the same to her.
John Chrysostom was neither the first nor the last to invoke a taste for
fruit—to reenact craving so as to prohibit its indulgence. The story was
retold throughout the Byzantine period, and humans would continue to
narrate it to their children and read it in their churches, even in the
Anthropocene. Fruit’s delight and fruit’s dangers. The leaf is brushed
aside by hands, left to its own dangling. Meanwhile, the Christian religion
is a new vegetarian meal, the sacrifice of crops. We all need to eat. Humans
are like that. It’s what Plato called plant-soul.
Yet there is more to plants than meets the palate. John’s church would
probably, like so many early Byzantine churches, have been decorated with
the plants’ genitals. As Emanuele Coccia has noted: “We do not want to
see the fact that offering flowers [to each other] means actually offering
3
PG 53.114c; trans. adapted from Hill, Saint John Chrysostom: Homilies, 186–87.
5 THREE LEAVES: A THEOPOETIC EPILOGUE 165
sexual organs. It’s like to offer … dicks and vaginas.”4 Flowers, like fruit,
are sex. And like bees, we ought to engage in it, if for nothing else than
helping plants reproduce. Yet they return to us as reminders of how unat-
tentively we pass by their colors. We offer them in forgetfulness. Cast a
glance without blushing. Did the Byzantines fill their churches with this
neglect? Who knows! But another part of plants also covered church sur-
faces: the leaf. The leaf of Knowledge gently flutters in the breeze, speak-
ing in a still small voice: Don’t neglect me, as you are taking me in. I flicker
in every little bush. This leaf, like all the others, breathes with us.
From a bud on a stem of a tree called fig grows a thick-lobed broadleaf. It has
been left untouched by human hands that searched out other larger ones
along its branch. A strange couple tiptoes between trunks, all figged up before
the leaf. I see trees, for I behold something like humans walking around.
When Eve and Adam donned leaf-wear, this not only foreshadowed
David of Thessaloniki’s transformation amidst almond leaves but also
unfurled in a whole Byzantine tradition of people in trees; even Symeon,
perched on column rather than tree, wove his body into a palm belt.
Naked limbs sought refuge in foliage. Having become aware of their own
nudity, the humans approached the fig and sewed garments from its leaves
(Gen 3:7), stretching verdant veins around their own. Transformed by
one tree’s fruit, they chose to dress up in another’s foliage. No wonder
some Christians would later fantasize about Eve turning into a tree.
John Chrysostom paid far less attention to the leaf incident than to the
fruit one, and posterior narrators have mostly followed his example. Maybe
it is time to return to the matter of humans in leaf and to the spiritual
meadows in which the idiosyncratic lives of tree dwellers flourished. Their
implicit insight is that as humans we are also vegetal. David and Nicholas
show us to ourselves as grafts, signaling with their withdrawn gestures our
absolute dependence on leafy trees. John may not have known of den-
drites—although it is not impossible that he did—but with them we may
be able to don new readings and take seriously another part of trees, let-
ting the fig foliage of Genesis 3 carry us from fruit obsession to leaf belief.
In beginnings, as we know, nothing is entirely fixed. Stories of creation
4
In “Emanuele Coccia: Plants Make Us Human,” Live Mic: Best of Toronto Public Library
Conversations, an interview with Adria Vasil, 5 March 2020 (https://livemic.simplecast.
com/episodes/emmanuele-coccia-plants-make-us-human/transcript)
transpire as stories of transformation. Modern accounts of evolution say

that all arboreal primates, including humans, are fundamentally shaped by
trees, giving us rotating shoulder joints and freestanding thumbs that
allow us to move more easily through the branches. The fig leaf observed
how foliage was part of what humans became; it participated in their
becoming. Welcome to the atmosphere!
All animal life ultimately feeds on leaves. Coccia reminds us that “on
leaves … rests not only the life of the individual to which they belong, but
also the life of the kingdom of which they are the most typical expression,
that is, the whole biosphere … To grasp the mystery of plants means to
understand leaves.”5 Leaves provide oxygen—as they exhale, we inhale. In
no metaphorical terms, they breathe us as we breathe them; indeed, “the
breath (πνεῦμα) blows where it chooses” (John 3:8). Leaves belong to the
spirit (πνεῦμα)—or vice versa. They tremble as πνεῦμα emits “sighs too
deep for words” (Rom 8:26), knowing that sighs and words rely on their
own work. Foliage not only paints the invisible air with its movement in
the wind; in a very real sense, it also creates this air.
Deciduously speaking, forestscapes dress in the seasons of leaves. In the
spring, woods dense up in lush green, creating shade and color and pro-
tection for the forest floor and those who roam there. In the fall, as the
chlorophyll retreats and temperatures drop, foliage falls. Brown layers
cover the ground of November days, turning branches and trunks into a
dark grid of sticks through which the weakened sunlight seeps. Winter
comes with enhanced gravity and reduced photosynthesis. The greening
of spring again recasts the landscape.
Just before he passed away, the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen rewrote
one of his own poems about death and had it published posthumously:
As for the fall, it began long ago

can’t stop the rain
can’t stop the snow
…
I move with the leaves … (“The Goal”)6
5
Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, translated by Dylan
J. Montanari (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 26.
6
An early version was posted on the Blackening Pages (1998) https://www.leonardcohen-
files.com/goal.html (accessed 21 Dec 2020) and later printed in Cohen, A Book of Longing
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006). The poem in the form quoted here was released
as track 6 on the posthumous 2019 studio album Thanks for the Dance.
Weathering the relentless cycling of seasons, the poetic I seems to fade.

