Tag: Michel Henry

Easter Life as Truth

The Gospel of John sets forth an alternative definition of truth which distinguishes the theological enterprise from every other truth endeavor. The life and light found in Christ are not of the world though they light up the world, simultaneously providing a new definition of truth (life, light, the way) and a new understanding of the world. Theology begins with this presupposition, set forth in John, that the Logos of Christ, the Word of the Cross, the Gospel, is the principle through which creation has its beginning (its arche) and end. Easter sums up the incarnate life of Christ, referencing all of the life of Christ, but John sums up creations purpose in the story of Christ (summed up in Easter). John begins with the Word of the Gospel (this is not a partial word, or a reference to the preincarnate Christ), but the Redeemer is portrayed as the Creator, with time unfolding from the middle and extending to the beginning and end. This truth sums up and surpasses every other form of truth.

Living Truth versus Dead Truth

What exactly is truth? There are factual trues (the cat is on the mat), historical trues (Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492), scientific trues (water is H20), but when Christ says he is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), the very definition and function of truth are changed up. The trues of the previous order pertain to the world and are constituted as true as they reference this order but to treat the truth of Christ as merely factual, historical, or scientific (though this reduction marks modern theology) is to miss the “living way” in which this truth pertains.

There is a certain deadness or irrelevance in the former trues. At some point in time or at some place or within the framework of this world these things correspond to a state of affairs. This truth reduces to packets of information which serve as code about something, but does not really encompass cats, mats, the person Columbus, or the wetness of water. These things show up in the world as “facts” but they are after the fact and do not pertain to fullness of experience. This particular cat has moved on, Columbus is long gone, and H20 references component parts that convey nothing about drinking, swimming, or sailing. The experience of these realities is not captured in their “truth” but these are things which have presented themselves, and are referenced in trues about them, but this truth does not pertain to or capture present or past experience. There is no life in this truth as the truth which is life cannot appear under its reduction to DNA, neurons, and physical particles. Life cannot appear under the parameters of truth of the world.

Christ’s truth claim, of being the way and the life, is a truth that exceeds the factual, historical, scientific, or the predominant philosophical notions of truth. This is a living or lived truth, in that life is the truth and the sharing in this life is the truth. This means it is experienced, it is subjective and the truth of a subject, and it is a first order truth (it is not about something else). Where Heidegger wants to locate truth in the “world’s worlding” (imagining the world is the ultimate context which will show up the truth), Christ says his truth is not of the world. His truth and life are not the “ways” of the world and he pictures a complete humanity as not of the world: “because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:14). This does not mean that the truth resides elsewhere, but his truth is not from or contained in the world but encompasses the world. Christian truth locates and relativizes the creaturely order: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3).

The ungraspable realms of time, space, language, and embodiment, taken as the parameters of truth, necessarily divide and deal out death, but where these creatures serve their proper end of conveying truth and not containing the truth they are relativized. Time alone would deprive us of all things in that there is no present but only the past and the future converging in an instantaneous, annihilating now. Embodiment is subjection to times entropic arrow, pointing us to the grave upon conception. Creation’s big bang points to its explosive end. Where creation as medium constricts the message, death and entropy seem to contain the original nothingness as the absolute from which the world emerged.  What appears is disappearing and what is heard is continually lost in the wind of time.

Isn’t this just a depiction on the order of Paul’s: “For, indeed, the form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31)? Truth, as it is in this world, cannot be pinned down as it is continually passing away. It appears complete after the fact. This truth is dead on arrival. Before it arrives from out of the future it is unknown and it is only made known in passing. No one knew about the cat (the one on the mat) or Columbus before they showed up, and attached to their appearance was their disappearance, and only in disappearing are they fully known. Only then do we have a definitive word. The epitaph is the final and full word.

The cross and Easter displace the finality of the epitaph as the “lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) is the Word which was in the beginning, which is God and is with God. “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:18). The resurrection of Christ is the final and full word, displacing death with life: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:4). His life is the light of truth, as he is the beginning, the source, the head (with the “beginning” in John 1:1 meaning the same thing as in Colossians 1:18), and not simply the first in a temporal line. The form of life “is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) as this life does not reveal itself in the world as it exceeds the world. This life precedes the world (at its foundation – Eph. 1:4) and surpasses the world: “When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory” (Col. 3:4). But this resurrection life is in effect now: “Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth” (Col. 3:1-2). This is not a passage out of the immediacy of life but it exceeds time and place in the experience of life.

