Till We Have Faces Again
Till We Have Faces Again
Terence Sweeney
Every new semester, I print out a single sheet of paper with tiny pictures of each of my students, their names and majors listed underneath. I look through the roster, beginning the mental process of linking faces with names. I see the few seniors on the list and know that the picture is now 3 years out of date; I chuckle at the prom photos that make up most of these snapshots. This familiar ritual is part of getting to know my students so I can help them to get to know a little bit about philosophy, a little bit about truth. The rite this year will be marred by the strange reality that I will not see their full faces arrayed in the classroom before me.
As we get ready to enter a semester of masks, online lectures, and Zoom meetings, I expect to keenly feel the importance of human faces. It is easy to forget how integral faces are to human life—we are surrounded by faces all the time, faces of strangers and loved ones, faces on Tinder and Instagram, faces old and wrinkled, faces young and fresh. In an era of selfies and Facebook, we can still miss the meaning of the human visage. Familiarity causes us to forget that being a person means facing other persons. And suddenly, all of those faces that surround us are shrouded with an alienating array of masks.
Kent Skibstad
A Strange New Semester
This is not an anti-mask screed; I wear mine and you should wear yours. Rather, it is a lament as I get ready to meet my students without ever quite seeing them. This semester, we will study the humanities together. We will read the complicated stories of people succeeding and failing to look each other in the face and see a person on the other side. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan enters the garden to corrupt Adam and Eve. What nearly stops him is not flame wielding archangels or the command of God, it is seeing “the human face divine.” In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, the transformative moment in the story is when the grandmother, kneeling before her murderer, “saw the man’s face, twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’” The recognition of a face is the recognition of relationship. In the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas, it is always the face of the other that demands justice, the face that says “thou shalt not kill.” It was the face—and the pained last words of George Floyd—that galvanized so many in this nation and in the world. We saw in his pained expression the failure to see the humanity of black faces. Perhaps the deepest prayer of the Old Testament is that of the Psalmist, “Lord, I long to see your face.” We need to know that we have faces, and to see others’ too.
We Need Faces
And we need faces when we teach. If we were just information conveyers, we could wear masks forever, teaching behind screens and barriers—but teaching is about persons encountering truth together. As schools re-open under these bewildering circumstances, our masked status can be the occasion to remember the deep intimacy of teaching, the encounter of persons in a classroom. This means looking each other in the face and seeing neither an enemy nor a stranger, but a brother and a sister.
For teachers, the faces of students are unavoidable. When a class is going poorly, I can always tell: eyes glaze over; mouths set firmly shut when I venture a question. With reddening cheeks, I look at 25 students staring at me, demanding an explanation for my failure. But when class goes well, the evidence is clear, once again, in their faces. It isn’t so much that they look at me; rather, they look at each other. Ideas start to ping around the classroom. Students struggle to parse out Augustine’s anguished attempts to order his loves while laughing about their own struggles to do the same. They talk about how they would order love of career, money, family, justice, and God; they look at each other and see each other for the first time. Their peers—these people they chatted with hazily over beers at a party—turn out to be the people who might help them understand what it is we are doing here. To teach well is to see human faces come alive.
This semester, I will have to learn to see those faces despite those masks; I will have to open to new ways of doing things, new ways of capturing the intimacy of truth with students fresh out of high school and fresh into a world bewildered by disease, economic dislocation, racial injustice, and a sense that shared truths are hard to come by. I will instruct beginners and find that I too am just beginning. I will have to learn from them.
Augustine’s Instructing Intimacy
At Villanova University, I often walk by a statue of Augustine teaching three students. He is sculpted in classical garb while they don contemporary wear. I used to think the statue corny, but if you spend some time with it, you see why Augustine was a good teacher. He is looking into the faces of his students and he is listening to them. Augustine, in his Instructing Beginners in Faith, speaks to this deep intimacy of teaching that makes teachers into learners and learners, teachers. When we really engage with our students, “our listeners are touched by us as we speak and we are touched by them as they learn, each of us comes to dwell in the other, and so they, as it were, speak in us what they hear, while we in some way learn in them what we teach.” This is the heart of teaching: speaking and listening to each other so that we can hear the Truth that teaches us from within. Christian colleges—whether they are the Villanovas of the world or tiny colleges barely getting by—need to remember that this is what we are about. It is not the money, the fancy dorms, not even the basketball championships, but the soul’s blossom toward truth.
It is perhaps a strange thing that distancing in the time of coronavirus might be what reminds colleges of their reason for being. We are in the business of human persons facing each other while searching for truth. And the truth has a human face. The face that the apostles saw shine like the sun on Mount Tabor; the face they abandoned when it was bleeding on the cross. Masks might end up uncovering this forgotten dimension of education, but the day will come when we will leave our masks behind in our offices and dorm rooms. That day may still be some time away, but we should use the interim to relearn how to teach and how to learn. Until then, we are all a lot like the Psalmist, looking out over our masks, and saying to each other: “I long to see your face.”
Terence Sweeney
Writer & Professor
Terence Sweeney is a philosopher at Villanova University, a theologian at the Collegium Institute, and an editor at the Genealogies of Modernity Project. He is also a writer and has published in First Things, American Magazine, Plough Magazine, Dappled Things, and Church Life Journal.
Photography by Kent Skibstad