The Face of the Other

An exploration on presence, holiness, and the ecumenical encounter before words are spoken

18-Minute Read by Dr Ian Watson

In a recent reflection Alien and at Home, I wrote about the experience of attending a Pentecostal service for the first time - the strangeness of it, the bodily unfamiliarity, the unsettling but ultimately enlarging encounter with a completely different grammar of Christian prayer. I argued that genuine ecumenical encounter often feels disorientating before it feels enriching, and that the discomfort itself is a sign that something true is happening; namely, we are actually meeting the other, rather than a version of them we have made safe and acceptable in advance.

This exploration begins elsewhere, not with strangeness or the shock of deep difference, but with nearness, and with something quieter yet more searching - the sense of holiness encountered in a face.

During the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I attended an Orthodox service. The world I entered was not distant to me in the way the Pentecostal service had been. There was chanting, unhurried and ancient in its rhythms, and the purposeful movement of the priest. There was incense, and the particular quality of light that falls in a space lined with icons - those identical faces in gold and ochre that seem not so much to hang on a wall as to look back at you from another order of reality. As a Catholic, I recognised the liturgical instinct behind all of it, even where the specific forms were unfamiliar. It was (almost) a language I understood.

What I remember most clearly, however, is the priest himself. From the moment he greeted me, with a warmth that felt neither formal nor performed, to the way he carried himself throughout the entire liturgy, there was a quality of presence that I found myself simply receiving before I had thought anything about it. He was attentive to everyone around him in the way that people are attentive when attention has become, through long practice, their natural mode of being. 

The welcome he offered was not an act. It was, I sensed, a habit of the soul. And within that bearing, I encountered something I can only describe as holiness. It arrived before any rational assessment, and it left behind a question I have been mulling over ever since: what was actually happening in that moment, and what might it mean for how we understand ecumenical encounter?

To explore this question, I turn to a philosopher whose work was, until recently, unfamiliar to me and perhaps many of you. His thought has helped me understand experiences many of us will recognise, and his central insight remains one of the most illuminating accounts of how human beings truly encounter one another.

Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born Jewish philosopher who spent most of his career in France.  He lost much of his family in the Holocaust. That catastrophe - perhaps the most systematic denial of the human face in modern history, reducing persons to categories and categories to death - stands behind all his work. His lifelong concern was to understand what it is in another person that makes an absolute moral claim on us; not simply which rules require right action, but what it is in the sheer presence of another human being that says before any ethical system is consulted: “you cannot ignore me, you cannot use me, you are already responsible for me.”

His answer was the face. By face, Levinas did not mean the physical feature. Rather, he uses the term to describe the way another person's presence breaks through every category, label, or prior understanding we carry, to addresses us directly. For him, the face speaks before words - it simply says: “I am here.” In his language, this is the encounter with what he called the Other – a term he always capitalised because the Other is never reducible to our idea of them. This encounter, he argued, is the origin of all genuine ethics. Before any theological framework, any assessment of agreement or disagreement, the face of the Other makes an unconditional demand.

This can be quite slippy to grasp. The way I grasp his meaning, particularly in an ecumenical context, is the attempt to describe the person before us in all their uniqueness and dignity. Before we have reflected on our differences, assessed their beliefs, or located them within a particular tradition, we are encountering another human being whose very presence already makes a claim upon us. For Levinas, that recognition comes first, only afterwards do we begin the work of analysis, judgement, agreement, or disagreement.

Although Levinas did not present his ethics as theology, his language often opens onto theological questions. For example, he spoke about what he called the trace of the infinite in the human face; namely, something that exceeds the merely human that cannot be fully contained by our categories or explanations, but which makes a claim upon us. Readers across traditions will find an immediate resonance here. What Levinas describes as the trace of the infinite can be understood, in Christian terms, as the image of God (the imago Dei) present in every person. 

