Sight Unseen(verse)
Fremantle, Anne
further of himself: "Never for a moment did he stand at the side of the road to watch the soldiers pass by. The soldiers were himself. Not for a moment did he stand by the side of the road to watch...
...This is not the exclu- sive election of the Jews...
...Not peripheral in any way but upright and straightforward...
...The sacred is placed on each human face...
...No matter what's observed: how to set down the seen From outside in or inside out Is everything...
...Simone Weil reproached personalism for erecting each person into an entity that could, so to speak, compete with God...
...God has known it since the original sin, and it did not impede him from sending Christ into the world...
...The sinners were himself...
...What Emmanuel Mounier called engagement is the logic of the Incarnation...
...others chose A single snowflake or a grain of sand...
...It was born in a particular language, by a particular will, from a particular people...
...We should be no more disgusted than he...
...The personality is the special vision that each man has of God," wrote LEon Bloy...
...See, and be seen...
...He is of this immense troop...
...it refuted simultaneously, as the two faces of a single abstraction, both materialism and idealism...
...The Incarnation is the foundation of history...
...it is offered to all...
...We do not place ourselves on a peak, as do the Olympian intellectuals, but on the axis, or rather at the crossing of the axes, where the new crosses the old, and the world of grace crosses the world of history...
...It is impossible to save oneself alone and to establish history anew after a general confession...
...I have never doubted this...
...That the world is violent and soiled is not a recent discovery...
...Then came the microscope, and from the crawling Germs observed, some came to visions, and so Blake Painted a flea's soul...
...Jesus who was born among the poor is an unarmed liberator...
...No one has seeri-God, says the Scripture...
...This it is that, for me, gives life and direction to a person...
...But it inaugurates a pluralist history in which certain individuals, certain peoples, and certain moments witness by a particular adventure that we only perceive after we have escaped it...
...The sacred is not spread indistinctly over the entire earth...
...For their vision of me supports me...
...it excludes the primacy of the observer...
...But who has encountered man...
...His incarnation itself signifies the impoverishment of God, his "dethronement" to use the word of Paul Thibaud...
...Certainly, Mounier and his companions at Esprit tried to construct, from the point of view of Western tradition, a concept of the human and a standard of existence and institutional life with which it would be possible to imagine and live out a human life guided by values common to believers and unbelievers...
...counter to the tyrannies of money and the S(ate i|~held up the concrete face of man, the subject of rights.' Bttl tt did not pay for this maximum existence conferred on rrrati:b~, reducing God to the minimum...
...Anyone acquainted with evil and knowing that it is remediable, anyone who does not refuse to look evil in the face, recognizes what he must know about domination: it comes from our cowardice, our incer- titude, our isolation...
...They alone truly identify me who love me and, even more, whom I love...
...They gave themselves, or more exactly, they gave the person the maximum existence...
...We handle the same objects, we hear the same words, but we do not see the same persons, and each of us glimpses the Divine Person differently...
...these trace a path toward universal recon- ciliation...
...II I II II Anne Fremantle Sight Unseen First they saw outsides only So artists drew Or painted apples, nudes, birds, trees and flowers Armed warriors, crowned kings or grazing horses...
...We don't have to pretend to know every- thing before we possess the power within ourselves to rebel...
...Not for a moment did he stand by the side of the road to watch the sinners pass by...
...Next, insides were observed, and men portrayed Flayed carcasses, split open beasts, or game, Skeletons, and man's own anatomy...
...It sets us in an alignment with man, with men...
...Lastly man flew, and from above looked down On moving clouds in endless variation And so made abstract art...
...Proust noted that even if the observations of natural ob- jects converge and we agree on definitions (an apple tree is an apple tree, a house is a house), people see one another in very different manners...
...The anathemas hurled at politics and lower arise from turning evil into something occult...
...it is approached only when love rises up, through poetry, music, art, and in rare moments through its own power, to the point where it becomes evident that no destiny is abolished in death...
...But I note that it started from the same place that some pretend to have discovered today...
...Now artists have returned To outsides once again: soupcans and string, Meticulously rendered...
...It is this difference that grounds both the uniqueness of the individual and the plurality of humanity...
...All the work presents itself in the alignment of man as he faces the last judgment...
...He came not as a conqueror but as a servant, and in the same act by which he brings a universal opportunity for salvation, he renounces universal empire and confers on each individual, each nation, its own rights and destiny...
...Personalism did not become established, because it was caught short by the demands of the commitment it taught and was perhaps too reasonable for its historic period...
...The common vision that would reveal the unity of God is not now given us...
...Not on the side...
...Viewed only in the eyes of others, who am I? A character in their private cinema, a symbol in their mythology, an instrument in their plans, an example in their conversation.., and most of the time an item decorating their scenery, a shadow in the street...
...though at times it limits or obstructs me: The vision I have of them, however, strengthens me in my integrity because I recognize in them the presence of a being I feel lacking in myself...
...I III I Illlllll III IIIIII II IIII IIIII II I IIIII 22 December 1978:813...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 25