The prologue of John might be rendered: At the source of all is the Word (the crucified and risen Jesus), and the Word is God and from out of this Wisdom is life and all things. As John Behr puts it, “As such, this verse is nothing other than a summary of the whole Gospel: that Jesus is in first place on the cross, as the head of the body, as the king in authority upon his throne, and as the source and fulfilment of all things; he is going, through the cross, to the God and Father; and, as the crucified and ascended one, he is confessed as God.”[1]    

United Truth Versus Divided Truth

The former truth (fact, history, science) is a truth that is divided, whereas the truth of Christ is indivisible. We speak of the cat and mat, Columbus and his dates, and the hydrogen and oxygen in conjunction, locating them in time and space in reference to other referents. This truth is extrinsic to its object, showing us something about what it names. Christ’s claim to truth refers to himself. Though we might speak of him historically (born in Bethlehem), factually (died under Pontius Pilate), or even scientifically (he was biologically human), his truth encompasses and exceeds trues about him, to include himself as the truth. Seeing him, hearing him, knowing him, is not divided from what is seen, heard and known. He is the light and what is first illuminated is himself. He is the word and what is heard is himself. The revealer is the revelation in that his revelation is self-revelation. In each instance, this is life gained in the seeing, hearing, knowing and living.

Greek philosophical truth (arguably the characteristic philosophy) makes division an absolute, separating the forms of truth from their appearing so that the H20ness of water, and not the water itself is its truth. The truth of the water, the cat and Columbus reside outside of their passing physicality and time bound nature. Truth, for the Greeks, is what is unchanging and therefore the signs of these changing things are their truth. In turn, the Being of the world equated with the essence of God reduces the living God to the Unmoved Mover of the philosophers, trading an appearance, an apparition (a lie) for the God revealed in Christ. The same principle is at work in each realm of truth, as the language (or signs) takes precedence over what they signify. The description, name, location, date, chemical composition, are the things that can be said about objects. These things show themselves as external to the reality shown. Appearance apart from substance or an empty word devoid of content is of the order of a lie, which may be why Christ contrasts his identity and truth with a language grounded in a lie (John 8:44). The lying word is bound by and binds its adherents to the temporal order (“Abraham died, and the prophets also” (John 8:52) and that is the end of the matter according to his interlocutors).

The Logos of Christ stands over and against this divided logos in that the word of Christ is not about him, describing him, reducing him, but it is Him. “In the beginning was the Word and this Word was with God and was God” (John 1:1). To speak or hear this word entails the full phenomenological reality of who he is. There is no division between the sign and what he signifies. The passage of this sign into flesh, into the spoken word, into history, into time and space, is not diminished by these means but the mediums are relative to who he is. Time and history do not diminish his abiding presence (e.g., “I am before Abraham”). Embodiment does not delimit his universal incarnate presence (e.g., “Where two or three are gathered, I am there.” “I am the Alpha and Omega.”) This revelation makes of time and space his effective presence. He gives himself through these media but what is given exceeds the creaturely order through which he gives. Those who receive this gift receive life and this life is who he is and this is a truth not bound by the divisions of language, time, space, and embodiment.  

The Phenomenology of Suffering as Model of Life in Christ

According to philosopher Michel Henry, one way of getting at the difference between the truth of the world, in its divisiveness, conjunction, and otherness, and the truth of Christ, in its self-referential unity, is through the phenomenology of suffering. “Suffering experiences itself,” as Henry describes.  “It is only in this way that suffering speaks to us; it speaks to us in its suffering. And what it says to us, by speaking to us in this way, is that it suffers, that it is suffering.”[2] Rather than a mere appearance, a name, or a fact (the truth of the world), suffering does not appear external to itself or as other than itself.

So too the life and truth of Christ are not other than himself and those who enter into this experience share the unified life of Christ. What is manifest in Christ is not a power, or life, or redemption separate from Christ. The revealer, revealing the revelation, manifests himself in the fullness of human experience. “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.”[3] This truth is “irreducible” to the concept of truth which dominates the world. “What manifests itself is manifestation itself. What reveals itself is revelation itself; it is revelation of revelation, a self-revelation in its original and immediate effulgence.”

Henry, having begun with the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, concludes with the idea of a pure revelation and phenomenology: “With this 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.” This pure experience of life through access to God by means of his self-revelation consists of a singular “phenomenality proper to Him.” It “is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so.”

