Johannine Arch-Intelligibility

Chapter Six opens up Part Three of this work, devoted to the reading of the Gospel of John given by the French Phenomenologist Michel Henry. This chapter begins by exploring the phenomenology of life developed by Henry, not that which appears in the world, but that which is prior to the world and only known in the immediacy of its pathos, the self-affectivity of the experience of living. The condition of our self as living ones is Christ himself, the First Living One, in whom the life that is the Father is engendered, so that, as Henry quotes Eckhart, ‘God engenders me as himself’. Identity in pathos (suffering is the experience of suffering, it doesn’t appear elsewhere by another means) grants truth, unlike the horizon of the world, in which something only appears as other than itself, torn from its own identity, rendered dead (for life, Henry reminds us, does not appear in the world). According to Henry’s analysis, this pathos of life constitutes the flesh, as phenomenologically distinct than the body; the latter is how we appear, externalized, in the world, the former is how we experience ourselves in the self-affectivity of the pathos of life. This then enables Henry to provide a more sophisticated understanding of Incarnation, not as the appearing of the Word of God within the world, but rather as the Word of God giving us access to life by sharing in his own flesh and his own pathos. The chapter finishes by considering how Henry reads Scripture, especially John, not against the horizon of the world and its history, but as an invitation to life with its own intelligibilty or ‘arch-intelligibility’.