Joseph Rivera states the two primary goals of his ambitious and dexterous book, The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology,1 very clearly: first, he seeks to introduce and engage Michel Henry’s phenomenology in general and his notion of a “duplicitous self” in particular. Second, and it could be argued, more importantly to Rivera, is his aim to move beyond Henry; he intends, in other words, “to construct over against Henry . . . a contemplative self whose temporal and bodily modes of existence are firmly situated within the world even if the reach of its gaze, unveiled in Christ, seeks to apprehend and behold the Triune life of God who transcends the world” (327). Specifically, Rivera seeks to bring Henry’s notion of selfhood more concretely into this world, as a being in the world, as well as to orient the “eschatological directionality of the self” (6). Henry’s self is too fixated on both interiority and protology, or arch-origins—both of which can lend themselves to a sort of escapism which Rivera, rightly, abjures.

The most promising, if somewhat counterintuitive, claim guiding Rivera’s book is his argument that a notion of contemplative selfhood, in fact reconciles oneself with, and dedicates oneself to, the world as gift, even while it epektasically desires and seeks after the Triune God within and beyond that world. I have a couple of smaller questions, or critical comments, to state with regard to Rivera’s project. However, the central observation I would like to make, in appreciation of Rivera’s work, has to do with what I see as the larger significance of the argument he is making vis-à-vis the current intellectual movements in phenomenology.

My first question might be stated as follows: need Rivera have written this as a book on Henry? Certainly its value as an introduction into the complicated and, as Rivera notes, “jargon-laden,” thought of Henry is most welcome. However, in his constructive purpose to “articulate a self who seeks God always intimate, and yet, elusive” Rivera is clear that he is attempting to carve out a position that is between Henry, Marion, Derrida, Ricoeur, et al. Rivera wants to explore an “eschatological self [which] inhabits a space between those contemporary projects that render God a phenomenon (Henry, Marion, etc.) and those that treat God as wholly other (Derrida, religion without religion, etc.),” while simultaneously avoiding “the reduction of the self, whose personal identity is fully inscribed in this horizon of the world” (8). In order to do so, Rivera engages a host of thinkers from the phenomenological tradition, including Husserl and Heidegger, as well as, more broadly, drawing from the deep theological well of patristic writers, most especially Augustine. The question is, what is gained (and lost) by constructing his argument primarily as an engagement with Henry? To what extent does the fact that Rivera “appreciate[s] and despise[s]” Henry (9), overly determine his terminology and constrain the parameters of the discussion?

Second, having read Rivera’s introduction and critique of Henry’s too narrow focus on interiority and lack of attention to embodied beings in the world, when Rivera turned to explore a notion of contemplative selfhood in which one’s desire for God entailed an engagement with the world, I was looking forward to a rich discussion of concrete contemplative practices. However, this was not forthcoming. Rivera’s discussion of contemplation was richly sourced from the theological tradition and theoretically sophisticated. Moreover, his dichotomy between the dogmatic vs. doxological/contemplative self—in which the former “requires an absolute assent to one particular historical narrative,” whereas the former “cannot and does not want to prove apodictically the Christian tradition” but bear witness to it and participate in its wonder (26)—is one towards which I am deeply sympathetic. However, it remained a curiously abstract discussion, one which missed a number of opportunities to offer a phenomenology of liturgy, of hymnody, iconography, and the rich array of monastic contemplative practices—both corporate and solitary.2

Rivera’s explicit appeal to theology to complicate previous phenomenological accounts—indicating a theological rationality that can be elucidating to other discourses—makes explicit an undercurrent of much of the so-called “new phenomenology”: namely, an acknowledgment that theology’s inherent drive to heteronomy and creatureliness acts as a strong riposte to the modern emphasis on autonomy and self-sufficiency. Therefore, it is not surprising that, when so many phenomenologists turned to an emphasis on alterity and transcendence, they often found themselves sliding into theological territory so easily. This brings me to the central point I want to make about Rivera’s project: namely, its place within a larger history of ideas whereby phenomenology’s vital correction of modern understandings of selfhood is, itself, in need of correction—a move that is beginning to be made by a new generation of thinkers, amidst which I would locate Rivera’s work.

Rivera sketches the historical arc of philosophical conceptions of subjectivity in an attempt to think the self escaping “the long shadow of modernity” stretching from Descartes onwards (4). This modern understanding of selfhood entailed a certain relationship between the ego and Being, in which the ego cogito is understood primarily as that which confers meaning on Being. Moreover, until the intervention of phenomenology, this Cartesian inheritance has dominated European philosophy: “Functioning like a prism that draws together each divergent intellectual strand, Cartesianism is modernity inasmuch as every major philosophical breakthrough engineered after Descartes has intended to address the question of the being of the ego, and has done so, specifically on the basis of the ego’s capacity to apprehend and thus grasp what is outside itself—representational metaphysics” (20). Thus, modernity’s self is not merely autonomous and self-subsisting, it is the origin of the meaning of all things. The modern self, Rivera contends, finds its apotheosis in Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht: “a subject who looks at himself with the eye of god, which is secured and confirmed in the very production of himself as a god . . . the basic desire of the will to power is to produce and consume, and it does so at a distance from the world” (29).

The great gift of phenomenology was to challenge this notion of a subject who is not only self-sufficient and autonomous, but is also the first and final source of meaning for all things. In its foundations, phenomenology is a philosophical method by which the subject is necessarily open to the givenness of phenomena, thus breaking open “the solitary confinement of the Cartesian subject” (4). Rivera comes up with a usefully clear and concise formulation for defining phenomenology in its many variations: “it is the study of how phenomena ‘appear’ (i.e., manifest, reveal, show, disclose, display, phenomenalize, etc.) to a perceiving subject” (44). This implies the necessity of these two poles of phenomenology: a dative pole—the self to whom a phenomena is made manifest—and a genitive pole from what appears. Thus the center of gravity shifts from the valorized nominative “I” to become a dialogical relation “between a phenomenon and the lived experience it evokes in ‘me’” (45). The self must be reconsidered not as source and origin of all, but as receiver or witness, or, to repeat William James’s vivid metaphor used by Rivera, as “the center around which phenomena gather like iron fillings around a magnet’s pole” (48).

In Husserl’s hand this dialogical structure which seeks correlation between world and subject (or better, meaning intended and fulfilled, or noesis and noema), remains, nonetheless, confined to the horizontal plane of the finite world. In the second wave of phenomenologists an emphasis on the heteronomy of subjectivity opens beyond the finite world. However, this opening occurs in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we have the Levinasian tradition which clears a way beyond this enclosed thinking of self “toward dialogue, alterity, and intersubjectivity” (9), involving an emphasis on otherness, exteriority, and transcendence. On the other hand, in a less obvious move for a philosopher rejecting the ipseity of Cartesian subjectivity, Henry turns his focus inward, emphasizing interiority and auto-affection. On one side we have a transcendent summons which compels a counter-intentionality, on the other hand, an immanent self-revelation which precedes all intentionality.

