The Face and the Icon, Part One
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Le visage intérieur. Paris: Stock/Monde Ouvert, 1978, pp 11-25.
The biblical revelation, by affirming that God took on a face and that man is made in God’s image, has privileged the face. The meeting of gazes and also the meeting of lips are specific to this tradition. Nothing like this exists, for example, in the sacred eroticism of India where the union of bodies, as represented on temple walls, is accompanied by the closed fullness of faces drowned in an impersonal inwardness.
Today, however, the “death of God” threatens the human face. The fusional crowd of totalitarianisms and the solitary crowd of the new great cities erase it equally. A civilization fleeing from death (and from mystery) drowns it in the excess of noises, images, foods, and the whole superficial existential play of nervous aggressions and compensatory carnal heaviness. The human face has disappeared from contemporary painting — of which Max Picard noted, as early as 1929, that it places tombstones on the asphyxiated face of man.
Today, however, non-figurative art, when it moves from phantasms to spiritual essences, sketches out strange harmonies, perhaps angels with closed mouths, around an ineffable nativity... The philosophies of difference, and this “third culture” that Jean-François Six sees emerging among young people, sense the mystery in the very otherness of the other. Banished from painting, the face reappears, derisory and pathetic, in the close-ups of cinema and television. If, from distant Easts, come faces (non-faces) absorbed by the “en-stasis” they savor, from a less distant East — Eastern in its sense of universal sacrality, yet fundamentally Christian — we receive the testimony of the icon, that is, of an eternity that opens in the inexhaustible nature of the face, of a God who truly took on a face so that we could decipher in Him, unique but not separate, the human face. The final proof of God’s existence (a showing, rather than a proof in the formal sense), said Paul Evdokimov, is iconic. It consists of the radiance of certain faces.
Hence the urgency of a reflection on the face as anticipation of the icon and also as blasphemed icon (in Dostoevsky, the great blasphemers break icons in order to destroy the icon each of them could himself become). A reflection that will lead us to the “face of faces,” that of God made man, and to the icon of the deified man.
I. The Mystery of the Face
The contemplation of the face introduces us to a dramaturgy, as if within it were inscribed the light of the origin, then the night and the waiting for an eternal sun.
Every face, however worn or nearly destroyed it may be, if only we glimpse it with the eyes of the heart, reveals itself as unique, inimitable, escaping repetition. One can analyze its components, dismantle their assembly coldly or cruelly, thus reducing it to the world of objects that we explain, that is to say, that we possess. Seen against a background of night, of nothingness, the face is an uninhabited archipelago, a dehumanizing caricature. Seen from the side of the sun, the face reveals an other, someone, a reality that cannot be decomposed, classified, “understood,” because it is always beyond, strangely absent when one wants to grasp it, but which radiates from its very beyond when one accepts to open oneself to it, to “plight it one’s troth,” as the old language admirably says. The face refuses possession, not through a material impossibility, but because its very manifestation, always unpredictable, even if defying prediction only by a tiny detail, calls into question, as Emmanuel Levinas noted, my “power to have power.” It is no longer a thing among things, nor bounded, however rich and complex it may be (it is its poverty, its nakedness that signify the most); it passes beyond its own form and all the forms of the world, and here it is no longer of this world: molded in clay, certainly, but coming from elsewhere, always the reverse of a death mask. It looks at me and speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relationship that is not a power. It awaits the meeting of gazes as reciprocal welcome, it awaits my response and thus my responsibility. The gaze especially expresses the world’s translucence to another light, to the radiance of another world. Sometimes the eyes are not only vision of light, but its gift. In the indefinite prison of the world, the face creates a breach, it constitutes a kind of opening of transcendence.
