The mystery of the face : on coming to know a woman in the Song of Songs

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The sketch is dedicated to the cultural mystery of the face’s symbolism in the Old Testament’s Song of Songs. The problematics of interpreting the polymorphic text became the point of departure of formulating a hypothesis, according to which a woman’s face can be understood as an epiphany of God’s ideogram of the world. The face of the Beloved is a challenge, which has the character of an initiation. An attempt to encounter the face, and therefore to recognize the work of creation, has the cultural values of misterium tremendum and misterium fascinans. The Beloved, identified with the dark and awesome initiating goddess, does not let the meeting with the Lover be accomplished, for the risk of the death of the initiated. In this way, the unfulfilled initiation, the three attempts of an encounter ending up in the situation of parting, gain a gnoseologic dimension - are a figure of the fate of a human searching for an insight into reality, mediated by discovering a meaningful other - a loved person. The experience’s temporality was suggested in the text by a picture of an empty space, discovered by the Beloved behind the door opened for the Lover. The emptiness and the feeling of a cognitive ufulfillment, experienced by both the Lover and the Beloved, diagnose the painstaking efforts to encounter the Other as a mirror relation of the fear of initiation, discovered while attempting to unsolve the mystery of the face.The key to understand the cultural icon of the paradox of love seems to be, in the Song of Songs, the cognitive construction of the figure of a woman - the Beloved, built up in the attempts - undertaken three times - to meet with the Lover. The scheme of reaching the sense of reality through a person’s face allows to see in the Old Testament’s lyric the justification of dialogic interpretations of the human-God Text. Seeing the other’s face, showing one’s face to the other, becomes a metaphore of the epistemic risk - the encounter with the truth of the Other.