The Holy Face and the Human Race

George Orwell in his classic 1984 once famously said that the future of the human race under totalitarianism would be a “boot stomping on a human face, forever.” Although like most dystopian classics, Orwell saw with a certain amount of prescience tendencies within modern society, his work has not stood the test of time like say, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in that the tyranny of postmodernity lies more in the ascendency of technocracy and rule by ‘experts’, than in brute force. Brute force employed in ways contrary to human dignity is certainly and disturbingly commonplace in today’s world: one can readily call to mind the millions in concentration camps (called officially “re-education camps”) in western China at the present moment, or the woman who was tased in Ohio after refusing to wear a mask at a Middle School football game. However, this brute force is first given intellectual and political cover by the technocrats. In this way, both Orwell and Huxley were correct in their fashion. We may not live in a world today where a boot literally smashes the human face, but we certainly live in a world where the human face is scrutinized and exploited by literally thousands of cameras using facial recognition AI, much like in 2002’s Sci-Fi dystopian movie Minority Report, where the protagonist could hardly walk down a street without being assailed by hundreds of targeted advertisements. Perhaps ironically, advancements in facial recognition technology have been thwarted by the increased use of masks in public areas. The dystopias of the current age, it seems, all have in common a distinct distrust, or at least cynical exploitation, of the human face. This deserves some degree of critical analysis on our part.

The Sacred Scriptures are full of references to the face or countenance of God, as expressed in the Hebrew word panim (פנ’ם), which appears 2,109 times in the Old Testament. Like much of Hebrew, panim is a wonderfully concrete noun, which the Biblical Authors utilized to express very rich concepts. Although it is usually translated ‘face’, which is similar to our own usage of the word, such as in Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit of God moves over the ‘face’, or surface, of the waters, when it is used in respect to the face of a person, it may be more aptly translated as ‘countenance’, ‘presence’, or even ‘gaze’. For instance, God says to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before my face” (Gen 6:13), which is usually translated “come before me”, in order to reduce the instance of Hebrew idiom. Panim appears constantly throughout the Psalter: “Make your face to shine upon your servant” (Ps 31:16), “Our God shall come, and not keep silence: a fire will devour before his face” (Ps 50:3), “Cast me not away from your face, and take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Ps 51:11). These are only a few of the instances.

In the New Testament, the Greek prosopon (προσωπον) largely takes the place of panim, and this usage is also found in versions of the Greek Old Testament, whether in the Septuagint or elsewhere. There are several significant places in the Gospel where the human face of Christ occupies center stage. Perhaps above all is the Transfiguration, where “his face shone as the sun” (Matthew 17:2). There is also the abuse of that same face, which his persecutors “struck…with the palms of their hands” (Matthew 26:67). In further reflection upon the revelation of Christ, St. Paul utilizes an analogy between the glory on the face (prosopon) of Moses, as is recounted in the Old Testament, and the glory of Christ, which Paul says we behold by faith “with unveiled face…transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Corinthians 3:18). To gaze upon the sacred face of Christ, in the theology of Saint Paul, is a means to be transfigured into his likeness. Eastern Theologians and Mystics in particular love to draw upon the connection between the Transfiguration and the ‘divinizing’ light which comes forth from Christ’s face.

In the West, the primary place we see the face of Christ is in images of his Passion. Important images include the Shroud of Turin, or the Holy Face of Manoppello, just to name two. In 1849, an image of the Holy Face kept in the Vatican, before hundreds of witnesses, glowed for three hours before the public. I think both Eastern and Western emphases say something very important about the face of Christ, and its importance to the Christian. The East tends to remind us of the reality of the divinity of Christ and our partaking in his divine nature by means of his human nature. The West focuses on the Passion as the means by which this sacred exchange is applied to individuals. The Incarnation made this possible, but the Passion of our Savior, which St. John time and again calls his glorification, is the ‘meritorious cause’ (to borrow from the theology of the Council of Trent) of our deification in Christ.