This constitutes an opening of transcendence. Thus, the face is the boundary between this world and another. This is notably marked in the relationship between silence and speech. It is silence, a full, epiphanic silence, that transforms the face from an assemblage into a presence from beyond. In the peaceful person, in the attentive child, the prominence of the forehead makes silence flow like a blessing over the sense organs arranged in the face. The silent dome of the forehead, the silent clarity of the gaze, the silent listening of the ears composed for the Ancients the celestial face that unifies and purifies the earthly face of the nose, cheeks, and mouth. Thus, the nose and mouth do not merely recall sex, with the masculine symbolism of one and the feminine of the other; the nose can also perceive the Breath of life: “God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The nose perceives the fragrance of the Spirit in the smell of humus after rain, a fertile odor expressing the union of heaven and earth. The mouth can speak from the abundance of the heart, from the abundance of silence. The cross of the face, a diving bird, becomes the movement of metamorphosis. The heavenly unfolds horizontally like a luminous cloud in the upper part of the face to descend with great wing beats, to penetrate through human breath mingled with divine Breath the flesh of the earth and make it gentle and light, so that the mouth in turn takes flight: in The Cancer Ward, when Vera speaks and smiles, her mouth vibrates like a lark in full ascent.
It is therefore especially of the face that we can repeat what Gregory of Nyssa says about man in his personal dimension, that he is called to become “microcosm and microtheos” — a synthesis of the world in the image of God. The infinite shines in the unfathomable depths of the person, in this inaccessible reality that the energies of love make participable, in this beyond that reveals itself and radiates. Patriarch Athenagoras evoked “the inner ocean of a gaze” and Levinas compares “the total nakedness of the eyes, without defense,” and “the nakedness of absolute openness to the Transcendent.”1
The face is the place — a spaceless place — where the person discovers himself as the image of God, rooted in the heavenly, thereby capable of assuming all of humanity, whose history becomes his history, and the entire cosmos, which becomes both his body and his language (through which he converses with God and with others, returning to God the world that he marks with his creative genius, and the world thus sealed is first sealed by a face). Human unity, in the most realistic sense, not of simple similarity but of consubstantiality, expresses itself through transmissions, lineages, languages, cultures, forms of prayer: the unbroken continuity of the fathers, in its best aspects, deposits its fine layers of mother-of-pearl in the inner depths of the face. The assumption of the world is realized through particular landscapes. The stratifications of history, the internalization of landscapes thus create true crus2 of faces. These crus will be all the more flavorful as man lives in serious and slow cultures, where he learns to be silent to welcome the earth and sky: the man of villages and old cities; men of the mountain, vineyard or sea; shaped by adoration: the old Latin liturgy, dense, compact, models the stripped face of the Benedictine, a face carved in the stone of faith; the Byzantine liturgy, flowing, internalized by a method of invocation, gives the translucent face of the Athonite monk, in the streaming of beard and hair. Once, the certainty of total sacramental presence gave gentle fullness to the face of the Catholic priest; an all-consuming faith stretched toward the inaccessible deepened the face of the Protestant pastor.
When the face becomes an abyss of silence, as with the fisherman or the mountaineer, nature inscribes herself there with a strange fidelity: “The mountain-dweller has clearly inscribed on his face the image of the mountains. The bones on this face are steep rocks. There are on this face passes, recesses, peaks; and the clarity of the eyes above the cheeks is like the clarity of the sky above the dark folds of the mountains.”3
Another cross inscribes itself in the face of man. No longer situated, structuring, but a spinning that disintegrates or hardens: that of the call and the refusal, of communion and possession, of the thrust toward freedom and the anguish of finitude; of beauty and decline. The existentialist philosophers have said everything about the gaze that petrifies me and robs me of my world, that makes of me an emptiness, an object. The movement of the face reverses: no longer from top to bottom, the heavenly illuminating the earthly, but from bottom to top, the earthly erasing the heavenly: from the disdainful and predatory mouth to the nose that becomes beak or snout, to the gaze that freezes and possesses, to the purely cerebral intelligence of the forehead.
Originally, the forehead unifies the duality of ears and eyes, and, through the nose and the breath, becomes an arrow directed toward the heart, so that the heart reestablishes its unity with the intelligence. In the vertigo of the Fall, the heart is forgotten, sinks into unconsciousness, and the craving of the entrails rises up through the mouth and nose, cleaving intelligence, polarizing the gaze into a grasping made of oppositions or confusions. The face wavers between the grasping, devouring, perhaps even fusion-seeking pleasure of the mouth — an ogre-face — and the implacable character of the gaze. At the limit, as in certain carnivalesque orgies, the body is laid bare and the face is masked, becomes a mask.
