"Sense" in Being and Time

These questions as far as they go remain phenomenological and do not depend upon articles of faith. Nevertheless, Falque correctly detects in Henry's Incarnation a liaison between Part II and Part III, between the phenomenology of flesh stricto sensu, and Incarnation in "the Christian sense". Here, Falque advances a second principle objection and a positive claim: "[N]othing ensures, at least in reading Michel Henry's work, that the divine incarnation in a flesh pure and simple [Inkarnation] also expresses the becoming human of God [Menschwerdung]… Only a theology of the body or of the purely organic, rather than a unilateral phenomenology of the flesh, will be able to produce the identification, frequently avoided by Michel Henry, between the carnal incarnation of God and his historical and corporeal humanization in the figure of the incarnate Word".

Falque seems to suspect that Henry subsumes "Incarnation in the Christian Sense" under a general and also inadequate phenomenology of incarnation. Far from providing an account of incarnation in the Christian sense, Henry's phenomenology of life glosses over it and renders it equivalent to the fleshly condition of anyone. At best, Revelation becomes a mere moment of phenomenology, rather than the absolute Transcendent. What is worse, it can hardly be called "incarnate" or even "human," since it is fundamentally dis-incorporated. Flesh without body, in this precise sense, is finally a gnostic flesh, as a-corporal as a-cosmic. It is neither Christian nor human. "A monadism and a modalism of the Henryan flesh would thus become all the more dis-incorporated as the body would be destroyed and absorbed into it".

In response to this precise objection, let us consider more closely a text that Falque cites in support of these claims and that seems to invite the charge of Spinozism. Henry describes the living person [vivant] as "no more than a mode of it [auto-impressionality]. In other words, it is something that has no consistency by itself, but only as a manifestation, modification, or peripeteia of a reality that is other than it". Read one way (as Falque reads it), this passage seems to deny the integrity of creation, and to assert a strange, if not to say false, relation with an a-cosmic, unworldly, dis-incorporated reality. One cannot even say it is a relation of dependence, which would already imply a consistency of its own, but rather a relation that merely, as Spinoza might say, expresses the absolute. If Henry means what Falque thinks he means here, Falque would be right to reject it. But I think Henry is saying something else entirely, and a better understanding of it will also shed light on Falque's other objections.

I read Henry's phrase, "has no consistency by itself," with Augustine rather than Spinoza in mind. If Henry means that apart from Life and, in a deeper sense, apart from God's own life given in Christ, human living dis-integrates, and lacks unity or consistency, then Henry's claim is impeccably phenomenologically and theologically precise. Neither here nor elsewhere does Henry turn finite flesh into a dis-incorporate epiphenomenon lacking all reality. Nor does he claim it is only a "mode" of absolute life in the manner of Spinoza. Henry is claiming, instead, at least three things: 1) Finite flesh is not autonomous absolutely. The pretense to be itself on its own, by its own power, is illusory. It cannot give itself its own law if it cannot give itself its own life. 2) Flesh can be a site in which life manifests itself, or alternatively can be a site where life is denatured. Whether one or the other eventuality ensues is, in part, a function of the kind of relation flesh maintains with the life that gives it to itself. 3) Infinite Life, strictly speaking - insofar as it brings itself about in itself [se porte soi-même en soi] - is, with respect to finite life, an alterity, "a reality that is other than it".

Here we have a fundamental distinction between finite and infinite flesh, an alterity not reducible to the alterity of the finite other. It expresses in phenomenological terms what the creature-creator distinction expresses theologically. As fundamental as it is, however, that distinction does not destroy the fundamental relation that is creation. But Falque does not see this distinction in Henry, or does not find it strong enough: "There is a distance in the relation of the human to God… that is not identical to the distance of sin". For Henry, once again, finite life cannot "bring itself about in itself". The power to give life, even life to itself - a power at infinite remove from any human power - it forever lacks. I am not "my own" life and will never be. Is this not, in fact, the orthodox concept of creation? God is Life and the giver of life, and all the living bear a relation to God by virtue of their living condition.

It is not simply creation that Falque finds missing, but also an orthodox concept of incarnation. Somewhat surprisingly, he suspects that Henry denies that the Son of God has taken on the human condition in every way but sin. Where Henry writes that the "one who took on flesh in Christ was not an ordinary man but the Word of God" (160 / 69, Falque's emphasis, citing Incarnation, 231 / 331), Falque interprets Henry as denying that Jesus was born in human likeness, just like any of us, with a carnal body of visible matter. But here again nothing prohibits us from reading this differently. The one who has taken on human likeness in the man Jesus is not just anyone, is not you or me, but rather the One who is in himself the Word. Of course Jesus is a man like any other, but he is not only a man like any other, since he is in his person the very Word of God. Falque wants to compliment an emphasis on the "exemplary" with an emphasis on "the ordinary life and common fleshly humanity of the Son of God".