Eventually loosening its grip altogether, it will drift through air, feeling
the pull of the earth, moving with the leaves—perhaps falling. Gravity is
summoned, and you can’t stop the autumnal fall from slowly stealing the
color of the leaves, from turning rain into snow. (At least you couldn’t
until recently.) This shower drizzles into the primeval fall, which began
long before the Anthropocene. Buckets of rain. Buckets of snow. And yet
even gravity itself seems to dissolve, as the leaves, one may imagine, are
swirling in the autumn breeze.
The very imagery is part of an ancient movement, for there is nothing
original in death—not even a poet’s. Homer once said:
Just as are the generations of leaves, such are those also of men. As for the
leaves, the wind scatters some on the earth, but the luxuriant forest sprouts
others when the season of spring has come; so of men one generation springs
up and another passes away. (Iliad VI 146–49)7
The Hebrew prophet Isaiah bemoaned that “We all fade like a leaf, and
our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” (Is. 64:6) Human history
unfurls and decays like leaves, ephemerally.
Byzantines recognized beauty in foliage as well, a transient yet tangible
attractiveness that it shared with flowers. In one literary garden, leaves
participate in erotic play: “[The trees’] branches, which were in full foli-
age, intertwined with one another; their neighboring flowers mingled
with each other, their leaves fondled, their fruits joined” (Achilles Tatius,
Leucippe and Clitophon 1.15).8 Tactilely, almost tickling, arboreal parts
touch. In gardens, both real and imagined, leaves and flowers appear as
lovely as they are short-lived.
Not least in poetry, a more spiritual aspect of foliage budded forth. As
we noted in the beginning, Ephrem the Syrian imagined that the “blessed
7
Trans. A. T. Murray, Homer: Iliad, Volume I: Books 1-12, rev. William F. Wyatt, LCL 170
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 284–5.
8
Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. S. Gaselee, LCL 45 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1969), 45 (slightly modified). Regarding this passage and its nov-
elistic afterlife in Byzantium, see Ingela Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasure: Narrative
Technique and Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine & Hysminias (Uppsala: Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001), 209–10. See also Adam J. Goldwyn, Byzantine Ecocriticism:
Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
tree, the Tree of Life, is, by its rays, the sun of Paradise; its leaves glisten”
(Hymns on Paradise III 2).9 While the fig leaf transforms sunlight into life,
the leaves of the symbolic tree themselves radiate. Ephrem knew about the
other tree too, about the fruit of Knowledge and Adam’s fatal tree encoun-
ter, yet he understood that since “Adam touched the Tree [of Knowledge],
he had to run to the fig; he became like the fig tree, being clothed in its
vesture: Adam, like some tree, blossomed with leaves” (Hymns on Paradise
XII 10).10
Being arboreal, Adam would also speak arboreally. He addressed the
plants and their foliage as friends: “Blessed meadow, trees and flowers
planted by God, … let your leaves, like eyes, shed tears on my behalf!”
(Christopher, On the Transgression of Adam 4.3).11 In an earlier Greek
hymn, he begged Paradise to empathize with him and share his pain:
“with the sound of your leaves implore the Creator not to shut you!”
(Anonymous, Adam’s Lament 3)12 The subtle rustle of quivering greenery
may be heard by God, or so Adam thought. And many a prayer has been
fluttering in the wind throughout history, imitating leaves on trees, as God
will have noted. Many a rag has been tied to a sacred tree, dressing arbo-
real limbs in human cloth.13
9
Trans. Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, trans. (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990).
10
Trans. Brock, St. Ephrem, 164 [include page number for trans?].
11
Greek text in Τριῴδιον κατανυκτικόν, περιέχον ἅπασαν τὴν ἀνήκουσαν αὐτῷ ἀκολουθίαν τῆς
ἁγίας καὶ μεγάλης Τεσσαρακοστῆς (Rome: NP, 1879), 102–7. Christopher is an otherwise
unknown hymnographer, but this kanon hymn, composed before the tenth century, is
assigned to Cheesefare Sunday. For scholarly discussion of both this and the following
lament, see Derek Krueger, “Mary and Adam on the Threshold of Lent: Counterpoint and
Intercession in a Kanon for Cheesefare Sunday,” in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium:
Marian Narratives in Texts and Images, ed. Thomas Arentzen and Mary B. Cunningham
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 180–91, and idem, “Beyond Eden: Placing
Adam, Eve, and Humanity in Byzantine Hymns,” in Placing Ancient Texts: The Rhetorical
and Ritual Use of Space, ed. Mika Ahuvia and Alex Kocar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018),
167–78 (from where this translation is also quoted).
12
Frühbyzantinische Kirchenpoesie: I. Anonyme Hymnen des V.–VI. Jahrhunderts, ed. Paul
Maas, 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931), 16–20; trans. Ephrem Lash. This stanza is avail-
able in his St. Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ: Kontakia (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1995), 254; his translation of his whole hymn is available on https://web.
archive.org/web/20150702103638/http://www.anastasis.org.uk/adam’s_lament.htm
(accessed 21 Dec 2020). The hymn is still sung in churches of Byzantine rite to this day.
13
“Prayer trees” or “rag trees” can be found throughout the eastern Mediterranean. For a
survey of their role among various religious groups, see Amots Dafni, “Why Are Rags Tied
to the Sacred Trees of the Holy Land?” Economic Botany 56, no. 4 (2002): 315–27.
An unknown Byzantine preacher, spuriously identified as John

Chrysostom, praises the cross as being “clothing for my nakedness; its
leaves are the breath (πνεῦμα) of life” (ps-Chrysostom, On Pascha [sermon
VI] 51.5).14 Again, leaves flutter through πνεῦμα, or vice versa.
In a different dialogue, staged between the deep roots of the same
cross, the devil admonishes Hades: “Quiet, be patient, lay hand on mouth,
for I hear a voice announcing joy; a sound has reached me bringing good
tidings, a rustle of words like the leaves of the cross” (Romanos, On the
Victory of the Cross 14).15 Hades is asked to hold his breath, as leaf words
echo through the air and down to the underworld, heralding joy as grief
to the subterranean villains. Poetic folia speak in many tongues. The fig
leaf speaks only very little. It says: You were naked and I gave you clothing
(cf. Matt 25:36). This leaf must live, and it must die, must die and so must
live. This leaf, like all the others, breathes with us.
From a bud on the stem of a tall oak (a home to crows) above our heads,
where we are sitting on a garden bench, grows a leathery leaf. It sees us
breathing uneasily under our face masks, in the middle of a pandemic that
has taken so many breaths. It hears us mumble about fruit and some
Byzantine trunks and how we cannot eat through cloth.
One of us is reminded of another locus amoenus in the theological land-
scape: “Hail, tree with shady leaves, under which many shelter!”16 Foliage
offers protection, even in the guise of a Byzantine Theotokos. She appears
as hospitable as a chaste tree—or this old oak, for that matter. Breath of
life is wafting through her branches. It is as if trees create places all around,
but so discreetly that we fail to see them clearly. We all agree on that. It’s
like the wind sometimes.
14
Homélies pascales I, ed. Pierre Nautin, SC 27 (Paris: Cerf, 1950; rp. Paris: Cerf, 2003):
177; trans. from Kallistos Ware, “Through Creation to the Creator,” in Toward an Ecology of
Transfiguration: Ortho-dox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed.
John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013),
86–105, at 104.
15
Romanos le Mélode: Hymnes IV, ed. José Grosdidier de Matons, SC 128 (Paris: Cerf,
1967), 304; trans. Lash, St. Romanos the Melodist, 161.
16
Akathistos to the Theotokos 13.11, Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica, ed. C. A. Trypanis
(Vienna: Böhlaus, 1968), 29–39; trans. Ephrem Lash, https://web.archive.org/
web/20160405104129/http://www.anastasis.org.uk/akath.htm (accessed 21 Dec 2020;
trans. slightly modified).
Who wants an apple?