The Liturgy, especially in its hymnody, is likewise full of references to the face of Christ. Most recently, those praying the Office will recall the lovely and ancient hymn, Corde Natus ex Parentis, known in English as Of the Father’s Love Begotten. In particular the fourth verse turns to the humanity of the Blessed Virgin, from whom our Lord received it. It says, “Et puer redemptor orbis [ex ea] os sacratum protulit”; “the boy, the Redeemer of the World, took (literally, “procured”) from her his sacred face”. Both the Benedictus, prayed at Lauds, and the Nunc Dimittis, prayed at Compline, both reference faces; both ours, and Our Lord’s. Zechariah prophecies that his Son, John the Baptist, “will go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways” (Luke 1:76), and Simeon says that the infant Christ in his arms is the salvation prepared and promised “before the face of all people” (Luke 2:31).

Perhaps most importantly, our eschatology emphasizes the importance of the face of Our Lord. To see the face of God is synonymous with what the Thomists would call our intuitive vision of the Godhead, which is called the Beatific Vision. God has no literal face, because he his spirit. The fact that the Word of God took a human face is an absolutely extraordinary and provocative idea, because with so much Biblical language surrounding the face of God, we may truly say, based on the Incarnation, that God does in fact now have a face, that of Our Lord. This face, much like his other human features, must have a salvific orientation. Since we know so much about the human importance of the face, both to our psychological and social development, there must also be significance in the human face of Christ. When Christ smiled, God smiled. When he wept, God wept. In Christ, all the anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament take on a startlingly literal and concrete reality. Suddenly, the God who created us according to his own image and likeness, which traditionally has been interpreted as a spiritual image and likeness, now takes on our physical likeness as well, the face of which is the most expressive part.

The past few years in postmodern society has seen an accelerating movement toward the obscuring of the human countenance in favor of, paradoxically, more anonymity, and more invasive violations of human dignity. Facebook, which only really became a mass market phenomenon in the late 2000s, in theory sought to put a human face to the pseudonyms and handles of the ubiquitous instant messaging handles of the 1990s, from ICQ to AIM. While Facebook and its derivative services may have helped connect a lot of people, it is also ground zero of an increasing amount of deceit, with people’s accounts being hacked, their identities compromised, and their personal information stolen. Just to cite one current problem, many Pastors across the country are facing elaborate impersonation schemes by people in Africa and Asia who pretend to be Priests in order to solicit funds from the gullible. Even Bishops have not been immune to this.

This obscuring of the human face has also come at a time in an epochal shift in the how words are presented and absorbed. Father Walter Ong, SJ, famously described the shift of human language from orality to literacy in his classic, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. In ancient cultures, he observed, most people were illiterate, and so the primary means of transmitting information was via ‘orality’, which is one reason why so much of Classical Literature is poetical: poetry is relatively easy to remember, repeat and disseminate. With the invention of the printing press, and literacy becoming more common, our culture shifted into a more text-bound one. Our primary way of receiving and storing information was via the written word. Walter Ong died in 2003, but I imagine he would not disagree if I were to propose that we are quickly becoming a world which transmits information not by speech or by text, but above all, by the image. Images have the power of at least partially bypassing our rational defenses; this is one reason why memes are so potent, and so feared, by the censors of the technocrats. I find it interesting that the proliferation of ‘deep fakes’ and other means of image-based disinformation, especially in so far as they accurately reproduce the movements of an actual human face, are growing in sophistication at precisely a time when we are seeing less and less of each other’s natural faces. I am not suggesting this is some sort of conspiracy, but I think it is important to observe these points of detachment within our culture.

