Words of Christ (Interventions) - Softcover

Henry, Michel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802862888 ISBN 13: 9780802862884

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011

Synopsis

In Words of Christ Michel Henry, an important French philosopher, asks how Christ can be both human and divine. Also, how can we as humans experience Christ's humanity and divinity through his words? Are we able to recognize certain experiences or words as divine? How do divine words differ from human words? Henry approaches these questions from the angle of material phenomenology the study of reality as we experience it. Startling possibilities and further questions emerge as Henry systematically explores these enigmas. For example, do divine phenomena possess their own kind of phenomenality, and do we have access to this other realm? Henry's perspective on Christ's words here translated into English for the first time is highly original and interdisciplinary in nature, in keeping with other volumes of the Interventions series. This was Henry's last published work before his death in 2002.

About this title

About the Authors

Michel Henry (1922-2002) was a leading Frenchphenomenologist who taught at the University of Montpellier.He wrote extensively on phenomenology and also authoredseveral novels. His books include The Essence ofManifestation, Material Phenomenology, and I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy ofChristianity.,

Christina M. Gschwandtner is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

WORDS OF CHRIST

By Michel Henry

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2002 Éditions du Seuil
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6288-4

Contents

Foreword, by Jean-Yves Lacoste.....................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction to the English Edition, by Karl Hefty.................................................................................................................xiTranslator's Note..................................................................................................................................................xxxIntroduction.......................................................................................................................................................31. Words That Christ, as a Human Being, Addresses to Humans in Their Own Language—about Themselves...........................................................112. Disintegration of the Human World as a Result of Christ's Words.................................................................................................213. Upheaval of the Human Condition Through Christ's Word...........................................................................................................304. Words That Christ Addresses to Humans in Their Own Language—No Longer about Them, but about Himself: Affirmation of His Divine Status.....................405. Christ's Words about Himself: Reaffirmation of His Divine Status................................................................................................496. The Question of the Legitimacy of the Words Spoken by Christ about Himself......................................................................................587. Word of the World, Word of Life.................................................................................................................................688. The Word of God: Self-Justification of the Words Spoken by Christ about Himself.................................................................................799. Christ's Words about the Difficulty for Humans to Hear His Word.................................................................................................9110. Christ's Words about the Possibility for Humans to Hear His Word...............................................................................................101Conclusion: Listening to the Word: What Christ Said in the Synagogue of Capernaum..................................................................................114

Chapter One

Words That Christ, as a Human Being, Addresses to Humans in Their Own Language—about Themselves

One can highlight in the Gospels a certain number of remarks which could be those of a human being, namely of the man Jesus. These words would be distinctive only by the depth of their views and by the conclusions which one draws from them in order to provide rules of conduct for their listeners. This type of speech constitutes what one might call a wisdom speech. Moreover, often such remarks do not isolate individuals, but consider them instead in their environment, indeed in their relation with the whole universe. The judgment concerns the human being; the advice resulting from it consequently implies a judgment on the universe itself.

This is the case for two singular passages, one from Mark, the other from Matthew. Furthermore, their importance is due to the way in which they tackle the problem of evil in a decisive fashion: evil is not in the universe, but is found solely in the human being. This thesis is laid out in regard to a question that is both very specific and very practical, if not to say trivial. "Then the disciples approached and said to him, 'Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?'" [Matt. 15:12]. Once again opposing the ritualistic formalism of Jewish religion, Jesus simply declared that it is not necessary to wash one's hands before eating. Yet this declaration, provocative for all the legalists, makes a metaphysical affirmation. It is not content only with stating, as Hegel will nineteen centuries later, that "only the stone is innocent." Rather, it extends this assertion to everything that is similar to the stone. Any material process, all that is studied by science, everything that does not sense or experience anything, everything that is different from humans, is all innocent. That is why "he [Jesus] declared all foods clean" [Mark 7:19].

Instead, it is in the heart—where humans experience everything else and also experience themselves—where one is human in distinction from all the "things." The heart contains evil; evil comes forth from it. Thus Matthew: "Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile" (Matt. 15:11-20). One finds a similar text in Mark (7:14-23): "There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.... For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.... All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

The demarcation of the place of evil, here called defilement, concerns not only an ethics; it implies a general definition of the human condition which, as we have just said, uses the "heart" as its principle. The identification of human reality with the "heart" has an unprecedented significance. It testifies that in distinction from the things of the universe which do not sense and do not experience anything—and which for this reason would be unable to be either good or evil—humans are those who experience themselves. It is for this exact reason that humans find themselves at the same time capable of experiencing and sensing all that surrounds them, namely the world and the things which show themselves within it. Yet experiencing oneself constitutes the distinctive feature of life. Living is in fact nothing else: suffering what one is and rejoicing in it, rejoicing in oneself. The "heart"—this term which recurs so often in the Gospels—hence designates human reality as essentially emotive, which is what it really is. Affectivity is the essence of life. Furthermore, in the transmitted collection of words, Christ employs the term "life" in order to refer to human reality, our reality, our life. The most concrete Synoptic texts say the same thing as the Johannine texts or Paul's letters.

