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.”