A Seeker and His Mentor Explore Faith, Mysticism and History

“I was not a cheerful agnostic,” confesses Kyriacos C. Markides in “The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality.” Born in Cyprus and raised in the traditions of Greek Orthodoxy, he was lured away from his “naive faith” when he arrived in the United States as a college student in the early ‘60s. Ultimately, he came away from his studies in the social sciences with the sure conviction that “society gave birth to the gods, not the other way around.”

“[B]elief in a personal God,” he writes, “was a thing of the past, a residue of medievalism destined to an eventual extinction.”

But Markides slowly found his way back to faith, first through the writings of Carlos Castaneda, Alan Watts and Fritjof Capra, then under the tutelage of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, and finally by making a pilgrimage of his own to the celebrated hermitage on Mt. Athos in northern Greece, an experience that he described in an earlier work, “Riding With the Lion.”

One senses that Markides had been searching all along for a source of wisdom that was ancient and authentic, and he found it in the person of an Athonite monk called Father Maximos, whom he describes as his “mentor, teacher, and key informant of Christian spirituality as it was preserved on the ‘Mountain of Silence.’ ” When Father Maximos descended from Mount Athos to open a monastery in the mountains of Cyprus, Markides joined him there--”I felt as if an Invisible Hand had arranged everything,” he writes.

Thus begins an account of the further encounters between Markides and his mentor, a fascinating narrative that is compounded of dialogue and meditation, history and politics, theology and travelogue. Among the topics that are touched upon in “The Mountain of Silence” are the life of Jesus, the politics of Cyprus under British colonialism, the use and misuse of icons, the workings of angels and demons in the real world, and the striving of the human soul toward “Christification.”

The thread that holds the book together, however, is a series of conversations between Markides and Father Maximos on the most arcane aspects of mysticism. They range from “illnesses of the heart,” which to Father Maximos include “preoccupation with worldly affairs, focus on physical pleasures, and obsession with wealth,” to eros maniakos (“maniacal eros”), or “the attainment of a deeply erotic relationship with God that lies far beyond the most intense and the most passionate erotic rapture between human beings.”

All of these conversations, which soar so high and delve so deeply into the realm of mysticism, are clearly intoxicating to Markides, who takes pleasure in drawing connections between Orthodox Christianity and his own secular knowledge and experience. But a certain current of tension can be detected in the encounters between the seeker and the teacher. Markides may be a practicing mystic, but he is also a working social scientist, and he wants to make a connection between the two very different worlds that he straddles.

“At this stage in history, no matter what our personal religious preferences may be,” he insists, “we need to re-integrate the rational with the intuitive, the scientific with the mystical, for the sake of our collective physical and spiritual salvation.”

But Father Maximos is having none of it. For example, Markides describes a conversation in which Father Maximos likens the hermit-monks of Mount Athos to “spiritual scientists,” an idea he clearly finds agreeable. But Father Maximos himself is not willing to blur the lines between faith and reason, and he insists that the scientific method has no place in the mystical enterprise that seeks oneness with God.

“We can and must study God, and we can reach God and get to know Him,” he insists. “And the organ by which we can achieve that is neither our senses nor our logic but our hearts.”

At the heart of “The Mountain of Silence” is the same clash between fundamentalism and modernism that underlies so many of the headlines in today’s newspaper. Recruitment of new monastics on Cyprus, for example, is hindered by the lure of “cafes, discotheques, and other worldly pleasures,” as Father Maximos explains. “A lad raised on hamburgers, pizzas, and Coke has a difficult time getting used to the boiled vegetables and legumes we eat.”

Despite all of the earnest theological and mystical strivings that are described in “The Mountain of Silence,” one comes away with the sense that it is Coke and pizza, science and technology, rather than Satan and his army of demons, against which Father Maximos and his arcane wisdom appear to be powerless.

Jonathan Kirsch is a contributing writer to the Book Review and the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People” and “King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel.”