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The Face As Theology
By Christopher Nugent

"In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled. and in a riddle."
(Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God).

FEW things of heaven and earth are as fascinating as the face. "Image of God," it may be no paradox that it is also a seat of human vanity. The face has "launched a thousand ships." And wrecked them. Few things have been scrutinized so much, as we all know, and understood so little. "Through a glass, darkly."

The primitive was fascinated with the face as dramatized in the ubiquity of the mask, an embodiment of mysterious power. Martin Buber, in his classic I and Thou, went so far as to characterize God as "the Face,"¹ and it may be that alienation from that Face, more than suffocation among latter-day colossi, accounts for all our contemporary observations about collective "facelessness." The face may be some measure of the Fall.

I

Most accessible of mysteries, the face is less an essence than an experience. And, in the light of the origins of theology in experience, spiritual experience, a theology of the face need be no more eccentric than a scholastic theology of the Middle Ages, a comic theology of Renaissance, a tragic of the Reformation, and, certainly, the goddess theology of a contemporary mode. In fact, the face might even be a salutary centering device. The face is not just fascinating. In an age of bifurcation, and sometimes disturbing bifurcation, between professional theological specialization and simultaneous popular foundering over one's fundamental being-one's true face, a theology of the face might also be instructive. A focus. And our focus is, perhaps inevitably, upon the classic text of Genesis: "Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves" ( l:26). The strictures of scholarship, or scholarly, modesty, are such that its exegesis does not go significantly beyond the traditional one as, for example, in the authoritative Anchor Bible's book of Genesis. That is, the view that the text denominates a new species of

Christopher Nugent is Professor of History, University of Kentucky. He holds bachelor's. master's and doctor's degrees from Bellarmine College, Creighton University, the Universities of San Francisco and Iowa, and the Institute for Theological Studies, Tantur, Jerusalem. Poet and playwright, Dr. Nugent is also the author of Ecumensim in the Age of the Reformation (1974) and Masks of Satan: The Demonic in History (1983).
¹ Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (1923; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). 108.

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creation, fundamentally distinct from and superior to inanimate or brute creation, and distinguished by a sharing in divine gifts, such as reason and will. Our experimental theology of the face, predicated of this exegesis, can be far more speculative.

II

Let us begin with a few deductions. For example, if we are made in the image and likeness of God, the face is, in some sense, a sacrament. A sacrament in the Augustinian formulation: a visible sign of invisible grace. We have perhaps all shared some experience of this, about which the Dante of La Vita Nuova and the courtly poets ecstasized, with no more extravagance than visionaries are entitled to, as the faces of a Fra Angelico might attest. For there is even, conceivably, "a mysticism of the face," proceeding mostly, by self-effacement. A mysticism of the face might, incidentally help elucidate and even harmonize our ideas of the "beatific vision" with the putatively bolder one of "divinization," more endemic to Eastern religion, including Eastern Christianity. The face is ecumenical.

Sacramentality can certainly suggest that the face is indeed a "mystery." It shares in the larger mystery, of the Godhead. if sometimes as its caricature, as the ridiculous to the divine. Protean if not kaleidoscopic, one's face is probably what one studies most over a lifetime, only to inspect a photograph to see what we really look like. Maybe because the face is a revelation and, like Revelation, both reveals and conceals. And, in either instance, ridiculous or sublime, concealment might be salutary. St. Augustine confesses: "You set me in front of my own face."² And he did not like what he saw. On the other hand, the absolute Face one may not look upon and live (Ex. 33:20). Finally, as the image and likeness of God, the face can be viewed as an icon. "Show me thy face," sang the woman of Shula (Song of Songs 2:14), and she loved what she saw. If nothing more, the face is a work of art, and it can be a testament that there is an Artist resident on the other side of our sullied creation.