In both cases there is a gesture, either implicit or explicit, to the involvement from beyond the finite plane, to the infinite, to God. For both trajectories God is an absolute phenomenon. In the tradition of Levinas and Marion, however, the manifestation of God transgresses the borders of the subject from outside, overwhelming or saturating its normal capacities and inverting the intentional gaze of the subject, in a hyperbolic moment of excess. For Henry, on the other hand, God is internal to the subject, appearing in a non-intentional “field of interiority”—a “concrete sublayer, or primal ‘underground,’ of self-experience” (62).

While both of these trajectories mark the real achievement of phenomenology to escape the hubristic enclosure of Cartesian subjectivity, they are not perfect. It may be that we have reached a point where these phenomenological correctives, themselves, are in need of correction. As Rivera points out, the problem with the Levinas-Marion version is that not all religious experience, in fact, is that excessive; religion is not only “mountain-top experiences” and these thinkers give us little resources to think about everyday religious experience, or corporate religious experience (62). On the other hand, Henry’s problem is that he “eliminates the distance between the creature and the Creator” (63). Moreover, despite accusing Husserl and Heidegger of “ontological monism” (for having ignored the interior and invisible dimension of human experience), Henry so “privileges the interior and invisible at the expense of the exterior and visible” that he himself runs the risk of establishing a “monism of its own making” (117). One might also add that the former trajectory pays too little attention to the subject, or the internal experience of the subject (something fundamentally at odds with phenomenology’s methodological emphasis on “lived experience”). Whereas the latter trajectory is so limited to the interior life of the subject as to forget the spatial and temporal extensions and locatedness of that subject’s feeling. It forgets, in other words, that the subject is embodied and thus always and only ever in this extended world and in time looking forward to the future. Rivera wants to avoid both extremes without returning to Descartes’s ego cogito. In his own words he attempts “to surmount the metaphysics of autonomy and representation” without a “swing to the contrastive pole of utter passivity” (66).

In this regard, I would place Rivera’s book as part of this newest wave of philosophers of religion and theologians who are seeking to rethink subjectivity again in a way that is neither a return to Cartesian autonomy, with its pretense of a self-seeking mastery over the world, nor the entirely passive and abject self who can only be the subject of an accusation or who forgets the distance between the “object” of its desire and her present contemplation. This new opening for phenomenological thinking would challenge the assumption that the only possible alternatives for thinking about subjectivity are either a robustly sovereign, narcissistic, infinitely acquisitive, and dominating subject, on the one hand, or an insubstantial, passive, inept, guilty, and subjugated subject, on the other. Furthermore, it would question whether the emphasis on the subject’s absolute passivity and non-intentionality might not curtail the extent and power with which one can respond, or indeed, what one even means by response.

Rivera gives us an exciting possibility with which to think a way forward: “The contemplative self is a more subtle and complex interweaving of the soul and body, of the self and its outward narration in the world, all guided by the eschatological direction of time itself. To contemplate is to move upward, not beyond time, but in time, towards the properly theological destiny of the heavenly city” (329). Such a phenomenological account of the self would certainly appear beyond the shadow of the Cartesian ego cogito, but might also avoid the excesses of passivity demanded in the prior escape attempts sought in the two trajectories of “new phenomenology”—the absolute passivity of the accused self who is subjugated to the transcendent other (Levinas), or effaced in the reduction to pure givenness (Marion), on the one hand, or the non-intentionality of the self who finds itself only within the fully interiorized and immanent movement of divine self-manifestation (Henry), on the other. In order to do so, a phenomenology of the contemplative self needs to be grounded in concrete material practices and historical subjects, whilst directing its vision forwards in hope.

In addition to providing probably the clearest, most comprehensive English-language presentation of, and challenge to, Michel Henry’s phenomenology of Life (immanence), Joseph Rivera’s The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: A Phenomenological Theology provides a way to think existentially about existential issues often not treated attentively enough in contemporary continental philosophy of religion.1 Contemporary continental philosophy of religion surely considers issues such as selfhood, calling, relationality, love, faith, freedom, spirituality, etc., but it does not always pay them the existential or phenomenological mind that such topics seem intrinsically to warrant. Contemporary continental philosophy of religion—like most academic philosophy today—seems to have left existentialism behind in favor of more technical “philosophical” discussions. Such oversight seems especially conspicuous to me in contemporary phenomenological theology, which seems to favor meta-phenomenological discussions over the existential import and phenomenological dimensions of what it means to live a life, as Rivera puts it, in which one realizes and manifests oneself as imago Dei. According to Rivera, this approach amounts to “an intentionality of ‘seeking’ or pilgrimage undertaken in faith and love, mobilized in word and sacrament, in pursuit of the full vision of glory, the God before whom I will sit ‘face to face’ in the parousia to come” (276).

In this engagement with Rivera’s work, I want to press against Rivera’s first contribution in order to show favor to his second contribution. First, I shall suggest that Rivera’s first contribution, specifically his account of the temporality of faith characteristic of the contemplative self, falls within the growing body of meta-phenomenological literature. Second—and motivated by Rivera’s several tantalizing mentions of the existential tenor of the temporality of faith and faith’s benefits for the good life—I shall sketch the intentional structure and temporality of faith in light of one of the benefits of faith that Rivera identifies, namely, patience. Following a leading clue in Rivera’s text, I offer some suggestions for how phenomenology may make speak this mute (phenomenologically unarticulated) life of faith, particularly the temporality of patience as disclosive of the life of faith.

As a situating explication and critique of Michel Henry’s phenomenology, Rivera’s book works predominately with thinkers grouped in the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Henry, Marion, J-Y. Lacoste, etc.) and recognizes but also exemplifies what I take to be one of the central issues facing the meta-phenomenology that predominately characterizes phenomenological theology. I’ll move quickly and in broad strokes to establish what I mean by this label. Like all philosophical traditions, phenomenology has a methodology and a presupposed dialogue (or internal debate). Husserl formulated and developed phenomenology’s method in such a way as to give voice to the things themselves by describing various acts of consciousness or subjective achievements, their objective correlates, the empty and filling elements of that intentional structure, etc. As phenomenologists, starting with Heidegger, worried that the subject-object correlation compromised the “integrity” of the things-themselves or, worse, rendered impossible their appearance as the things-themselves, discussions amongst phenomenologists became meta-phenomenological. By this term, I mean to draw attention, however crudely, to the tendency of phenomenological authors to write about phenomenological authors and matters such as invisibility that sometimes do not seem apposite to phenomenological description. In such writings, authors in the phenomenological tradition, seeking to overcome the corruption of the things themselves created (purportedly) when one “presupposes” the subject-object correlation in intentional experience, become preoccupied with expressing “phenomenality”—a catchphrase that captures, for example, that which makes possible intentionality or the self’s self-awareness and thus its awareness of objects.

As early as 1930, Heidegger develops the notion of transcendence as that upon which intentionality is founded.2 As phenomenology moves into the 1960s Heidegger is writing about the es gibt or the clearing on which is founded “everything pre- and absent,”3 Merleau-Ponty develops the notion of latent-intentionality or wild-being from which intentionality “emerges,”4 and Henry introduces his monolith on divine Life’s radical immanence “experiencing itself in its Ipseity and in this self-affection giving birth to Christ and to humanity as his ‘Sons’” (107). I deem such reflections meta-phenomenological because they go beyond (or beneath) the phenomena and leave unaddressed two questions: To what phenomena are you pointing? And what is appearing to whom?5

Rivera himself wants to provide an alternative to Henry’s non-intentional and (on some readings) mystical dimensions. Specifically, he develops an “Augustinian-inspired conception of the [contemplative] self” (237) to overcome such “conceptual problems in Henry” (219). Rather than a radically non-intentional, non-temporal mode of immanence or self-awareness or life within divine Life, Rivera characterizes the contemplative-self as a “stance that is temporal, but carries with it an attitude that desires the eternal,” a view of a self that “seeks God without making God a phenomenon in the mystical purchase of pure union” (220, 225). It is this seeking and a phenomenology of it to which I shall return below.

Rivera prefaces the development of his alternative to Henry’s theo-phenomenology by facing squarely those questions that I think we must ask when reading later phenomenologists (especially those writing in the so-called “theological turn”):

If God is involved within the economy of selfhood, communicating himself in grace to us, it remains for us to thematize with greater phenomenological care how this interior entity . . . is describable. How is the interior intimacy with God to be, after all, a phenomenologically observable field? (241)

Rivera considers the problem an “ostensible” one “the resolution” to which “lies in . . . the double-entry of contemplation” in the contemplative self (241, 235). The account of the double-entry of contemplation, however, insofar as it relies on a “theological modification of Husserlian consciousness of internal-time” (261), amounts to a variant of meta-phenomenological analyses of self rather than a phenomenology of the self that “seeks God” in its pilgrimage.

I place Rivera’s discussion of the temporality of the contemplative self in the meta-phenomenological camp not because I think the phenomenology of time-consciousness is meta-phenomenological. It surely need not be. Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, for example, articulates (while avoiding phenomenological and logical pitfalls) what the structure of conscious life must look like given that we experience consciousness as aware of itself in its awareness of the world and objects in the world across time.

Rather, Rivera’s theological modification trades in the meta-phenomenological because it rests on two moves. First, his account of the contemplative self’s distinctive intentionality rests on the Augustinian notion of the self (or soul) as imago Dei, which Rivera cites Robert O’Connell as claiming, “cannot have ‘forgotten God completely [because] if that were the case . . . no ‘reminder’ could ever succeed in awakening that lost memory” (263). Second, Rivera explains the intentional structure of the contemplative self on analogy with what Husserl in his unpublished Bernau Manuscripts termed a far-retention (as opposed to near-retention or retentions as they’re considered in the lectures on the consciousness of internal time). Taking these two moves together, Rivera argues that a kind of “primordial memory of the immemorial”—the “origin” of imago Dei—“orders” imago Dei’s “temporality of faith,” i.e., “contemplative style of intentionality” (263). Rivera thus develops (against Henryan immanence) his view of the contemplative self as a self that is self-given (in its seeking) in a far-retention that includes the possibility that “the ego can experience an object even while not experiencing it as present in consciousness.” Insofar as there is “some kind of presence” in this [far-retention] experience because, for example, I once must have learned a person’s name to experience now that I no longer remember that name, far-retention marks the form or structure of the self that phenomenologically captures the primordial memory or original immemorial in imago Dei (265, 267, 263). In this “contemplative intentionality,” moreover, we find a far-protention that, “in its eschatological form, draws the past forward” (271).

Does this account meet Rivera’s own and well-founded standards for phenomenological availability? Does this account disclose the self-seeking God and tell us anything about the temporality of faith as lived?

However much Rivera’s analysis might tell us about the temporal form or structure of imago Dei—and that is a promising contribution because a phenomenological description of a self that is conceived of as made in the image of God should have interesting and pertinent differences from a self that is conceived of as (with a form but) not made in the image of God—an account of the temporal form or structure of imago Dei cannot tell us much about the life and temporality of faith. The former tells us about imago Dei’s passive structure, while a certain conscious “act” founds the life and temporality of faith, i.e., at least the activity of choosing. An analysis of imago Dei’s passive syntheses seems to reveal little about the active dimension of the life and thus temporality of faith.6 A phenomenology of the life and temporality of faith—“the portrait of a life of holiness, . . . an account of pilgrimage, growth, and contemplation” that Rivera wants to phenomenologically depict (253)—differs greatly from an account of the temporal structure of imago Dei.7

I was brought to these more “methodological” reservations after having been gripped by the section of Rivera’s book that leads up to his account of imago Dei’s near and far retentions and protentions, namely §30, in which Rivera sketches the “spiritual pathos” and “existential intensity” of the temporality of faith. There, Rivera presents a persuasive account of how the temporality of faith oriented toward the original memory and the eschaton renounces the closure or closed structure and finality of Heideggerian being-unto-death (255). Going beyond the formal, temporal structure of imago Dei, Rivera notes promisingly that “the imago Dei, sustained by faith . . . remembers the divine who can make it happy and strains patiently (in hope) toward that absolute future in which faith is consummated and made happy in the presence of God (parousia)” (260).

Faith makes both the world and the self within the world appear differently. What, then, are the phenomenological differences between the life of faith and its secular counterparts? And how, for example, does patience manifest differently in natural-attitude lives lived inside and outside of the life of faith?

At the outset of Ideas II, which section of Husserl’s work Rivera discusses in a lengthy note, Husserl reminds his audience that consciousness is always interested in the world (inter-esse or among the things) with its affective and cognitive commitments coloring the way the world appears (356–66). One reads the opening sections of that lecture course and sees that, to use my own example, the very same food appears differently to different agents given their different interests; the objective correlate that is the food appears differently to a rushed mother, a hungry vagrant, a refined chef, a spoiled child, a nutritionist, a knight of faith, etc. Phenomenology, we must remember, does not want to invalidate these natural-attitude intentionalities but to describe them. To bring the background of life into the foreground, phenomenology, of course, denies itself use of the theories, methodologies, and explanatory models of disciplines such as the physical and social sciences, philosophy, theology, etc. It takes these various interests and ways of life—these intentionalities—just as they appear to these agents’ lived-experiences in the natural attitude.

These various ways of life “color” how the world appears to the agent who engages it and whose interests correspondingly give the world a different axiological valence. Phenomenology will not, for example, describe the Eucharist according to the “science” of systematic theology. Phenomenologically speaking, one who lives a life of faith does not grasp the Eucharist as a systematic theologian grasps the Eucharist when she analyses it from within the systematic-theological-attitude. Phenomenology would say, further, that the professional systematic theologian taken as a believer considering and receiving the Eucharist does not grasp the Eucharist as a systematic theologian but as a practicing believer. The meaning and appearance of the Eucharist co-relates to the agent’s (present) interest. How does the life and temporality of faith appear in the natural attitude in the way that phenomenology wishes to articulate it? What will a phenomenology of the life and temporality of faith look like, then, beyond the temporal structure of imago Dei?

Perhaps we must start, as many theologically inspired phenomenologists in various ways have said, from the observation that faith be characterized as “faith in . . . rather than belief in . . .”8 The subjective act of (choosing to have) faith takes as its objective correlate neither an abstract fact, nor an abstract principle, nor a proposition of some sort, nor an impersonal power.9 A phenomenological description of faith, particularly Christian faith, would hold that faith is thus interpersonal and bound up with desire, will, and affect, unlike belief, which is merely intellectual. Faith and belief further differ insofar as the former but not the latter necessarily entails choice and commitment. It is trivially true that I choose to believe certain facts, pieces of evidence regarding, say, the chemical composition of water, the recorded Major League Baseball standings as the season progresses, etc., but I do not choose those things. I choose to believe them but not to commit myself to them. The life of faith necessarily entails commitment to the choice; the act of belief, since it does not necessarily entail commitment to those matters believed, is thus not called a life of belief. Of course, I may become impassioned about those matters and choose to become a scientist or a historian of baseball and this is closer to the kind of choice involved in faith that makes it different from belief.10

A careful phenomenology of the life of faith would work out and weed out such equivocations in an eidetic analysis. A phenomenology of the life of faith also must factor into its starting point the realization that, according to the life of faith, I am given to myself in a foundational way in the accusative or second-person. Phenomenology does not attend to theoretical questions surrounding the evidence for such faith commitments; rather, it attempts to disclose the how and the what of such lived experiences. While it’s trivially true that I must be the dative to receive the call in the accusative, a phenomenology of the life of faith must start from the transformative acceptance of the call rather than dwell on the invisible subjectivity that fascinated Henry; indeed, while Henryan Life (immanence) and Rivera’s contemplative self both lead further away from the phenomenologically describable, what I am proposing resurrects the life of faith’s essentially and profoundly existential character by preserving a classical phenomenological approach to the life of faith as lived in the natural attitude.

In order to capture the intentional structure—the subjective and objective correlates—of the life of faith, phenomenology must begin from that life’s understanding of itself as an affective-cognitive, interpersonal life willed as such. And a natural attitude intentionality that is the life of faith, as Rivera mentions, entails additional affective dimensions such as hope, patience, trust, obedience, gratitude, etc.11 As these affective dimensions are not unique to the life of faith, a phenomenology of the life of faith would need to explore these affective attitudes as they occur both inside and outside the life of faith (both in a believer and a non-believer). Such a contrast could serve as a foil for an eidetic analysis that will clarify the natural-attitude intentionality that is the life of faith. And to sketch that briefly, we can look at the temporality of patience as a “virtue” in the believer and non-believer.12

Rivera notes an “existential patience” that waits in hope for the full presence of God (260). Such theological-existential patience (TEP) differs from patience in the ordinary sense in the natural attitude (OP). Phenomenologically, we could say that OP differs from TEP at the most fundamental intentional level. Patience is a stance toward the world that wants some X in the process of happening to finish happening, but it waits in a way that defers to the happening and lets it occur at its own pace. The patience of OP can intend two specific objects within this general object that patience takes: It is part of the essential structure of OP that OP can wish for (1) a present to become absent (e.g., I control myself while the screaming toddler collects himself) or (2) an absent to become present (e.g., that cake cooking in the oven smells great and I want it to be finished cooking and cooling so I can frost and eat it, but I wait patiently for the process to unfold lest I ruin the cake and undermine my own desires). For a person living the life of faith, (1) can surely apply because OP can surely apply to such a person. But, with respect to the specific object of TEP, namely, awaiting the face-to-face with God, we only can apply (2) to the essential structure of TEP.

A second fundamental difference exists between OP and TEP. In the case of OP, it is possible to “know” (a) that the desired X will occur (although I must wait for it to occur) and (b) roughly when it will occur. My point is not that (a) and (b) are essential features of all instances of OP; rather, my point is that OP alone and unlike TEP can intend (1) or (2) in the modes of (a) and/or (b), whereas TEP cannot intend (2) in the mode of (a) or (b). This means that the temporal orientation of OP and TEP, while both future directed, will hold different meanings, involve different modes of expectancy and anticipation, etc. I don’t yet know how I would work this out, but the temporal meaning of patience in TEP must look quite different from the meaning of patience in OP because the modes of (a) and (b) in TEP-2 are not underdetermined but fully indeterminate (for I do not know, although I believe that I shall see God again, and I surely cannot even estimate the arrival of the eschaton and parousia).

One more (but surely not the last) fundamental difference between OP and TEP comes to mind. From the perspective of OP, given that the modes of (a) and (b) may apply in some instances of (1) and (2), OP may have a desire—feel tempted—to act in order to hasten the completion of the process for which it wishes and waits. Most likely, if the OP agent is truly behaving patiently, then she will restrain herself, and she will restrain herself because she knows that that is the way to realize the good she desires and for which she waits. For example, if I frost the cake before letting it cool, or if I voice an objection before my spouse finishes her point, then I may diminish the cake’s quality or derail the conversation (and fail to realize the good I desire and for which I’d been, at least trying, to patiently wait). But there is no control available to TEP. Nothing the TEP-agent does or does not do will hasten or destroy that for which she presently waits. TEP thus may share with OP moments of frustration, but TEP will not feel tempted to intercede.

The remarks in the second half of this engagement with Rivera’s book sketch what I hope is (despite its broad strokes) a promising starting point for a phenomenology of the life and temporality of faith as it is lived in the natural attitude. It is an approach to theological phenomenology that the current state of the field leaves underexplored. It is an approach to theological phenomenology that retains a distinctly phenomenological character that, through its phenomenological description, attends to the essentially existential quality of the life and temporality of faith. It is an approach, moreover, that Rivera recognizes but leaves silent. Favoring the state of the art in contemporary continental philosophy of religion—meta-phenomenology—Rivera leaves us only promising, tantalizing whispers of the essential existential quality of the life and temporality of faith.13

Joseph Rivera’s book is audacious in its aims, and that is to be applauded.1 It raises many issues that I think are central to the work of philosophy of religion, including the nature of the self, the relation between self and God, and the significance of that relationship for the self’s relation to the world. While positioned closer to a theological articulation than a philosophical one, it nevertheless uses insights from phenomenology to seek to clarify what precisely is at stake philosophically in theological questions of contemplation, the imago Dei, and spiritual life. Having done so, it then seeks to (re-)articulate a Christian response to what Rivera takes to be the central issue in philosophy of religion: the question of the “being of the ego” or of the self (327).

There are so many different avenues I would like to discuss, so many issues opened up admirably by the book and its analyses. This is a testament to the book. I will have some difficulty in limiting myself to the few points I can adequately cover here, but I will try to respond to the challenges raised by the book by suggesting, in the main text of this review, two additional areas of phenomenological clarification that I think would assist the project that the book lays out. I will then pursue one of these areas to try to further elaborate a way that phenomenology and Christianity can be used for the mutual benefit of both. The extent to which my suggestions align or fail to align with either Henry’s or Rivera’s I will, for the most part, leave for others to decide. My purpose here is not to critique the book, per se, but to build on it, as it builds on Henry. My hope is that the following fleshes out the discussion that Rivera’s book opens up so admirably, suggesting ways that certain elements of Rivera’s analyses (usually pointed to in the footnotes) can be more concretely articulated so that we can better understand the self and the world (a problem that Rivera points to in the book’s closing words as a subsequent challenge to be taken up) in a way that is both phenomenologically informed and religiously—even spiritually—helpful.