This revelation is redemptive as it is a sharing of life in his light: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:4). The temporal, intellectual, sensual, concentrated as it is on appearances exists as a form of darkness and incomprehension of light and life: “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:5).

The equating of life with the essence of God and with the opening of God in Christ, Henry maintains, is thematic in the New Testament. He references the following examples: “I am the living one” (Revelation 1:17), “the living God” (1 Timothy 3:15), “by him who is declared to be living” (Hebrews 7:8), “He who is living” (Luke 24:5). The point is that this is a life opened to all: “‘Go, stand in the temple courts,’ he said, ‘and tell the people these words of life’” (Acts 5:20).  Henry’s focus is on developing these themes from John, as in the prologue, “In him was life and this life was the light of men” (John 1:4). “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). This life given to the Son is opened to all humanity: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25); “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). The divine essence is explicitly stated to be that of Life, “the bread of life” (John 6:48) and “the water of life” (John 4). The life Christ gives provides open access to God and in the New Jerusalem: life is opened to the nations in the river flowing “down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life” (Revelation 22:2).

Life reveals itself in a two-fold sense: “it is Life that achieves the revelation, that reveals – but, on the other hand, that what Life reveals is itself.” Henry concludes, “Living is not possible in the world. Living is possible only outside the world, where another Truth reigns, another way of revealing. This way of revealing is that of Life. Life does not cast outside itself what it reveals but holds it inside itself, retains it in so close an embrace that what it holds and reveals is itself.” This folding in of truth and life in a unity which is unbreakable is the revelation of Easter. Death, difference, distance, time, cannot disrupt the resurrection life, the condition of all true experience.

(Register for the upcoming Class on the Gospel of John starting May 9th here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 260.

[2] Michel Henry, Words of Christ, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012) 74. Quoted in Behr, 276

[3] Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford University Press, 2003). This quote and the following are from an online excerpt: https://philosophiatopics.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/i-am-the-truth-ch12-pdf.pdf

A New Ordering of the Body of Thought

We can trace three psychological types in the New Testament, which correspond to three psychoanalytic descriptions, in which the coordinates between the mind and the body are determinative of alternative perceptions of reality.  What might be called the inside out person is completely subject to the valuation of cultural norms, such that there is no interior conflict or alternative awareness, at least at a conscious level (here we encounter the most common type and the most frightening possibilities). The second type is someone who begins to question the order of things (the cultural norms, the symbolic order, the law) but the struggle with these norms is still determinative, as there seems to be no way forward or no escape. The third type has not exactly escaped appearances or phenomena arising from the symbolic or cultural order, but there is a turn to an alternative order of experience.  Deploying the work of the philosopher Michel Henry, it is this third type that I want to explore in depth, but a description of the first two orders of experience will indicate the way the third order of experience is constituted.

The inside out person, the individual who knows who she is based on the scale of values afforded by complete identity with the law or the symbolic order, is at one level the most transparent and the most dangerous. Paul, during the phase in which he is arresting and presumably aiding in killing Christians, is transparent in his identity. He describes this phase of his pre-Christian understanding as guilt free in which he regarded himself “without fault” in regard to the law. As he describes it in Philippians, he considered himself righteous, zealous beyond his peers, and bearing the highest qualifications and impeccable credentials: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless” (Php 3:5–6). Paul has a clear conscience.  No introspective guilt-stricken conscience here. By reason of his birth, his descent from Benjamin, his linguistic and cultural identity as a Hebrew, Paul considered himself faultless and head and shoulders above his peers. His status as a Jew is his identity. This is an inside out world, as we understand this Paul by the outward markers of the law and his Jewishness. Inside out characters must be the most predominant: the Adolph Eichmanns of the world, willing to find their identity in the bureaucracy, the law, the legal proceedings, making sure the trains to the death camps are running on time. Their ambitions, hopes, and desires, are determined completely by the particular symbolic world in which they find themselves. Perhaps we all come to age as petty bureaucrats, presuming the order of things and the scale of values are those set out by the social order.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis this type is dubbed masculine, not because it necessarily pertains to gender, but because of complete identification with societal authority or the father figures of a particular cultural order. As Paul describes this type, “the law dominates the man for whatever time he lives” (Romans 7:1 DBH translation). Paul will identify this type, according to his own experience, as ignorant of their own actions and an incapacity to discern evil. There is a fusion between sin and the law so that Paul, at the time he was doing it, could not discern the sort of evil in which he is engaged. As he describes, in a parallel passage in Galatians, his zeal for the law and his advancement in Judaism were marked by his persecution of the church and his desire to destroy it (Ga 1:13-14). For Paul, the law was not a marker of sin and evil but was fused with sin such that he could not perceive his own evil due to his zeal for the law. As he advanced in law-keeping and in Judaism he simultaneously advanced in his participation in evil. It did not occur to Paul the Pharisee that there was a reality which exceeded the measure of the law. Clearly, Paul is not imagining that in this understanding he has rightly perceived the law; quite the opposite, as he dubs this orientation as “having confidence in the flesh.” [1] The problem is, the flesh marked by the law, has become a principle unto itself.