If there is a theology of the face, there is a demonology of the mask. As icon, the face is vulnerable to the twin perils of idolatry and iconoclasm, respectively, narcissistic and nihilistic impulses elemental forms of the demonic. The first would transform the image into the thing imaged, issuing in pretense to what C.S. Lewis termed "inherent luminosity." That is, to one of the "strange gods" and, not ironically, to estrangement. Not knowing ourselves. The second. "iconoclasm," is ultimately only "man's inhumanity to man," and if we are made in the image and likeness of God, anything that defaces us is demonic. With this, the demonic is removed from the dualism of "the other side" and the trivialism of parlor games and situated within the heart, or heartlessness, of history.

² The Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Mentor, 1963), VIII , vii). 173.

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Emergent is an apparent duality of the face: image of God, but with a certainly latency to Satan; or, if one prefers, to alienation. To some of the church fathers, Satan was the alienus. But Satan is less a "person" than an impersonator, and this latency functions by "addition" rather than by "subtraction." That is, a mask is an addition, not a pure or naked face. Spiritualization, by contrast, as we have suggested, is in self-effacement, the cutting through acquired or cultural increments and the uncovering of one's true face. One's true face, without loss of one's true humanity.

III

What is one's true face? Fortunately, there is no orthodoxy in faces: there are faces and faces. But if there is a theology of the face, it would appear-that the depths of one's lived theology can sometimes be divined from the face. Here, to be sure, we must avoid any, pretense to "the reading of souls," the kind of face-fetish that seems implicit in some one-dimensional fundamentalism-and likely seduction by either the ethereal soulishness of the neophyte (or the spiritually disingenuous), or by the intimidating pugilism of the apocalyptic warrior.

Wanting any, prescribed rules of discernment, we might best proceed with a few contemporaries who might have found their true face. Especially since. as the late Lord Clark told us. the Cimabue face of St. Francis has been redone in the nineteenth century. My own candidates would include the expressive, even impish face of Thomas Merton, the ascetic (but also often impish) face of Mobandas Gandhi, or the iconesque countenance of Teilhard de Chardin. As a group, my prejudice is often to find the most compelling faces among blacks and in the Third World, with their inherent dignity made resplendent by suffering. And it may, be that the lineaments of these faces are the least roboticized, but they are too unsung (and perhaps too numerous) to be singled out. But it may be that my, favorite face is the kenotic, "emptied" (emptied, but hardly vacuous) face of Charles de Foucauld, spiritual father of the Little Brothers (and Sisters) of Jesus.

All the foregoing are, as it happens, seasoned faces, and I believe it was the happy insight of Jean-Paul Sartre that we "get" our faces only with time, since all babies look alike. The Kingdom of Heaven may be for little children, but its saints have put away the things of a child. If childlike, they do not necessarily appear as children. And their peace does not necessarily, appear as peace, for it may be a "peace that surpasses understanding" (Phil. 4:7).

In all events, these faces reveal less serendipity than apatheia, by which is intended that state where one's instrumentality is put before one's feelings. Neither cherubic nor robotic, they, are wholly and irrepressibly human, yet intimative of something transcendent; individualized, yet as sculpted after some common model. Might it not be that that model is the Face as revealed in the "man of sorrow" (Isa. 53:3)? And might it not be that the Face is a respecter of the face"? As in the

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Scholastic synthesis, grace perfects rather than displaces nature, even if perfected through suffering.

IV

I do not see such faces when I survey the contemporary spiritual marketplace, whether in some evangelizers of the "electronic church" or their putative antithesis in the more mercenary entrepreneurs of Eastern religion. Theologically, the two may be as far apart as heaven and earth but, couriously, they, are one in their smiles. All but identical smiles. And all but compulsory smiles, as guarantors of orthodoxy after all'? The same holds for, and may find a common model in, some of the purveyors of the new therapeutic-oriented natural "spiritualities" endemic to California, not necessarily, accidentally, the homeland of Hollywood. Of glitter rather than luminosity, with the hawking of spiritual wares enough to make a Tetzel blush.

