The Face of Man

“If you gaze long enough at a human face, you will begin to weep.” I have been chasing the origin of this quote, or this paraphrase of a quote, for several years now to no avail. I do not recall now where I first encountered it. As best I can tell, it comes from some piece of literature associated (review, interview) with The Artist is Present, a piece of performance art wherein Marina Abramović set up a table and chairs in the Museum of Modern Art, and, from March 14 to May 31, 2010, spent more than nine hours a day gazing into the faces of anyone who came to sit across from her. In her residency at MoMA, Abramović played companion and silent interlocutor to 1,545 human beings. Very few stipulations were in place for those who joined her, though one rule was silence. Stay as long as you like. Most people stayed for only a few minutes.

Whether or not one thinks such a thing art, or good art, a man would do well to spend just a moment contemplating what effect it would have on his soul to gaze into the eyes of strangers all day, every day, for 78 days. I wish I had the time to do it.

While Lewis’s discussion of affection in The Four Loves often centers on the bond between parents and children, storge has a much broader reach. Affection is “the least discriminating of loves” (58), and “almost anyone can become an object of Affection” (62), for affection does not come from sympathetic interests, but from proximity, situation, and familiarity. As such, affection is a kind of love any man may have for another for the simple reason they are both human, live on the Earth, and will someday die and go to be judged. Lewis dismisses the “treacly tunes” (66) in which popular art expresses a universal fondness for mankind (John Lennon’s vapid “Imagine,” for instance, or Michael Jackson’s “We Are the World”), although he admits that affection looks “tawdry” or “grotesque” (56) when brought out for examination, and so the art of expressing affection for all mankind is frequently met with an incredulous or cynical audience. For every one fine work of universal affection (Sigfried Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang,” or Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”), there are a hundred moments as cringe-inducing as, say, that of Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’,” wherein Fred Durst gives a shout out “to everybody all around the world” or Whitney Houston’s morosely subintellectual “The Greatest Love of All,” wherein the great mezzo-soprano offered up the bold credo, “I believe the children are our future.” The expression of universal storge tends to come across as desperate, pathetic, and we immediately begin comparing a man’s claim of universal affection with his inability to love well those few people fate has put in his house. If storge, as a general “goodwill unto men” is to be well expressed (and be put to some spiritual or didactic purpose), rather than coming off as cloying, it must be properly prompted. From whence comes the elegant, dignified storge?

Gazing into the human face has a unique power to call forth universal affection.

Joshua Gibbs

Gazing into the human face has a unique power to call forth universal affection. In Slavery and Freedom (1939), Nikolai Berdyaev writes,

The face of man is the summit of the cosmic process, the greatest of its offspring, but it cannot be the offspring of cosmic forces 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. (8)

Elsewhere, Berdyaev describes man as “a personality not by nature but by spirit…. Personality is a microcosm, a complete universe” (8). The human face is not natural, but supernatural, windows unto heaven. The human face is unlike all else in creation. We may gaze into the eyes of another man as though they are binoculars with which we view all mankind, the universe, and mankind’s Creator.

