The Divine Face in Four Writers

Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, and C. S. Lewis

Maurice Hunt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781501333965
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501311031
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

An important contribution to studies in literature and religion, The Divine Face in Four Writers traces the influence of Christian and Classical prototypes in ideas and depictions of the divine face, and the centrality of facial expressions in characterization, in the works of William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse, and C.S. Lewis.

Maurice Hunt explores both the human yearning to see the divine face from post-Apostolic time to the 20th century, as reflected in religion, myth, and literature by writers such as Augustine, Shakespeare, Hardy and Dostoyevsky, as well as the significance of the hidden divine face in writings by Spenser, Milton, Hesse, and Lewis. A final coda briefly detailing Emmanuel Levinas's system of ethics, based on the human face and its encounters with other faces, allows Hunt to focus on specific moments in the writings of the four major writers discussed that have particular ethical value.

Part One

The Judeo-Christian Strain

1

The Divine Face and the Face-to-Face Encounter in the Bible

One unforgettable passage in Western literature about God’s face appears in a play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, reputed to be an atheist who supposedly said that Moses was a “juggler” and that Christ and the Beloved Disciple, John, were bedfellows. Early in Christopher Marlowe’s popular Elizabethan tragedy The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, a version of the legend of the scholar who sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power and pleasure, the demon Mephistopheles tells Faustus that “God threw him from the face of heaven” (1.3.70).1 He tells him that he is “forever damned with Lucifer” (1.3.74). “Where are you damned?” the atheist black magician asks. “In hell,” Mephistopheles replies. “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” puzzled Faustus rejoins. “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,” the devil rejoins:

Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,

Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. (1.3.75-84)

Heaven for those angels left in heaven, and presumably for all of them before Lucifer’s great temptation, consists of the contemplation of the face of God. At least Marlowe implies so. Matthew in his Gospel supports Mephistopheles’ claim when he says “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones”—one of the children—“for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven” (18.10).2 This Disciple records this Beatitude of Christ: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (5.8). With this pronouncement, Matthew sets a difficult criterion for Christians yearning to have this vision.

Augustine in his Confessions pleads to God “Do not hide your face from me … Lest I die, let me die so I may see it … To be far from your face is to be in the darkness of passion.”3 Paul, however, says after his conversion on the road to Damascus, “Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen [the risen] Jesus Christ our lord?” (1 Corinthians 9.1, 15.8). The actual accounts of this experience involve a blinding light from heaven and the voice of Jesus speaking only to Saul [Paul] (Acts 9.3-9; 22.6-11, 26.12-18). Saul does say in Acts 22.17-18 that immediately after his regaining his sight, when he had come to Jerusalem and prayed in the Temple, “I was in a trance; and saw [Jesus] saying unto me, Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem.” And in Acts 26.16, Saul has Jesus saying “I have appeared unto thee … to make thee a minister.” But neither Paul nor anyone else in the New Testament—including the Disciples, who see the risen Christ—tells readers what Jesus’s face looks like. The details are scanty. St. John the Divine promises that God’s and the Lamb’s servants “shall see [Jesus’s] face and his name shall be in their foreheads” (Revelation 22.4). Isaiah had prophesized that “there [would be] no form nor comeliness” in the Messiah and that “when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53.2). But no one in the New Testament says that this prophecy is fulfilled. Seeing God’s or Christ’s face can only be a post-Apocalyptic event for believers. Matthew may say “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5.8), but they shall do so in the afterlife because they are pure in this life.

This absent presence might seem to be a rather large problem for someone presumptuous enough to write a book on the subject that includes an account of the face of God and that of Jesus. And yet it is a rich subject, and major motif, in Western literature. Still, how could God’s features be described? The features of the human—and animal—face are designed to make empirical knowledge and physical nourishment possible. Empirical knowledge consists of the information generated by sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The ear has spiral-like swirls to help focus entering sound; the nostrils of the nose need to protrude to gather oxygen; the eyes are situated at a distance apart below the forehead to register a panorama; teeth are necessary for tearing vegetables and meat necessary for life. It is perhaps surprising that something so basically designed for physical—one might even say animal—survival should be judged beautiful. The face’s beauty of course has nothing to do with its features’ survival functions, but with the aesthetic appreciation of proportions and the delicate, often curved, lines that the composite, when viewed, provokes in men and women. These proportions in the case of eyes and ears, even teeth, compose a symmetry that prompts the judgment of beauty. Whether the feeling of beauty that a certain face gives to men and women is learned or intuitive is debatable. Some people see beauty in only a few faces.