Leafing through this book, the oak attempts to remind us that the
ephemeral periphery of foliage is at the heart of trees: “Leaves are not just
the principal part of the plant. Leaves are the plant: trunk and root are
parts of the leaf, the base of the leaf.”17 By them, the energy of the sun is
transformed into life on earth.18 The oak leaf says: I guess you knew that?
Byzantines did not know that foliage provides oxygen through photo-
synthesis; that trees and other plants create the atmosphere is a more
recent discovery. Even if they lacked knowledge about the process, how-
ever, they seem to have paid more attention to trees than we do in the
forests of postmodernity and to have had a greater reverence for them. It’s
strange. They venerated them and feared them, hugged them and received
from their bounty. And when they looked at them, they saw themselves
sometimes, undressed in the arboreal other. It’s strange, isn’t it?
Leaves speak of the deciduousness of life.
The oak leaf lives, and it must die, must die and so must live. And as the
three of us are absorbed in discussion, a thin green-lobed blade lands on
the bench between us. This leaf, like all the others, breathed with us.
17
Sergio Stefano Tonzig, “Sull’evoluzione biologica: Ruminazioni e masticature” [unpub-
lished manuscript], 18, quoted from Coccia, The Life of Plants, 26.
18
cf. Coccia, The Life of Plants, 25–28.
Bibliography
Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon. Trans. S. Gaselee. LCL 45. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Alexiou, Margaret. After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor. Ithaca-
London: Cornell University Press, 2002.
———. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Allevato, Emilia; Antonio Saraceno; Silvio Fici; and Gaetano Di Pasqual. “The
Contribution of Archaeological Plant Remains in Tracing the Cultural History
of Mediterranean Trees: The Example of the Roman Harbour of Neapolis.”
Holocene 26, no. 4 (2016): 603–13.
Appuhn, Karl. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Archè: A Collection of Patristic Studies. Ed. J. den Boeft and D. T. Runia. VChrSupp
41. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Arentzen, Thomas. “Arboreal Lives: Saints among the Trees in Byzantium and
Beyond.” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 5
(2019): 113–36.
———. “The Chora of God: Approaching the Outskirts of Mariology in the
Akathistos.” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 4, no. 2 (2021) [in press].
———. “Some Early Christian Trees.” Studia Patristica [forthcoming].
———. The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5
172 Bibliography
Armstrong, Rebecca. Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Arneson, Hans; Emanuel Fiano; Christine Luckritz Marquis; and Kyle Smith. The
History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa.
Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2010.
Arnold, Ellen F. Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in
the Medieval Ardennes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook. Ed. Vincent
L. Wimbush. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990.
Bahnson, Fred; and Jeremy Seifert. “The Church Forests of Ethiopia: A Mystical
Geography.” Emergence Magazine [https://emergencemagazine.org/story/
the-church-forests-of-ethiopia/?fbclid=IwAR0yDyV3rh4lvI_Y_6nrUzAM1R
MvaOXKxJjijA5MIMWiMm84Ara_QkWKCSY]
Barnes, Martin. Into the Woods: Trees in Photography. London: Thames & Hudson-
Victoria and Albert Museum, 2019.
Basil of Caesarea. The Collected Letters of Saint Basil, vol. 1. Trans. Roy J. Deferrari.
LCL 190. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926.
Basilakes, Nikephoros. The Rhetorical Exercises of Nikephoros Basilakes:
Progymnasmata from Twelfth- Century Byzantium. Ed. and trans. Jeffrey
Beneker and Craig A. Gibson. DOML 43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016.
Bazzano, Giovanni B. “Cucurbita super caput ionae: Translation and Theology in
the Old Latin Tradition.” Vetus Testamentum 60, no. 3 (2010): 309–322.
Behr, John. Origen: On First Principles II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Benozzo, Francesco. “Il Cad Goddau del Llyfr Taliesin dai cataloghi di alberi
all’epica del paesaggio.” Quaderni di Semantica 19, no. 2 (1998): 309–25.
———. Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature. Aberystwyth: Celtic
Studies Publications, 2004.
Bernabò, Massimo; Glenn Peers; and Rita Tarasconi. Il Fisiologo di Smirne. Le
miniature del perduto codice B.8 della Biblioteca della Scuola Evangelica di
Smirne. Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998.
Bintley, Michael D. J. Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England. Woodbridge,
Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2015.
Birge, Darice. “Trees in the Landscape of Pausanias’ Periegesis.” In Placing the
Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock and
Robin Osborne, 231–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Borilo, Federica. “A Dome for the Water: Canopied Fountains and Cypress Trees
in Byzantine and Early Ottoman Constantinople.” In Fountains and Water
Culture in Byzantium, ed. Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson, 314–23.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Bibliography 173
Bostock, John; and H. T. Riley, trans. The Natural History of Pliny. Vol. 3. London:
H. G. Bohn, 1855.
Bosworth, C.E. The History of al-Tabari (Ta’rikh al-rusul wa’l-muluk). Vol. 5. The
Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1999.
Brosse, Jacques. “Postface: The Life of Trees…” In The Social Life of Trees:
Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, ed. Laura Rival, 299–303.
Oxford-New York: Berg, 1998.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark, 1937.
Burrus, Virginia. “Augustine’s Bible.” In Ideology, Culture, and Translation, ed.
Scott Elliott and Roland Boer, 69–82. Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2012.
———. Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
———. “Hagiography without Humans: Simeon the Stylite.” In Classical
Literature and Posthumanism, ed. Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel,
237–44, 387. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Byzantine Gardens and Beyond. Ed. Bodin, Helena, and Hedlund Ragnar. Uppsala:
Uppsala Universitet, 2013.
Calvino, Italo. The Baron in the Trees. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. New York:
Random House, 1959.
Carr, Annemarie Weyl. Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from
The Menil Collection. Houston: The Menil Collection, 2011.
———. “Taking Place: The Shrine of the Virgin Veiled by God in Kalopanagiotis,
Cyprus.” In Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval
Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov, 388–408. Moscow: NP, 2006.
Charalampidis, Constantine P. The Dendrites in Pre-Christian and Christian
Historical-Literary Tradition and Iconography. Rome: Brentschneider, 1995.
Charlesworth, James H. The Odes of Solomon: The Syriac Texts. Missoula, MT:
Scholars Press, 1978.
Cheetham, Mark A. Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ‘60s.
University Park, PA: PennState University Press, 2018.
Chiotis, Eustathios. “Springs, Sanctuaries and Aqueducts in the Ilissos Valley,
Attica, and the Enchanting Scenery in Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus.” Conference
paper, 2016.
Christie, Michael. Greenwood: A Novel. London: Hogarth, 2019.
Coccia, Emanuele. “Experiencing the World.” In Trees, ed. Bruce Albert, Hervé
Chandès, and Isabelle Gaudefroy, 24–31. Paris: Foundation Cartier pour l’art
contemporain, 2019.
———. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Trans. Dylan J. Montanari.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
174 Bibliography
———. “What is the Wilderness?” Spike 65 (Autumn 2020): 32–33.

