My conversation with Matthew Westermayer, visiting assistant professor of religion, took place in the midst of a busy period of travel and faculty orientation. He had just defended his doctoral thesis at Cornell a few weeks earlier – “it was a mad sprint to the deadline” – then left New York with his cat, Harper.
Given that Westermayer is a specialist in Late Antique Christianity in the Near East, you may be surprised to learn that we spent most of our time talking about trees. “Trees are having their own moment,” he told me. “Everyone I talk to is very interested in trees, but not so much in Christianity. But you know, trees are sort of a great equalizer: it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, everyone cares deeply about the tree.
His interest in trees is, however, relatively recent. It was religion that first attracted him. “As with any subject,” he reflected, “I think you are compelled by some force of necessity. And this is very true for me.
In high school, Westermayer had what he thought at the time was a religious experience. “(I) would continue to deconstruct that later in life and ask, ‘What was really going on there?’ “, he remembers. Nonetheless, it was a “pivotal moment.” He went from not attending college to studying religion at Baylor University.
After earning his bachelor’s degree, he came out, which “created a lot of tension with the communities I was a part of.” He had no particular plans but knew he wanted to continue his education, so he applied to Princeton Theological Seminary in order to “buy a little more time” to think about his life. (He added that he would never advise a student to do this.)
At Princeton, he took a class with a prominent New Testament historian, who also happened to be a “new professor” that year. Watching him give his lecture, Westermayer felt impressed: “There was such a mastery of thousands of years of history. I thought: I have to do this. This is my life’s calling.
For Westermayer, studying history is about discovering “everything that lies beneath the surface of everything you hold dear or believe in.” He begins to learn the languages of the original texts: Greek, Syriac, Coptic. Then he did a master’s degree at Yale in the history of Christianity to obtain “exceptional training in all things history and language.”
It wasn’t until he went to Cornell for his doctorate, while living in the “interesting physical environment” of Ithaca, that he became “the tree guy.” During his first semester, he wrote a paper about Egyptian Christian crosses that had faces and could talk. During his research, he came across graffiti in a monastery, near where monks and visitors used the cross to spell their names on the wall. It was a tree with a human head and human finger branches. It wasn’t really relevant to his project at the time, so he “put it away.”
The summer after his freshman year, he had a moment of reflection. “I sat down and thought: Ultimately, what kind of thesis would I be happy to write? » He decided: “Regardless of what happens with jobs – and everyone knows this, the Ph.D. The job market is one of the worst – I would be forever happy if I had written a book about this tree.
He has since said, “I’m just consumed by the trees.” »
Westermayer noted that many people believe that Western religions, particularly Christianity, are only interested in metaphysics and are responsible for our current disconnection from the natural world. “But these ideas are being rejected,” says Westermayer. His own research reveals a history of “rigorous intellectual engagement and practices with trees and plants, flowers and places” within Christianity.
For example, her thesis focused on the tactile ways of encountering trees – such as grafting, harvesting, or felling them – and how they shape both the tree and the person acting. “So I ask: “Why? And it’s thanks to this powerful and dynamic connection between people, trees and practices. To illustrate this, he cites two famous moments in Christianity where fruit was taken from a tree: Adam and Eve in the garden, and Augustine of Hippo, whose theft of a pear prompted him to recount his Confessions and wondering about the origin of evil. “And I say that’s exactly what happens when you take fruit from a tree!”
This fall, his “Ecology and Religion” course goes beyond Christianity and Western religion to examine why there is “a unique place for the arboreal…in every culture and every history.” In this time of unprecedented climate crisis and reassessment of our relationship with animals and the non-human world, Westermayer believes that turning to our stories and traditions is a way to mobilize all resources – to complicate our thinking, to “give back a certain form of otherness to humanity.” these non-human subjects” and slow us down. “I would have considered it a successful course if people were looking at trees or goats or cows and maybe all of a sudden they stuttered, or had some sort of hesitation about how to think, act or identify with these things.”
As for the study of Christianity, Westermayer believes it is “a kind of invitation to the study of everything.” Indeed, “to understand it as a phenomenon, you have to think about everything, from how to bury the dead, to how to behave with a tree, or… Can women read the Bible? Can they preach? —And they did it in ancient times, but it made some men angry. Or… How do we make books? And who reads these books? It’s a sort of fractal pattern… it keeps repeating itself, over and over again. This way, “whatever interests you as a student, you can contribute to that topic.”
He acknowledges that Christianity is a subject that “elicits a lot of reactions” and contains many assumptions. One of these hypotheses, according to Westermayer, is that there is a small standard set of texts by which to understand the origins of the entire movement. But when you read outside the canon, as students do in his other course this fall, titled “Jesus,” “you’ll get a sense of the complexity and contestation of the origins and development of this movement.”
In his free time, Westermayer surprisingly doesn’t enjoy hiking or the outdoors, although he looks forward to lying in his hammock “for an obscenely long time” at “that time in October, when the weather is ideal “.
He is a lover of poetry and thinks that “everyone should have a different taste in it”, although he particularly highlighted Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaca” because it made him cry. When I asked him for other books to read as a student, he, without “wanting to appear pretentious,” recommended “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust: “Volume one, and perhaps two, then you will understand from there if you want to go to the whole seven. (It’s on volume four.)
Another example is Jacque Derrida’s “The Monolingualism of the Other” and his ideas about the need to leave space between oneself and the other. Here we returned to the trees: “Of course, (the trees) don’t talk. So every time I try to think about them and understand them, I have to give space. I cannot leave confident and assured, because I must understand that there is an act of translation between us.
In the year ahead, Westermayer is excited about the little things, like enjoying the beauty around Amherst (“the photos don’t do it justice”), celebrating eight years with his partner, as well as getting to know each other with his students and “see what they will teach me. And they certainly will.