A flawed but worthwhile glimpse at a rich tradition.
A scholar’s personal exploration of the mystical side of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Exploring mysticism first as an academic but then also as a believer, Markides (Sociology/Univ. of Maine; Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality, 2005, etc.) shares a variety of experiences that have most recently shaped his understanding of the subject. Much of the book revolves around Father Maximos, a respected monk at Mount Athos, a leading center of Greek Orthodox monasticism. Through multiple conversations with Father Maximos, the author shares monastic wisdom on a wide array of topics, including the seven fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. On one visit to Cyprus, Markides and his wife visited an aging novelist and engaged him in a lengthy discussion about the existence or nonexistence of an afterlife. In another chapter, the author chronicles his visit to St. Catherine Monastery at Mt. Sinai, where he viewed its ancient artistic and historical treasures and climbed the holy mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments. As a student of world religions and a sociologist, Markides sees Orthodoxy from a larger perspective: “I realized that what many Western intellectuals searched for in the ashrams of India and the lamaseries of Tibet—that is, an experiential pathway to the Divine—has been all along within the very heart of Christianity.” The author succeeds in providing a meaningful look at Orthodoxy and mysticism, but his use of extended dialogue is often forced. Nonetheless, Markides creates a useful collage of contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy, “an integrated system of spiritual practices within Christianity that can lead to a direct experience of God.”
A flawed but worthwhile glimpse at a rich tradition.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88587-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Image/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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