I. Further Phenomenological Clarification

I begin, then, by offering two points of further phenomenological clarification that I think would aid in the discussion opened up by the book. The first has to do with the question of eschatology in the phenomenological tradition (something Rivera deals with extensively in the book’s third part). The second has to do with the notion of “expression” that is used at several key junctures throughout the book,2 but remains largely unexplained.

I begin, then, with the question of eschatology. Rivera’s use of the term seems consistent with a certain theological framework: in general (though perhaps not exclusively), Rivera uses eschatology to indicate the manner in which the eschaton, as a future-present moment, works back in time to affect the present and/or the past.3 This understanding of the work of eschatology is therefore often aligned with hope, which, in Rivera’s case, acts as the “horizon” orienting part 3’s extensive discussion of the Augustinian notion of epektasis (cf. 254).

While this traditional understanding of eschatology is well-founded in theology, it is not the primary way eschatology is employed in the phenomenological tradition. In phenomenology, eschatology is most often invoked to indicate not the working-backwards of chronological time (i.e., from future to present), but rather the irruption (and not merely the interruption) of alterity or otherness within the subject itself.4 This phenomenological account of eschatology distinguishes two types of relation to the future (broadly speaking, those at work in the subject’s powers of constitution and those at work constituting the subject itself) that, in turn, help us articulate an essentially eschatological (and heteronomous)5 element within the very subjectivity of the subject itself—a move that seems to be precisely in line with Rivera’s own project and intentions (e.g., 7, 188).

Central to this phenomenological account of eschatology, then, is a clarification and reconceptualization of the relationship between that which originates with the self and that which originates outside the self (an issue that, we will see, is central to Henry and to Rivera’s project). Initially, Husserl saw the world as coming from outside the self, and breaking into the “stream” of the subject’s project of self-constitution via the notion of a “primal impression.” This supported his early monadic account of the self, as well as the more “idealist” leanings of, e.g., Ideas I. It also enabled Husserl to largely ignore the uniqueness of the future, especially regarding protention, which was originally viewed as being like retention, but moving in the opposite direction.6 It is no coincidence that when Husserl begins to pay more attention to the unique function of the future and of protention—e.g., in the Bernau Manuscripts—his account of temporality in general, and the present in particular, changes dramatically. The present is now understood as an amalgamation of protended retentions and retained protentions (as Rivera discusses, see 265–69) that exists as a matrix of expectations, clarifying and confirming intuitions, and different types of fulfillment that greatly minimizes the idealist and monadic leanings of the early Husserl by complicating the simple picture of a subject “here” with a world arrayed before it over “there.”

Utilizing more of the resources opened up by these phenomenological investigations of eschatology and the future would open the door to a more clearly articulated halfway point between “empty” and “fulfilled” intentions. This is vital to finding a middle ground between the “Husserlian Revolutions” of Derrida and Marion that Rivera suggests provide the outline for the contours of contemporary philosophy of religion in the phenomenological tradition (cf. §5 of Rivera). Insofar as Rivera wants to situate not only Henry’s work but also his own in this space between the “bipolarity of empty and full intentions” (58), utilizing some more of the phenomenological distinctions at work in the detailed analyses of protention and eschatology would give him a bigger toolbox with which to work to clarify his argument.

The need for such clarity emerges most forcefully on the issue of the relationship between the subject and the world. Currently, Rivera posits Henry’s theory of “nonintentional life” as the best way to proceed between the aforementioned “bipolarity.” But he ends up situating Henry’s project (and perhaps also his own) not between Derrida and Marion at all, but rather in opposition to them, if not to Husserlian phenomenology more generally, on grounds that he will both laud and critique Henry for: the relation (or lack thereof) between Life (as “interior” “auto-affection”) and intentional consciousness (“hetero-affection”) as our way of engaging the (“exterior”) world. In short, Rivera suggests that Henry provides an account that is so focused on the subject that it is unable to account in any meaningful way for our relation to the world.7

All readers of Henry would concede, I think, that Henry’s major contribution to phenomenology is his persistent analysis of self-experience. This experience is categorically unlike my experiences of other things insofar as (to use Rivera’s language) the dative and the genitive are identical in cases of self-experience (or auto-affection) and are necessarily distinct in all other types of experience. This distinction between self-experience and my experience of other things is not itself the problem, for Rivera. The problem, he contends, is that Henry privileges the truth of self-experience to such an extent that he ultimately ends up losing the ability to (legitimately) experience the world (cf. especially §12 and §18).8

Now, Rivera is far from the first person to claim that Henry fails adequately to account for the relationship between self-experience and experience of the world.9 But I think we must be clear, phenomenologically speaking, about the nature of Henry’s analysis and of the problems it engenders.10 Henry is at pains to show that some type of distinct awareness of self is necessary, even for my experience of other objects. While Henry is not the first phenomenologist to notice this (the Husserlian distinction between horizontal and transverse intentionality in his work on time-consciousness seems to suggest something similar, for example), he is the one who pays it the most attention, and the one who is most dogged in maintaining that self-awareness is different in kind than hetero-awareness.

Henry’s focus on two distinct modes of givenness or two distinct modes of bringing to awareness begs for an account of how those two modes are related to each other (cf. 103): how does the way in which I am aware of (or experience) myself tie in with the way in which I am aware of (or experience) the world so as to create a well-rounded picture of my experience of the world? This is an essential phenomenological question, and it is this that most commentators agree Henry fails to adequately account for.

II. Expression and Spirituality

And trying to respond to this challenge, I think, requires a further phenomenological clarification, the second of the two I have promised. For what is needed is a way in which, in one and the same experience, I can in fact have two distinct types of awareness operative, even though I do not immediately experience them both in the same way. And this is precisely the task that Husserl assigns to expression. In the Logical Investigations,11 expression is described as the situation in which two distinct elements are experienced in a phenomenal unity. This unity is characterized by an asymmetry in which I do not experience the two parts of the expression as two parts, but rather precisely as one.12

Expression is therefore marked primarily by the change in intention by which one element (e.g., the physical appearance) is no longer taken merely in its perceptual intuitive sense but rather is taken to mean something via a “meaning-intention.” As such, expression is construed primarily as a function whereby my intention is directed not at the object appearing but at the sense that is intuitively presented with or “in” the object appearing. This intention occurs immediately in the intuitive presentation of the object and decidedly not as a distinct intuition requiring a distinct act of “fulfilling or illustrative intuition” (LI, I, 194). That is, there is not a perceptual-intention that leads us to a distinct meaning-intention (as is the case in indication); in expression, the two are given as one, in a phenomenal unity.