The Judeo-Christian God made humankind in his own image. A Christian assumes, then, that the human face to some unknown degree reflects, or resembles, the face of God. “As for me,” the Psalmist says, “I will behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness” (Psalms 17.15). This Jew is saying he beholds the face of God in the face of a righteous man or woman. A Christian would believe this correspondence especially true for those who saw Jesus’s face because, after all, He was the Son of God. As a man born of a woman’s womb, Jesus had to have had the features necessary for survival as a man. But this fact, of course, does not preclude the belief that God’s face must look different from Jesus’s, adapted as it is to his mortality as a man. After all, neither Jew nor Christian assumes that an omniscient, eternal God who made everything needs the features of a face designed for acquiring physical data and nourishment. “Hide not thy face from me when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me,” the Psalmist prays (102.2). This ear, however, can only be anthropomorphic. How else can we imagine an absent presence?

The writer of Deuteronomy asserts that “there arose not a prophet … in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34.10). Prior to Moses receiving the tablet of commandments on Mount Sinai, he speaks to God and sees his face. Prior to the Jews’ departure from Egypt for the promised land, “the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33.11). Shortly after this utterance, God says

I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy. And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock [Sinai]: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen. (Exodus 33.19-23, my italics)

Later, when Moses comes down from Sinai with the tablets, “the skin of his face shone; and [the children of Israel] were afraid to come nigh him.” The glowing orb of God’s indistinguishable face engulfs Moses’s. After the Jews approach Moses, until he

had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his face. But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the vail off, until he came out. And he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel that which he was commanded. And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone: and Moses put the vail upon his face again until he went in to speak with him. (Exodus 34.30, 33-35)

The veil adopted by Moses to accommodate his speaking to the Jews doubles for God’s shining cover of his face.

The New Testament complementary episode is the Transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17.1-13; Mark 9.2-9; Luke 9.28-36). The fact that the vision of Moses’s glowing face produces a fearful rather than joyous reaction among the Jews suggests that Jesus’s bright face may prompt a similar reaction from the Disciples. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John the brother of James on to a high mountain. His “face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matthew 17.2). Mark omits any description of Jesus’s face. In Luke, Jesus’s “countenance was altered” (9.29). How so, Luke does not say.4 Only Matthew’s version begs comparison of Jesus’s face with that of Moses’s blazing countenance as he descends another mountain. All three Gospels assert that Peter, James, and John are not frightened as the Jews were but that they have a vision of Jesus talking with Elias (Elijah) and Moses. Matthew’s Gospel is suggestive; the Disciples’ vision of Jesus’s shining face seems to not just coincide with but also to prompt their supernatural vision of the primary Prophet and the Bringer of the Law.

In Matthew, Peter exclaims, “Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles: one for thee; one for Moses, and one for Elias” (18.4). This wish appears in the other two Gospels. These tabernacles would be respectively for the Messiah, for the Law, and for Prophecy. But Peter does not understand from seeing Jesus’s shining face in relation to those of Moses and Elias that he is greater than the Law and Prophecy (that he fulfills them), that he is God’s Son, and that he should dwell in man’s heart rather than in a tabernacle. While they speak with Christ, a bright cloud overshadows the Disciples, and they hear God speaking from the cloud, saying that Jesus is his “beloved Son” (Matthew 17.5). God has corrected Peter, as well as Matthew’s reader. Now the Disciples are frightened and fall on their face; when Jesus rouses them, he instructs them to “[t]ell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen from the dead” (Matthew 17.9).

Moses goes into and out of the tabernacle to speak with God and convey what he has said to the Jews, who remain thus separated from God himself. Christ familiarly touches the frightened prostrate Disciples, lifting them from the ground and speaking calmly to them. Considered in this context, the Preacher’s assertion that “a man’s wisdom maketh the face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed” (Ecclesiastes 8.1) revalues in The Old Testament the forbidding luster of Moses’s face. Similarly, it is as though the Disciples’ vision of Jesus’s shining face prompts their vision of the truth of Christ’s status and his dwelling place. Matthew recalls Christ’s bright face in the Transfiguration when Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James see an angel, whose “countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow” (28.3), descend from heaven and roll back the stone from Christ’s tomb so that they can see it is empty. Through the paralleli...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part 1 The Judeo-Christian Strain
• 1 The Divine Face and the Face-to-Face Encounter in the Bible
• 2 Christ-Like and Compassionate Faces in Shakespeare’s Plays
• 3 Christ’s Face and its Adversaries in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot
• Part 2 The Classical Strain
• 4 Divine Faces and the Face-to-Face Encounter in Apuleius’s Tale of Cupid and Psyche
• 5 Syncretistic Faces in Hermann Hesse’s Demian
• 6 Ancient and Christian Faces in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright