The Ethos of Liturgical Art
and the Aesthetics of Orthodox Bells

Gothic architecture, like scholastic thought-- and we might even say, like the mechanical tuning of Western bells-- tends to restrict truth exclusively to the intellectual faculty, to logical analysis and emotional suggestion.

This is why both of these instances of "technique" leave us with the feeling of an inability to transcend the bounds of individual existence; we are overwhelmed, and finally crushed by the vast impersonal and mathematical spaces of a Gothic cathedral, and in this sense it leaves us predetermined our individual nature, without connection and without personal room left for the unforeseen, for freedom– we have a feeling that there is no escape.

In contrast, a prime characteristic...