Face of Evil
George Orwell once said at age 50 everyone has the face he deserves. Underlying this remark is the assumption that a human face reveals something of a person's character -- an assumption also implicit in portrait photography. If a person is evil, for example, can you tell just by looking at him? Is there a true face of evil? Surely not the face of Christ, above left, that graced the cover of the Sunday bulletin at the church service I attended a year or so ago. The image was a contemporary icon in the Byzantine tradition by British artist Aiden Hart. Although I had never seen it before, the icon appeared hauntingly familiar. I realized why when I got home and saw almost the same face staring back at me, above right, on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. There was the same long dark hair, the same large almond eyes, straight nose, rosebud mouth and whispy beard. The icon on the church bulletin bore an uncanny resemblance to Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bomber – enough like him to be his older brother; indeed, more like him in appearance than Tsarnaev’s real older brother, who was gunned down in a firefight with police several days after the Boston Marathon bombings.
My point here is not that Christ is a terrorist but that his dark Mediterranean features conform to the stereotype of the terrorist implanted in the collective psyche of Americans traumatized by the 9/11 attacks and all that has come after. If anything, the icon appeared more sinister than the young Tsarnaev, who looked more like a poet than someone capable of killing and maiming scores of innocent people. What is truly disturbing about evil is that it has no face – or at least none that is readily identifiable as such. In that respect, it is just like us. Of all the faces in the world, the one face we cannot see – at least not directly – is our own. We may see its reflection everywhere, but if, like Narcissus, we mistake the reflection for something else, we are on a fool’s errand. So it is with evil. We must not look outside ourselves but look within. As the old radio series put it: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
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© Eric Rennie Photography