Understood in this way, Levinas’s account of the face of the Other resonates with Christ’s command to love our neighbour. It reminds me that the neighbour often first appears as a stranger, someone whose beliefs, practices, or assumptions differ from our own. We respond to the stranger, not because she is familiar, nor because agreement has already been reached, but because she stands before us bearing the image of God.

Obviously, Levinas was writing as a Jewish philosopher, yet this insight has resonated far beyond its original context. A number of Christian thinkers have either engaged directly with his work or arrived at remarkably similar conclusions through their own theological reflections. For example, Paul Ricoeur saw in the encounter with the other person a foundation for ethics that could not be reduced to either abstract reason or mere sentiment. Jean-Luc Marion developed Levinas’s thought in a more explicitly Christian direction, while Karol Wojtyla - later Pope John Paul II - argued that every human person possesses an irreducible dignity that precedes all systems, categories, and institutional arrangements.

Similar themes can also be found in the thoughts of Pope Francis, whose emphasis on encounter was, in my opinion, one of the defining features of his pontificate. Again and again, he argued that genuine meeting changes us before agreement is reached. Levinas offers a philosophical account of why this might be the case.  So, applied to ecumenism, in the face of the Other we encounter a person before we encounter a denomination, a doctrine, or a disagreement. Few insights are surely more relevant to the desire for Christian unity.

Reflecting on Levinas has helped me understand why that brief Orthodox encounter remained with me. The holiness I sensed in the priest was not simply a pleasing impression, nor merely admiration for an individual; it seemed to arise from the encounter itself. Before we had exchanged more than a few words, I was already responding to something present in him: peace, attentiveness, wisdom, and a life shaped by prayer. Before any discussion of theology, Church structures, or ecumenical difference, I was responding to the person before me. Looking back, I think this comes close to what Levinas means. The face of the Other speaks before conversation begins.  Put another way, the person arrives before our assumptions do.

I want to resist the temptation to dwell exclusively on the Catholic-Orthodox encounter - illuminating as it is. The experience I am describing, holiness encountered in the Priest before the dialogue begins, is not unique to that relationship. Indeed, in my three years as County Ecumenical Officer for Norfolk and Waveney, holiness in the face of the Other, has been one of the most consistent features of my ecumenical effort across Christian traditions.

I have sat with Methodist ministers whose quiet pastoral wisdom communicated something that transcended any doctrinal position. I have shared in the gathered silence of Quaker meetings where attentiveness itself seemed to become a form of prayer. I have met Baptist pastors whose love of Scripture was so clearly rooted in love of Christ that the denominational boundary seemed a very small thing beside what we shared. I have encountered Salvationists, Anglicans, Reformers, and Catholics whose commitment to service spoke eloquently of a Gospel lived as well as proclaimed.

In each case, something arrived before the ecumenical or doctrinal conversation; that is, a recognition and reception of something I can only call holiness, which preceded and (at least in some sense) grounded all that followed. 

For me, there is also a connection here with the theme of testimony, which I explored in an earlier reflection: Whom do we Trust. Before another Christian speaks a word about their faith, their life is already bearing witness. The face of the Other presents us with something that argument and debate alone cannot provide; namely, a lived expression of character, integrity, attentiveness, and holiness. Crucially, we do not encounter these things only as conclusions reached after careful analysis. We encounter them directly, in the presence of another person. That is why the face of the Other matters. It is our first experience of testimony.

This is not sentimentality, nor is it a claim that differences do not matter. Theology, doctrine, and ecclesial structure clearly matter. Indeed, ecumenism conducted as if they do not is, at least for me, not ecumenism but evasion. The point I am making is different. The face of the Other speaks first, and what it speaks is not a position but a presence; not an argument but a relationship.

This insight finds an interesting echo in the work of the Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, who argued that personhood is constituted through relationship. To be a person, in the fullest sense, is to exist in communion with others and ultimately with God. Seen in this light, the encounter with another Christian is never merely an exchange between representatives of different traditions. It is first an encounter between persons.
 
