Lyricism as Historical Method

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Christian late antiquity—austere saints and ascetics, glittering mosaics, Christian emperors, and theologians such as Jerome and Augustine—was a time of enormous consequence within the history of the ancient Mediterranean. It turns out that we do not live in the wake of these changes but in their current and undertow. Capturing this requires unconventional sensibilities and methods. Traditional tools for interpreting history are rationalist: they work to separate, organize, and sequence time, placing the historian outside of the stream of history and denying the felt basis of knowing. My new book, After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity (Duke University Press, 2025), argues for a post-rationalist historical method and presents history in lyrical language.

Lyricism is not just elegant language or poetic style. It is a form of deep daydreaming that can entertain the expansiveness of time. Lyricism speaks to and from the unconscious, revealing the ways past and present are welded to each other, and showing history at its most daily and disorienting. After Transformation bends and breaks scholarly form as it takes up central figures, texts, and phenomena of Christian late antiquity. I “translate” these figures, stories, and themes through a variety of lyrical forms: poems, micro-essays, vignettes, and poetic fragments that foreground blurred histories and highlight the ongoing presence of the past.

In the prose poem “I Wish I Was One of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” I rewrite a sixth-century story about seven Christian brothers from Ephesus sleeping through two hundred years of historical change. The story fuses with the contemporary desire to “check out,” to find ways to anesthetize ourselves through harrowing political landscapes. 

I have been that tired. So tired that I could pass out for two hundred years. So tired that my only speech was to God, Please just let me sleep. Paramedics enter the house across the street, the low red light flashing over the arterial blues of January. It’s too early for tragedy, for more of it. What I wouldn’t do to hide from all of this, the constant emergency, just outside the house. To let the centuries pass in a cave, wearing the same clothes day after day, blank but unscathed through the racket, the houses razed. Emperors and gods would rise and recede, famines would bloom and fade. And then one day I’d rouse to a sky no longer flurried with the ash of burning flesh, and suddenly the cross, the mark of my survival, is everywhere looming.

Christian late antiquity resonates in our world. The ascetic value of impassive endurance through practically any suffering bleeds into university life, which also requires its inhabitants to continuously bear more, promising them an eternal horizon of possibility that never arrives, certainly not upon graduation or tenure. There is too an ongoing force to the ancient Christian relish for documenting the supposedly “foreign” influence of heresy, emblematized by the Christian bishop Epiphanius’ text, Medicine Chest, a work that invents with fantastical detail countless pathological threats to Christian orthodoxy. This clinical obsession with poisonous, contagious others reveals itself today in bureaucratic violence against non-citizens and perceived outsiders. The past is witnessed, even amplified, through the present. 

Overtly non-rational forms of knowing, especially those we associate with religion, must be taken seriously on their own terms. Issuing from the deepest recesses of the psyche and from the body’s memory, speaking through language’s musicality, lyricism opens us to forms of non-rational knowing that are crowded out by traditional historical tools and methods. Suspending the conscious mechanisms that construct categories and chronologies, lyricism opens channels for the experience of history living in and through us. The desire to “check out,” as in the seven sleepers tale, may be less spectacular and visible than acts of war or profiles of great thinkers, but it is no less important in registering history’s effects. Lyricism can be both more critical and more constructive for metabolizing the structures and dramas of living. 

The present is rich, and it overwhelms us with the forces of those many times that pulse through it, though we imagine those times long gone. Christian late antiquity is available to us in the texture and minor details of our modern everyday experiences. Other times live on diffusely, profoundly, in the very grain and shape of our individual and collective lives. Rationalist and scientific postures know some things well, and they know other things badly. By lyrically retelling Christian late antiquity, I invite readers to experience the wildness and immanence of history that can come from knowing through the lyrical. 

Permissions: Maia Kotrosits, "I Wish I Was One of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus," in After Transformation: A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity, pp. 23-26.  Copyright 2025, Duke University Press.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission of the publisher.  www.dukeupress.edu