Thomas Arentzen: Early Christian Trees

In the wake of the current environmental crisis, scholars of late ancient Christianity are beginning to explore early Christian attitudes towards the natural world. Most recently, Virginia Burrus and Patricia Cox Miller, for instance, have studied the way Christians situated themselves among other natural creatures.This paper will turn to trees. Trees form an important part of the biblical story of Eden (the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge). For Christians, then, trees were never neutral; they were always already endowed with meaning. The cross itself was a tree, or at least made of a tree. With the various typological resonance of these trees, Christians started to be interested in the tree and the very wood of Christ’s cross. And early Christians experienced trees to be more than symbolic figures. The fifth-century Christian historian Sozomen, for instance, tells of a healing tree. Some late ancient sources relate how trees bow and venerate the Mother of God. These seem, in other words, to be pious Christian trees. So what kind of agency do early Christians imagine trees to have? The paper will discuss the roles played by trees in a selection of textual sources, in contexts where they are not merely seen as types or symbols, but as actual agents. What do Christian trees do?