In addition to an adequate conception of the humanity of Jesus, it is also the uniqueness or singularity of the incarnation that Falque wishes to safeguard. Now citing "the philosopher" Merleau-Ponty: "the Incarnation changes everything". And Falque is right. Incarnation in the Christian sense does change everything. But Falque thinks incarnation in Henry's sense, like the astral flesh of Marcion, or the angelic flesh of Jakob Böhme, cannot "change" anything, strictly speaking. How could it if the auto-impressional flesh it involves is forever a-temporal, invisible, dis-incorporated, and thus entirely unlike the temporal, visible, bodily appearance of the Word made flesh, which in the words of John, "we have heard… we have seen with our eyes… we have looked at and touched with our hands"? If we are to affirm these words, as we do, must we not side with Falque against Henry on this point? The theology Falque wishes to preserve is not in question here, but only the phenomenology, and thus the conditions under which (the way) the revelation of God in Christ comes to manifestation.

How does the affirmation that the Word was made flesh in a flesh like ours go together phenomenologically with the theological singularity of the Word made flesh, indeed its primacy? For as we have seen, it is not just any incarnation in question, in your flesh or mine, but the incarnation of the One who is the Word. To be more precise, how must we describe, following Nicholas of Cusa but this time phenomenologically, the co-incidence of the following two apparently-irreconcilable opposites: The man Jesus is both seen and heard, and rejected as God by many? Can a phenomenology that starts with visible body tout court do it? We should avoid any hasty appeal to faith to explain the difference between acceptance and rejection. Falque's intuitions are correct: it is not only the eyes of faith that see God in Jesus, but the sensible eyes of the body, and also the intellectual "eyes" of those who contemplate him.

But by insisting that the one who sees Jesus - i.e. sees him "bodily" - does indeed perceive God in the flesh, has Falque left any room for those who wish to deny it, as many did and still do? After all, they do not reject what they see, a man in space and time, visible like any other. Nor is it a different man, but the same one his followers also see. What they reject is that this appearing man is God. (In this precise respect Falque claims about the priority of the body are correct. In the order of historical time, they see Jesus first, before some come to believe he is the Christ). But can the humanity of precisely the Word made flesh be recognized as such by appealing first or exclusively to the visibility of it, where the meaning of "flesh" is blended with, and finally phenomenal as, the visible body? How then could we come to terms with the invisibility of the Father? In the Johannine text, Jesus says: "No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me… Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father".

By refusing the phenomenological privilege of invisible, auto-impressional flesh, not just the experience of flesh or life, but flesh as it undergoes experiencing itself - is Falque committed to an exclusivism of the sensed? Not necessarily. He does not refuse the fact of an invisible dimension of flesh, but refuses it priority, and refuses to sever its (visible) bond with the irreducibly visible, the "spread body". He refuses the notion that flesh is invisible alone, sensing alone, touching alone, in favor of a view that it is also, and at the same time, visible, sensed, and touched - which is to say, is also body. Of course, at one level, Falque's claims are entirely legitimate. This "thing" I call my flesh "is" also this "thing" I call my body. The distinctions Henry and others make between the subjective body, the living body, the organic body, the objective body, and so on, these are phenomenological declinations of the body as such. The body, as such, "is" their unity. But only in flesh and as flesh is that unity self-given. It is not given in its original phenomenality either in perception or in sensibility.

If we wish to follow Merleau-Ponty's path, as Falque does, either we must remain in an ontic register that denies the fundamental, original, phenomenological irreducibility of visible and invisible, world and life, and finally flesh and Life, or we must enter into theological territory and with eyes of faith recognize these twos as ones. One can offer a kind of phenomenology from faith, as Emmanuel Falque does so well, but one can also wonder whether, because this is a phenomenology of faith and from the perspective of faith, it is theology more from "from above" than "from below," despite everything. "Eyes of faith" here means, minimally, hearing the Words of Christ and believing, and maximally, participating fully in sacramental life. If we remain in the realm of sense perception and confine our understanding of these realities to the sheer ontic unities of flesh and body, body and world, flesh and world, we seem committed to a theologically- and phenomenologically-questionable materialism. If, instead, we understand seeing as seeing in the light of faith, we must admit that it is faith that gives the incarnate unity in question, Word and flesh, and Word made flesh. In the order of perception, it is faith and not sensibility, or better faith with sensibility, that gives the unity in question. The one who denies that Jesus is Lord also sees Jesus, or could do so. In seeing Jesus they also see the Lord, and deny him. But they do not deny what they see, Jesus.

