Why Angels Fall: a journey through Orthodox Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo Victoria Clark Macmillan, 460pp, £18.99 ISBN 033375185X

Victoria Clark may well be annoyed to learn from one reviewer that her journey through Orthodox Europe is "in the great tradition of 19th-century English lady travellers". However, that description is not far off the mark. Who but an English lady traveller would think of smuggling herself on to Mount Athos disguised in a long black beard? The idea is pure Rose Macaulay; what a shame she doesn't follow it through! I suspect that only a lady traveller, and possibly only an English lady traveller, could have won the confidence of so many suspicious Orthodox monks and priests. Volodia, an old Russian acquaintance of mine, used to view English women as magical, impossible beings. Creatures of myth and literature, they were to a degree exempt from his general hostility towards all things western. Clark enjoys a similar privilege, and exploits it to the full. She charms the crotchety old prelates she encounters on her journey, and is, in turn, charmed by them. The overall result is a charming book.

If an English person has any acquaintance with Orthodoxy, it is probably through icons or church music. From there, he or she might progress to Vladimir Lossky or Sergei Bulgakov - cultured emigre theologians, products of Russia's "silver age". This tradition of sophisticated, cosmopolitan Orthodoxy is faithfully maintained in the Russian Orthodox Church in London. In so far as we think about Orthodoxy at all, it is as an exotic version of High Anglicanism, an aesthetic faith with ancien regime overtones.

Why Angels Fall shatters that false image. The Orthodoxy that Clark presents is a peasant faith, earthy and magical. There is beauty - in the ritual and in the liturgy - but it is not recognised as such by those who take part in it. Icons are venerated as holy objects, not savoured as works of art. Clark's Serbian friend Bogdan is disgusted by the "Treasures of Mount Athos" exhibition. "They are showing things that should not be shown like this, as if they were only important as art." Belief in the magical potency of certain objects and places is at the heart of Orthodoxy. The aesthetes and intellectuals who are drawn towards it, such as John Taverner, have usually not reckoned with this central fact.

Sacred and profane rub shoulders in the Orthodox world, just as they once did in medieval Europe. There is nothing precious about Orthodox piety. The conversation of two Romanian monks descends quite naturally from theology to bawdy jokes. "I have an interesting theory," says one, "that there is an important connection between lack of Orthodox belief and frigidity in a woman - it must be something to do with a passionate heart leading to other forms of passion, don't you think?" Father Milorad has a Serbian slant on the death of Princess Diana. "An accident? Pshaw! She was killed on the orders of your Queen. That was her punishment for fucking a Muslim. What did she want to do that for? Haven't we got enough Muslims in the world already?" Why Angels Fall is full of such gems.

Clark organises her investigation around two central concepts: Hesychism and Phyletism. They represent, respectively, the heavenly and the earthly faces of Orthodoxy. Hesychism is the name given to the mystical movement in 13th-century Byzantium, which enjoyed a significant revival in the 19th century and is still practised in some corners today. The centrepiece of Hesychism is the incantation of the "Jesus prayer" - "Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me"; its more arcane practices include various kinds of posture and breathing exercises. The similarity of these disciplines to Yoga suggests an eastern influence. The advanced Hesychist is meant to be able to recite the Jesus prayer "continually", so that it becomes a hardly conscious background to his other activity. After several years of such exertions, he attains a state of inward bliss, not always distinguishable from outward lunacy. This is how the Orthodox world occupied itself in the Middle Ages, while St Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica and Pope Innocent III summoned the fourth Crusade.

Phyletism is the ugly face of modern Orthodoxy. It refers to the religious nationalism that overran the Orthodox world after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and is overrunning it again today. In the Balkan countries, it is diluted with a kind of crazy folk-humour, but in Russia it is a po-faced ideology. A monk tells Clark that Russia "is the only pure country left. Every saint there has ever been has said that Russia will save the world." A Petersburg monk adds: "Nicholas II's life was simply one long podvig. His life and death can only be compared to that of Jesus Christ, who was also killed by Jews." These banal fantasies reappear again and again with disturbing monotony. Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly indistinguishable from fascism.

Hesychism, writes Clark, "acts as a powerful antidote to the infection of Phyletism". I am unconvinced. The two movements have a common source in the anti-intellectualism of Orthodoxy. "While you are still in your head," wrote a 19th-century Russian Hesychist, "your thoughts will always be whirling about like snow in winter . . . All our inner disorder is due to the dislocation of our powers, the mind and the heart each going their own way." But if it is possible to rise above rationalism, it is also possible to fall below it. The rejection of reason creates an uneven landscape, with oases of poetry scattered amid deserts of superstition and brutality. Immersed in the Jesus prayer, the Orthodox clergy failed to develop the bureaucratic structures that might have provided an effective antidote to Phyletism. But then, their Ottoman masters gave them little choice.

For all its charm and colour, Why Angels Fall is guilty of taking Orthodoxy too much at face value. Clark accepts Orthodoxy's view of itself as an ancient, timeless faith, in which all ages exist in a simultaneous present. It's true that Orthodox priests like to present east and west, Christianity and Islam, as actors in a great drama that hardly changes from one century to the next. But what does this rhetoric conceal? Isn't this language simply a glorious iconostasis, behind which lurks the sad reality of poverty and defeat? The countries of eastern Europe are far less the products of Orthodoxy than they are of communism. Even when they ignore their communist heritage in favour of a more distant and glorious past, they remain captive to it. A Russian priest talking about Protestant missionaries might, were it not for a few minor alterations of vocabulary, be confused with a politburo spokesman talking about American spies.

There is nothing special about what has taken place in Orthodox Europe. Given the right circumstances, it could happen anywhere. History is of little use in predicting which nations will succumb to xenophobia, because all nations have elements in their history that lend themselves to xenophobic interpretation. The past has no mysterious power of compulsion over the present. When a nation proclaims that it is acting in accordance with an ancient historical destiny, one can be sure that it is concealing some more immediate and mundane motive. Religion in eastern Europe is playing the role that religion so often plays: that of substituting a mythological podvig for the real problems of everyday existence.

Edward Skidelsky's reviews appear monthly in the NS

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