Six days
Many worlds

Greek commentaries on the Six Days of Creation preserve a largely forgotten archive of premodern knowledge about the natural world.

My book project, Reading Creation Environmentally: Byzantine Hexaemeral Literature and the Natural World, reads this tradition across more than a millennium, from Basil of Caesarea to Constantine Portaites. Its shared biblical framework sustained different accounts of nature. Authors selected and reworked inherited learning, sometimes alongside personal observation, to explain creation to particular audiences. Their choices challenge the familiar dismissal of these texts as merely derivative.

Examining human dominion and wonder alongside animal behaviour and habitats, the project explores how hexaemeral discourse reflected, and may have shaped, understandings of the living world. Human authority is privileged but limited, and divine care extends to creatures irrespective of their usefulness to humankind. These convictions do not, however, produce an obligation to protect nature. Confidence in providence can instead make lasting environmental disruption by human activity inconceivable.

Reading later Byzantine works alongside their patristic predecessors, the project aims to bring an overlooked tradition into the environmental humanities and reconsider the relationship between Christian anthropocentrism and the value of non-human creation.

Related project: Beyond the Sacred: Conceptions of Nature in Byzantium (4th–15th c.)