Coder, Kim D. “Trees of the Bible: A Cultural History.” Warnell School of Forestry
& Natural Resources Outreach 43 (2016): 1–7.
Cohen, Leonard. Blackening Pages [https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/
mirror.html].
———. A Book of Longing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006.
———. Thanks for the Dance. Leonard Cohen and Various Artists. Prod. Adam
Cohen. Columbia-Legacy. 2019.
Constas, Nicholas. Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late
Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Courtonne, Yves, ed. Saint Basile: Lettres I. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957.
Crooks, Sam; Caroline Jane Tully; and Louise A. Hitchcock. “Numinous Tree and
Stone: Re-animating the Minoan Sacred Landscape.” In Metaphysis. Ritual
Myth and Symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age, ed. E. Alram-Stern et al.,
157–64. Leuven-Liège: Peeters, 2016.
Crostini, Barbara. “Resolving Humbert’s Crux: Anti-Greek Polemics and the
Question of Crucified Saints.” In Contra Latinos et Adversus Graecos: The
Separation between Rome and Constantinople from the Ninth to the Fifteenth
Century, ed. Alessandra Bucossi and Anna Calia, 153–82. Leuven: Peeters, 2020.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Dafni, Amots. “Why Are Rags Tied to the Sacred Trees of the Holy Land?”
Economic Botany 56, no. 4 (2002): 315–27.
Dalby, Andrew. Flavours of Byzantium. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003.
———. Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece. London-New
York: Routledge, 1996.
Davis, Stephen J. Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine
Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Dawkins, Richard M. Modern Greek Folktales. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1953.
Decker, Michael. “Agriculture and Agricultural Technology.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon and Robin
Cormack, 397–406. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Deferrari, Roy J., trans. Saint Basil: The Letters I. London: William
Heinemann, 1926.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les saints stylites. Brussels-Paris: Société des Bollandistes-
Auguste Picard, 1923.
Deliyannis, Deborah; Hendrik Dey; and Paolo Squatriti. Fifty Early Medieval
Things: Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Bibliography 175
Della Dora, Veronica. Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer
to World War II. Charlottesville-London: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981.
———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis-London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Detienne, Marcel. The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology. Trans. Janet
Lloyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Dietzel, Irene. The Ecology of Coexistence and Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the
Religion, Nature, and Culture of a Mediterranean Island. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2014.
Dillon, Matthew P. J. “The Ecology of the Greek Sanctuary.” Zeitschrift für
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 118 (1997): 113–27.
duBois, Page. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of
Women. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Dunn, Archibald. “The Exploitation and Control of Woodland and Scrubland in
the Byzantine World.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992): 235–98.
Ebbeler, Jennifer. Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in
Augustine’s Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Edmonds, J. M. Greek Bucolic Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1912.
Edwards, Mark J. “Locus Horridus and Locus Amoenus.” In Homo Viator: Classical
Essays for John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, and Mary Whitby,
267–76. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987.
———. “The Tree of Life in Early Christian Literature.” In The Tree of Life, ed.
Douglas Estes, 217–35. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Eidinow, Esther. Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise. Trans. Sebastian Brock. Crestwood, NY:
St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990.
Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula. Ed. T.L.F. Tafel. Frankfurt am
Main: Beerenverlag, 1832; rp. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1964.
Evans, Arthur J. “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and Its Mediterranean
Relations.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 21 (1901): 99–204.
Fehrle, Eugen. Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum. Giessen: A. Töpelmann, 1910.
Feist, Sabine. Die byzantinische Sakralarchitektur der Dunklen Jahrhunderte.
Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2019.
Ferrari, G. R. F. Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
176 Bibliography
Fisher, Philip. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Fleischer, Jens. “Living Rocks and locus amoenus: Architectural Representations of
Paradise in Early Christianity.” In The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The
Play of Construction and Modification, ed. Nils Holger Petersen, Mette Birkedal
Bruun, Jeremy Llewellyn and Eyolf Østrem, 149–71. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
Foltz, Bruce V. “On the Beauty of Visible Creation.” In Toward an Ecology of
Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and
Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz, 324–36. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013.
Fourteen Early Byzantine Cantica. Ed. C. A. Trypanis. Vienna: Böhlaus, 1968.
Foxhall, Lin. “Natural Sex: The Attribution of Sex and Gender to Plants in Ancient
Greece.” In Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the
Classical Tradition, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, 57–70. London-New
York: Routledge, 1998.
Frühbyzantinische Kirchenpoesie: I. Anonyme Hymnen des V.–VI. Jahrhunderts. Ed.
Paul Maas. 2nd ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931.
Fürst, Alfons. Augustins Briefwechsel mit Hieronymus. Jahrbuch für Antike und
Christentum Ergänzungs Band. Münster: Aschendorffsche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1999.
Gagliano, Monica. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking
Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books, 2018.
Gagliano, Monica; Charles Abramson I; and Martial Depczynski. “Plants Learn
and Remember: Let’s Get Used to It.” Oecologia 186, no. 1 (2018): 29–31.
Geometres, John. The Progymnasmata of Ioannes Geometres. Ed. Antony
R. Littlewood. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1972.
Geoponika: Farm Work. A Modern Translation of the Roman and Byzantine
Farming Handbook. Trans. Andrew Dalby. Totnes, Devon: Prospect
Books, 2011.
Giet, S. Basile de Césarée: Homélies sur l’hexaéméron. SC 26 bis. 2nd ed. Paris:
Cerf, 1968.
Goldwyn, Adam J. Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the
Medieval Greek Romance. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
———. “Did Byzantines Feel Ecological Grief? Mourning the Natural World in
Medieval Greek Literature.” Conference Paper, 2020.
Goodison, Lucy. Holy Trees and Other Ecological Surprises. Dorset: Just Press, 2010.
Gorter, Henriette. Centuries Old Trees in Cyprus. Epe: University of De
Boschgeest, 1997.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Briefe. Ed. Paul Gallay. GCS 53. Berlin: Akademie-
Verlag, 1969.
Bibliography 177
Grunenberg, Robert. “Poetics of the Palm Tree.” In Paradise is Now: Palm Trees
in Art, ed. Robert Grunenberg, 12–18. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018.
Guignard, Christophe. “L’agriculture en syriaque: L’Anatolius Syriacus
(‘Géoponiques syriaques’).” In Les sciences en syriaque, ed. Émile Villey, 215–52.
Études syriaques, vol. 11. Paris: Geuthner, 2014.
Guthrie, Stewart E. “Anthropomorphism.” In Encyclopædia Britannica [https://
www.britannica.com/topic/anthropomorphism. Accessed 09.07.20].
Haberman, David L. People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. Oxford:
Hallé, Francis. “A Life Drawing Trees: Interview with Emmanuele Coccia.” In
Trees, ed. Pierre-Édouard Couton, trans. Emma Lingwood, 32–47. Paris:
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019.
Harris, W. V. “Defining and Detecting Mediterranean Deforestation, 800 B.C.E. to
700 C.E.” In The Ancient Mediterranean Environment Between Science and
History, ed. W. V. Harris, 173–94. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992.
Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and The
Lives of the Eastern Saints. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
———. “Dendrites.” In Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, ed.
Glen W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, 407. Cambridge,
MA-London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Hass, Petra. Der locus amoenus in der antiken Literatur: Zu Theorie und Geschichte
eines literarischen Motivs. Bamberg: Wissenschaftler Verlag, 1998.
Heilmann, Till A. “Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism.” In Classics and Media
Theory, ed. Pantelis Michelakis, 29–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Hennings, Ralph. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und Hieronymus und ihr
Streit um den Kanon des Alten Testaments und die Auslegung von Gal. 2,11–14.
Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Henrichs, Albert. “‘Thou Shalt Not Kill a Tree’: Greek, Manichaean and Indian
Tales.” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16, nos. 1–2
(1979): 85–108.
Hersey, George L. Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion
to the Present. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Herva, Vesa-Pekka. “Flower Lovers, After All? Rethinking Religion and Human-
Environment Relations in Minoan Crete.” World Archaeology 38, no. 4
(2006): 586–98.
Heubner, Sabine R. Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Hill, Robert C., trans. Saint John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis 1–17. FC 74.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
178 Bibliography
Hilton, John. “Erotic Date-Palms in Ammianus Marcellinus (Res Gestae, XXIV,

