“Only within an encounter is the true
 world manifested in this world”

by Alessandra Stoppa

“I was a mathematician,” he explains. “To be sure that Christianity was true, I had to see at least one person who lived this way.” Today, he is ashamed of having thought this, in front of the photos of the 1,700 martyrs of the Russian Church collected in the KGB files, the subject of the exhibit he curated for the Meeting (see issue #5 of Traces 2013, p. 45). But at the time, Aleksandr Filonenko was a soldier, the son of Soviet society and convinced that religion merely compensated for human limits. Then Fr. Florenskij arrived and contradicted all his ideas: “He lived a stupendous life in the midst of hell. I was ready to abandon everything to follow him. But he died. I remember that I asked a friend: ‘Will there be anyone else who still lives this way?’ I could not answer this question in a theoretical way. I had to search.” And then he found them, face after face.
The whole life of the Ukrainian Orthodox philosopher speaks of this desire for faces–“those of the people in front of whom I want to live” and thanks to whom he discovered his own. For him, this is the point of the upcoming Meeting: when and how true humanity manifests itself and emerges from anonymity. He tells Traces why this is a matter of hope.

The Pope recently said, “What is in crisis is man! But man is the image of God! For this reason, it is a profound crisis.” Where do you see the emergency, the danger?
We live in a tranquil time, and yet fear of unexpected things is growing, rather than diminishing. It is the fear of post-modern women and men. On the one hand, we say that we are absolutely free, and on the other, we must resolve the problem of our own safety ourselves. The pressure of social problems has increased sharply and the state is no longer expected to provide protection: it seems that people must first defend themselves and only afterward dedicate themselves to what enlivens us. But the fundamental problem is one of priority: when love becomes secondary, everything is unsolvable. Society is defined by anonymous power and we usually view the attainment of stability, of being safe, as exiting the crisis.  But in this way we end up in a blind alley, because we regulate life in the attempt to placate fear.

Why do you speak of “anonymous power”?
Think about wartime. A boy, who has a name, is taken away from his family, from the place he lives, to be a soldier. At that point, his history, his family, his life no longer interest anyone. When the war ends, it seems that something has changed, because tranquillity arrives, but the logic of this anonymous existence remains. Anonymous power is a power that does not address the human person by name. It addresses a point in the system.

What does your post-Soviet experience teach us?
You are afraid of entering into the conditions that we are leaving. Our history led us to the atomization of society: the person is no longer of public interest. This is the crisis. In the studies of Western society, this risk has been felt since the 1990s. We have been living it for decades, and are trying to leave it. But the paradox of our testimony is that it comes from hell.

What does it teach us?
When you reason about the possible ways out of the crisis, you first of all must realize that you are only dealing with the surface of the hell of the 20th century. We could never have imagined what was going to happen, so horrifying is it. But this indicates that policies for security are condemned from the outset. The way out is not to resolve the lack of safety and then give people a full life. If people do not find themselves, they do not escape the crisis. It is necessary to discover the place where true, original humanity is born.

When Fr. Giussani, in 1988, used the expression that is the title of this year’s Meeting, he also said that the first task is to “restore the human person to himself.” Now you are talking about discovering the origin of true humanity. In this regard, the “emergency” is not just in the sense of crisis, but in the emergence of the human face.
There is a word in Russian, olicetvorenie, that etymologically means precisely “give the face.” There is no corresponding term in other languages–you would have to translate it as “personification,” but the precise meaning is the discovery of the face. This is the way out of the crisis: make history a person, give a human face back to a society that is anonymous. This task is a Christian work. It is a precise work. A second word, likovanie, helps us understand it. The root is also lik (face), and it means elation, joy, but also community. Here, within this word the Christian claim is strongly expressed–the deepest, greatest claim: the discovery of your own face. So then, the great question is when and how our face is manifested in the world.

In your experience, how does this happen?
We cannot see our face. We do not see it looking at ourselves in the mirror. It is like a girl who is told, “You’re beautiful!” Then she becomes aware of herself. The person who tells her needs to be a witness to the life that is in her. When I encounter another person, and our encounter is real, I experience that elation. The other, who is part of this encounter, sees in my features the appearance of my true face. Something incredible happens: only within an encounter is the true world manifested in this world. You cannot discover your own “I” without this. If people thirst to discover themselves, they must have an encounter, an experience of community.

Why do you speak of community?
The precondition of the experience of community is not so much the exterior community but the interior one: something that the human person already has within. I call it community of the heart. They are the faces of those people before whom we would like to live. We never live in solitude. Even the most solitary people live before the faces of the people with whom they would like to live. The search for the face is the thirst to broaden this community of one’s heart to the dimensions of the whole world.