The second type of subject questions the cultural symbolic order but this questioning and challenging become definitive of this individual. Paul devotes most of chapter 7 of Romans to describing this individual, continually tossed about by their orientation or disorientation to the law. While this person is perhaps a step-up morally and spiritually from the first type, this psychologically tormented individual is consumed with their personal struggles. Sometimes these folks bring a breath of fresh air into our lives with their willingness to challenge all the norms but ultimately, they are exhausting as we realize there is no end to this pursuit of freedom against the law.

 Ironically, in kicking over the traces, shedding all the shackles of culture, this person is oriented to a transgressive questioning of the law, but it is still the law that defines them. This radicalized freedom might express itself philosophically, politically, socially, or as is most often the case, sexually (e.g. democratic revolutions including the American Revolution in which freedom is enshrined as an end in itself, in Marxist and communist revolutionary movements, and in the gender revolution of the moment). The possibility of reconstructing, from scratch, what it means to be human unleashes a plague of possibility. Beyond good and evil, unchained from the worlds sun, not only describes a philosophical realization but a nearly unbearable psychology and a new form of personality or personality disorder. The two most common psychological disorders might be traced to this agonistic questioning. Where obsessional neurosis is structured around the question of existence (think here of the Cartesian cogito in attempting to establish being through thought), hysteria is structured around human sexuality: “Am I a man or a woman?” or “What is a woman?”

The problem of the first two subjects is that their life is defined by the symbolic order. This order might be associated with law, culture, normative values, or simply language. The problem is how to suspend this order so that a person’s life is not spent in service to an artificial construct. Slavery, bondage, deception, and exodus, redemption, and truth, are the motifs under which the Bible poses the problem and solution. The passage is described as new birth, recreation, adoption into a new family, or citizenship in an alternative kingdom. At its most radical it is depicted as an exchange of one cosmic order for another or one sort of body (the body of death) for another (the body of Christ). The movement is not away from embodiment but towards a different sort of body, constituting a different sort of world. 

The way that Paul pictures this as happening in both Colossians and Ephesians is in and through Christ’s flesh. “He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body” (Col. 1:22) “by abolishing in His flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). The enmity with the symbolic order is taken up in the sickness of the self that is definitive of the human disease. To state the reversal of this state most succinctly, the Life that is God (as opposed to death under the law), revealed in and as Christ, is communicated to us through the incarnation, in which we can become participants (through the body of Christ). At a basic level, this is to give absolute significance to embodiment. Where the human body is written over with the law, it appears as a medium for the true significance of the symbolic order.  But the body is not a medium but a source of significance in itself, and this distinguishes it radically (substantially) from other things (which are lent their significance symbolically in language).

As Wittgenstein put it, “The best picture of the soul is the body.” It is because there are human bodies that there is a world of communication and it is by my body that I belong to this world. But there is a profound sense in which we are dispossessed of ourselves, of our bodies, as the flesh becomes symbolic of something else. The first two sorts of subject inhabit a world controlled by the flesh and the desires of the flesh, not because they occupy their bodies, but because the flesh is written over with a significance in which it takes on an alien principle. Paul describes it as giving rise to hostility as it pits the self against the self, the self against God, and the self against others. Paul’s “confidence in the flesh” speaks of an objectifying and distancing from the center of life. There is a sense in which we are restored to ourselves, to our own bodies, without interference, only through the incarnation of Christ. That is, we become incarnate (peace is restored, the dividing wall of hostility is broken down) as we become as he was, incarnate, truly inhabiting our bodies, and this is definitive of true life.