In “traditional” societies, the mask is ambivalent. At times it calls for a spiritual metamorphosis — the animal form, felt as a reflection or incorporation of an “angelic” or “divine” state, serving precisely as a mediator. One finds this idea in several Church Fathers, for whom the spiritual, in its “contemplation of nature,” must assimilate the wisdom embedded in certain behaviors of the animal world. The same also see, simultaneously, in other animal behaviors, the cosmic manifestation of the “passions” that man must master… Today, the mask is nothing more than entertainment; it is the face itself that becomes a mask, a reflection of itself upon itself, in a play of mirrors without exit.
Could it be that the face would not escape death — even if only on rare occasions, perhaps in a love faithful to its origin? The gaze that once liberated me by flooding me with light — if it does not petrify me in exteriority and accusation — petrifies itself in death. “Closing the eyes of the dead”: our final funerary rite, the most significant one.
Dostoevsky believed that “man can preserve his human form only so long as he believes in God”; let us say, more modestly, only so long as he remains capable of transcending himself in the encounter with mystery. If that encounter is lost — if that movement of surpassing oneself can no longer take place — the face loses its spiritual center of gravity, its openness to the other world in relation to which it finds its order. Then entropy seizes hold of it. The experiences of personal destiny, like those of the civilization that now conditions it (since it has lost access to the unassailable beyond), imprint themselves too violently in its flesh, transforming it into either a caricature of excessive individuality — sculpted in the gray stone of isolation — or into a kind of formless anonymity. Missing are the peace and the depth of inner silence in which the scars of individual and collective events might be healed in the light. A fog of “vain words” rises, fed now by the machinery of the mouth, now by that of the media. Each part of the face seems to cry out, and the entire face dissolves into this cacophony. In place of speech, a scream. In place of true silence, emptiness.
The face then loses its role as mediator — between society and the universe on one side, and the Transcendent on the other. It becomes the face of an orphan, unprotected by any community. The waves and fashions of current events invade it. “The trees in the face are like sawn-off stumps, the mountains like they’ve been cleared away, the sea like it has been drained.”4 The abstract and solitary megacity spreads itself in the void of that face. Not the true city, which concentrates intelligence and beauty, and of which one might say that if man is the “image of God,” it is the “image of the image.” But the shapeless suburbs of industrial society in Europe, the crushed urban hearts in the United States. And yet, it is precisely there that, today, one can still see real faces — only just torn from cultures of slowness and silence, not yet drowned in the excess of the “production society” — but these are the faces of the excluded.
A text attributed to a great monk of the early Church, Macarius the Great, describes fallen men as prisoners chained in such a way that they can never look one another in the face. Nothing could illustrate this remark better than an ordinary pornographic film. Eros without love knows of the face only its “erogenous zones”: a machine of pleasure. By contrast, Nietzsche, quoting Stendhal, affirmed that in true love, it is the soul that envelops the body. The soul — or rather, simply the ignorance of it — in the face is inscribed in the relationship of domination, exploitation, and exclusion that I mentioned earlier. In ancient Greece, a slave was called aprosôpos — literally, “one who has no face.” During the suppression of the Paris Commune, a general ordered the execution of those with gray hair: experience, he said, should have taught them. In his Letter to a Hostage, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry notes that the Catalan anarchists who captured him while he was reporting on the Spanish Civil War did not look at his face but at his tie. It is never the face that is seen, but its color, or the length of the hair that frames it, or any sign that allows a man to be categorized as one of the aprosôpoi. Ideocracies and “the bomb” reign over a humanity without faces.
The hatred of the face, finally, erupts in everyday violence. To take possession of the inaccessible face, torture becomes necessary — threat, mockery, sadism, inquisition. The aim of torture is to force the face — which is not of this world — to enter into this world, into this order that is “mine.” And yet, even disfigured — and this is vertiginous: the more it is wounded, the more fiercely it is struck — the face escapes. Just when one thinks one has seized it at last, it takes refuge in death. Man regains power over the other only by killing him. But death is enigmatic.