3,12–13).” Listy Filologické 138 (2015): 213–29.
Homélies pascales I. Ed. Pierre Nautin. SC 27. Paris: Cerf, 1950; rp. Paris:
Cerf, 2003.
Hooke, Della. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape.
Woodbridge, Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2010.
Horn, Cornelia B. “St. Nino and the Christianization of Pagan Georgia.” Medieval
Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998): 242–64.
Howe, Nicolas. Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred
Space. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Hughes, J. Donald. “Ancient Deforestation Revisited.” Journal of the History of
Biology 44 (2011): 43–57.
Hunt, Ailsa. Reviving Roman Religion: Sacred Trees in the Roman World.
New York-Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Inwood, Brad. The Poems of Empedocles. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001.
Irigaray, Luce; and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical
Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Izdebski, Adam; Jordan Pickett; Neil Roberts; and Tomasz Waliszewski. “The
Environmental, Archaeological and Historical Evidence for Climatic Changes
and Their Societal Impacts in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity.”
Quaternary Science Reviews 136 (2016): 189–208.
Jacob of Serugh’s Hexaemeron. Ed. and trans. T. Muraoka. Leuven: Peeters, 2018.
Jashemski, Wilhelmina F. “Produce Gardens.” In Gardens of the Roman Empire,
ed. Wilhelmina F. Jashemski et al., 121–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017.
Jones, Owain; and Paul Cloke. Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their
Places. Oxford: Berg, 2002.
Kalla, Gábor. “Date Palms, Deer/Gazelles and Birds in Ancient Mesopotamia and
Early Byzantine Syria: A Christian Iconographic Scheme and Its Sources in the
Ancient Orient.” In Across the Mediterranean—Along the Nile: Studies in
Egyptology, Nubiology and Late Antiquity Dedicated to László Török on the
Occasion of His 75th Birthday, ed. Tamás A. Bács, Ádám Bollók and Tivadar
Vida, II: 863–99. Budapest: Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the
Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Museum of Fine Arts, 2018.
Keller, Catherine. The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. New York:
Routledge, 2003.
Kliszcz, Aneta, and Joanna Komorowska. “Glades of Dread: The Ecology and
Aesthetics of Loca Horrida.” In Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of
Antiquity, ed. Christopher Schliephake, 45–60. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2017.
Bibliography 179
Krueger, Derek. “Beyond Eden: Placing Adam, Eve, and Humanity in Byzantine
Hymns.” In Placing Ancient Texts: The Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space, ed.
Mika Ahuvia and Alex Kocar, 167–78. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018.
———. “Mary and Adam on the Threshold of Lent: Counterpoint and Intercession
in a Kanon for Cheesefare Sunday.” In The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium:
Marian Narratives in Texts and Images, ed. Thomas Arentzen and Mary
B. Cunningham, 180–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Ladizinsky, G. “On the Origin of Almond.” Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution
46, no. 2 (1999): 143–7.
Laiou, Angelike. Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and
Demographic Study. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Larson, Jennifer. “Nature Gods, Nymphs and the Cognitive Science of Religion.”
In Natur-Mythos-Religion im Antiken Griechenland/Nature-Myth-Religion in
Ancient Greece, ed. Tanja Susanne Scheer, 71–85. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2019.
Lash, Ephrem, trans. St. Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ. Kontakia. San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.
Latyshev, V. “O Zhitíyahb Prepodoónago Davida Solunskago.” Imperatorskoe
Odesskoe Obshchestvo Istorii I Drevnosti. Zaspiski 30 (1912): 217–51.
Lefort, Jacque. Géoponiques: Traduction. Paris: Monographies. Centre de recher-
che d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2012.
Lim, Richard. “The Politics of Interpretation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron.”
VC 44, no. 4 (1990): 351–70.
Littlewood, Antony R. “A Byzantine Oak and Its Classical Acorn: The Literary
Artistry of Geometres, Progymnasmata I.” Jahrbuch der österreichischen
Byzantinistik 29 (1980): 133–44.
Loernertz, Raymond-Joseph. “Saint David de Thessalonique: Sa vie, son culte, ses
reliques, ses images.” Revue des Études Byzantines 11 (1953): 205–23.
Lübeck, Emil. Hieronymus quos noverit scriptores et ex quibus hauseret. Leipzig:
Teubner, 1872.
Lucian: Phalaris. Hippias or The Bath. Dionysus. Heracles. Amber or The Swans. The
Fly. Nigrinus. Demonax. The Hall. My Native Land. Octogenarians. A True
Story. Slander. The Consonants at Law. The Carousal (Symposium) or The Lapiths.
Trans. A. M. Harmon. LCL 14. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1913.
Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York-London:
W.W. Norton, 2019.
Maguire, Henry. Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art.
University Park, PA: PennState University Press, 1987.
———. Nectar & Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature. Oxford:
180 Bibliography
Mancuso, Stefano. “Plant Intelligence.” In Trees, ed. Pierre-Édouard Couton,

trans. Vanessa Di Stefano, 48–57. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contem-
porain, 2019.
Marder, Michael. Grafts: Writings on Plants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2016.
———. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia
———. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia
Meeker, Natania; and Antónia Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative
Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.
Merian, Sylvie L. “Protection against the Evil Eye? Votive Offerings on Armenian
Manuscript Bindings.” In Suave Mechanicals: Essays on the History of
Bookbinding, ed. Julia Miller, I: 42–93. Ann Arbor: Legacy Press, 2013–15.
Methodius. Méthode d’Olympe. Le Banquet. Ed. Herbert Musurillo. SC 95. Paris:
Cerf, 1963.
———. The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity. Trans. Herbert Musurillo. Ancient
Christian Writers, vol. 27. New York: Newman Press, 1958.
Miles, Margaret M. “Birds around the Temple: Constructing a Sacred
Environment.” In Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity: Natural
Environment and Cultural Imagination, ed. Jeremey McInerney and Ineke
Sluiter, 151–95. Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 393. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Miller, Patricia Cox. In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient
Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Moschus, John. The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum Spirituale). Trans. John Wortley.
Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992.
Murray, A. T., trans. Homer: Iliad. Volume I: Books 1–12. Rev. William F. Wyatt.
Myers, Natasha. “Are the Trees Watching Us?” Spike 65 (Autumn 2020): 64–65.
Narkiss, Bezalel. “The Sign of Jonah.” Gesta 18, no. 1 (1979): 63–76.
Nau, F. “Opuscule maronites: Histoire d’un bienheureux qui demeurait sur un
arbre à Ir’enin.” Revue de l’Orient Chrétien 4 (1899): 337–40.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Nilsson, Ingela. Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasure: Narrative Technique and
Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine & Hysminias. Uppsala: Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001.
Nilsson, Martin P. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek
Religion. 2nd ed. Lund: Gleerup, 1950.
Nordlander, Andreas. “Green Purpose: Teleology, Ecological Ethics, and the
Recovery of Contemplation.” Studies in Christian Ethics 34, no. 1
(2021): 36–55.
Bibliography 181
Olson, Alexander. Environment and Society in Byzantium, 650–1150: Between the

Oak and the Olive. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Ovid: Metamorphoses. Volume II: Books 9–15. Trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev.
G. P. Goold. LCL 43. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.
Pacini, Giulia. “Arboreal and Historical Perspectives from Calvino’s Il barone ram-
pante.” Romance Studies 32, no. 1 (2014): 57–68.
Panaretou, Anthimos. E dendrolatria apo archaiotaton chronon mechri simera. 2nd
ed. Nicosia: Filodasikos Syndesmos, 1979.
Papathanassiou, Maria K. “The Occult Sciences in Byzantium.” In A Companion
to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros Lazaris, 464–95. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020.
Pastoureau, Michel. “Introduction à la symbolique médiévale du bois.” In L’arbre:
Histoire naturelle et symbolique de l’arbre, du bois et du fruit au Moyen-Âge, II:
25–40. Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1993.
Peers, Glenn. Animism, Materiality and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel?
Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021.
———. “Byzantine Things in the World.” In Byzantine Things in the World, ed.
Glenn Peers, 21–84. Houston-New Haven: The Menil Collection-Yale
———. Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001.
Péguy, Charles. Oeuvres en prose complètes. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1987–92.
Philes, Manuel. Carmina. Ex codicibus Escurialensibus, Florentinis, Parisinis et
Vaticanis. Ed. E. Miller. 2 vols. Paris: Excusum in Typographeo Imperiali,
1855–57; rp. Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1967.
Pierce, Alexander H. “Reconsidering Ambrose’s Reception of Basil’s Homiliae in
Hexaemeron: The Lasting Legacy of Origen.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum
23, no. 3 (2019): 414–44.
Pikichian, Hripsime. “Festival and Feast.” In Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and
Identity, ed. Levon Abrahamian and Nancy Sweezy, 217–34. Bloomington-
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Trans. Harold North Fowler.
———. Theaetetus. Sophist. Trans. Harold North Fowler. LCL 123. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1921.
Powers, David. The Overstory. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.
Race, Revulsion, and Revolution. Ed. Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake,
and Micah James Goodrich. Postmedieval, vol. 11, no. 4. Chaim, Switzerland:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Rackham, Oliver; and A.T. Grove. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An
Ecological History. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2001a.
182 Bibliography
———. “Land-Use and Native Vegetation in Greece.” In Archaeological Aspects of