The philosopher Michel Henry begins with the realization that experience of life, pure subjective experience from within, contains the only direct phenomenological access to life. Life reveals itself in itself through the flesh. Everything else presents itself from a distance and poses a gap between the perceiver and the perceived. In his exposition of the Word become flesh in John, Henry points out that if this is the way the Word becomes human, then relationship with God is to be had in and through the flesh. The flesh is not an obstacle but is the locus of our identity with God.[2] This explains why the Word becoming flesh is revelation (John 1:14). It is not that another body among many has appeared, but the flesh of the Word is the revelation. To say the Word became flesh is not to add something else to the Word. This is the cogito as it should be, without any gap between the subject and object of reflection, but pure revelation. There is not, as with ordinary human words, the possibility of duplicity or misrecognition. As Henry puts it, “Because the Word has become incarnate in Christ’s flesh, the identification with this flesh is the identification with the Word—to eternal Life. ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.’”[3]

The danger is that we might reduce the body of Jesus by allowing a symbolic significance to reduce it to a sort of mystical writing pad. So, step one is to acknowledge the primacy of the incarnate Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Trinity. The mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal generation of the Son. There is nothing secondary, shadowy, or even analogous about Jesus. Jesus is the reality of God incarnate. Jesus is the absolute truth and an absolute morality. The mystery of God revealed as Trinity does not unfold from a fleshless (asarkos) heavenly realm but from an embodied earthly realm. In turn, all human bodies are accorded their full meaning as they participate in this fullness of incarnate significance.

This reconstituted world through the flesh is determined by the incarnate Christ. This world is not a symbolic order pointing elsewhere but meaning inheres in it. There is a world where law might reign or where it has not yet been determined what one should do or can do. In Christ’s embodied life what we should do is determined and what we should not do is determined. “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). What we are to do flows from the absolute which is the body of Christ. Notice that it is Christ Jesus – the incarnate Christ. His human body is the source of significant behavior. His body and our body and human embodiment is the place from which the absolute flows, not from a transcendent law, or a vague situational principle, or a symbolic order utilizing the body and the world as its medium. The body is not a tool or a medium for writing, or a megaphone for the voice, such that we are inside of it, manipulate it, and “have” it. The flesh of the body is our incorporation into the world, community, communion, and communication.

The hostility of the flesh written over by the law is undone in Christ. Living significance (as opposed to a dead letter) is restored as “now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). As we inhabit his body, we are no longer divided in ourselves, from one another, and from God. “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall” (Eph. 2:14). Entering this peace is synonymous with life and meaning and is a first order experience which serves as its own ground of meaning. This is a self-validating and self-evident truth and not a truth that refers elsewhere or mediates something else. This truth is without the gap between signifier (I think) and signified (I am) as the life is in this Word of truth. There is no gap in this order, as it is a Word enfleshed, a direct access to life and the realization of life as a first order experience.

[1]  Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 247-51 Lacan dubs this most common human a “pervert.” Perversion does not refer so much to abnormal sexual practices as to a structure in which the subject sides with the law in the attempt to escape its punishing effect and to partake of its surplus enjoyment. Every individual, religious or not, who presumes to sit in judgment and to punish others in the name of the law, God, Jesus, the Nation, etc. is acting out the simple formula Paul epitomizes as the sinful orientation: the law is completed or established through sin. There is a denial of sexual difference and of death in what Žižek describes as giving oneself completely over to the symbolic without regard for finitude and mortality: “Perversion can be seen as a defense against the motif of ‘death and sexuality,’ against the threat of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference.”

[2] Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh (Northwestern University Press, 2015), 124.

[3] Words of Christ, 124. I am following John Behr’s exposition of Henry in, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 296 ff.

Two Concepts of Truth: Truth as the Power of Death or the Power of Life

Pilate pronounces what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “most subtle witticism of all time.” With his question, “What is truth?” Pilate “annihilated the New Testament,” according to Nietzsche.  The strong “revel in ambiguity” while the weak cannot “afford uncertainty and so demand a clear dichotomy.” The strong man must take a stand “beyond good and evil” and presumably Pilate, with his question ventures beyond mere morality and religion. The superman braves subtle shades of grey and refuses the dictates of a determinate notion of truth. Jesus, in Nietzsche’s scheme, is the subject/slave of truth – his life depends upon a determinate truth while the judge and executioner can allow for “subtleties” or “contingencies” in truth. Continue reading “Two Concepts of Truth: Truth as the Power of Death or the Power of Life”