The Akathistos is a mysterious piece of poetry and probably the most important Marian song of the Byzantine realm. Apart from the fact that nobody knows who wrote it and when, it has a peculiar constitution: As opposed to much kontakion hymnography, it lacks a narrative development; instead it depends on flourishing imagery which slings itself out in intertwining scrolls. Thus it appears as a spatially oriented composition. At the same time, the Akathistos – despite later iconographic domestication of its otherwise wild and sprawling metaphorical growth – confronts us with perplexing images and unimaginable spaces.  

Having discussed such tensions, I will venture into what I call the “dark mariology” of the hymn and explore how the salutations’ obscure imagery associates the Theotokos with landscapes and fields – where the Logos incarnates into more-than-human flesh – and downplays her human forms in ways that yield an earthier and more dispersed Marian imagination. 

This book examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine. 

As the father of Lutheran hymns in the Norwegian Nynorsk language, Elias Blix (1836-1902) looms in the Scandinavian country’s song culture, and his compositions remain popular, both inside and outside the church. Blix lent significant space to the more-than-human in his poetry, expressing the Christian gospel in the changing of seasons or the budding of plants. This article explores a baptismal hymn from a new-materialist perspective. It demonstrates how the poet cast the initiation rite as a dynamic, erotic dance between the two elements of water and spirit/breath/air. With what one might call an ecocentric sensibility, Blix adumbrated a Christian understanding that decenters the human, as baptismal transformation unfolds with the agency of the elements.

In the wake of the current environmental crisis, scholars of late antique Christianity are beginning to study Christian attitudes towards the natural world. How did the early Christians relate to their environment? This article explores perceptions of trees, surveying the writings of Tertullian, Basil of Caesarea, and Sozomen the historian. What did an arboreal plant do, according to patristic authors? What kind of agency did they imagine trees to have? The investigation shows that members of the educated elite might think of trees as bodies with living, intelligent souls; they saw complex variety and gendered creatures with personal characteristics when they gazed at beings in bark. Certain arboreal species engaged in and were communicating through a sexual-life; many individuals made rational choices. Although trees are not free to move around, Christians assumed that boughs and branches could bend in devotion as trees expressed attention to divine presence.

This article explores the more-than-human characterization of the Theotokos in the famous Akathistos Hymn. The Mother of God emerged as an intercessional figure in the Christian imagination during late antiquity, but the formative period of mariology is still partly uncharted territory to modern scholarship. Reflecting on its rich landscape imagery and chora language, the article argues that the Akathistos minimizes the human traits of the Theotokos, rendering her more as a spatial phenomenon. In the hymn, we may glimpse traces of Marian ideas less developed during subsequent periods, ideas which gesture toward what we may call a "dark mariology." The Logos incarnates into more than human flesh, and the womb has a close affinity with the landscape. The Akathistos evokes the vision of a wider nonhuman participation in the incarnation rooted in the natural landscape of the Theotokos.