Michel Henry Quotes

The genius of the Christian ethic is to point out in the simplest of ordinary lives, accessible to all and comprehensible by all, the concrete conditions – the circumstances, as it were – in which the extraordinary event is produced by which the ego’s life will be changed into God’s. As an example, let us consider the parable of the Good Samaritan (whose good deed is terrifyingly represented by Luca Giordano in the painting in the Rouen Museum). Someone like the priest or Levite, who passes by without helping the man robbed by brigands who has been thrown down and is covered with wounds – that person now advances along the route to perdition without knowing it. By contrast, the Samaritan, setting aside his own business, all preoccupations about himself or his interests, is concerned only with the unfortunate one. Taking him to an inn, having him tended, paying for everything – in short, practicing mercy, he has done everything that could be done to “inherit eternal life” (Luke 10:25-37). If such is the metaphysical destiny of the protagonists in the parable, it is good that acts are what count.

Christianity proceeds to overthrow the concept of reality as well as that of action. In tearing action from external Being and from the process of objectivation leading to it, Christianity situates action in its rightful place, where to do is to make an effort, take pains, suffer to the point that the suffering of this effort is changed into the joy of satisfaction. To do refers to life’s internal pathetik self-transformation and finds there its sole motivation, its unique purpose, not to mention the very milieu in which it is accomplished and is possible. So, surprising as it may seem at first glance to the naïve realism of ordinary perception, the subjective conception of action is the only one that preserves its possibility. If we consider action as an objective process similar to a natural process, to a cascade of water that makes a turbine turn, then nothing distinguishes this so-called action from some material process, and there is no longer any action, but only objective phenomena. Human acting and the effort and suffering involved are reducible to causal sequences, to “the action of gravity,” for example.

Thus the Christian ethic presents itself from the start as a displacement from the realm of the word, meaning also of thought and knowledge, to the realm of action. This displacement is decisive for three reasons. First, it leads the world’s truth back to Life’s. Second, dissipating all the illusions that traditionally link the truth to representation, to theory, and to their ecstatic foundation, it unequivocally relates Life’s Truth to the process of its self-engendering, to the power of an action. Third, in life, it is precisely no longer the ego’s power, the I Can constitutive of its will and freedom, that is at issue, but the “Father’s Will,” or the process of absolute Life’s self-engendering. Now the ethic can link the two lives, the ego’s and God’s, in such a way that it assures the former’s salvation in practice. To do the Father’s will designates the mode of life in which the Self’s life takes place, so that what is henceforth accomplished in it is absolute Life in its essence and by its requirements.

If, in traditional philosophical thought, it is wisdom – a wisdom built upon knowledge, careful thought, judgment, and so one – that ought to lead to beatitude, then we must recognize that this beatitude has nothing to do with the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. But the banishment of knowledge – any form of knowledge, whether philosophical or scientific, intelligible or sensory – in the process of Christian salvation is not gratuitous but rather is motivated by the very nature of the expected salvation. In order to vanquish the Forgetting that renders the absolute Life Immemorial, the Forgetting in which thought holds Life, we would precisely not ask that of thought. The salvation that consists of rediscovering this absolute Life escapes all orders of knowledge, expertise, and science. It does spring from consciousness as understood by classical or modern thought, as in “consciousness of something.” It is not some “becoming conscious of” that can liberate a person. It is not the consciousness’s progress through various kinds of knowledge that will secure salvation.

The interpretation of man as “Son of God,” or, more precisely, as “Son within the Son,” has many weighty implications. But before we pursue them, there is one question that cannot be differed. If men are really Sons of God within Christ, how can we explain that so few of them know this and remember it? If they bear within them this divine Life in all its immensity – because there is no other Life but that, and the living can only bow before its profusion – how can we understand why they are so unhappy? In the end, it is not the tribulations visited upon them by the world that oppress them; rather, it is with themselves that they are so discontented. It is their own incapacity to achieve their desires and plans, it is their hesitations, their weakness and lack of courage, that provoke the deep malaise that accompanies them throughout their miserable existence. If they never tire of attributing the cause of their failure to circumstances or to others, it is only to fool themselves and to forget that the real cause lies within themselves. As Kierkegaard puts it: “Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be himself.” But how can one despair of this me if it is nothing less than the coming into us of God within Christ? Such despair is possible only if, one way or another, man has forgotten the splendor of his initial condition, his condition of Son of God – his condition as “Son within the Son.” It is this forgetting that we must now attempt to understand.

To understand man on the basis of Christ, who is himself understood on the basis of God, in turn rests on the crucial intuition of a radical phenomenology of Life, which is precisely that of Christianity: namely, that Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ, and for man. This is so because there is but a single and selfsame essence of Life, and, more radically, a single and selfsame Life. This Life – that self-generates itself in God and that, in its self-generation, generates the transcendental Arch-Son as the essential Ipseity in which this self-generation comes about – is the Life from which man himself takes his transcendental birth, precisely since he is Life and is explicitly defined as such within Christianity. He is the Son of this unique and absolute Life, and thus the Son of God. The tautological expression “Son of God” – tautological in that there are no sons except in Life and thus in God – conceals the profound truth that man’s essence, that which makes him possible as what he really is, is not man as we understand him, and still less some humanitas or other. Rather, it is the essence of divine life – that which makes him one of the living, and that alone.