When we encounter another person and receive from them what Levinas calls the trace of the infinite, we are not simply having a pleasant experience, we are recognising something that points beyond ourselves. In Zizioulas’s terms, where that encounter is marked by genuine openness, attentiveness, and mutual recognition, a form of communion is already taking place at the level of persons, even where it cannot yet be fully realised at the level of institutions.

From a Catholic perspective, the Second Vatican Council offers a theological framework for understanding experiences such as these. In Unitatis Redintegratio, the Council acknowledged that elements of sanctification and truth are found beyond the visible boundaries of the Catholic church. The face of the Other, therefore, does not reveal an abstract humanity alone. It may reveal the work of grace already active beyond our own denominational border - grace that has shaped through years of prayer, discipleship, and faithful service - the quality of presence we receive as holiness. 

To encounter that grace in another Christian tradition is not to blur the boundaries that still exist. Rather, it is to take seriously what the Council itself recognised that the Holy Spirit is at work beyond our divisions, and that the fruits of that work can be recognised when we encounter them.

What, then, does the face of the Other require of us? If my previous reflection on the Pentecostal encounter argued for the discipline of unselfing - the willingness to let the ego step aside so that genuine otherness can be received - this reflection points towards something related: the discipline of attention. This is the capacity to let another person’s presence speak before our judgements arrive, to receive what is before us before deciding what to make of it.  Simone Weil was right when she described attention as one of the highest forms of love - a patient openness to the reality of another person and a willingness to suspend ourselves long enough for the Other to be truly encountered. In this sense, she believed, attention becomes a form of prayer.

I think this helps explain why the face of the Orthodox priest remained with me. The attentiveness, peace, and welcome he communicated were not simply aspects of personality. They seemed to be the fruit of a life shaped over many years by prayer and grace. The Orthodox tradition speaks here of theosis, which is the gradual transformation of the human person into a closer likeness of God. 

Whether or not one uses that language, there are moments when holiness becomes visible in the way a person inhabits the world. This also has implications for ecumenical formation. Learning about other traditions matters, but information alone is not enough. Ecumenism requires a receptivity that cannot be acquired solely through books, courses, or dialogue documents. It is cultivated through encounter.

Over the years, I have found that the most significant ecumenical moments are rarely the formal ones. More often they occur in conversations over a drink, in shared silence before prayer, or in the walk between the church door and the meeting room. These are the moments when another person ceases to be a representative of a tradition and becomes simply themselves.

Looking back, I can see a common thread running through all these encounters. Whether faced with the unfamiliar world of Pentecostal worship, the near-communion of the Orthodox tradition, or in the many other Christian churches I have visited across the ecumenical landscape of Norfolk and Waveney, the challenge is fundamentally the same. We are called to be present, receive, and to let the Other speak before we assess, judge and categorise. For me, that is not a retreat from serious ecumenical engagement but one of its deepest forms.

Levinas wrote that the face of the Other always exceeds our grasp of it. We never fully comprehend what it asks of us - only that it asks. I find that a very intriguing thought. At its best, the ecumenical encounter leaves something unresolved, not a problem postponed, but a presence still speaking, a holiness still being received.

Ask yourself, what might happen if Christians became as attentive to the holiness revealed in the face of the Other, as they often are to the differences revealed in the Other’s doctrines? Well, maybe the question of unity would not disappear but (surely) it would become impossible to ignore.

References

• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1961).
• Levinas, E. (1981) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1974).
• Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Translated by K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Second Vatican Council (1964) Unitatis Redintegratio: Decree on Ecumenism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
• Wojtyla, K. (1979) The Acting Person. Translated by A. Potocki. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.
• Zizioulas, J.D. (1985) Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

***

Concept and article by Dr. Ian Watson, whose lay views are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney. The purpose of Ian's regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.
 
Image created with the help of OpenAI. 

(Author: )

---