After slogging through two books I’m happy to not have to read again, I just started a good history of the byzantines. It seems balanced and insightful, at least in the first part of the book. It’s very interesting to get insight into a stream of the Christian faith that I really have no grid for, and I’m really looking forward to hearing from them and worshiping with them in just a couple of weeks.
East and West had evolved different ways of apprehending Man’s relation with his God. Sensible and rational, the Latins believed that Man must wait until after death to know if he was saved or damned. idealistic and mystical, the Byzantines believed Man could be saved before death. A central tenet of Eastern Orthodox Christianity is that ‘God became human so that we might be made God.’ Deification, theosis in Greek, is precisely what the few ‘saints’ on Mount Athos are striving towards today, as generations of monks have for centuries, becoming ‘like a golden chain with each of them a link, bound to all the preceding: saints in faith, love and good works . . . one single chain, in one God’.
“Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe From Byzantium to Kosovo” (Victoria Clark), page 18
pat loughery 
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