From the philosophical point of view, the definition of humans as deriving their reality from the Affectivity of life, and thus as living beings who do not cease to experience themselves in suffering or in joy, has revolutionary import. On the historical level, it shatters the horizon of Greek thought which defined the human as a rational being: humans are distinguished from animals precisely through Reason, as being "endowed with Logos." The Christian definition, which turns the human being into a "living being" [un vivant], nevertheless has nothing to do with its current biological interpretation. According to the biological interpretation, what one traditionally calls "life" is actually reduced to a set of material processes consistent with those studied by physics. The scientific view is focused on this realm, which Matthew's and Mark's description marks as the "outside"—where there is no evil because there is really nothing human.

This establishes a distinction between, on the one hand, what as outside of humans is foreign to them and, on the other hand, the "heart" where humans experience themselves and all the particulars of experience —their affections, their desires, and, for example, "the evil intentions: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly" (Mark's version). Such a distinction, as important as it may be, in no way permits us to elevate ourselves above the human order: quite to the contrary, it serves to define it. At stake is an order which is no longer that of things but of the life which experiences itself in its sufferings, its evil cravings, or its immense joy of living.

In this way one sees a movement of thought constantly occurring in the Gospels, which accompanies us from one order of reality to another. The at times extraordinary circumstances in which such a displacement takes place do not suffice to mask their evidence. After a night of fruitless fishing, Simon and his colleagues upon Christ's command throw their nets once again into the waters of the lake of Gennesaret. When their nets are ripping under the weight of the fish, they are so terrified that Simon asks the Lord to go away. We are familiar with Christ's response: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people" (Luke 5:1-11).

The apparently very simple distinction operating between "things" and "humans" can nevertheless only be understood in the context of the thought of the Gospels. The people in question are living and incarnate beings, inasmuch as we have been led to recognize from our first reflection on the person of Christ defined by the Incarnation of the Word. Incarnate beings are not beings that have a body similar to things—an objective material body incapable of sensing anything. Incarnate beings are beings that have flesh, indeed, who are flesh: this moving and unbreakable totality of sensible, affective, and dynamic intuitions, which constitutes the concrete reality of the fleshly beings we are. These beings feel hunger, thirst, cold, the discomfort of unsatisfied need, the pain of effort, fear of obstacle, resentment against anything opposed to or greater than them, contempt for anything inferior to them or considered to be such.

That is to say that the world with which these incarnate beings have to deal is no longer one which confronts pure minds or a rational subject —the abstract world of theoretical knowing and of science with its objects which are themselves abstract, bare of all sensible quality, defined by mathematical parameters. The world of incarnate beings is composed of sensible objects, carved up and determined by needs and affects, carriers of all the values that life confers on them. In this way, the human world is the world of living beings, a life-world—Lebenswelt, as the German philosophers call it. The opposition that Christianity establishes between the human being and the world is in no way a theoretical distinction between a subject of knowledge and its object. It separates incarnate beings from this life-world which is theirs, a world of values corresponding to needs, to drives, and to emotions which form the substance of our flesh. This opposition constantly affirms the primacy of the human, understood as the fleshly living Self, over the whole of things useful to his or her life and which gain from it their value.

When speaking to humans about themselves, Christ also continuously places before their gaze their superiority over the entire universe. This superiority motivates one of the major criticisms that one meets in a good many Gospel passages, especially in this text from Matthew (6:25-34): "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?.... Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.... So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own."

The point of impact of this celebrated criticism is difficult to delimit. For in contrasting humans with the world they put into play, the criticism concerns a world that is less than the human. Yet it immediately turns around against humans themselves inasmuch as they put their interest in this world which is less than them. Making what is inferior to them the source of their lust, creating a network of pseudo-values which henceforth regulate their desires and conduct, they devalue themselves at the same time. Humans' concealment of their own condition and of anything eminent it contains, corresponds to the overestimation of the world and its objects that have become its ideals or its idols. Hence Christ's strange and categorical declaration: "Are you not worth more than these?"

