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, the… - Michel Henry
" "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.
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About Michel Henry
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan. His novel L'amour les yeux fermés (Love With Closed Eyes) has won the Renaudot Prize in 1976.
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Phenomenological definition of God
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Additional quotes by Michel Henry
There is no longer any more room to challenge the omnipresent objectivism of modernity. After the unilateral objectivism of science, there is the media which tears the human being away from him or herself. At every moment, it produces the content that comes to occupy the mind, thereby authorizing an unprecedented and unlimited ideological manipulation that prohibits all free thought and all "democracy". It condemns every interpersonal relation to be reduced to external manifestations, for example, love is reduced to the objective movement of bodies and to photos.
The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.
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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.
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