Ebook: Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium

Nature is as much an idea as a physical reality. By ‘placing’ nature
within Byzantine culture and within the discourse of Orthodox
Christian thought and practice, Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in
Byzantium explores attitudes towards creation that are utterly and fascinatingly
diff erent from the modern. Drawing on patristic writing
and on Byzantine literature and art, the book develops a fresh conceptual
framework for approaching Byzantine perceptions of space and
the environment. It takes readers on an imaginary fl ight over the earth
and its varied topographies of gardens and wilderness, mountains and
caves, rivers and seas, and invites them to shift from the linear time
of history to the cyclical time and spaces of the sacred – the time and
spaces of eternal returns and revelations.