By DONALD DeMARCO
The sixth of the 14 Stations of the Cross tells us that “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.” According to tradition, Christ left an imprint of His face on the veil (or cloth) that she used. Veronica looked upon Christ’s bloodstained face with sympathy, Christ responded with an expression of His loving gratitude.
Much has been said about the mystery of the cloth that wiped the blood and sweat from the face of Jesus. Who was Veronica? What was her real name? The name Veronica is a hybrid of two words: truth and image. Has the cloth she used survived? Is it available for veneration?
The mystery notwithstanding, the incident mentioned in the Sixth Station has moral implications that are not in the least mysterious. One that appears to be very important, that has not been sufficiently explored, is the deep significance of the face-face relationship.
We live in a time of alienation, when people cross paths but do not meet, interact but do not have the time to look each other in the eye. The result of this alienation is a diminishment of interpersonal relationships which leave people hungry for communion. The playwright, Arthur Miller, has described the situation as an “air-conditioned nightmare. We are prolific in science but impoverished when it comes to face-face relationships.
Sociologists at the beginning of the twentieth century observed that as populations increased in cities, face-to-face relationships diminished. The notion of communities was slowly being replaced by the notion of crowds. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley noted that as the metropolitan web tightened, human relations became increasingly de-personalized. For more and more people, their true personalities remained unexercised.
Pope St. John Paul II wrote a great deal about “participation” versus “alienation.” With the word “participation,” he refers to the capacity that all human beings have to share or participate in the lives of others. The doorway to this participation is through the face. The face invites the other to enter as to form a meeting of souls. Martin Buber referred to this phenomenon as establishing an “I-Thou” relationship.
The Russian existentialist philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, has stated, in his book, Slavery and Freedom: “The face of man is the summit of the cosmic process, the greatest of its offspring, but it cannot be the offspring of cosmic processes only, it presupposes the action of a spiritual force, which raises it above the sphere of the forces of nature. The face of man is the most amazing thing in the life of the world, another world shines through it. It is the entrance of personality into the world process, with its uniqueness, its singleness, its unrepeatability.”
A great work of art, despite its excellence and how much it is admired, has a fundamental limitation. It does not invite us to share or participate in its reality. It cannot smile back at us. It is not a person. It is a mere thing. It can neither thank us nor laugh at us. It is frozen in its thingness.
Philosophers over the centuries have not written very much about the face. Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, for example, avoided it and reduced history to a series of purely material changes. They could not begin to understand the human face, a physical entity that can smile.
Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew, on the other hand, formulated a “philosophy of the face.” The first word that is written on the face, according to Levinas, is “Thou shall not kill.” In the access to the face there is an access to God. “To my mind,” he writes, “the Infinite comes in the signifying of the face. The face ‘signifies the Infinite’.”
Another serious student of the face is the Swiss psychiatrist, Max Picard. In 1929, he published a book which bears the simple title, The Human Face. He states that “God enters man’s face as a friend enters the house of a friend, without a stir, hardly knocking at the door.” He sees the face as conveying the mildness of God. And since God is in every face, he sees his own image whenever he looks out from one face to another.
Pope St. John Paul II, Levinas, and Picard all see the face as an answer to the problem of alienation. When we look at the face of another, we not only see God, but also another self. We are no longer strangers. Strangers, by the very definition of the word, are alienated from each other, objects that are unable to relate to one another as objects. Alienation begins with the suppression of the face. Instead of displaying a face that bears a smile, people will adopt a facade, a false face that masks the one that is real.
The face of Christ on Veronica’s veil is a particularly transparent indication of the presence of the Infinite. But its meaning for us is that God’s face is imprinted, not so much on a veil, but in our hearts. The Sixth Station of the Cross is urging us to establish face-to-face relationships with others. In this way, we are able to enrich our lives as well as the lives of others by a creative sharing which expands our world and frees us from a prison of solitude.
“It is not good for man to be alone,” God said of Adam and, by implication, to everyone. But we can be lonely in a crowd when one sees others as mere objects. Then, we fail to understand who we are as partners in human participation. Christ is telling us that it is through face-to-face human relationships that we, like St. Veronica, are blessed.
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