To be sure, such spiritualities have positive value, and our spiritual journeys must begin somewhere. It may be that their exponents, more unwittingly than not, and improbably than either, function off their own variation of "first the good news, then the bad." First Mount Tabor, then Mount Calvary. But euphoria can obscure moral sense, including Mount Calvary, and I perceive them as confounding the part with the whole, which is unlikely to change unless the whole is made painfully evident. Unless they come to know themselves that is, to know that they are not necessarily where they, think they are.

My inclination is to see the spiritual marketplace. on balance. as representing what Philip Rieff denominated The Triumph of the Therapeutic. As suffused with more psychic than spiritual experience, and betraying the cheapened emotionality of the new cult of sensibility. Such faces may bespeak peace-or a more placid, acquired tranquility, but not pain.

The best faces reveal both, simultaneously. The first, peace, is not the absence of tension so much as the graced gift of living with tension; the second, pain, is not a testament to an alien. "spiritual oppression" so much as to a life lived de projundis, fully, incarnated in the human condition. Grounded in both peace and compassion. Rudolph Otto, in his classic study, speaks of "the strange harmony of contrasts" and the "dual character of the numinous consciousness," the fascinans and the tremedum.³ The true spiritual masters, for example, Julian of Norwich, bespeak not one-dimensionality, but synthesis. She writes of our "marvelous mixture of well-being and woe," and she announces from her very first revelation: "This vision was living and vivid and hideous and fearful and sweet and lovely."⁴ This kind of thing, before which

³ The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press. 1928).31.
⁴ Showings,. trans. and ed. Edmund College and James Walsh (New York: Paulist, 1978).279.188.

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language pales, may be ontological as much as moral in its constitution, rooted in the mystery of Being as well as behavior. Spiritualization is not just in "divinization" but, not necessarily ironically, in humanization. Simultaneously. It goes beyond dualistic exclusivism to dialectical inclusivism to what Friedrich von Hugel characterized as the "God-like Totum Simul."⁵ All is present to God, at once.

This is obviously, not an appeal to a self-lacerating Puritan gravity, which can be as contrived as the felicity of the contemporary spiritual market-place. Only to suggest that the "holism" of the latter may not be holistic enough. That the finer faces, on balance, are apt to be marked less by blinding Mosaic radiance than by chiaroscuro (Ex. 34:29-33). By light and shadow, peace and pain, spontaneity and submission, attachment and detachment-including detachment from courtship with one's own feelings-and by life and death, by the ever-penetrating rising and dying of which Paul (II Cor. 4: 10- 11) wrote so maginificently and which Albert Schweitzer saw as the core of his mysticism.⁶ By manifesting the root rhythms of spiritual life.

In spiritual life, as in life more generally, there is often an inverse relationship between appearance and reality, the persona and the true self. Carl Jung's comment on Adler's problematic of "godlikeness" has been reducible to a rule: "the brighter the persona, the darker the shadow."⁷ The problem, generally, is not pathology but maturity, including one's degree of openness to the wounds of the world. The role of religion is not to anaesthetize, but conscientize.

V

I have attempted this essay not just because of a fascination with the face, but of a concern with its future. The face may have a history, a past, and that past can reveal a part of the concern for its future. Gone, it would seem, is the authority of the face as elicitable in the archaic Greek sculptures that keep watch within the British Museum. If the face is a measure of the Fall, there does seem to be a decline in the period from, let us say, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose visage is described "like the face of an angel" Acts 6: 15), to a child, "the sad-eyed angel" whom Elie Wiesel⁸ viewed upon the gallows in the Kingdom of Night, the Nazi deathcamp.