Is this “giving a face to history”?
Look, it is very important that Vaclav Havel’s book, The Power of the Powerless, was reissued. He speaks of the parallel polis, the human community, and warns that it cannot be closed. It can be small but it must be open, in dialogue; it must pose a question to all of society. This question is the task of searching for a face. It is what we must do with the history of our Church: restore the faces, because this is a story of love, of friendship. Hope, which seems impossible, appears in unexpected places: it appears in the joy of true encounters, any true encounter. This is where hope is born, and from hope the civilization of friendship is born, as the Meeting testifies.

What is a “true encounter”?
This is the most important question of all. I will answer with an example, because it is not a matter of a theory. One day, Tatiana Caika, a philosopher at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, interviewed a woman who had survived the Holocaust. After listening to her terrible story, she asked the woman what she desired. “Nothing,” came the response. But Tatiana could not believe it, and insisted: “What is your greatest desire?” And the woman answered, “Just to die.” Tatiana still could not believe it. Finally, the woman said, “I have a desire... but it is just a fantasy. In my life only one person loved me, my mother, and I no longer remember her face. Just her silhouette. I would give everything to be able to see her face.” Tatiana asked the woman: “Do you have a memory of her?” “One day, she gave me some little boots, of white felt, that she had made.” “How did she give them to you?” “In the morning, she woke me up and she gave them to me.” “Did she have you put them on?” “Yes, she had me sit in a chair, and she slipped them on my feet.” “But how was she positioned... kneeling?” “Yes, but what absurd questions you ask! Anyway, yes, she was kneeling to put them on me, and she asked me if they fit...” Suddenly, she went silent. “Oh, Lord, I see my mother’s face.” That woman, for years, wrote Caika to thank her for giving her back her mother’s face.

What strikes you in this story?
In the most desperate situation, the deepest desire we have is the desire of the face of someone who loves us. You need to have thirst for a face to understand this.

How does this happen to you?
With my friends of Charkov, I do charitable work in a residence for the disabled.  A year and a half ago, a young man, Vitalik, who could not talk, began to spend time with us. I only understood that he was trying to ask questions, but I could not make out what he was saying. It tormented me: how could we help him? Over time, with various attempts, I learned to understand him. He was unable to talk because for years nobody had had the patience to listen to him to the end. Well, now every time Vitalik sees me he tells me, “I have a question.” Actually, he has a hundred questions, but this is his battle against time and so he tells me that I have to answer at least one. Last time, the question was, “We have known each other for a year and a half, and I have the sensation that we are friends. For me it is very important to know whether this is a fantasy of mine or whether we are truly friends.” You can only answer this question with your whole life. It is the question of the olivetvorenie, the question of the discovery of his face and mine, at the same time. When friendship is born, I discover my face, I change. And the result is gratitude.

Is this stronger than everything?
Yes, than everything. Think of the promise of Christ: “The gates of hell will not prevail against you.” Usually, it is understood in a defensive sense, as if the Church were a fortress that no power can destroy. This is the minimalist interpretation. Then there is the maximalist interpretation that looks carefully at the image: the gates are fixed there, where they are supposed to be, and do not attack. The point is that they cannot hold up against the pressure of testimony. It is so powerful that it breaks them and the light enters into hell. The history of the Russian Church of the 20th century is this. Knowing it means discovering ourselves, because I take the step of gaining awareness of myself only through the encounter with something great, as it is with those who did not simply survive hell, but remained alive.

Havel closes his book wondering whether the luminous future is “always truly and only the problem of a far away ‘there,’” or whether it is rather “something that has  already been here for some time” but that we do not see.
We have to learn to see and to grow. We see the future in the present, in the here and now, when we see the face. For this reason, the art of seeing is the art of discovering the face. The art of growing, on the other hand, is the art of gratitude. If we know how to see, gratitude is born. This in turn needs to bear fruit: love, as action directed to the world. When we ask where people get the courage to love in a world where fear reigns, we respond that it is out of a sense of duty or principle. But these are very weak sources. Love is born out of gratitude for what you have seen. Seeing, thanking, loving... And loving is testifying. When I no longer know what my task is within the work of mercy, I need to return to the vision. Not to return to the issues, to the principles, but to see.

Is this the reason that before the complexity and harshness of reality, skepticism does not win?
We react to the power of evil with a will not to be dreamers. But this happens to the detriment of hope. Joy and elation seem to be very fragile things, but they are rather the one place where hope is born. For this reason, the testimony of those who say that this joy exists, that a love deeper than hell exists, is decisive. The hope that we encounter every day in the gaze of our beloved, in the gaze of a child, becomes strong. It becomes more solid, because it is blessed by the face of those who live up to Christ, live up to His challenge. Without them our hope would be vulnerable, and skepticism and caution would win. Instead, joy appears.  It appears in faces. When I have moments of oppression and uncertainty, I think of those faces, and I revive.