Holy Men of God

Book excerpt: "Holy Men of God is a history of the kings, priests, and monks of Eastern Orthodoxy, an intriguing subject especially for Western readers. It focuses on the violent and luxuriant worlds of Byzantium and medieval Russia, taking its readers from the Iconoclastic crisis, the last church fathers, the Bogomil heretics, the God-intoxicated Hesychasts, and the flowering of Russian saints under the Mongol yoke, to the quarrel between the Possessors and the Non-Possessors, the bizarre persecution of the Old Believers, the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, the spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim, and the death on a Greek peninsula of the solitary monk Silouan. Central to its plot are the quarrelsome figure Symeon the New Theologian and the final schism between the Eastern and Western churches in AD 1054. Throughout the book the quiet sanctity of the Eastern church is contrasted with the neurosis and sadism of the Russian and Byzantine monarchs. This interplay helps the reader better appreciate the strength and resilience of a church that has been repeatedly exposed to chaos and catastrophe up to the present day"--