The Ethos of Liturgical Art
and the Aesthetics of Orthodox Bells
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The Orthodox Church assumes a different experience of life than that envisioned by Western technology.
The identification of art with worship in the Eucharist is organic, not technological; and if we recognize that in every heresy, Christ always ends up as merely a paradigm of "moral perfection", or else becomes somehow disincarnate, we can easily see why our theology must express this organic vision— and not our theology only, but our art and our worship as well.
For technology, in its abstraction and its search for repeatable results, requires a certain perfection, and seeks to disregard the particular, or at least to submit it to the the absolute mastery of sameness and technique.
By contrast, Orthodox art, architecture, and even bell-ringing value the personal uniqueness of each thing; a harmonious unity achieved precisely in and through diversity— not in spite of it— is the keynote of all those things by which we seek to express our Trinitarian vision.