La vie est incréée. Étranger à la création, étranger au monde, tout procès conférant la Vie est un procès de génération. - Michel Henry

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

Material phenomenology is able to designate this invisible phenomenological substance. It is not a nothing but rather an affect, or put otherwise, it is what makes every affect, ultimately every affection, and every thing possible. The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in view is the pathetic immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself according to the how of its original phenomenalization. Life is thus not a something, like the object of biology, but the principle of every thing. It is a phenomenological life in the radical sense where life defines the essence of pure phenomenality and accordingly of being insofar as being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it. For what could I know that could not appear ?

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.