This understanding of expression is not confined strictly to language.13 In his later work, Husserl talks at length about the way in which the elements of the lifeworld (e.g., cultural objects, artifacts and institutions) are inherently expressive of a “spiritual meaning.”14 This idea of a spirit that is essentially expressed in the lifeworld is consistent with his definition of spirit as a “vital presentiment” (Crisis, 275). In this definition, Husserl indicates two important elements of spirit: first, that it is inexorably tied to a uniquely future-oriented way in which we experience the world;15 and second, that it is in some important way connected to “Life” itself.16 First, spirit functions pre-objectively (Gegenstandlich)17 as a pre-condition of rational or theoretical thought; it is more felt than thought, more a product of passive than active synthesis. Spirit is an active, dynamic force that shapes how we bring the world to intuition by operating upon the clarifying mode of bringing to intuition, which helps narrow the range of intuitional possibilities via the horizon of expectations out of which we operate. By filling some of the emptiness of the intended object, the clarifying mode enables the intended object to coincide with a confirming-fulfilling intuition in a synthesis (cf. Hua XI, 79–80).18 As such, spirit helps shape the communal horizon of sense that each individual subject draws upon in constituting their own experience.

But that this is drawn upon in acts of constitution does not mean that it itself operates only within the realm of the constituting work of the subject. To more clearly connect this to the issue of auto- and hetero-affection, we must acknowledge Husserl’s explicit connection of spirit to life. When augmented by Henry’s detailed analyses of Life and Derrida’s arguments for the ultra-transcendental nature of Life as both expression and differance,19 the essential connection between spirit and life suggests that spirit is operative on a transcendental register20 that affects (or perhaps even makes possible) the subject’s constitutive abilities, but does not originate with them. Spirit is precisely that which is expressed in and by the subject even as it arises from outside the subject. Rather, to be more precise, one should say that Spirit arises within the subject—but only as a “trace” of something other-than-the-subject that is both outside the subject (as Other) but also constitutive of the subject. As such, the other is not only “in me” (as Derrida says on multiple occasions), but I am—in my very being as an “I”—the expression of something other. That is, in spiritual expression we can see how “the ego possesses its bodily powers/capacities and wields them freely and spontaneously through a primal ‘I-Can’ [that] in Henry’s estimation [it receives as] a gift” (215).

III. The Spiritual Self

Spiritual expression—perhaps we could even speak of the “spiritual self”21—can therefore help us speak to the issue of the relationship between self-experience and experience of the world that bedevils much of Henry’s project. For this account of spiritual expression brings us back to the question of the world (posed most explicitly by Rivera on 331), and of the ability of God to appear within it—or, more specifically, the ability of us to experience God as appearing within the world. As discussed above, insofar as the elements of our lifeworld are spiritually expressive, we are shaped essentially (perhaps even transcendentally) by the spirits at work in our world. To have a spirit at work in our heart (cf. 175) is, therefore, not only to express that spirit through the actions we consciously undertake, but also to have our very ability to constitute and experience the world shaped by that spirit at work in our Life.22 As we come to express, e.g., the spirit of God better and better, that spirit not only changes our actions, but also how we constitute and represent the world to ourselves: the entire operation of the “I can” is transformed by the recovery of the spirit of Christ which reawakens us to the spiritual depth that is our very selves.23

To speak of the very nature of the human self in the context of Rivera’s book brings us to the question of the imago Dei, the way in which the human being bears the image of God. With the notion of a “spiritual self” that cannot help but express some spirit in its very being and hence in all of its actions,24 bearing an image of something (i.e., expressing some kind of spirit) becomes essential to the very nature of what it is to be a human being.25 It seems that we cannot help but bear the image of something in and through our lives.26 The question of image-bearing then becomes whether the image we bear—whether the spirit we express—is the Spirit of God, or some other spirit.

With this question we are returned to a point that is fundamental to Henry’s project: the spirit that is operative in us—the “spirituality” that constitutes us in our very subjectivity—affects the entirety of our experience of the world. This point allows us to see how Henry’s work on barbarism is as essential to his oeuvre as is his so-called “Christian trilogy.” Because the spirit of barbarism disallows us from seeing spiritual depth at all, including its own “spiritual depth” as a spirit, barbarism is a spiritual problem (perhaps even an “idolatry”) that has real, phenomenological consequences: we constitute the world differently if our heart is in the grip of barbarism than we would if were expressing some other spirit. And we cannot even understand or engage this difference as long as we remain stuck in barbarism, insofar as barbarism inhibits us from seeing the role that spirit plays in our constitution of the world.

What Henry is calling for in both Barbarism and the “Christian trilogy,” then, is a re-engagement of the spirituality that belies the central core of subjectivity itself.27 Missing from his analysis is perhaps what expression opens up for us: the mechanism by which we can experience two things in such a way that causes us to “live through” one of those things so as to “live in” the other. While we may experience subjectivity as pure auto-affection, this does not entail that the self itself is an instance of pure auto-affection—given the reduction, experience is not ontology. If the self is a spiritual expression (i.e., an expression of a spirit that comes to us from elsewhere, picked up in and from the lifeworld(s) in which we live and are constituted), then a way is open to possibly affirm both Henry’s account of auto-affective experience and Derrida’s and Marion’s accounts of heterologous subjectivity.28

The re-emergence of expression here also helps us articulate the challenge of barbarism anew. Husserl is clear that an expression can only function meaningfully (in non-solitary discourse) if it is first taken as indicative (i.e., if I know that the physical grapheme or phoneme is not “all there is” but that a sense or meaning is to be indicated thereby). If I do not take the sounds you make to be meaningful (if I think the noises you make are “just sounds,” like the wind rushing through the trees), then I will never understand what you are telling me: if the “meaning-intention” is never aroused in me, I can never get a meaning from what you are saying. Barbarism can be understood, then, as the spirit that shapes us to intend the physical world only perceptually, so that “meaning” is to be looked for only when there are humans there to introduce meaning into a world of “just stuff.” Barbarism is the “flattening” of spiritual depth and the loss of the possibility of spiritual expression.

If we operate under such a guise—if we never get beyond the perceptual intention to the meaning-intention—we will never be able to experience God in the world, and our religion is condemned to be something that can only ever be “transcendent” (in the sense of “outside the world”).29 This is not to say that God is not operative in the world, but merely that we will never experience God in the world if our engagement with the world is limited to just “physical stuff.”

Through a recovery of the notion of spiritual expression, we can say that Henry is trying to argue that it is only when we recover a spiritual depth that the possibility of God being experienced in and through the world is possible. And it is only when barbarism is countered that we can encounter that spiritual depth—in part by recovering the spiritually expressive nature of human being. Spiritual expression is, therefore, essential to Henry’s project, both phenomenologically and religiously, insofar as it is essential to helping us better understand the self, its relation to the world, and the religious nature of Life itself. As such, I think it is an essential next step in the admirable project that Rivera undertakes in The Contemplative Self after Michel Henry: to “articulate a self who seeks a God always intimate, and yet, elusive” (8).

Michel Henry is widely known as the most intellectually honest philosopher in his generation. Before Henry published his first Christian text, a friend of mine told me once in earnest that Henry’s armchair was already ready for him in the kingdom of God. The friend who said it was no friend of the Rahnerian theory of “anonymous Christianity,” but he was—and is still—a philosopher with a sound theological education: he knew what Christian theology says about the unbeliever’s salvation. I have not forgotten the friend’s opinion (I may reveal his name, by the way: Rémi Brague . . .).

Once a Christian, Henry ventured into the field of religious, and even theological, investigation. This venture deserves to be praised. Professional theologians have read Henry’s last works with delight. A critical mind if any, the biblical scholar Paul Beauchamp went so far as praising these works as spiritually helpful to him. Joseph Rivera’s tribute to a man whose intellectual and personal career was devoted to the pursuit of truth, and truth only, is well deserved. Rivera is not totally satisfied with Henry’s “contribution to theology.” Nor am I, of course. Nonetheless, Rivera’s counterproposal does not meet with my entire approval—on the questions he asks and answers, I have given elsewhere what is not, let us hope, my “opinion.” A repetition of the views I have already expressed would have been useless, and all the more useless would be to say that I feel more agreement than disagreement. What follows is, therefore, a series of marginal remarks on Henry, on Rivera’s interpretation of Henry, and eventually on Rivera’s own proposition. Long conversations will be necessary to go further. For both of us.

I.

I would have been vastly surprised, when I first came across Henry’s works, had I been told that he would develop in his almost old age into some sort of a theologian. I had a quick look at him in the late sixties (the lady who taught us philosophy at high school loved phenomenology of all kinds), only to discover the strange case of a phenomenologist repudiating intentionality, with the inevitable consequence that I failed to understand the Henryian concept of “life.” Henry reappeared in my life in 1976. Levinas, a philosopher of exteriority if ever there was one, had decided to devote his last seminar to The Essence of Manifestation, and Jacques Colette (a fine Kierkegaard scholar who was then writing a huge, never to be published, dissertation on Levinas) urged me to attend the seminar. The seminar itself was frustrating: students reading weak presentations and the Master answering too shortly. I nonetheless understood the why of this valedictory seminar: Levinas obviously had found in Henry a philosopher of unsurpassable interiority and wanted to take leave of French academic life, in all fairness, in acknowledging the rights of a totally non-Levinasian phenomenology. Noticing the polarity of Henry-Levinas is admittedly very easy (to me, now). But for a graduate student with much room in his creed for intentionality, it was no mean experience to discover that Henry’s repudiation of intentionality was accepted as a legitimate move by someone who, by all accounts, was one of the best phenomenologists alive. Levinas, of course, was himself battling against intentionality . . .

II.

Though Henry is at his best when demolishing his opponents, he never opposed Levinas. Levinas never appeared to me and us, then, as opposing Henry—his desire was to let Henry be read. In one case, nonetheless, Levinas felt the need to be more Henryian than Henry himself, and this case was in relation to Scheler. Henry refuses two Schelerianisms: the concept of intentional feeling (“Fühlen von etwas,” “feeling” for instance a value) and the concept of non-intentional feeling (“Gefühl,” unable as such to feel anything). If you refuse both, where can you accommodate “sentir” in a philosophical/phenomenological construction? Levinas may have answered the question, and I may very well have failed to understand the answer. But if this is the case, I suspect that something was missing in the “last seminar”: an account of Henry’s first book, prior to Essence of Manifestation. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body is Henry’s most lucid work (a good reason to ask students to read it as an introduction to the Henryian corpus) and a provocative book. It is provocative, at least, as an interpretation of Maine de Biran: a French philosopher whom all French apprentice philosophers, in Henry’s day, were doomed to overlook (common prejudice among young men of my generation: there was no French philosopher worth being read from Rousseau to Bergson). Henry’s reading of Maine de Biran is fascinating. After reading the book, in the early eighties, I remember telling a friend of mine that if Maine de Biran had actually written everything Henry claimed he has written, Maine de Biran was a great philosopher. Henry was making Maine de Biran a forerunner of phenomenology, of course. But rightly so. And when I decided, very late, to have a close look at the sources, I noticed quickly that Henry had found in him what he needed to work out his own concept of “life” and “flesh.” Maine de Biran’s endeavour is post- and anti-Cartesian: in this only book he spent his life writing and never wrote (the words are Henri Gouhier’s), his ambition (in words he never uses so bluntly) is to rewrite the Cartesian “cogito” from the point of view of bodily, not mental, experience. To use Husserl’s terminology (a terminology Henry knows when he writes his commentary), the move is from an “ego cogito” to an “I who is a flesh” Leib—the common French translation, in these days, was “corps propre.” We “have” a body—corps organique. We “are” a flesh; and our best experience of ourselves is the very simple experience of ourselves as making the tiniest bodily effort. The self therefore is not a “cogitatum.” The self is “felt.” This feeling is not intentional. The philosophy of the body leads thus to a phenomenology of the body/flesh, and it becomes evident that Henry could find no better point of departure than Maine de Biran’s descriptions of embodied existence.

III.

It is wise, at this point, to draw the attention to another very different (but French) philosopher, Claude Bruaire. A Hegelian who had sat at the feet of Gaston Fessard, Bruaire published in 1968 a Philosophy of the Body, which is perhaps his best book. It is also his only book to have met with some public success—a book bearing this title, if it appeared in the midst of the students’ movement, was bound to attract (a totally illegitimate) attention. Bruaire, at a guess, had not read Henry’s book. He used to scorn phenomenology. But his book is important. A theological philosopher, Bruaire (whose dissertations had been devoted to Hegel’s Logic and to the Existence of God) tries to pave the way to a philosophy of the body which makes it possible for the body to have an absolute future: resurrection. An affirmation runs all along the book: the way we think the Absolute and the way we think the body are intrinsic correlates. One guesses that the conclusion will be derived from an incarnational theology. The conclusion, therefore, as fairly often in neo-Hegelian French philosophy, owes as much to philosophy as to theology. But I am alluding here to Bruaire because his is a philosophical work, perfectly respectful of the standards of a particular brand of philosophy, and which must not be read as a piece of apologetics. In any case, my point here is only historical: in 1965, Henry describes a self which is a body without any absolute future, and Henry is not existentially or theoretically interested in Christianity; and in 1968, Bruaire speaks as a philosopher whose concepts and interests are born within Christianity. Their philosophies have very little in common (with a qualification: the necessity of a bodily experience of the human ego). But the quasi-simultaneous publication of both books has something to teach: either on the way to a trinitarian ontology (in Bruaire’s last book, Being and Spirit) or on the way to committed Christianity, one cannot skip viewing the body/flesh as a major philosophical object.

IV.

This episode, of course, is part of a very old story, and a story where Christianity bats perpetually for the body. In his “True Discourse,” for instance, Celsus (quoted by Origen), speaks with contempt for the Christians: they are “in love with the body,” pothountes to sôma. Even in Descartes’ late writings, according to Jean-Luc Marion, the body is nothing exterior to the self: it is almost a Husserlian “flesh” of sorts. But, to pay more attention to Henry, one must agree with Rivera on an important point: the eschatological concept of the body we find perpetually in the Christian tradition is almost never to be found in Henry, be it in his pre-Christian or in his Christian period. We may put it in other words. Bruaire’s insistence is on a body which may be saved, whereas the human body, as felt, is part of an absolute now which is in no need of an absolute future. We have all learnt as undergraduates (from Balthasar, Taubes and others) that the eschatological problem has been lurking in recent philosophy since Hegel. We have all learnt (from Kojève) that Hegelian eschatology is a realized one (we have nothing to hope or after absolute knowledge has become available), and it is a strange coincidence that Henry’s eschatology is a realized eschatology as well, whereas Bruaire battles through Hegelianism to argue in favour of a futuristic eschatology where the human body will inherit its absolute future. There is no hermeneutic difficulty here. What Henry learns about the body when he reads Maine de Biran he will never forget. And which is more, he will certainly deepen his intuitions, but he will never question the description of a “parousiac” experience of oneself as a fleshly being. This parousiac experience, to be sure, is no beatific vision, and the paradigmatic version of Henry’s “cogito” is to be found, not in the thinking thing, but in a suffering self—and suffering, pathos, has (hopefully) no absolute future. This parousiac experience (one must stick to the words Henry uses) is nonetheless an eschatological experience. Here and now, I am not content with becoming aware of myself as feeling myself. I, literally, am comprehending myself. And we shall need only a detail (!) to Christianize this realized eschatology and say, with Henry’s late works, that my parousiac presence to myself is tied to Christ’s parousiac presence to myself: life (mine) and Life (Christ’s) are co-given here and now. In fullness.