Woodland Ecology, ed. Susan Limbrey and Martin Bell, 177–98. BAR S146.
Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1982.
———. “Our Lady’s Garden: The Historical Ecology of the Holy Mountain.” In
Encounters on the Holy Mountain: Stories from Mount Athos, ed. Peter Howorth
and Chris Thomas. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.
———. Trees, Wood, and Timber in Greek History. A Lecture delivered at New
College, Oxford, on 10th May, 1999. Oxford: Myres Memorial Lectures, 2001.
Rahner, Hugo. “Die Weide als Symbol der Keuschheit in der Antike und im
Christentum.” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 56, no. 2 (1932): 231–53.
Rival, Laura. “Trees, from Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts.”
In The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, ed.
Laura Rival, 1–36. Oxford-New York: Berg, 1998.
Robbins, Frank Egleston. The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and
Latin Commentaries on Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912.
Romanos le Mélode: Hymnes IV. Ed. José Grosdidier de Matons. SC 128. Paris:
Cerf, 1967.
Rose, Valentin. Leben des heiligen David von Thessalonike griechisch nach der einzi-
gen bisher aufgefundenen Handschrift. Berlin: Asher, 1887.
Rousseau, Philip. Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of
California Press, 1994.
Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the
Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. London: George Allen, 1903.
———. Modern Painters. Ed. and ab. David Barrie. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Saguaro, Shelley. “‘The Republic of Arborea’: Trees and the Perfect Society.”
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 17, no. 3 (2013): 236–50.
Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece. Trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Ioannes
Polemis. DOML 54. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2019.
Sallon, Sarah; Elaine Solowey; Yuval Cohen; Raia Korchinsky; Markus Egli; Ivan
Woodhatch; Orit Simchoni; and Mordechai Kislev. “Germination, Genetics,
and Growth of an Ancient Date Seed.” Science 320, no. 5882 (2008): 1464.
Salonius, Pippa. “The Tree of Life in Medieval Iconography.” In The Tree of Life,
ed. Douglas Estes, 280–343. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020.
Savage, John J. Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. The
Fathers of the Church, vol. 42. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961.
Sayre, Kenneth M. Plato’s Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Scardino, Carlo. “Editing the Geoponica: The Arabic Evidence and its Importance.”
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 58 (2018): 102–25.
Schenkl, Karl, ed. Sancti Ambrosii opera I. CSEL 32. Prague: F. Tempsky, 1896.
Bibliography 183
Schlapbach, Karin. “Locus Amoenus.” Reallexikon von Antike und Christentum

23 (2010): 231–44.
———. “The Pleasance, Solitude, and Literary Production: The Transformation
of the locus amoenus in Late Antiquity.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum
50 (2007): 34–50.
Schönbeck, G. Der locus amoenus von Homer bis Horaz. Heidelberg: Doctoral
Dissertation, 1962.
Schultze, V. Archäologische Studien über altchristliche Monumente. Vienna:
Braumüller, 1880.
Seifert, Jeremy. The Church Forests of Ethiopia.
[https://www.nytimes.com/video/players/of fsite/index.html?vide
oId=100000006808736].
Serres, Michel. Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. Trans. Randolph
Burks. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Sharkie, Thomas; and Marguerite Johnson. “Eroticized Environments: Ancient
Greek Natural Philosophy and the Roots of Erotic Ecocritical Contemplation.”
In Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, ed. Christopher
Schliephake, 71–90. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
Shaw, Brent D. “Go Set a Watchman: The Bishop as Speculator.” In Leadership
and Community in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Raymond Van Dam, ed.
Richard Kim and A.E.T. McLaughlin, 63–89. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.
Siewers, Alfred K. Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval
Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Silvas, Anna M. “In Quest of Basil’s Retreat: An Expedition to Ancient Pontus.”
Antichthon 41 (2007): 73–95.
Skemp, J. B. “Plants in Plato’s Timaeus.” Classical Quarterly 41 (1947): 53–60.
Smith, Kyle. “Dendrites and Other Standers in the ‘History of the Exploits of
Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest John of Edessa’.” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac
Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 117–34.
Smith, Steven D. “Art, Nature, Power: Garden Epigrams from Nero to Heraclius.”
In Greek Epigrams from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Period, ed. Maria
Kanellou, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey, 339–54. Oxford-New York: Oxford
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.
Sommerstein, Alan H. “Swearing by Hera: A Deme Meme?” The Classical
Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2008): 326–31.
Squatriti, Paolo. Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts,
Economy, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Stewart, Charles A. “The First Vaulted Churches in Cyprus.” Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians 69, no. 2 (2010): 162–89.
184 Bibliography
Stuckey, Priscilla, “Being Known by a Birch Tree: Animist Reconfigurations of

Western Epistemology.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
4 (2010): 182–205.
Stubbings, Frank H. “Xerxes and the Plane Tree.” Greece and Rome 15, no. 44
(1946): 63–7.
Talbot, Alice-Mary. Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800–1453.
Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2019.
Talgam, Rina. Mosaics of Faith: Floors of Pagans, Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and
Muslims in the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2014.
Tengberg, M. “Beginnings and Early History of Date Palm Garden Cultivation in
the Middle East.” Journal of Arid Environments 86 (2012): 139–47.
Theophrastus: Enquiry into Plants. Volume I: Books 1–5. Trans. Arthur F. Hort.
Torchia, N. Joseph. “Sympatheia in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexameron: A Plotinian
Hypothesis.” JECS 4, no. 3 (1996): 359–78.
Touwaide, Alain. “Botany.” In A Companion to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros
Lazaris, 302–53. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2020.
Τριῴδιον κατανυκτικόν, περιέχον ἅπασαν τὴν ἀνήκουσαν αὐτῷ ἀκολουθίαν τῆς ἁγίας
καὶ μεγάλης Τεσσαρακοστῆς. Rome: NP, 1879.
Trouet, Valerie. Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Tully, Caroline Jane. The Cultic Life of Trees in the Prehistoric Aegean, Levant,
Egypt, and Cyprus. Louvain: Peeters, 2018.
Ulrich, Roger B. Roman Wordworking. New Haven-London: Yale University
Press, 2007.
Underwood, Paul A. The Kariye Djami. Volume 1: Historical Introduction and
Description of the Mosaic and Frescoes. New York: Pantheon, 1966.
Van Dam, Raymond. Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Vasil, Adria. “Emanuele Coccia: Plants Make Us Human.” Live Mic: Best of Toronto
Public Library Conversations (5 March 2020) [https://livemic.simplecast.
com/episodes/emmanuele-coccia-plants-make-us-human/transcript].
Vasiliev, Alexander. “Life of David of Thessalonica.” Traditio 4 (1946): 115–47.
Villa, Susie Hoogasian; and Mary Kilbourne Matossian. Armenian Village Life
before 1914. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982.
Vismann, Cornelia. “Genealogische Ordnung und ungeschlechtliche
Vermehrungsweise.” In Pfropfen, Impfen, Transplantieren, ed. Uwe Wirth,
51–63. Berlin: Kadmos, 2011.
Wallace, Mark I. When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the
Re-Enchantment of the World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
Bibliography 185
Wallace-Hadrill, D.S. The Greek Patristic View of Nature. Manchester: Manchester