Faces are common, though, and so we do not credit them as anything particularly divine. We recognize famous faces and admire certain faces for their beauty. A man could gaze for a long time at a face in a photograph, but a human face and an image of a human face have little in common. While we might stare at an image of a human face, we are ashamed to gaze for long into the visage of another. The average man can look at the sun for a longer period of time than the face of a stranger, for we are always breaking our gaze for rest and refuge in something less significant. Even in a normal conversation with those we care for, we meet their eyes for but a moment and then look away, as though gazing into the eyes were spiritually exhausting, or unnerving, or overwhelming. We must constantly break our gaze in order to think properly, for we become “lost” in the eyes of another. We dare those we think liars to say their lies while “looking me in the eye,” because the soul is vulnerable through the eyes. We close our eyes to kiss, even to French kiss; while a man is willing to put his tongue in the mouth of his wife, yet it seems an intrusion of privacy to do so with his eyes open. Why? If man is truly microcosm, and if the human face is “the summit of the cosmic process,” we are overwhelmed to gaze into another human face, for it is the beginning of a beatific vision we are not virtuous enough to receive. To gaze into the human face is to look at all there is. How would it not be overwhelming? An Italian study conducted in 2015 placed strangers in pairs and asked them to gaze at one another for ten minutes. Ninety percent of those involved experienced “hallucinations,” and “reported seeing changes and distortions to the person’s face, sometimes seeing the person’s face morph into a monster or animal, into their own face or into the face of a friend or relative” (Gregoire). If such claims seem outlandish, consider that the average man might only have one occasion every decade to direct his unbroken gaze into the face of a stranger for more than ten seconds. Most of us get itchy eyes after just a second or two. A man’s visage is so overwhelming, if we cannot escape it, we will simply begin transforming it into another.

The universal storge which a single human face prompts in Berdyaev has been variously acknowledged by other religions with strong traditions in metaphysics. “He who saves one life saves the world entire,” and why, but because each man is, on his own, the world entire?

Every year I lead a trip of sophomores to New York for four days to see the Metropolitan and the Cloisters, and while these museums are sublime, they are not overwhelming as the simple act of setting aside earthly cares and walking a city as thoroughly inundated with people as New York. While negotiating the city can be stressful, during parts of the trip I may have ten city blocks or more before me and I must walk them all amidst dense oncoming foot traffic. My eyes move from one face to the next to the next; in a fleeting moment, perhaps no longer than half a second, I suddenly find a man’s eyes, take in his whole mien, make some judgement of him. As his face moves out of view, I advanced to the next face. Describing the sensation of taking in one face after another is difficult, for it produces an hypnotic effect. What can be known about a man in the half second his face is visible before receding back into the sea of undifferentiated humanity, never to be encountered again? On the one hand, nothing. On the other hand, enough to be stunned, vanquished.

It is tempting to think Christ died for mankind because mankind was such a fantastic bargain: trillions of human souls in exchange for just one righteous man’s death. However, the rule of the microcosm (“He who saves one life…”) defies an economic Christ. If the salvation of one man is the salvation of the world, Christ would have died for but a single man, any man, even if that one man were someone as vapid and tedious as Kim Kardashian. While reminding yourself “Christ died for this person” is a fine way of resisting the temptation to hate, telling yourself, “Christ died for only this person” slays the ego and restores the mystery of Others which is usually lost to the solemnities of self-worship which we conduct eleven hours a day in the privacy our hearts. The judgement I make of those I pass is nothing more than self-forgetfulness.

To gaze deeply, but briefly at one face after another is to intuit the full range of emotive possibility in each—but also to imagine living as such a face, or being incapable of hiding behind such a face as that face goes off, in death, to meet the God who has always loved it. In this, the slow-burning fire of storge is stoked, and the power to forgive the world for all the evil it has done to you grows, but also the want to apologize to the world for all the evil you have done it. While storge is natural, it should never be thought “complete.” The pursuit of deeper universal affection for mankind restores King Adam to us as common father, and our common mother, Eve. Every man is reinstated as brother, every woman as sister, and the world regains its status, to borrow from Robert Capon, as a “gorgeous old place” (3) While maintaining such feelings of universal affection is hardly sustainable over the course of a lifetime, neither is a life livable without such feelings to buoy us across the common, anonymous vicissitudes of being cut off in traffic, cursed by unknown faces in blog comments, and kissing goodbye tax dollars which will only be spent against us.

Works Cited

Berdyaev, Nikolai. Slavery and Freedom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944)

Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. Modern Library Food. (New York: Modern Library, 2002).

Gregoire, Carolyn, “Weird Things Happen When You Stare Into Someone’s Eyes For 10 Minutes.” Huffington Post, Aug 24, 2015. Accessed May 4, 2017.

Lewis, C. S., The Four Loves. (New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1960).