Virginia Burrus’ Earthquakes and Gardens asks readers to wander on its “ocean of possibilities,” to make connections that help us drift along deep, ancient currents. For me, her monograph evoked the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, specifically the opening images of an isolated monastery floating on a lake circled by mountains. The camera follows two Buddhist monks, a small boy and a paternal master. Their grey garb blends with the rocks around them, and they are swallowed in the surrounding browns and greens of the lake and the alps. Their one-room home has two sleeping mats, a statue of the Buddha, a meditation bowl, and, in the middle of the room, there is a stand-alone door connected to no walls. (A certain kind of person might ask, “Why do they use the door? They can see each other or just walk around it.” That kind of person will not like this movie.) Everything on the lake is indeed connected. But the ritualized space, like depth of field, focuses attention. Sacred places and special objects teach while always being exposed to wider, if sometimes blurred, landscapes.[1] The film is less interested in the distinction between sacred and profane and more in the distinction between different scales of sacredness. It’s a film about place, about the lessons learned there, the ways time functions differently for different characters in different seasons there, and the ways bodies become and become like (and sometimes resist becoming like) their environments.

In the first season (Spring), the boy, who is maybe five years old, starts tying rocks to fish, snakes, and frogs. He enjoys the cruelty of watching them struggle to swim. And his teacher, seeing this ugly pattern emerge, ties a large rock to the boy and tells the boy to untie the creatures. If they die, the master warns, he will carry that rock in his heart for the rest of his life. The boy sets the frog free. The fish dies.

By the end of the film, the master has died, too. The boy has grown in physical size, but more, he has grown in his sins and in his grief. And to repent, he ties himself to a stone and drags his body and his rock-bearing heart up the enveloping mountain. Maybe, like the fish, he dies along the way, and he is reborn at the summit in a meditative bliss. Maybe he is the frog: he is released with some cathartic, childhood sobs along the way. I am not sure. But the film builds to the first time we get some distance from the hermitage, the first time we move from what Roland Barthes called an “apical” view (a plunged, saturated, insider view) to a “panoramic” view (where everything is “wide, deep,” and “in front of” him).[2] One way to read the film is to understand him as transcending, or moving outside, the place. The other is that as he meditates on the mountaintop alongside his rock and a statue of the Buddha, he sees (theorei) his place; and there, in Burrus’s words, he “encounter[s] a worldly transcendence in the dizzying scale of things.”[3] The clouds and horizon swirl in our memories with rocks, frogs, water, boats, beds, fires, doors, and the master. The distance from the place that has grown familiar over the film’s ninety minutes intensifies its presence. The nameless monk unites to the place and drifts above it. Ecstasy is not the opposite of rootedness. Immersion becomes its own kind of release.[4]

Historians often try to reconstruct places; they map areas to give readers a sense of a whole. I am grateful for that work. But Burrus reminds us that humans do not really experience places as whole. Flickers of ecstasy provide perspectives as much, if not more, than the slow, deliberate mimetic mapping; or better, those moments of felt, shifting intensities—of grief, of shame, of trauma or joy—motivate and ground the calm understanding. Hilarion’s garden too sat “among remote and harsh mountains.” The stone in the film, or the fruit-trees in Hilarion’s garden (1) stand in for, (2) transcend, and (3) give focus to place. No, Hilarion does not have the redemption story that the movie’s monk does, and we do not even see a mountain-top moment, so there is no temptation to read him as getting “outside” place. Absorption, not escape, brings peace. But, for both, fragments fixate, and they fix excessive places. Burrus, too, fixates and fixes: she spots poetry in Jerome’s prose and again she has taught us the power of an excessive detail, a punctum, to refocus stories, to shift what is blurry and what’s clear. We have had Macrina’s tattoo, Macrina’s ring, Agnes’s tongue, Syncletica and “the stench of sanctity,” and now a ruined temple and a garden.

Earthquakes and Gardens is an “experiment in the close reading of small bits of a text.”[5] Burrus puts details under enough pressure that the whole text fractures, because how a thing cracks is part of what it is.[6] Saints too, Burrus writes elsewhere, often “desire to fall to pieces… to take themselves to new places.”[7] Breaks are not just negations; fractures both reveal and make or organize religion and place. These breaks are fault lines along which local religion slides, creeps, and shakes.

