Product Description

`Compelling, powerful, magnificent` THE TIMES

In revealing encounters with monks, nuns, bishops and archbishops, in monasteries ancient and modern Victoria Clark measures the depth and width of the gulf now separating Europe`s Orthodox East from the Catholic and Protestant West. Many of the differences in outlook, priorities and even values can be traced back to the 1054 schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople which created Europe`s most durable fault-line. Travelling from Mount Athos to Istanbul and unravelling the tangled history, Victoria Clark demonstrates a rare sympathy with Eastern Orthodox Europe.

`I finished the book wanting to meet this intelligent, warm-hearted writer, and to follow her to some of the places she visited` LITERARY REVIEW

`A masterful synthesis of vivid and often humorous travel writing, a series of probing interviews and a pertinent historical context` THE TIMES

`Exhilarating... her book will be immensely helpful to anyone occasionally puzzled by events, especially politics, in Eastern Europe` FINANCIAL TIMES

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #484821 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Amazon.com
Victoria Clark traveled across most of Eastern Europe to write Why Angels Fall. Having worked for six years as a journalist in Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and Russia, Clark was fascinated by the Eastern Orthodox churches and keen to unravel their histories and beliefs. To do so, she journeyed from Mount Athos, to Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Cyprus, and finally Istanbul, interviewing clergy and other believers. We're treated to a series of vivid cameos, a few of whose subjects glow almost visibly with holiness, a few terrify, and many show qualities rare and needed in the West. As Clark puts it, after the ancient split between eastern and western Christianity, "each side lost something it could not happily do without ... at the risk of oversimplifying for the sake of clarity, western Christendom can be said to have lost its heart, eastern Christendom its mind."

Her keenness to explain Orthodoxy to Westerners stems from a fear that the continent is in the process of fracturing along a 1,000-year-old fault line, between the Catholic and Protestant west and the Orthodox east. The book combines high-quality, highly readable travel writing with a powerful mix of politics and religion. Most of all, perhaps, it demonstrates the power of history, and of different peoples' conflicting versions of history. Again and again, Clark finds the present in the grip of the past. In Serbia, for example, she cannot escape the legends surrounding the destruction of the Serbs' medieval empire in 1389, and the death of the venerated Prince Lazar: "the battle of Kosovo's interruption of Serbia's golden greatness has become a cataclysm to rival man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the minds of Serbs.... Prince Lazar is the key to understanding the Serbs' deep conviction that, however many wars they initiate, they remain a nation of victims and martyrs." --David Pickering, Amazon.co.uk

From Library Journal
To bring us this vivid and sensitive portrait of Eastern Europe's Orthodox church, journalist Clark (London Observer) traveled widely within its key geographical regions (the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Cyprus, and Turkey) and conducted extensive interviews with various levels of the church hierarchy. The author, who has reported on the Croatian, Bosnian, and Chechen wars, focuses upon the historical events that have greatly influenced the development of the Orthodox Church, from its origins in the 1054 schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, through centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule, to the more recent decades of modern communism leading up to the present. While Clark does admit to offering only a sketchy treatment of Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, and Moldavia owing to a lack of space, this unevenness does not detract from the importance of the work. Recommended for academic and theological libraries.DMichael W. Ellis, Ellenville P.L., NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
British journalist Clark covered southeastern Europe for the Observer during the '90s. In Why Angels Fall , she examines the region's history and current problems, using the Orthodox faith as a unifying theme. Americans and western Europeans tend to trivialize the Eastern rites. Clark demonstrates, however, that "Eastern Orthodox Europe is waging [a defensive war] to hold its own--spiritually and territorially--in an area threatened by godless materialism from the West and a population explosion from Islam to the south." Clark travels to Mount Athos, the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Cyprus, and Istanbul, meeting with priests and patriarchs, nuns and monks. She also travels back in time, to the Great Schism of 1054, the Fourth Crusade, and Rome's long effort to force Byzantine patriarchs to accept its primacy. Clark also examines the impact of the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, which stimulated both the nationalistic "Phyletism," which produced a separate Orthodox Church in each country, and the spiritual movement called "Hesychasm," which is at the center of Orthodoxy's current appeal to Westerners. An enlightening overview of a vital region. Mary Carroll
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