The Human Face is the Face of God

There is something shining through everything

When I was googling images of Steve Biko for one my posts this week, I came across the haunting image of his corpse – his battered face after dying from torture.

I thought of his own words then – his words about bestowing on our society the gift of a human face.

I’ve been thinking about this concept for the whole week now. What does it mean for a society to have a human face, and what do we mean by the concept of some ideal, abstract human face?

And how does this connect with how Biko’s face came to be in death – bloodied and desecrated after he died naked in the back of a truck?

One of the great philosophers of our time, Roger Scruton, has looked at the same issue, in a series of lectures he gave entitled ‘The Face of God’ at St Andrew’s in Scotland in 2010.

The main point he makes is that as human beings, with consciousness and choice and intention, we find ourselves most fully in relationships not only with other people, but also with the world.

To give two examples, we build restaurants to eat together with other people; and we go on walks in mountains and on beaches. And both things make us feel more human.

His conclusion follows some abstract logic but is not impossible to grasp: the world has a human face – a face which looks upon us. And this is God’s presence in the world.

This explains the rise of atheism. We are not atheists so much because we rationally have rid ourselves of ‘the myths’ of the past – but rather because we have created a world in which we scar nature and the faces around us, live in lonely boxes, and so put away the Face of God.

The fact that we recognise the possibility, and the actuality, of the human face and the landscape being desecrated, only reinforces the idea of its sacredness.

As Scruton puts it:

“Like the spouse in a sacramental marriage, God is unavoidable, or avoidable only by creating a void. This void opens before us when we destroy the face, not the human face only, but also the face of the world. The godless void is what confronts us, when our surroundings are defaced.”

This reminds me of the words of another philosopher, the Marxist Terry Eagleton, who believes that the chief reason for the rise of super-atheists like Nietzsche was a misunderstanding of who God is, and how to know him.

God was not seemingly absent or invisible because he did not exist, but rather because he was so close, closer to us than even we ourselves are; the face, to use Scruton’s term, that shines through all things.

In his book, ‘Culture and the Death of God’, Eagleton writes:

“The God of Christianity is friend, lover, and fellow accused, not judge, patriarch, and superego. He is counsel for the defence, not for the prosecution. Moreover, his apparent absence is part of his meaning. The superstitious would see a sign, but the sign of the Father that counts is a crucified body. For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where he is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.”

So how do we see this face again? How do we cross the void we have created?

As Dostoevsky would say, beauty will save the world.

We see the face of the world again when we see the beauty of the world and the beauty of a life well-lived in this world.

We see the face in untainted nature, and well-cultivated human space. We see the face when we understand the world is garden and city, not machine.

We see the face in others – in the face of both victims and heroes. Heroes who are not heroes by virtue of glib talent, but of character and sacrifice.

Such lives teach us there is a Deeper Magic to this universe – one that goes beyond science and matter, and towards the Love that moves the stars and the planets.