Parts can exceed wholes in this telling, but that does not mean that any part pings out into an undifferentiated hinterland. The ping, the “worldly transcendence,” links into a broader imagined space that also requires theorization. To both contain and accelerate those excessive details, Burrus provides “resonance chambers,” places that help us think and feel at scale, places where concepts become metaphors that carry us to worlds within worlds: where ancient plants touch modern art; where “fragments remember what [we] cannot imagine,” as Mike Chin writes.[8] To know a place, Burrus shows us, is to know its dirt and its smells, its seasons, but it’s also to carry or curate associations that supplement the place, that are extra and necessary to it. Bodies are always exposed to worms and words.[9]

Many of us compare spaces; we fill in gaps where texts stay silent.[10] Earthquakes and Gardens does more: it examines affinities between artifacts.[11] These chambers help clarify the past, but more, they redistribute senses. Historians here read desire and resensitize themselves to the forces of antiquity.

One chamber that Burrus builds bounces readers between Hilarion and the “do-nothing farming” of the “permaculture” movement. These contemporary farmers, like Hilarion, ride the line between “meddling with” and “abandoning” a place. Hilarion loved the orchard without possessing it.[12] The do-nothing farmers, too, act. They sow and reap. They have tools but not chemicals. They correct and connect with the land without leaving a trace. But leaving no trace requires thoughtful design, immense experimental learning, and a good amount of work. And that work often leaves the farmer more intertwined with the garden and more alone.[13] Hilarion’s garden was a “pleasant” (peramoenum) place, but Jerome also reminds readers that we’d probably find it “really terrible,” maybe lonely, certainly “remote” (terribilem valde et remotum).[14] It’s not just that Hilarion is like these farmers; it’s that reading Burrus’s words about them slows us, too. It helps readers think and feel not in news cycles, but in seasons, or generations. It helps readers “think like the earth.”

We might wonder, too, if ancients curated their own resonance chambers.[15] Hilarion’s remote place still touched other gardens of the Roman world—through literature, through a felt history—still floated on their ocean of possibilities. It bounced off Antony’s Garden most explicitly, yes: Hilarion does not work the land, or discipline the animals, or eat the fruit like Antony does. Jerome wants that association, if only to reject it. But Hilarion’s garden also resisted the more obviously imperial gardens of Roman aristocracy. Augustus’s building projects are often thought of as a time of great Roman marbling, but, as Christopher Hallett argued, it was also a time of greening, “a time of public gardens and shaded walkways: new groves in porticoes, in sanctuaries, and beside temples.”[16] Parks were power, and Pliny saw that greening as returning of Rome to its wooded roots. “Trees,” he wrote, “were the first temples of the gods. We feel ourselves filled with religious awe no less by sacred groves and their very stillness than by the statues of the gods, glittering with gold and ivory.”[17] And home gardens, too, brought produce and power. Cicero said that with a garden and a library, a person had everything they ever needed, but he also might have had his name hedged into his shrubs.[18] As Annalisa Marzano has argued, plants, too, were status symbols. Roman soldiers paraded with plants, like the balsam shrub from Judea, to announce a conquered land. Plutarch discussed how even philosophers fancified trees through grafting.[19] Cherry and peach trees, like Greeks and Syrians, Pliny noted, were “naturalized” into the Empire.[20] Interconnection is not the opposite of imperialism.

Eden, I know, is the more obvious reference. Augustine and some Cappadocians had their moments in forests and gardens as well. Those are certainly in the chamber. So too are philosophical settings and monastic gardens. But there were lots of memorable gardens and trees in antiquity, many small, some big. After one of Pompey’s victories, he grafted and named a new variety of fig after himself. A century later, that fruit branding was not enough, and there were rumors that a man of consular rank had spliced a new type of walnut tree that bore fruit twice a year.[21] The enslaved often cleared walkways so the posh could walk through their orchards barefoot and “really connect” with the land.

