By putting out of play not only the lifeworld but, more seriously, life itself or what we are, the play of knowledge is laden with significant conseq… - Michel Henry

Because our flesh is nothing but what, feeling itself, suffering itself, sustaining itself and bearing itself and so enjoying from itself according to always reborning impressions, is able, for this reason, to feel the body which is exterior to it, to touch it as well as being touched by it. What the exterior body, the lifeless body of the material universe, is by principle incapable.

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.

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.