Why Angels Fall: A Portrait of Orthodox Europe - Hardcover

Clark, Victoria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 033375185X ISBN 13: 9780333751855

Publisher: Macmillan, 2000

Synopsis

Victoria Clark combines history with contemporary detail in this study that traces the story of the Orthodox Eastern Church, from its legacy of Byzantine politics to the current Serbian troubles and its remoteness from the Western Churches.

About this title

Review

Victoria Clark travelled across most of Eastern Europe to write Why Angels Fall. Having worked as a journalist in Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Russia for six years, she was fascinated by the Eastern Orthodox churches and keen to unravel their history 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 over-simplifying 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 thousand-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. Perhaps, most of all, 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

Review

"'Compelling, powerful, magnificent' The Times '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"

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 033375185X
• ISBN 13: 9780333751855
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480