Here let us call upon the founder of modern rationalism -- Descartes. In the eyes of one of the greatest philosophers, it was sheer absurdity to clai… - 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.

The key feature of modernity, which makes it into a barbarism of a hitherto unknown kind, is precisely to be a society lacking any culture and existing independently from it. As ordinary and common as it might seem today, this situation creates an almost untenable paradox, if it is the case that life, as self-conservation and self-growth, is itself a cultural process. This is something that all past civilizations illustrate. Barbarism is thus a sort of impossibility. If it happens nonetheless, it is never through an inexplicable dulling of the powers of life. Instead, the powers of life must be turned against themselves, in the phenomena of hate and resentment. This happens because life, in a suffering that is coextensive with its being and that it can no longer bear, attempts to get rid of itself. Barbarism cannot exist without the emergence of Evil, which is a mad but wholly intelligible desire of self-destruction. Or rather, in every state of social regression, it is possible to discover, underneath the evidence of the features of stagnation and decline, the violence of the deliberate refusal of life to be itself.

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.