On Seeking the Soul in One Who Will Not Be Found
Masks. — There are women who, wherever one examines them, have no inside, but are mere masks. A man is to be pitied who has connection with such almost spectre-like and necessarily unsatisfactory creatures, but it is precisely such women who know how to excite a man’s desire most strongly; he seeks for their soul, and seeks evermore. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
The aphorism says three things and binds them together. That there are creatures who, however one examines them, have no inside, only a mask. That the man attached to them is to be pitied, for he finds nothing to satisfy him. And, the sharpest part: it is precisely they who kindle desire most strongly, and he seeks their soul “evermore.” Emptiness does not repel; it attracts. The more what is sought withdraws, the more the search grows. The aphorism speaks of women, but the structure it describes has no sex: a man can wear the same mask, and a woman can be the one who seeks without end. The aphorism can therefore be read as a law of desire, not as a verdict on a kind of people.
The Greek word for face, prosopon, first meant the actor’s mask in the theater, through which one man’s voice sounds as another’s; and the actor was called a hypokrites, whence the hypocrite. Christ uses the word with its full weight: whitewashed tombs, beautiful outside and full inside of dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27-28); those who pray and fast so as to be seen by men (Matthew 6:5, 16). Dogmatically, the history of the word is more telling still. The heresy of Sabellius was the teaching of a God with three masks: the same One playing in turn the role of Father, of Son and of Spirit. The Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, rejected this reading and put in place of the mask the hypostasis, real subsistence: the Three Persons are not three appearances of the One, but Three who are truly Someone. The word that meant what is shown was redeemed to mean who one is. The person, in the Church’s theology, is that which cannot be reduced to what it shows.
Man, made in the image of the Persons, has nothing more to lose than this reality. The mask without an inside is therefore not another nature, but a person who has withdrawn into what he shows. And her seeker, in turn, is not seeking a phantom but a Person: what draws him is the fact, true in the depths, that behind the mask there is someone.
But the aphorism also says something about the one who seeks. Why does he seek “evermore”? Scripture knows the answer: the eye is not satisfied with seeing (Ecclesiastes 1:8); hell and destruction are never full, and so the eyes of men are never satisfied (Proverbs 27:20); and through Jeremiah God says that His people have committed two evils: they forsook Him, the fountain of living water, and dug for themselves cracked cisterns that hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13). The mask is the cracked cistern: it has the look of a well and no water; and thirst, finding its mouth, lets itself be deceived into lowering the bucket once more. St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that desire was given to man for God; turned toward creatures, it finds no rest, for it asks of them what they cannot give. Augustine said it in the shortest form: our heart is restless until it rests in You.
Evagrius shows the mechanism too. The carnal thought has no need of a person, only of an image, and the image of a closed soul is more fruitful than an open soul, for lack leaves room for fantasy: the mind fills the void itself with what it desires. The mask is the perfect image: an appearance without presence. And the one who wears it, if she wears it out of vainglory, lives on being sought, for every search is a gaze, and the gaze is her food; Evagrius said that kenodoxia cannot live without witnesses. Seeker and mask thus feed each other, like two mirrors set face to face: each sees in the other, endlessly, its own desire.
The place of the soul, in Scripture, is within, and there stands its glory. “All the glory of the king’s daughter is within” (Psalm 44:14); the imperishable adornment is the hidden man of the heart, in a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:3-4); and the Kingdom of God is within us (Luke 17:21). But the inside of another cannot be taken by force and cannot be extracted by searching: it is given or not, in freedom. The seeker who wants to seize the soul before him makes of it an object, which is exactly what he complains of finding: a mask.
Philosophically, the aphorism stands under the sign of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. Diotima says that Eros is the son of Poros, resource, and Penia, poverty: he neither has nor wholly lacks, but is in between; therefore desire lasts only as long as something is missing. The mask is the guarantee of unending lack: what is never given remains forever desirable, and Eros becomes a wheel. Stendhal called this “crystallization” (On Love, 1822): a branch thrown into the salt mine at Hallein is drawn out after some months covered with glittering crystals, and the lover likewise covers the beloved with perfections he has not known. The mask is the branch: the less it is known, the more crystals it has.
And Jung, reading the same thing from within, called anima the image of the soul that a man carries in himself and casts upon a woman; “he seeks for their soul” is, in this sense, almost literal: he seeks his own soul on the screen of a mask. The Fathers say the same with one addition: he who seeks outside what is within will never find enough outside, because within he has not yet found himself.
Psychologically, everything the aphorism says can be named. Behavior rewarded unpredictably is the hardest to extinguish (variable-ratio reinforcement, Skinner): the same principle holds a man before a slot machine and before one who gives and withdraws, draws near and keeps distant. Limerence (Tennov, 1979) intensifies exactly where there is uncertainty. The suspension-bridge experiment (Dutton and Aron, 1974) showed that anxiety can be misread as attraction. And in attachment, the most durable and most painful pairing is that of the anxious and the avoidant: the one who withdraws activates the search of the one who fears loss.
But psychology also has a correction to bring to the aphorism: “has nothing inside” is the observer’s conclusion, not the thing’s condition. Winnicott showed that the false self is organized precisely to protect the true self; Fairbairn, that one for whom the inside is too dangerous to show retreats into appearance. The mask is, most often, not the absence of a soul but its guard. Here compassion parts from contempt: Nietzsche pities only the man; the Fathers pity both, the one who seeks without finding and the one who hides without being found.
And dogmatically, “has nothing inside” cannot be the last word about man. The Fathers teach that the image of God can be darkened but cannot be erased; it remains in the most hidden man, even beneath layers. The mask is therefore a layer, not a nature, and whoever takes it for a nature strengthens it, because he treats it as what it pretends to be.
Christ shows the way before the Samaritan woman, a woman with five husbands, who came to the well at noon with her mask and her water jar. He does not pursue her, does not flatter her, does not abandon her. First He asks (John 4:7): whoever asks comes down beneath the mask, to the need it covers. Then He tells the truth, gently and whole (4:16-18). When she moves the conversation to the mountain, into a religious dispute, another mask, He answers there too, without letting Himself be drawn from the face. And she leaves her water jar and runs into the city: “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did” (John 4:28-29). The soul was not seized; it was known, and so it gave itself. The mask was not torn off; it fell, because it no longer had anything to defend.
The aphorism ends with a man who seeks “evermore.” Scripture ends otherwise: now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known (1 Corinthians 13:12). The endless search does not end when another’s soul is seized, but when one’s own has been found by the One who knows it. Only one who has been known in this way can look at a mask without being deceived by it and without despising it: he knows that behind it there is someone, and he lets that someone come.