Outside the original paradise, Cain does not cease to kill Abel. But for the man of the Bible, between the knife and the victim, the ram caught in the thicket interposes itself forever — the crucified Lamb. The commandment: “Thou shalt not kill” inaugurates the redemption of the face.
The origin is recalled in the fallen face through tears and through the smile.
Tears bear witness that man was not made for the inevitable. They are prayer. They implore, and already they point toward a life stronger than death, a love stronger than separation and hatred. The stone that seals the sanctuary of the heart, preventing its light from reaching the eyes, dissolves in the baptismal water of tears. Tears are an illuminated bitterness. They call out for a mysterious meaning when meaninglessness seems to overwhelm us; they are crossed through by faith in the possibility of the impossible. Perhaps they would wish to bridge the abyss of separation... “True tears,” writes Pierre Boutang, “reveal that in situations with no way out, there are no grown-ups.”5 When the heart becomes conscious in tears, we become “like children,” says the Gospel...
The smile, too, brings us back to the wonder of childhood, when it arises from fear and simply becomes marveling. It reopens paradise. It reaches toward the other like a bridge thrown across the abyss, from face to face. In Letter to a Hostage, everything is transformed when one of the jailers, in the randomness of a requested cigarette, meets the prisoner’s eyes and begins a smile.
But when it once is Smil’d,
There’s an end to all Misery.
as Blake wrote.
Tears and the smile meet, say the old Christian ascetics, when the “memory of death” is transfigured into the “memory of God”: “He who has clothed himself in tears as in a wedding garment, he is the one who knows the blessed smile of the soul.”6
The fall of the face is inscribed, almost in a banal way, in the withering of youthful beauty. Something was given to the face — a grace of being that was impersonal, almost vegetal — such as archaic Greek art depicted in the unmoving smile of the Kouroi and Korai. This something, more often than not, the face could not hold on to, could not interiorize or make its own. One is struck by the radiance that surrounds an adolescent or a young couple. A few months later, that glory has vanished. Hence the desperate attempt to preserve first beauty with the artifices of cosmetics, or to paint oneself, when age comes, with the winds and sun of the open world — old adolescents chasing their own shadow. Already, youthful beauty — betrayed by the disharmony, in relation to it, of speech and gaze — evokes a mask, a bait laid by the species for the individual, and which the species snatches away when the time of production and reproduction is past.
Yet with age, another beauty may illuminate the face — one shaped from within, rising from the heart, burnished by its secret sun, attuned to the word and the gaze.
This beauty — made of patience, trust, humble service — transfigures even wrinkles: they are no longer signs of decline and death, but the cracks of a chrysalis beginning to open. The light in the eyes, which have wept, and the light of the smile, find correspondence in the whiteness of hair and beard. The transition from the darkness or brilliance of hair — which itself is a sign of strength and sensuality — to a whiteness first mixed, then sovereign, seems to mark the stages of a transfiguration.
The ultimate sign of possible redemption is surely this solemn, pacified, wholly interior beauty, which often bathes and blesses the faces of the dead. It already begins to appear during deep sleep, that inescapable surrender which Péguy saw as an image of faith. “I sleep, but my heart watches,” the men of prayer loved to say, echoing the Song of Songs. Death is often prepared for — even in the most anguished beings — by a kind of pacifying remission. Even when preceded by a cruel agony, in which the face reaches the extreme of disfigurement, it often allows the secret icon to surface for a brief instant: as though the person were sealing with light and peace the world they are leaving behind... “And there in the coffin lay Matryona. Her mutilated, disfigured body was covered with a clean sheet and her head was bound with a white cloth. Her face, calm and looking more alive than dead, was untouched.”7
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 173; English translation: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Editor’s note: Originally a term from viticulture, referring to a specific vineyard or growth whose unique soil, climate, and cultivation produce a wine with distinctive character.
Max Picard, Le Visage humain, traduit de l’allemand par J.-J. Anstett (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1962). English translation: Max Picard, The Human Face, translated by Guy Endore (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930).
Ibid.
Pierre Boutang, Ontologie du secret (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), 311.
Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, revised ed. (Brookline, MA: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2008), Step 7.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich. Matryona’s House and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975., p 40.
Thank you for sharing this. It was balm to my heart.