from ON HUMAN BEING Chapter 2

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"Creatures," wrote Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow in the last century, "are balanced upon the creative will of God as upon a bridge of diamond; above is the abyss of the divine infiniteness and below is the abyss of their own nothingness."

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When we ask of something, 'What is it?" we are seeking to learn about its nature. The question, being an abstract idea, is neutral. The person, however, goes beyond all questions. It cannot be defined, it cannot be captured by conceptual thought.

The person, says Lossky, is 'the irreducible of the individual to his human nature', the person is irreducible. In the non-Christian East reduction is by ascetic practice, in the post-Christian West by science. The Eastern method removes the dead layers, cosmic, biological, social, psychological, and reabsorbs the human being in the transpersonal. The Western method concentrates on the health of the infrapersonal, analysing its conditionings and curing them by psychoanalysis or social revolution.

But what the person desires is deified humanity. It acts in collusion with the living God, being like him secret, mysterious, incomprehensible. Deep calls to deep...Whatever the mind can grasp can only be the nature, never the person. The mind can grasp only objects, whatever is open to inspection. But the person is not an object open to inspection, any more than God is. Like God it is incomparable, inextinguishable, fathomless.

...And as, through Christ, this life of the Trinity is shed abroad, we find the same thing happening in the way we know our neighbour. The person, set by its very brilliance beyond the reach of rational analysis, is revealed in love. This disclosure surpasses all other ways of knowing a human being; it requires prayer, attentiveness, even to the point of dying to oneself; knowing a person is unknowing, the darkness of night made luminous by love.

Then, momentarily at first, we see the open face, that place where nature most readily allows the person to show through, first by the transparency of the eyes. For a moment, the face is seen, not weighed down by nature, but in God. Then we see everything from the opposite side. The person, far from deriving its meaning from the world in which it is immersed, suddenly illuminates the world by its presence and interprets it to us. The frets of time and pain on our flesh, the weariness which drags it down, the wrinkles which wither it, all become a miraculous sign of a personal existence. Our capacity for astonishment is renewed and refreshed.

...It is always tempting to judge rather than to accept. We are always labelling other people. If we are labelling them we are no longer seeing them. By knowledge, especially knowledge of other people, we achieve self-assurance, or the justification of our desires...True knowledge of someone else, that is unknowing, demands at the same time risk and respect. God has not truly known the human race except on the cross. An infinite vulnerability is the condition of this unknowing, where the more the known is known, the more it is revealed as unknown.

No, the God of Christians is not the summit--reassuring and plain to see--of a pyramid of beings. He is the depth who reveals depths everywhere, making of the most familiar creature a thing unknown. We are like drunken potholers; every face we see reveals the hidden side of the earth.

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...[H]umanity must 'personalize' the universe; not save itself by means of the universe, but save it by communicating grace to it. And all the while human beings must also humbly decipher the 'Bible of the world'; they elevate themselves above all life in order to bring it to fruition, giving voice to and encouraging its secret surge of praise. The modern will to dominate nature as if it were something mechanical, an assemblage of things and forces which we use without respect, is just as foreign to true Christianity as it is to the impersonal cosmization of the East.

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The face of Christ is inseparably the face of God in man, the only face which is never closed because it is infinitely transparent, the only gaze which never petrifies but sets free. The face of faces, the key to all faces.

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