At Easter, the tortured face of God teaches us to love our fellow man

Christ on the cross has a powerful message that teaches us to empathise with all humans who are suffering
Christ On The Cross by Andrea Mategna
Christ On The Cross by Andrea Mategna (1431-1506). The message of Good Friday is that we should try to love our felloow humans who are suffering. Photograph: The Art Archive/Muse du Louvre Paris/Dagli Orti (A)/The Art Archive

The face of God, on Good Friday, is that of a man abandoned and tortured until all the hope is squeezed out of him, along with all the breath, suffocated by the weight of his own scourged body. That's easy to say, and easy, at least for me, to feel. I can know what is meant by Jesus as the figure of all the suffering and butt of all the scorn in the world. That isn't Christianity. It's deeper even than humanity. A chimpanzee knows what an outcast is, and how it dies. You can't have even animal society without outcasts, and since we are a species that tells stories, you couldn't have humanity without a scapegoat.

But how could it be true, at all, that God could have a face? Isn't it necessarily true that anything which has a face is something we have ourselves invented, and therefore not God in any truly interesting sense?

The philosopher Roger Scruton asked this question, carefully and honestly, in last year's Gifford Lectures, now collected as The Face of God. What is it, he asks, that lets us see a face at all? Why can we understand the Mona Lisa is smiling, when this smile can be reduced to pigments on a page? More broadly, when we see a person in a face, he asks, are we deceived? Is this just an illusion to cover up the physical reality?

The answer he comes up with is that the self is not a thing in the physical world. We are subjects, rather than objects, to ourselves, and because of this we understand that others appear as subjects to themselves. There is no "puzzle of other minds". We know other selves exist by the same ways that lead us to find and to refine our own selves.

Selves, subjects, beings who have faces aren't quite in the world. Dead bodies show us that in the moment they suddenly change to objects which cannot have any self: "In dealing with the dead body, we are in some way standing at the horizon of our world, in direct but ineffable contact with that which does not belong to it. That … is the essence of the sacred." "Our world", in that passage, is the world of subjectivity, in which we live, and not the world of objects, which we can only observe. "Biology sees us as objects rather than subjects, and its descriptions of our responses are not descriptions of what we feel."

None of this says that biology isn't true or that science cannot accurately predict the world. Nor need it lead to religious belief. One of the clearest statements of Scruton's position is found in Primo Levi who looked around him at his fellow human beings in Auschwitz, starved, diseased, completely depersonalised, and asked what followed "If this is a Man." That did not lead him to religious belief.

But what Levi saw, and what he showed, was a violation of the sacred, of the dignity which can be desecrated and belongs to human beings, and which only human beings can see. If that was not real, then any crime against humanity can be washed away: not just forgotten, but abolished retroactively.

If I say that the core of Scruton's argument is that we know God can have a face because we know that people have faces and because we ourselves have faces, too, it sounds as if it is simply an argument from projection, or from anthropomorphisation: that it's a misapplication of categories. But the subtlety and power of his argument is that the apprehension of human faces, and of human subjects, is just as difficult to fit into a scientific world view as it would be to look for the face of God. This has nothing to do with miracles.

Scruton says explicitly that if you "look for the 'gap' in the physical order, the inexplicable departure from the laws of nature, which is the physical 'reality' of God's will, and you will find nothing … He is present in our world in the same sense that we are: as a subject. And when we attribute an event to his will, we are saying that there is a reason for it, and that this reason is God's answer to our own question 'why?'. We are not describing it as a miraculous intervention."

There is no miracle. Jesus hung there until he was dead. His face, as we see it in paintings of the passion, is terrible to study, not just for the anguish but because it is so completely without hope. There are hundreds of thousands of faces like that while I write this. And if I try Scruton's experiment, and ask what meaning they could possibly have for me, the only answer that comes back is that I should try to love them.