Ware, Kallistos. “Through Creation to the Creator.” In Toward an Ecology of
Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and
Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz, 86–105. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013.
Warren, Peter. “Tree Cult in Contemporary Crete.” In Loibe eis mnemen Andre
G. Kalokairinou, 261–78. Heraklion: Etairia Krêtikôn Istorikôn Meletôn, 1994.
Waszink, J. H. Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani De Anima. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Watkins, Charles. Trees in Art. London: Reaktion, 2018.
Way, Agnes Clare. Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies. The Fathers of the Church, vol.
46. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963.
Whitby, Michael. “Maro the Dendrite: An Anti-Social Holy Man?” In Homo
Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. Michael Whitby, P. Hardie and
Mary Whitby, 309–17. Oak Park, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1987.
White, Carolinne. The Correspondence (394–419) between Jerome and Augustine of
Hippo. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science
155 (10 March 1967): 1203–7.
Williamson, Christina G. “Mountain, Myth, and Territory: Teuthrania as Focal
Point in the Landscape of Pergamon.” In Valuing Landscape in Classical
Antiquity: Natural Environment and Cultural Imagination, ed. Jeremey
McInerney and Ineke Sluiter, 70–99. Mnemosyne Supplements, vol. 393.
Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Winden, J. C. M. van. “‘An Appropriate Beginning’: The Opening Passage of
Saint Basil’s In Hexaemeron.” In Archè: A Collection of Patristic Studies, ed.
J. den Boeft and D. T. Runia, 116–23. VChrSupp 41. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.
Discoveries from a Secret World. Trans. Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver-Berkeley:
Greystone Books, 2015.
Xyngopoulos, Andreas. “Anaglyphon tou osiou David tou en Thessalonike.”
Makedonika 2 (1941–52): 143–66.
Zakariassen, Kari. “My people consult their tree…”: Human–Divine Interaction in
Arboreal Spaces in the Ancient Levant. Doctoral dissertation, University of
Oslo, 2019.
Zepernick, Marte. “Heilige Bäume” in der antiken griechischen Religion. Berlin:
Lit Verlag, 2020.
Zohary, Daniel; Ehud Weiss; and Maria Hopf. Domestication of Plants in the Old
World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the
Nile Valley. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Zucker, Arnaud. “Zoology.” In A Companion to Byzantine Science, ed. Stavros
Lazaris, 261–301. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS Ammianus Marcellinus, 95n60, 98

1 Corinthians, 46, 47 Aristotle, 4, 6, 72, 90, 155
2 Samuel, 121 Athanasius, 23, 24n4, 49–51
Augustine, 24, 25, 52–61,
53n42, 63, 73
A
Aaron, 11, 46, 47, 144
Achilles Tatius, 23n3, 97, 97n65, 98, B
167, 167n8 Basil of Caesarea, 9, 11, 15, 18, 25,
Adam, 41, 72, 89, 94, 148, 165, 43–52, 44n34, 44n35, 47n38,
168, 168n11 47n39, 49n40, 63, 67n3,
Akashi, Kelly, 17, 18 68–80, 69n6, 72n10, 72n11,
Alexiou, Margaret, 13n27, 156–158, 73n13, 73n15, 77n21, 79n26,
156n122, 158n125, 158n126 79n27, 79n28, 79n30,
Almond, 11, 19, 47, 107, 112, 125, 82–91, 85n40, 85n41, 86n43,
127–130, 133, 137–140, 87n44, 93–95, 97–101,
138n66, 142–145, 147, 150, 100n70, 100n71,
154, 160, 161, 165 104–106, 106n82
Ambrose of Milan, 73, 73n15, 74, 79, Beech, 3, 95
79n29, 81, 81n34, 86, Bennett, Jane, 105, 105n81
90–92, 94, 95 Birch, 1n2, 65, 95
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75902-5
188 INDEX
Brosse, Jacques, 156, 156n121 144n81, 145n84, 146n86,

Buber, Martin, 68, 68n5 148n90, 154, 158, 160, 161, 165
Dietzel, Irene, 151, 151n102,
151n103, 151n104
C Dunn, Archibold, 13, 13n26
Callimachus, 156 Duret, Claude, 155
Calvino, Italo, 62, 62n49, 127,
158–162, 158–159n127
Cedar, 5, 11, 40, 81, 83, 130, E
130n41, 147 Elm, 158
Chaste tree, 18, 23, 23n3, 24, 27, Ephrem, 12, 12n25, 73, 89n47, 147,
35–43, 37n23, 42n30, 148n89, 167, 168n9,
62–64, 169 168n10, 168n12
Chestnut, 142 Evans, Arthur, 118–122, 119n15,
Christie, Michael, 5, 5n10, 159 119n16, 121n21
Ciceion, 55, 56, 64 Eve, 89, 94, 101, 163–165, 168n11
Coccia, Emanuele, 2, 2n2, 2n3, 5,
5n9, 7n14, 7n16, 8, 8n19,
52n41, 70, 70n9, 139n68, 164, F
165n4, 166, 166n5, Ferrari, G. R. F., 27, 27n9, 28n10,
170n17, 170n18 28n11, 29n13
Cohen, Leonard, 166, 166n6 Fig, 11, 40, 41, 88–90, 93, 94,
Cyborg, 107, 109, 112, 113, 117, 138n66, 148, 165, 168, 169
122, 136 Fir, 81, 83
Cypress, 11, 77, 81, 83, 127, Fisher, Philip, 84, 84n37
144, 149
G
D Genesis, 5, 9–11, 18, 35, 67–75,
Daphne, 19, 101, 109, 113, 67n3, 76n19, 81–83, 89, 94,
113n6, 114 163–165, 163n2
Date palm, 11, 50, 92–98, 92n54, Gospel of John, 89
101, 130 Gospel of Mark, 4, 87, 89, 89n47
David of Thessaloniki, 19, 107, 109, Gourd, 18, 25, 52, 53, 55–58, 59n46,
111–113, 115–117, 123–134, 60, 61, 63
125n26, 136, 139, 140, Graft, 1, 11, 19, 39, 40, 46, 63, 64,
143–145, 154, 159–162, 165 67, 84, 85, 92, 97, 98, 100, 112,
Dawkins, Richard M., 157, 157n124 133, 135–139, 135n56,
Dendrite, 19, 101, 107, 109, 112, 137n61, 137n62, 138n66, 145,
113, 116, 117, 122–132, 147, 165
125n26, 126n29, 127n32, Gregory of Nazianzus, 15, 18, 24, 25,
127n35, 130n43, 142–149, 43–52, 43n33, 63, 72, 100
INDEX 189
H 94n55, 103–105, 103n77,