The Middle Ages was not only as its last great minnesinger, Henry Adams, put it, a great epoch of emotion. It was also, I would suggest, a

⁵ The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her
Friends (2 vols. London: James Clarke. 1908) I, 238,
⁶ The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (1931: New York: Seabury, 1968), 16-17.
⁷ See, for example, the paper of Kenneth J. Zanca. "Buber, Jung, Conscience and Confession," p. 8. and "Phenomena Resulting from the Assimilation of the Unconscious." The Collected works of C.G. Jung (2nd ed.: Bollingen Series, 17 vols.; Princeton University Press, 1952-71). VII, 273ff. In some cases, the modern classic of Hervey Cleckley may apply: The Mask of Sanity (4th ed.; St. Louis: C.V.. Moseley, 1964).
⁸ Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Avon, 1969), 75.

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great epoch of the face. Whether in itself or in the eye of the beholder, the face was Imago Dei, and its iconography reveals saints who were not so much comely or robust as endowed with an uncanny and compelling supernatural presence. From the ubiquitous primitif to the portals of Chartres Cathedral, this is manifest. The change seems first visible in the Renaissance which, though possibly an eventual factor, did not represent the egalitarian over the hieratic. It represented, as John Ruskin argued, if at times too impassionedly beauty over truth. It seems signalled in a lapse of Castiglione, first arbiter of taste of the modern world, in the speech of Pietro Bembo: "The ugly therefore are also for the most part wicked and the beautiful good."⁹ With this, the balance was lost, authenticity forfeited, and in time the Virgin would have to look like Miss America. If this were not a loss of humanity, the longer devolution is perceptible from the late medieval primitif, the Pieta d'Avignon. to what sonic have considered the first modern painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, of Picasso. Art simply ceased to be human.

What about life? This reading is not necessarily as romantic as might appear, and, whether art imitates life or life art, it need be little more than a commentary upon the dissolution of an authentic, integral humanism and its effective displacement by an alienating, disintegral naturalism. By Social Darwinism, evolution inversus and, with sexual liberation, our new Satyrikon. "Icon of a satyr." In the image and likeness of beast" Or is the new "facade" the old mask, redivivus?

VI

For all our recent talk of liberation-which must, like everything else, be received with discrimination-I fail to see a liberation of the face. In fact, I sense, to the contrary, in this possibly cognate and certainly more conventional cheapened emotionality, a loss in its dignity. And this, perhaps, with a loss in its divine association. And is it that the withdrawal of life is first from the face? The Grim Reaper has no face.

The Grim Reaper has no voice either, and so will not be given the last word. We have tried to get beyond any given physiognomy of the face to the face as a product of time, and there is a cause for belief that time is on the side of the face. Two illuminations, one embedded in literature, the other expressed directly from life, representing something of both sides of the contemporary quest for authenticity, can be parabolic of this faith. The most compelling spiritual truths, including what may be a crystallization of a quality of the best faces, can come from the most uncanny places. Like Jack Kerouac. In the novel that lent a name to a generation and represents an unlikely metaphor for and sequel to the odyssey of Western humanity, his narrator, Sal Paradise, speaks of the central character, Moriarity, whose vagaries were, after all, a product of his search for his … ah … father: "He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific."¹⁰

⁹ Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of Courtier, trans. Friench Simpson (New York: Frederick Ungar. 1959). 81
¹⁰ On the Road (1957: Middlesex: Penguin, 1972). 184.

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As it were, a hidden, inextinguishable sanctity, or grace in the "world" was also observed in the spiritual odyssey of Thomas Merton. Moved once by the myriad faces in the shopping district of Louisville, he wrote that "at the center of our being" is le point verge, our all but ineradicable "point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion." "The pure glory of God in us," if we could but see it emblazoned in each other all the time, there would be no more war or cruelty "I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other."¹¹ There presently seems little danger from the latter, and the illumination seems a presentiment of the Beatific Vision. With which we conclude.

The recovery of the face is by a return to, turn to, the irreducible Face. It may, be that the Psalmist (27:8) cries, "Seek ye my face," because our true face is hidden in God. The face has a future. More than a future, it has a vocation. As Paul, in one of the most mystical passages of Scripture, puts it: "And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect" (II Cor. 3:18). And this, subliminally, may, be some part of our perpetual fascination with the face.

¹¹ Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1968), 158.