Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it… - Michel Henry

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.

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.

This pathetic community does not exclude the world but only the abstract world, which is to say, the world that does not exist and has put subjectivity out of play. But community does include the real world -- the cosmos -- for which every element -- form, color, and so forth -- exists ultimately as auto-affective. That is to say, it exists in and through this pathetic community. "The world", Kandinsky says, "sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit." This is why painting, for example, is not the figure of external things but the expression of their inner reality, their tonality, or what Kandinsky calls their "inner sound", an experience of forces and affects.