So, what extra but necessary things were in Hilarion’s garden? What echoed? Did his trees return him to an ancient religion, older and truer than the ruined temple next door? Was his do-nothing gardening a kind of anti-branding? Was Hilarion conquering new lands in a new Christian way, not hedging his name in creation or grafting for his own glory, but letting it form what Burrus calls, unseen, “omnidirectional, repetitive, and responsive” connections?[22] Evagrius found, in the desert, the “blue sapphire of the mind.” Perhaps, as a later Christian put it, Hilarion found, in the garden, the “emerald-paved pathways of his transparent heart.”[23]

Places, like people, lose themself in stories and symbols, but when they lose themselves, they don’t disappear. The point isn’t to pick one of those references. It’s that place does not make you pick. Hilarion, Burrus writes, “let himself be gradually absorbed by the background, vast and ancient, of which he was equally a part. Maybe this is what he had been yearning for all along.”[24] We could read this as “locative” religion, but I think it’s more absorption as transcendence: he is not fixing himself in one place (as if a place was one thing); he is entering and exposing himself to the endless, folded, layered reality of a place.[25]

In the film, the boy grows to be like the parental master and like the mountain. It does not end with him above the clouds, but with him on the lake, teaching another boy who will make the same mistakes he did. There is no progress, but there is a cultivated attention that reverberates the life-giving stillness of the surrounding mountain. “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a storm.”[26]

There is more to say about Hilarion’s Cyprus, but Burrus’s excessive details have been little moments of ecstasy that provide perspective for so much of late ancient history. I hope it’s ok to share that I remember exactly where I was when I read my first Virginia Burrus book (it was Begotten, Not Made). I shook. I did not know someone could write on Athanasius like that, that it was possible to demythologize and repoeticize in the same paragraph. But perhaps, like the ending of the film, those mountaintop moments, those earthquake moments, do settle back into gardens. A book by Virginia Burrus often shakes us and then sends us to our gardens of research more aware that religion, like place, is a moving thing, and that to know it, we will need more artifacts in our museums of care, new ways of sensing scales of sacredness.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. He hosts the podcast New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review.

[1] Virginia Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 141: “The saint,” Burrus writes, does not stand alone but is enfolded in landscapes of relations that are intimately known and loved and also always unfurling, unbounded, mysterious, inviting explorations and discovery.”

[2] Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) (Columbia University Press, 2005), 163–66. See discussion of Michael Marder, “The Garden as Form” in Virginia Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 114–15.

[3] Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 113.

[4] If, as Barthes writes, “literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die,” then perhaps, for Burrus, place becomes “more intensely [it]self” at the moment it dissolves into something else. Hilarion’s garden too sat “among remote and harsh mountains.” Maybe it had apple trees and a few patches of cabbage and carrots. There was a small pond that irrigated the land. Maybe violets bloomed in Spring. And demons echoed everywhere. One of those things is not like the other. But they all made a place. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Jonathan Cape, 1967), 38; Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 8.

[5] Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 8

[6] I am thinking of Sigmund Freud on crystals too (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE XXII [W.W. Norton, 1933], 73): If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind.

[7] Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 157.

[8] C. Michael Chin, “Four Notes on Memory Theater,” Ancient Jew Review (6 Jan 2020). See Barthes, The Neutral, 120: “to substitute the concept for the metaphor: to write.” Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 26:

This is what historians do: we take shards from the past and piece them together, filling in where necessary to make them part of something whole again. We are the agents of re-collection, of re-membering. We are the storytellers.

But what if the fragments have a kind of agency too? What if they have stories of their own to relate? They may want to tell stories of earthquakes and gardens. They may want to tell stories of places in process, in which the movements of a holy man are only part of a picture.

[9] Hilarion’s garden was “delightful” and haunted. Hilarion was surrounded by trees and by temptation, and there, he learned to ride the edge of desire without giving in. Pleasurable temptations and riding the edge, too, are another of Burrus’s great themes: shame can overwhelm, or it can make salvation real; Augustine has “no time for sex” because, once tethered to God, his desire burns too hot for any one thing. The specificity of Hilarion’s garden does not mean that he or we know any other place, but the close attention to one place lets him, and lets us, “easily slip into another world.” See Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards, Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Knof, 2023).

[10] We need these curated spaces to stretch fragments into landscapes, to “take seriously” the materiality of place even in literature. Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), 131: “A poem must rival a physical experience and metaphor is, simply, an exchange of energy between two things. If you believe that metaphor is an event, and not just a literary term denoting comparison, then you must conclude that a certain philosophy arises: the philosophy that everything in the world is connected.”

[11] Susan Sontag, “Writing Itself,” introduction to A Barthes Reader, ed. Sontag (Jonathan Cape, 1982), xiii. Burrus looks for “the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings, that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are pulverized.” That’s Susan Sontag on Roland Barthes, but I think it holds for Burrus as a reader as well.

