Michel Henry Quotes

That one should love the other is a prescription any ethic could accommodate, as uncertain as its foundation might be. An ideology lacking any foundation, as for example democratic socialism in our day, could equally lay claim to it. But that one should love the other who is your enemy, even if he is depraved, degenerate, hypocritical, or criminal, is in effect only possible if this other person is not what he appears, not even this I Can, the transcendental ego who has committed all this misdeeds. It is only if, as Son, the other carries within him Life and its essential Ipseity that he may, in his depravity, be the object of love, or rather not him – in the sense of a person, the one whom other people call a person – but the power that gave him to himself and constantly gives him to himself even in his depravity. The command is to love the other insofar as he is in Christ and in God, and on this condition alone.

Man’s forgetting of his condition of Son relates not only to the Concern for the world in which he constantly invests himself. As we have seen, it is the phenomenological essence of Life that makes Life what is most forgotten, the Immemorial to which no thought leads. Because Forgetting defines its phenomenological status, life is ambiguous. Life is what knows itself without knowing it. That it suddenly knows it is neither incidental nor superfluous. The knowledge by which one day life knows what since the beginning it knew without knowing it is not of a different order than the knowledge of life itself: it is a pathetik upheaval in which life feels its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection. This possibility, which is always open to life, to suddenly experience its self-affection as absolute Life’s self-affection, is what makes it a Becoming. But then, when and why is this emotional upheaval produced, which opens a person to his own essence? Nobody knows. The emotional opening of the person to his own essence can only be born of the will of life itself, as this rebirth that lets him suddenly experience his eternal birth. The Spirit blows where it wills.

The speech of the Word of Life is not made up of words lost in the world and stripped of power. Its word is its embrace, the pathetik embrace in which, holding itself, it holds the person to whom it speaks by giving him life – by giving him to be embraced within this embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself. The embrace in which absolute Life embraces itself is its love, the infinite love with which it loves itself. Its word is that of love, in the end the only one that the anguished people of our day, lost in world’s ennui, still want to hear. But what does this word say to them? Just itself, just their own life, too – the unspeakable happiness of experiencing oneself and of Living.

Thus the possibility of hearing the Word of Life is itself for each person and for each living Self contemporaneous with his birth and consubstantial with his condition of Son. I hear forever the sound of my birth, which is the sound of Life, the unbreakable silence in which the Word of Life does not stop speaking my own life to me, in which my own life, if I hear the word speaking within it, does not stop speaking the Word of God to me.

To be born is not to come into the world. To be born is to come into life.

What is one hungry for, in this Hunger that comes to all those who are well fed, as the misfortune that none of them will escape? What is lacking to each person who sees himself as the site and source of his pleasures and powers, except the power that gave him to himself, and doing so, gave him, in experiencing himself, the possibility of experiencing the power that gave him to himself to enjoy himself and to enjoy the power that gave him the joy of self? It is absolute Life, for which all those who are “well fed” will hunger if each is satisfied with himself as the source if this satisfaction. That they are hungry for absolute Life – whether this absolute Life is the single Food that can satisfy the Hunger, especially the hunger of those who are well fed, or else the sole Water able to quench the Thirst of all those struck by the curse because they live their satisfaction and pleasure as their own doing – is stated in the uncompromising words of the one who speaks about Life as about himself and of himself as of Life: the Arch-Son, in whom Life generates and reveals itself. “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32); “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14). This Food, finally, is the self-accomplishment of absolute Life, as is also stated: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (John 4:34).

For someone feeling himself as the source of all his powers and all his sentiments, especially his pleasures, someone who lives in the permanent illusion of being a self-sufficient ego having only from itself its condition as ego as well as all that thereby becomes possible for it (acting, feeling, enjoying) – to that person what is lacking is no less than what constantly gives this ego to itself and is not it: absolute Life’s self-givenness, in which this ego is given to itself and everything else is simultaneously given to it (its powers and pleasures). This terrifying lack in each ego of what gives it to itself – what it is missing even when it feels itself as lacking for nothing, as sufficing to itself, and especially in the pleasure it has of being itself and believing itself the source of this pleasure – this is what determines the great Rift. This lack and absolute void is the Hunger that nothing can satisfy, the Hunger and Thirst for Life, which the ego has stopped feeling in itself at the same time as its condition as Son, when, in pleasure, it takes itself for the source of this pleasure and identifies with it as its own property. “Woe to those who are well fed now, for you will go hungry” (Luke 6;25).

Faith is not produced in the field of knowledge, as a sort of knowledge of inferior degree, whose object is presumed without being truly seen, and perhaps without ever being visible – a knowledge that is not only inferior, then, but illusory. Faith is not a signifying consciousness that is still empty, incapable of producing its content by itself. Faith is not of the realm of consciousness, but rather of feeling. It comes from the fact that nobody ever gave himself life, but rather that life gives itself, and gives itself to the living, as what submerges him – from the fact that in life he is totally living, as long as life gives him to himself. Faith is the living’s certitude of living, a certitude that can come to him ultimately only from absolute Life’s own certitude of living absolutely, from its self-revelation, without reservation, in the invincible force of its Second Coming. Having entered into him in its own certitude that life is for living, Faith is within the life of each transcendental me as the feeling it has of absolute Life. From this comes its irrepressible power, not that of the transcendental ego placed in itself and in its I Can in absolute Life’s self-givenness, but the power of this self-givenness, its invincible and eternal embrace. This is why Faith never takes its force from a temporal act and never mingles with it. It is the Revelation to man of his condition of Son, the grasping of man in Life’s self-grasping.

