Just finished Catherine Michael Chin’s book, Life, at the request of another colleague. Here are some initial reflections.
Catherine Michael Chin’s book, Life, is unlike most scholarly books about the ancient world. Its walking partners were more like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter or Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects than other scholars of late antiquity, but it was the vibrant matter and ordinary affects of various ancient and eternal bodies affecting one another: from papyrus plants to minerals and metals to heavenly bodies and earthly bodies that in this middle realm bump against one another. It is the world of Rufinus of Aquileia. Instead of only speaking about Rufinus, Chin speaks with him, alongside him, through him, and in his and others’ voices.
The famous translator, Edith Grossman, once said that translators are speakers of a second text. One sees such a perspective in the many ways that Chin speaks of Rufinus speaking in the voice of Origen, making the translation of On First Principles as much as Rufinus’s voice as Origen’s. In another way, Chin has translated an entirety of a worldview with little reference to modern categories, reconstructing the fragments of Rufinus’s life on his own terms, which means including his afterlife.
Speaking of affects, Sara Ahmed regularly talks about the stickiness of affects making impressions, pressing on one, and one sees impressions throughout the book. Chin wrote out the book by hand before retyping the manuscript, creating a more intimate – and today regularly lost – form of impression of the hand feeling out each letter that differs from the taps of the keyboard. One finds impressions of Chin’s artwork juxtaposed to each chapter, including the life and afterlife of a stuffy to illustrate Rufinus’s-as-Origen’s view of the afterlife and cosmic return.
This is not a book to skim; it is a book to open in physical form, feel the glossy pages as you turn them, and think about the pulp, the ink, and the human hands and machines that impressed the pages as you sink into the all-too-familiar-and-yet-so-different world of Rufinus.
Jaeda Rising & Reborn: Ancient Jewish & Christian Crossings & Transitions 