Stamoulis Chrysostomos, Theology and Art, Palimpsiston publications, Thessaloniki, 2000, pp. 121.

 The homonym volume, small, but aesthetically pleasing, edited by professor Chrysostomos Stamoulis, contains presentations of a symposium dedicated to the relations of theology with art.

            This symposium and this volume attempt to reconnect theology and art, to formulate a more complete image of theology in order for it to escape barren intellectuality and embrace man as a whole, highlighting the beauty of him and of the creation.

The Eastern Orthodox Tradition, without ever resorting to an “aesthetic theology”, understood and embraced the multifaceted and multifarious aspect of man, embracing all the dimensions of his life. Thus, with art and the theology of the icon, it painted incarnation, with music, it sang the Divine Economy and with poetry, it mystified souls to the mystery of salvation, with architecture, it united earth and sky and with worship, it connected many aspects of every day life to the Table of the Kingdom.

All the adventures of the ecclesiastical life, but mostly the dogmatic ones, are evident in every kind of ecclesiastical art. The wealth of life in Christ, the historical malign of heresies and their confrontation, can all be traced in the feast of ecclesiastical arts, which prove in this way that the Church is a living and creative Christian community, at least during the first millennium. And this is because a fear exists since then, a conservatism, a mimicking of the past and a stagnation of Christian life in the figures of the first millennium. No form of ecclesiastical art has known substantial development after the passing of the first millennium.

 The above observations give rise to the timeliness and contribution both of the symposium and this volume. A plethora of experts, musicians, singers and painters, theoretical professors of the arts and also of theology, deal with almost the whole spectrum of the problematic, defined by the thematic of the symposium. The relationship between musical pioneering and theological speculations, the innate relationship of culture with theology, the dialectics of art and the ecclesiastical community, the theology of art, the relationship of the young with the religious and demotic music, is just a small part of a great cultural feast.