Henceforth, the relation between our own life and this world where we develop our projects and concern ourselves with their realization must be deepened if we want to understand the reversal of the hierarchy that we establish spontaneously between them. We are preoccupied with one, the things of the world, but forget the second—this life which is ours and which is infinitely more valuable than all the rest. The passage from Matthew that immediately precedes the one on which we have just commented, responds to our question. Behind the ethical character of formulated precepts, one should recognize the unfathomable significance of this response. The relation between the world and our life is here proposed under the form of a radical opposition between the visible and the invisible. The world is the reign of the visible, life that of the invisible. To the world belongs everything susceptible to appearing before a gaze, presenting itself as a spectacle in a "light" which is the world itself. This light comes from placing things at a distance or within a "horizon" of exteriority on the screen on which all things appear for us—in this "outside," this "in front of," this "before us," this "before humans" which is the world as such. The Gospels often call the light of this horizon of visibility "the glory of the world," in contrast to the invisible revelation of the life in us, referred to as "the secret" (a secret that consequently we are ourselves), or also as "the glory of God."

Yet this radical division between the two realms of the visible and of the invisible concerns us, who belong to the world as much as to life. On the one hand, the human being shows itself in the world as an objective body similar to that of things. In this way it gives itself to be seen by other humans as well as by itself. When this body acts, its action assumes the appearance of an external displacement; it appears objectively as this body. Yet we know that the body is only the visible appearance of a living flesh, experiencing itself in life and invisible as such. Only this living flesh, composed of our impressions, of our desires, of our efforts to satisfy them—thus of our sorrows and our joys—constitutes our true reality, the heart and the secret of our being. Because this invisible flesh defines our true corporeality, all our actions considered in their effective reality are also accomplished in it. Of this reality one always grasps only an outside appearance which envelops it, so to speak. The possibility of the hypocrisy that inhabits the human world is born in this gap between our real actions and their appearance. We see here that this hypocrisy is in no way limited to words but has as much to do with actions.

We are therefore now in a position to understand the text in Matthew (6:1-18): "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.... So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others.... But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret.... And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.... But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door.... And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.... But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may not be seen by others."

Beyond its obvious ethical meaning, this criticism of the attitude that one notices most often among human beings and which consists in seeking in the gaze of others a justification for what one does and thus of what one is oneself—one's own "prestige"—rests on the crucial conflict between the visible and the invisible, the external and the internal, a theme of opposition that runs through Christ's entire teaching. A similar opposition grounds the very possibility of hypocrisy, namely that between the reality held in the "heart" and the appearance of the world. It is also at work in the polemic against the Pharisees whose deceit is not their least flaw. It is encountered again in this passionate diatribe by Christ: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matt. 23:27-28).

The opposition of the visible to the invisible, which is taken up again and formulated explicitly in the Christian creed, has decisive philosophical import. It does not trace a line of division between what is human and what is divine, the invisible referring to "Heaven" and becoming like the latter a sort of "netherworld" or of mythical "beyond," an object of skepticism for those who claim to confine themselves to what one can see and touch. Rather, the invisible concerns the human being itself and his or her true reality. A human being is really twofold, visible and invisible at the same time. The analysis of the body has established that the body is given to us in two different fashions: on the one hand, under the form of an external, visible body in the fashion of other bodies in the universe; on the other hand, each person lives inwardly in his or her own body under the form of the invisible flesh, suffering and desiring, and is at one with it.

Even so, these two terms we have learned to distinguish are in no way situated on the same plane. Reduced to its objective aspect, our body is only one representation among others, a sort of reflection like that seen in a mirror. It also has the lightness, the transparency, the lack of reality, and the powerlessness of this image. This represented body, the object offered to the gaze, draws its reality, its stunning, dynamic, and pathos-filled [pathétique] depth which makes of our incarnate condition what it is, from our invisible flesh. It is hence advisable to affirm this at first glance perplexing truth: as far as human beings are concerned, it is in our invisible subjectivity where our actual reality is found. Our outside appearance is precisely only a semblance. This unusual thesis results from Christ's polemic against the Pharisees' hypocrisy, as well as from his analysis of evil. Whether it is a matter of fasting, of prayer, of good or evil action, these various activities escape the visible world and are accomplished where they remain unknown to others: in secret.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WORDS OF CHRISTby Michel Henry Copyright © 2002 by Éditions du Seuil. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802862888
• ISBN 13: 9780802862884
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152