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… - Michel Henry

I do not intend to ask whether Christianity is “true” or “false,” or to establish, for example, the former hypothesis. Rather, what will be in question here is what Christianity considers as truth – what kind of truth it offers to people, what it endeavors to communicate to them, not as a theoretical and indifferent truth but as the essential truth that by some mysterious affinity is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation. We are trying to understand the form of truth that circumscribes the domain of Christianity, the milieu in which it spreads, the air that it breathes, one might say – because there are many sorts of truths, many ways of being true or false. And we are also perhaps trying to get away from the concept of truth that dominates modern thought and that, as much in and of itself as in its multiple implications, determines the world in which we live.

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.

What does culture become in this state? Its voice is never entirely silenced; it remains in the continual arrival of life within oneself. It remains in a sort of incognito. The exchange that it seeks no longer happens in the light of the City, through its monuments, paintings, music, education, and media. It has entered the clandestine. There are brief words, quick instructions, a few references that isolated individuals communicate to one another when, in chance of meetings, they recognize themselves to be marked by the same sign. They would like to transmit this culture, to enable one to become what one is, and to escape the unbreakable boredom of the techno-media world with its drugs, monstrous growth, and anonymous transcendence. But it has reduced them to silence once and for all. Can the world still be saved by some of them?