Hebrews, 46, 144 105n80, 113n6, 124n25, 138,
Herodotus, 46, 63, 95n60, 96n61 138n67, 139, 154, 154n114,
Hilton, John, 95n60, 96, 96n64, 160, 160n129
99n68, 104n78 Matthew, 169
Methodius of Olympus, 18, 24,
34–43, 35n20, 49, 62, 63
I Miller, Patricia Cox, 14, 14n28,
I Kings, 121 103n76, 104n79, 152n106
Isaiah, 37, 39, 129n39, 167 Moses, 11, 41, 133
Ivy, 18, 25, 55–57, 64
N
J Nealon, Jeffrey, 7, 7n14, 7n16, 8,
Jacob of Serugh, 73, 80, 80n32, 8n18, 155, 155n117
82, 83, 123 Nilsson, Martin, 121, 121n20, 122
Jerome, 25, 50–61, 53n42, Numbers, 46, 144
56n43, 59n46
John Chrysostom, 163–165, 163n2,
164n3, 169 O
Jonah, 18, 25, 52–61, 58n45, Oak, 11, 65, 77, 78, 81, 121, 144,
59n46, 63 148, 149, 150n99, 151, 154,
Judges, 40 169, 170
Olive, 11, 40, 41, 56, 83, 85, 88
Origen of Alexandria, 9, 36,
L 36n21, 37, 72, 72n12, 73,
Leviticus, 9, 38, 39, 42 73n15
Locus amoenus, 21, 21n2, 23, 24n4, Ovid, 70, 103, 103n76, 156, 157
25, 28, 38, 44, 45, 49, 51,
155n118, 169
Lucian of Samosata, 101, 101n73, P
102, 102n74, 104 Palm, 38, 39, 50, 51, 53, 64, 77, 86,
92–99, 96n61, 101, 104, 106,
111, 112, 130, 130n41, 147,
M 153, 165
Macfarlane, Robert, 153, 154n112, Panaretou, Anthemios, 150n100,
161, 161n131, 162n134 151, 151n102
Mancuso, Stefano, 139, 139n68 Papyrus, 3, 29, 138n66
Marder, Michael, 2n2, 4, 4n8, 7, Pastoureau, Michel, 153n111,
7n14, 7n15, 7n17, 8, 28n12, 30, 160, 161n130
30n14, 33, 33n18, 62, 62n48, Penone, Giuseppe, 5, 5n11,
67n2, 79n27, 87, 87n45, 87n46, 6n12, 7, 122
190 INDEX
Pharmakon, 29–31, 31n15, 33, 36, Sheldrake, Martin, 153, 154n112

37, 42, 47, 62 Silvas, Anna, 48, 49n40
Pine, 3, 11, 65, 70, 81, 83, 85, Snyder, Gary, 85, 85n39
149, 158 Socrates, 18, 23, 24, 26–35, 43, 48,
Plane, 11, 18, 23, 23n3, 25–27, 51, 61, 65, 84
30–33, 35, 41, 44–49, 51, 52, Symeon the Stylite, 109–112, 112n2,
61, 63, 64, 125, 158 113n5, 123n23, 165
Plato, 4, 6, 7n15, 18, 23–35, 26n7,
27n9, 32n17, 41, 41n29, 43, 46,
47, 49, 52, 61–63, 70, 84, T
84n35, 86, 94, 164 Tertullian, 8, 9n20
Pliny the Elder, 37n23, 38, 38n26, Theocritus, 21
38n27, 42, 56, 56n43, 60, 62, Theophrastus, 95, 95n58, 96,
96–99, 96n62, 104, 135 96n63
Plotinus, 72, 79, 79n27 Thorn tree, 40, 42
Powers, David, 24, 24n5 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 19, 19n37,
Price, Richard, 159 20, 20n38
Proverbs, 10 Tully, Caroline Jane, 120,
Psalms, 10, 36, 36n21, 37, 39, 92, 120n17, 120n19
129, 130, 130n41
V
R Vine, 10, 21, 40, 41, 55, 56,
Revelation, 10 88–91, 102
Romans, 11, 14, 90, 119, 136, 166 Vismann, Cornelia, 137, 138,
Rousseau, Philip, 44n34, 47n38, 138n65
47n39, 72, 72n10, 72n11, 77,
77n21, 79n28, 86n43
Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, 84, 84n36 W
Rufinus of Aquileia, 57, 58 Walnut, 11, 152, 153
Ruskin, John, 116, 117, 117n11 Warren, Peter, 151, 152n105
White, Lynn Townsend, 126,
126n30
S Willow, 11, 36–39, 37n23, 42, 65
Schlapbach, Karin, 23, 24n4, 49
Serres, Michel, 131–133, 136,
136n59, 137n60, Y
137n61, 137n62 Yew, 3, 153n111

Thomas Arentzen Et Al - Byzantine Tree Life-Christianity and The Arboreal Imagination (2021)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thomas Arentzen Et Al - Byzantine Tree Life-Christianity and The Arboreal Imagination (2021)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

NEW APPROACHES TO

BYZANTINE HISTORY AND CULTURE

Byzantine Tree Life

More information about this series at

Byzantine Tree Life

ISSN 2730-9363 ISSN 2730-9371 (electronic)

Cover illustration: skaman306

Thomas wishes to extend his gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks Research

3 In the Beginning, Trees 65

5 Three Leaves: A Theopoetic Epilogue163

CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (series)

Fig. 1.1 Apse mosaic, sixth century, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna,

Fig. 3.3 Mosaic of the personification of Earth (Ge), sixth century,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

The themes of tree-hospitality, tree-affinity, and tree-transformation

or similar. In modernity, of course, literary works are inscribed not on

him, and comparing them to walking trees, whose visual appearance he

existentiality,” marked by radical openness to and dependence on others,

should I not affirm the wisdom and knowledge of trees?” Tertullian

aesthetic sensibilities with respect to treed and watered landscapes that

Perhaps that blessed tree, the Tree of Life,

the spiritual graces of that Garden.

is nonetheless certain.30 Agricultural need drove the clearing of arable

practices and attitudes toward trees remained broadly exploitative in antiq-

real or imagined, rather than trees functioning primarily as theological

chapter explores trees as primordial creatures and also as images of divine

Trees are a crucial feature of the landscape of a “pleasant place” (locus

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

ambivalent. The opening lines of Gregory of Nazianzus’s soliloquy On

Places and Trees: Plato’s Phaedrus

refutation (241e–243b). Socrates’s second speech, in praise of love, is one

of farming, sowing where suitable, and welcome it when what he sowed

Marder suggests as much when he proposes that the plane tree—plata-

Under the Chaste-Tree: Methodius’s Symposium

more literally translated as “overgrowingly”; the growing power of plants

branches—chastity itself—offer the dwelling place of the body its finishing

Under the Plane Tree: Gregory of Nazianzus’s

fantasies quite precisely, he asserts. As he embarks upon a lengthy descrip-

emaciated monk, which ‘I planted and Apollos’—your most honorable

point of transition to the future, a place to pivot to a career as a bishop and

Other plane trees in Turkey date to the fifteenth century, testifying to

merely “a few untended date palms [φοίνικες]” (Life of Antony 49.7),

In his descriptions of Paul’s and Antony’s dwelling places, Jerome

At the same time, the shadowy, forested landscape of Basil’s Pontic

Under the Gourd Tree: Augustine’s Letter 71

fuel a contentiousness exacerbated by a series of failed, delayed, and mis-

compelled to “correct” it, “as if false” (quasi mendosiatatem). Augustine

Such a depiction could easily be aligned with Christian expectations of a

eternally youthful, sleeping Endymion, a popular figure in sarchophagus

Trees and Places, Again

Marder, Plant-Thinking, 116.

and in so doing they harness its particular pharmaceutical powers to redi-

In the Beginning, Trees

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 65

beginnings (Hex. I 1.1–3).6 And so we too, following Basil’s own lead,

the learned views of an early Christian intellectual in the form that he

“certain mysteries,” but in an attempt to explore, in the prism of the cre-

The Word Made Wood

The beautification of the Earth, as she emerges from obscurity, consists of

Even today excessive moisture is a hindrance to the fertility of the Earth.

The sprouting forth of plants is spoken in a language evoking the imagery

Plants were not pre-conceived in an earthly womb before the begin-

All feminine in grammatical gender in Latin, these trees emerge as a host

3 In the Beginning, Trees 65

5 Three Leaves: A Theopoetic Epilogue163