In Search of the Human Face

What do we mean when we say “I”? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject—a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one’s own “I.” And nothing is as moving and provocative as the belief that God became flesh and blood to accompany each person’s journey in search of their own human face. Unfolding the implications of that belief is the burden of In Search of the Human Face, one of the seminal books by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation. Life presents us first of all with a decision about what we recognize as our own foundation—and this decision is an event that is continually proposed again. The encounter with the Christian event has for two thousand years been the encounter with a human phenomenon in which the passion for the discovery of one’s own face and openness to reality are mysteriously awakened, and it has as an inevitable consequence—the inauguration of a new type of morality, aptly described by Romano Guardini: “In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.”