Crisis of Empire

Book excerpt: "This book focuses on the attempts of three seventh-century Palestinian intellectuals--John Moschos, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus the Confessor--to determine the Church's power and place during a period of profound crisis, as the eastern Roman empire suffered serious reversals in the face of Persian and then Islamic expansion. Through their stories, Booth documents nothing less than a profound change in the very nature of the self-perception of a religious society. Although focused on the first half of the seventh century, this book throws bright light both behind itself--on the nature of the role of the holy man in late antiquity--and in front of itself--on the nature of the Byzantine Orthodoxy that would emerge in the middle ages, and which is still central to the churches of Greece and Eastern Europe"--