The radical and essential pre-destination implied in the condition of Son (identical to his Arch-generation) is what constitutes the principle of the Christian ethic, the Commandment. John perceives this Commandment in its original form, in God’s phenomenological life and identical with it. He calls it God’s love. God’s love is the first and only Commandment of the ethic. “The commandments ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandments there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9). […] The Commandment is only a Commandment of love because Life is love. Life is love because it experiences itself infinitely and eternally. Because it is Life, “God is love,” as John says (1 John 4:8). It is because God (as absolute Life) is love that he commands Love. He commands it of all the living by giving them life, by generating them in himself as his Sons, those who, feeling themselves in infinite Life’s experience of self and its eternal love, love themselves with an infinite and eternal love, loving themselves inasmuch as they are Sons and feeling themselves to be such – in the same way that they love others, inasmuch as they are themselves Sons and inasmuch as they feel themselves to be such. If the Commandment only prescribes love because the One who commands is himself love, it is because far from resulting from the Commandment, love is on the contrary the presupposition of it.

As for Christ, he has justified his act of healing on the Sabbath by identifying it with the original essence of acting, itself identical with the original essence of Life, that is to say, with the process of its unceasing self-generation. It is because the process of absolute Life’s self-generation does not cease, because “the Father is always at his work,” that Christ, too, does not cease working, not even on the Sabbath day; “I, too, am working.” By identifying his acting with God’s absolute acting, with the unceasing process of self-engendering of absolute Life, Christ refers to himself unequivocally and, once more, as consubstantial in his acting with the action of this process. He is the transcendental Arch-Son cogenerated in the process of self-generation of Life as the essential Ipseity, and the First Living, in which (and in the form of which) this process is alone accomplished. This is why it is given to him, as to the Father, to work – and work without cease. Life does not know rest on Sunday or Saturday – which is better for all livings, moreover.

To see what ought to be done without possessing the power to do so, to see what ought to be done while finding oneself deprived (in and through this seeing, in and through this commandment) of the ability to execute it – this is the dramatic and desperate situation in which the Law has placed each person, despite the fact that it is addressed to him from outside as a transcendent Law. A Law that defines the infraction and the crime, that opens before people the gaping possibility without giving them the power to avoid either, is a cursed Law. An absence of Law would be better, a state of innocence in which the possibility of crime was not every moment within sight. The Law, on the contrary, curses all those who do not put it into practice – in fact, it curses everybody, since it gives nobody the power to follow it. The Law multiples crime, as the Apostle says in a striking phrase: “The law was added so that trespass might increase” (Romans 5:20).

Here arises a critique of the Law within Christianity, formulated with rare violence by Christ, and for which Paul finds and wonderfully explains the ultimate motivation, which relates it to the Christianity’s central thesis, which places reality within life. It is precisely because the Law is transcendent and exterior to life and perceived by life as beyond it that it is deprived of reality. And by the same token, it is deprived of what finds in life’s reality the possibility of being fulfilled: action. The Law is thus unreal and powerless. Because it unites powerlessness with unreality, the Law places the whole system organized around it (especially the people to whom it is addressed) in an untenable situation. On the one hand, it prescribes, in the form of injunctions that are perceived quite clearly and thus indubitably: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and so on. On the other hand, however, this clearly enunciated commandment (not susceptible to being used for trickery) is by itself incapable of producing the action that suits it. “Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law” (John 7:19).

The action implied in merciful works is now quite clear. Whether it involves nourishing those who are hungry, clothing those who are naked, caring for sick, or another act, the manner of acting in these various actions has ceased to concern the ego that acts or to relate to it in any fashion; a common trait equally determines them all: forgetting oneself. […] Hence, what kind of action is acting in works of mercy, if it is not a power proper to the transcendental ego that says “I Can”? In this ego there is no power different from its own, different from all the powers it possesses, except for the hyper-power of absolute Life that gave it to itself in giving itself to itself. In works of mercy – and this is why they are “works” – a decisive transmutation takes place by which the ego’s power is extended to the hyper-power of absolute Life in which it is given to itself.

This is because the doing carries life as its irresistible presupposition, because there is no doing unless given to itself in life’s self-givenness, unless the work of salvation is entrusted to it. Entrusted to doing and to action, but not to any old action. If we examine the list of works of mercy, we see that is not a simple enumeration of empirical attitudes and conduct that would be beneficial to people who practice them. A hidden contrast runs through them, but not an opposition between simple precepts still removed from their achievement in practice, which is demanded as the single road that leads to life. Instead, the opposition appears on the level of the action itself. It distinguishes and contrasts two types of action – in effect, one that leads to life and the other to death.

Precise behaviors of the kind indicated in the New Testament were summarized by medieval theology as the “seven works of corporal mercy” (to feed those who are hungry, clothe those who are naked, care for the sick, release captives, visit prisoners, and so on) and of spiritual mercy (teach the ignorant, convert sinners, console the afflicted, pardon one’s enemies, pray for the living and the dead, and the like). It is not conformity with an external model of conduct that is required. Rather, within each person who performs each of the stated acts of mercy, salvation flows. Salvation is the second birth entry into the new Life. The action of the Christian ethic places the living person into the absolute Life that was before him and, giving him to himself, gave him life in his condition as Son.