Without the duplicity of appearing, one has either a kind of ontic phenomenality, so to speak, or faith. But then he phenomenality of faith, properly speaking, would seem to remain out of reach, since the sensible has already, of itself, been so fully loaded with faith. It is a way of thinking the unity of faith and phenomenological reason, but perhaps one that risks compromising something of both. The theologian must still bear the burden of describing phenomenologically what life means, and what it means for that Word to give its life for the world, for you and for me, what it means to live with it and in it and from it, to "participate" in precisely that Life and no other, and to be made able to do so. I am not confident all this can be done on the basis of the phenomenality of the world alone. Of course, I understand "world" here in Henry's sense and not that of Merleau-Ponty, and an objection to the position I am sketching here might find in that fact a point of dispute.

The charges of Gnosticism and Spinozism, in any case, are misapplied and ultimately unhelpful, at least when it comes to what clearly becomes the trajectory of Henry's final writings on Christianity. Like Kierkegaard says life must be lived, Henry's writings on Christianity must be read forward, but can only be understood backward. Life does not save me from the world, nor do I need saving from it. It simply gives itself otherwise and differently than what the world gives and how the world gives. The givenness of the world (as much as of the body and its bones) is and remains a givenness, but never a self-givenness. This is a phenomenological claim, not a soteriological one. The two should not be confused. But the decision to limit one's understanding or definition of reality to the unilateral exteriority of the world may indeed have soteriological implications. We may never come to terms with what faith means, what faith is about - to say nothing of creation, which is not a mere concept but also reality itself - if we remain so limited.

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A word remains to be said about the engagement of phenomenology with science and its place in these reflections. That area of study has its own merit, legitimacy, and interest. The protagonists of such research deserve enormous praise, with two small qualifications. First, the effort to correlate first- and third-person perspectives risks slipping to a kind of scientism if only those correlations ground the phenomenality and phenomenological legitimacy of experiencing undergoing itself in flesh. The phenomena arising in flesh are proper to flesh. The varying worldly vestiges of it, including its practical action, illuminate only what a world can be (including the world of science). They do not give or illuminate or justify what is given in flesh in itself, which has its own phenomenological integrity. Secondly, and for a related reason, science will never prove God (and here we mean "science" and not "reason"). Nor will it ever prove, for example, that Jesus is Lord. "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead". None of this can count in any way as a failure of science, but only as a difference from phenomenology, and in another way, a difference from faith.

Falque's phenomenology of flesh and bone is clearly distinct from Henry's phenomenology of life, and the distinctions between them merit further investigation. I share the same theological commitments as Falque, and I hold in high regard the profound spirit of his theological vision. These objections are only about phenomenology, and in a secondary way about how phenomenology relates to Christian faith, tactically speaking. I suspect that ultimately Falque's objections to Henry presuppose that one has already refused Henry's basic theses concerning phenomenality and the duplicity of appearing. But new questions can also now be posed, this time to Falque: Does the phenomenological priority of the body to the flesh assume a theological acceptation of the body as sacramental, and thus as theologically meaningful, as significant? If so, should we not understand this to be a sacramental phenomenology? And if that is the case, does it presuppose and depend upon the eyes of faith, or even sacramental experience, for its phenomenality? In my view, the further development of the phenomenology of life may also go in a sacramental direction. Henry himself invites it, and it is not clear that a rapprochement between their positions could not be found there.

In any case, one cannot avoid being struck by the subtle moments Falque expresses thanks for the reprieve that arrives when Henry admits a kind of "transcendent" life. But Falque does not put much stock in it. Why? Because admitting it, he thinks, would make of Henry's work a total contradiction and destroy its most important theses. But I think Falque and with him almost all readers of Henry have missed something very important. The phenomenology of life Henry finds in Christianity is not reducible to his own. Henry discovers in Christianity a depth (of life) that offers more than his own phenomenology on its own can provide, a depth which later involves a reproach that overturns the entire affective economy and the world of ethics it presupposes. If we must turn to Words of Christ to see its contours and extent, nothing prohibits us from reading Henry's final text, in part, as a response to Falque's objections. If that is in any way the fruit of a combat amoureux, for this we can also thank Emmanuel Falque.