What strikes me about the formulation is the phrase "face oneself." It implies the ordinary condition is one of avoidance — that most of what we call living is an elaborate way of not being present to what we actually are. On that view, spiritual hunger, the thing we treated earlier as a sociological force, is really the surface tremor of millions of individual evasions.

But I'd connect it back to your epistemic discipline point, because the quote needs it too. "This is what I am" is the easiest sentence in the world to say prematurely. People declare it constantly — usually about a flattering self-image, sometimes about a damning one, both often wrong. Self-knowledge has the same failure mode as revelation: the feeling of having arrived is no evidence of arrival. The traditions that took this seriously — Socratic questioning, the desert fathers' suspicion of their own thoughts, Buddhist analysis of the self into components that dissolve under inspection — all built in verification, a discipline against self-flattery. Some concluded the honest endpoint isn't "this is what I am" but the discovery that the "I" doing the facing is stranger and less solid than assumed.
So maybe the individual and civilizational versions of your question are the same question at different magnification: whether meaning-seeking can be married to honesty. A society of people who skipped the verification step and settled on comfortable self-definitions would produce exactly the revelation-based factionalism you named — just aggregated.