[12] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript “Private Property and Communism” 4: “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization.”

[13] By around 800, the Benedictine monk and gardener Walafrid Strabo (the squinter) discussed the “skill required… to grace these small things with great honor [ingenti res parvae ornentur honore].” Everyday work and “grubby hands [fuscare manus]”—not “a bunch of old books and spending long days doing nothing [otia longa dierum]” was the way to learn. Cultivating the land cultivated “a quiet life [plurima tranquillae].” The contrast is between tranquilla and otium. Hard work gifted tranquility, leisure made laziness. Attention to the specificity of the land and messy, manual labor made growth possible. To know a place required the hard work of presence. Intimacy and expansiveness are not opposites any more than are apophasis and kataphasis or interior and exterior. It’s the feedback, the vertigo between the two that leads to touching transcendence. (See Mastheads project in Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 110).

[14] Life of Haliarion 43: terribilem valde et remotum locum.

[15] That is certainly one way to understand rhetorical education: put a student in a hall of the greats, keep the range of comparisons and connections narrow, let the space become familiar, and then hope the duration does its work.

[16] See Christopher Hallett, “The Wood Comes to the City: Ancient Trees, Sacred Groves, and the ‘Greening’ of Early Augustan Rome,” Religion in the Roman Empire 7.2 (2021): 221–74.

[17] Pliny, Natural History 12.2.

[18] Cicero, Ad Varro, in Ad Familiares IX, 4: si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil. Pliny the Younger, Ep. 5.6.35.

[19] Plutarch, Mor. 2.640b, LCL, trans. Clement and Hoffleit.

[20] Pliny, Natural History 12.14: “The cherry and the peach and all the trees with Greek or foreign names are also exotic; but those among them which have been naturalized here will be specified among the fruit trees.” See Annalisa Marzano, Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 66–68, and more broadly K. Sara Myers, Ancient Roman Literary Gardens: Gender, Genre, and Geopoetics (Oxford University Press, 2024).

[21] Pliny, Natural History 15.19. See Marzano, Plants, Politics and Empire, 154.

[22] Burrus, “In the Beginning, Trees,” in Thomas Arentzen, Virginia Burrus, and Glenn Peers, Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination (Palgrave, 2021), 64.

[23] Venantius Fortunatus, Poem 5.1; trans. Michael Roberts (Harvard University Press, 2017), 279–81.

[24] Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 113. See also Cam Grey, Living with Risk in the Late Roman World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Grey’s analysis of living with risk similarly shows how the depictions of the saints of Gaul and Syria mirror the ways their rivers flooded. The Rhône’s flooding was “expected, anticipated, by no means fully controlled” (Grey, Living with Risk, 167). No one knew exactly when the flooding would happen, but people could plan for it, the way I might plan for those days when no student has done the reading or when a child starts screaming in a grocery store. The saints, therefore, are by and large managers. They’re calm and see God’s providence even when the rest of society shivers. The Syrian holy figures—think of Simeon—can be quite harsh and unpredictable, just like the violent floods that come out of nowhere. That “absorption” into place is sometimes, then, about fit. They were the right saints for the right time. But sometimes it can also be something to cultivate. Hilarion wanted to be someone comfortable with the demons, so he put himself in their presence and acclimated.

Burrus writes in Ecopoetics about how walking on red and brown tesserae cut from local Jordanian stone made worshipers see those surrounding stones afresh. And the mosaic menageries—jaguars, elephants, peacocks, grapes, vines, dogs and more—sent imaginations beyond the walls of the church. Burrus, Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, 183–84.

[25] Robert Macfarlane, borrowing from Thomas Berry, calls this inscending (as opposed to transcending) in Is a River Alive? (W. W. Norton and Company, 2025), e.g., 153. Burrus writes, “Places are the movements of all of us who inhabit them, and they are the effects that we have on one another, and they are also something else—a resonance, an amplification, or alternately a dissonance, a dispersal of forces that arise from us all and return us all to ourselves, changed. Places are always shaping us, but only because of the ways we and all the others are always shaping them at the same time” (Earthquakes and Gardens, 154).

[26] “Burrus, Earthquakes and Gardens, 113, citing Estelle Zhong Mengual, “The Point of View of the Mountain,” in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2020), 253.