The relation of Life to the living is the central thesis of Christianity. Such a relation is called, from life’s viewpoint, generation, and from the living’s viewpoint, birth. It is Life that generates any conceivable living thing. But this generation of the living can be accomplished by Life only insofar as it is capable of engendering itself. A Life that is capable of engendering itself, what Christianity calls God, we are calling absolute Life – or, for reasons that will emerge later, absolute phenomenological Life. Insofar as the relation of Life to the living occurs inside God himself, it is produced as the generation of the First Living at the core of Life’s self-generation. Insofar as such a relation concerns not just God’s relationship with himself but also his relationship with man, it is produced as the generation of transcendental man at the core of God’s self-generation. […] What is generated in Life as the First Living Christianity calls the first-born Son, or the only Son, or, in Hebraic tradition, the Christ or Messiah. What is generated in Life as man, that is to say, as man himself, it calls “Son of God”. Absolute Life, as it engenders itself and, in doing so, engenders the First Living, is what Christianity calls Father.

Experiencing oneself as Life does is to enjoy oneself [jouir de soi]. Enjoyment does not presuppose any differences similar to those in which the world is born: it is homogeneous phenomenological material, a monolithic affective body whose phenomenality is affectivity as such. The self-revelation of Life is not a formal structure that can be conceived on the basis of “outside oneself” and in terms of its own structures, since these are bypassed, overcome while being maintained in this very bypassing. The self-revelation of life is its enjoyment, the primordial self-enjoyment that defines the essence of Living and thus of God himself. According to Christianity, God is Love. Love is nothing other than the self-revelation of God understood as in its pathetik phenomenological essence, specifically, the self-enjoyment of absolute Life. This is why the Love of God is the infinite love in which he eternally loves himself, and the revelation of God is none other than this Love.

In the self-revelation of Life reality is given birth, any possible reality. […] This is why, from now on, we must reject an idea found in Hegel’s philosophy – and in its by-products such as its most tenacious expression, Marxism – before determining in turn many of the commonplaces of modern thought. This is the idea that Christianity is a flight from reality, inasmuch as it is a flight from the world. But if reality resides in Life and only in Life, this reproach disintegrates to the point of ultimately appearing as a non-sense. […] The content of Life – what it experiences – is Life itself, refers back to a more fundamental condition, to the very essence of the “Living,” to a mode of revelation whose specific phenomenality is the flesh of a pathos, pure affective material, in which any cleavage, any separation, finds itself radically excluded. It is uniquely because such is the phenomenological matter of which this revelation is made that we can say that in this revelation what reveals and what is revealed are one and the same. It is this pathetik phenomenological substance of living that defines and contains any conceivable “reality.”

Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. If, then, the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather we know it, and we can know it, only in and through Life itself. We can know the essence of God only in God. But this observation is premature.

Although it is not thought or some other form of knowledge, although it is not the truth of the world, that gives access to the Revelation of God, at least a single possibility persists, already mentioned as a simple matter of fact and now rendered unimpeachable. Access to God, understood as his self-revelation according to a phenomenality proper to Him, is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so. There where God originally arrives in himself, in the phenomenalization of phenomenality that is his own and is thus like the self-phenomenalization of this phenomenality proper – there alone is access to God. It is not that thought is lacking and so we cannot accede to the Revelation of God. Quite the contrary, it is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God – the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.

If by chance “the Revelation of God” were addressed to people, this would not consist in the unveiling of a content foreign to its own essence and somehow transmitted to a few initiates. To reveal Himself to people could only signify for God that He gives to them a share if his eternal self-revelation. Christianity is nothing other, truly, than the awe-inspiring and meticulous theory of this givenness of God’s self-revelation shared with man.

What, then, is a truth that differs in no way from what is true? If truth is manifestation grasped in its phenomenological purity – phenomenality and not the phenomenon – then what is phenomenalized is phenomenality itself. The phenomenalization of phenomenality itself is a pure phenomenological matter, a substance whose whole essence is to appear – phenomenality in its actualization and in its pure phenomenological effectivity. What manifests itself is manifestation itself. What reveals itself is revelation itself; it is a revelation of revelation, a self-revelation in its original and immediate effulgence. With the idea of a pure Revelation – of a revelation whose phenomenality is the phenomenalization of phenomenality itself, of an absolute self-revelation that dispenses with whatever is other than its own phenomenological substance – we are in the presence of the essence that Christianity posits as the principle of everything. God is that pure Revelation that reveals nothing other than itself. God reveals Himself. The Revelation of God is his self-revelation.

It is the first decisive characteristic of the Truth of Christianity that it in no way differs from what it makes true. Within it there is no separation between the seeing and what is seen, between the light and what it illuminates. And this is because there is in that Truth neither Seeing nor seen, no Light like that of the world. From the start, the Christian concept of truth is given as irreducible to the concept of truth that dominates the history of Western thought, from Greece to contemporary phenomenology. This traditional concept of truth determines not only most of the philosophical currents that have succeeded one another until the present day but even more so the ideas currently held about truth within the domain of scientific knowledge and within common sense, which is more or less impregnated with the scientific ideal. It is precisely when the Christian concept of Truth ceases to determine the collective consciousness of society, as it did in the Middle Ages, that the divorce from the Greek idea of a true knowledge and a true science appears in full force. And the consequence is, if not the suppression of the Christian concept, then at least its repression into the realm of private life, or even superstition.

Here we may perceive the seriousness of the way in which the world’s truth undermines everything it makes seen, everything that it makes true. To the extent, then, that the truth is a placing outside, seizing everything to render it manifest, it actually casts the thing outside itself at every instant. This putting-outside-itself by no means signifies a simple transfer of the thing from one place to another – as if, in such a displacement, it remained similar to itself, at most receiving this new property of showing itself. Rather, this coming-into-appearance in the “outside itself” of the world signifies that it is the thing itself that finds itself cast outside itself. It is fractured, broken, cleaved in two, stripped of its own reality – in such a way that, now deprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world's Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.