Although I am not in principle opposed to the wearing of masks for the sake of public health, as is the practice in much of East Asia, as simply a matter of course when one feels ill, the proliferation of masks, whether literal or virtual, have important theological and psychological implications in how we view one another and express human personhood. The psychological studies regarding how masks confuse and obfuscate the thoughts and emotions of others are abundant. Most interestingly, there are increasing studies about how adoption of mask-wearing (which, again, in itself, is a morally neutral action) largely can be predicted by where a person falls in terms of psychological agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extroversion. Mask-wearing may be the MMPI of the 2020s. Also, mask wearing is more prevalent where public trust is known to be higher, and communities are more valued than individuals. Yet, even in those places, masks are not a semi-permanent practice. They are worn as needed. Masks seem to show far more about us as individuals and our state of mind than the severity of the current state of public health.

The Church, mercifully, has for some time resisted the tendency to technologize away the significance of natural signs. We insist on this in more ways than simply adhering the matter of the Sacraments, using water, oil, bread, and wine. The Church also largely insists on using physical lectionaries, burning candles, nativity scenes, fresh flowers, and a multitude of blessings for all sorts of elements of the natural world. But perhaps most importantly, we have a theological and philosophical commitment to resist the belief that so much of human activity can simply be subsumed into cyberspace and virtual ‘participation’. This is over and above our bedrock theological commitment to the idea that God has created and sanctified the created universe in such a way that can be a means to receive grace. The face, especially due to the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, is a natural sign per excellence in that it expresses to us the personhood and personality of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity in an effable and mysterious way. In so far as human beings also participate in God’s image and likeness by means of possessing a simple soul with an intellect and will, the face of mere human persons can likewise manifest something of a theophany. One need only hear of stories like Seraphim of Sarov, and several Catholic saints, where their faces, and even entire bodies, acquired a reflected brilliance in the midst of their prayer.

So while mask-wearing may be helpful in mitigating the threat to public health, we should commit ourselves all the more to embodied action, which includes the use of our faces, in social communication. Unfortunately, as I remarked briefly in my Christmas Post Mortem, many parishes seem to be incentivizing people precisely to not participate in an embodied way in the Church’s life, by overutilizing the use of cameras and video recordings. In several parishes, there are stories of pastors who, to increase attendance at Mass, deliberately refused to livestream their Masses! I for one am not certain whether livestreaming Mass is a net positive or negative for the spiritual good of people. For one thing, we have the wonderful work of EWTN, which for decades at least has provided the Mass for thousands of shut-ins. Does every parish and chapel really need to engage in this virtual arms race? Can every parish and chapel afford to do this? Moreover, how will this contribute to the self-understanding of the Priest and his role in the Mass? Perhaps this is an even better opportunity to emphasize the critical importance of ad orientem worship, where all our faces turn toward the same God, and the face of the Priest only turns to the people to proclaim God’s word, to bestow God’s blessing, or to show forth the immolated victim in the Ecce Agnus Dei.

On that last point, I think Saint John Paul II has an important insight to contribute. In his Ecclesia de Eucharistia, he makes mention of the “Eucharistic face of Christ”, which, under the appearance of bread and wine, nevertheless is present, since the whole Christ is present in even the smallest visible part of the Eucharistic species. To use the colloquial idiom, in the Eucharistic species, Christ is “veiled”. It is interesting how veiling traditionally belongs to the human race, and especially women, historically speaking. We veil that which we believe deserves particular respect. Men, traditionally, uncover their heads and faces in the presence of divinity. I believe this is not due to some great patriarchal conspiracy, but rather because both men and women in their bodies and biological sex manifest something of the mystery of God: men, manifesting the active, outward-going element which seeks God, and women, the passive, contemplative element which receives God and his life. Both are reflective of the inner life of the Trinity, and also his “going out” to create, bless and sanctify the universe. The Eucharist is Our Lord’s continual kenosis in the world, his coming to us in order to incorporate us into the life of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit. If he veils himself, it is only to accommodate our weakness. We, on the other hand, must contemplate him with unveiled faces, if only that be metaphorical for the unveiling of our thoughts, hearts, and affections before him. We need his face, and we need each other’s faces, for health and for salvation. To echo the aspiration of the Psalm: “Restore us, O God; let thy face shine, that we may be saved!” (Psalm 80:3)