The paradoxical faces of religions

Abstract

Many religions attribute a body to transcendence, even when they deny its representation. Prohibiting the depiction of the divine face implicitly means postulating its existence, or at least its thinkability. In fact, given the importance that the face plays in the evolution of the human species, in its cognitive system, and consequently also in its cultures, there is no part of the body whose imagination has been more central in the history of religions. Certainly this also abounds in other parts of the body, hands, feet, genitals, etc. But nothing like the face occupies the iconographic desire associated with belief systems.