V.

I have been drawing attention to Bruaire because of the unquestionably Christian orthodoxy of his philosophy of the body, and it is only fair to admit that Henry’s point of departure does not lead him to genuinely Christian conclusions. Were one to accept some brand of realized eschatology (“authentic” existence according to Bultmann would be a candidate, but there are many others), Henry’s absolute present would get theological legitimacy. But are we allowed to use the adjective “parousiac” when describing our relation to the Absolute and to ourselves? I doubt we can, and I am not the only one to give voice to such a doubt. Our bodily presence to ourselves is beyond all doubt. The presence of God’s Word may be the secret of our presence to ourselves. But Rivera is right: Henry, here, deals only with the subjective side of our body (we as “flesh,” Fleisch) and throws its objective side (we as “bodies,” Körper) into the darkness of a meaningless “world.” On the one hand, we are already saved (as beings who are a flesh). On the other hand, our “organic bodies” need no salvation. The flesh is already “risen.” The body will not be risen from the dead. And this undeniably is not far from Gnosticism. The charge of Gnosticism has been levelled against respectable thinkers. Baur published his fat book against Hegel three years after Hegel’s death. Since he has been rediscovered, the late Schelling has been an inspiration for theologians (there is Schellingianism in Balthasar), but his gnostic proclivities have been acknowledged by all. And Heidegger would accuse Scheler’s religious works to be akin to Valentinian gnosticism . . . Henry is in good company. But a qualification is required: whereas the three philosophers I have alluded to had a good knowledge of Christian theology, Henry had almost no knowledge of it at all. Henry undeniably confessed the Christian faith, sometime after his “Genealogy of Psychoanalysis,” and stuck firmly to it. His “version” of Christianity (I borrow “version” from Ricoeur), now, is conceptually queer. Henry told once to a common friend that he had just read John’s Gospel and that it fitted perfectly his philosophy. The friend, a philosopher with much theological expertise, welcomed his enthusiasm, but suggested that he ought to read more. It seems that Henry followed the friend’s advice and read some Balthasar and other contemporary divines during his last years. But Henry undeniably died too young for him to allow Christian theology to influence his philosophy in any depth. Standard gnostics have normally taken leave from (orthodox) Christianity after having been well acquainted with it. Henry, a non-standard gnostic, was not granted the time to take leave from the gnostic ingredients of his philosophy. But those who have known him well (I am not one of them) were impressed by the fervour of his faith.

VI.

It is interesting to note here that the intellectual crisis of the Church of France in the late sixties and in the seventies was described as a gnostic crisis in an influential book by the Dominican Marie-Joseph Le Guillou, Le mystère du Père, in 1974. Le Guillou tried to make a point in his book: the classical interplay of “fides quaerens intellectum” and “intellectus quaerens fidem” had—then—disappeared, and theology had more or less become “ancilla philosophiae,” or rather “philosophiarum.” Present day gnosticism, according to Le Guillou, is not what ancient gnosticism was, philosophy run mad, but a reign of philosophy over theology with the Christian tradition falling into oblivion. Hegel had been the arch-case. He is not the only case, and Le Guillou argues that gnosticism is lurking around when theologians become intellectually churchless. Henry died a churchgoer. As a matter of fact, he lived all through his last years the (happy) experience of the man in the pew. He was happy with Christianity as he had discovered it. But what he had discovered was the few tenets of Christianity which fit his philosophical a prioris. 1 Henry had been a creative philosopher for many years when he ventured into Christianity, and he died a young Christian. Making theology (though he never claimed to contribute to theology stricto sensu) the handmaiden of his phenomenology is something he did not want, nor is it a program he would have approved. A clear-cut distinction between the “field” of theology and the “field” of philosophy is also something he does not know of: and he meets here with my full approval. But, I am allowed a “semitic inclusion,” Henry had not taken part in Christian intellectual debates in the days when philosophers who had a desire to be Christian devoted much time to learn theology. If the label “Gnosticism” is to be used aptly in his case, it will only mean that on his way to Christian gnôsis he had not the good fortune to find theological advisors . . .

VII.

A surprising comparison crops up when Rivera suggests that Henry’s Christology, as Rahner’s, is “transcendental.” Surprising? Indeed, no. As far as Rahner is concerned, his “transcendental deduction of an absolute savior” leads perhaps somewhere—but it does not lead to the Middle Eastern territories where, in the most contingent way, a man was crucified and rose from the dead, to be acknowledged as saviour. Rahner’s Christ is anonymous. He belongs to no history. And so it is the case with Henry’s Christ. Recent theological lingo has made (too) much use of a distinction, theology from above vs. theology from below, and Henry’s Christology comes straight from the Fourth Gospel and stops dead before the Word is known as present in a man called Jesus. There is something refreshing in authors who do not feel the perpetual need to remind us of Jesus’ “Nazarene” origin. But if events have happened which allow Christian theology to state, in the most un-Greek fashion, that “caro salutis cardo,” then “contingent truths of history” matter. Johannine spirituality is never far from Henry’s “theological” contributions, and this is not an objection. Henry’s Christology is a near revival of monophysitism, and this is an objection. A proposal might be more useful than all objections, though. Rahner’s transcendental theology is more or less unable to come to terms with the historic and the contingent. So is Henry. And in both cases, the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola might have come to the help of the party. In Ignatian meditation, contemplative prayer begins with what is known as “compositio loci,” imagining the place where this or that happened and becoming intuitively present to something which has the double quality of pastness and exteriority. Praying is not “having a look.” Praying, nonetheless, involves intuition and data of intuition. The Jesuit to be, and anyone who accepts the style of contemplation advocated in the “Exercises,” is committed to looking. He will, no doubt, have the “eyes of faith.” What faith allows him to see, and what neither Rahner’s nor Henry’s transcendentalism make possible, is the undeducible manifestation of the Absolute in the there and then of events in Palestine.

VIII.

An addition. Associating Henry with Rahner sounds strange. Another strange (but, to my mind, true) association occurs: Henry and Teilhard de Chardin have something in common. Teilhard had travelled. His journey to China is part of his legend. And yet, he never visited Palestine. His Christ is “cosmic” (a Christ “in quo omnia constant”) and deprived of any historical reality. In The Divine Milieu, a book he began to write in the desert of Gobi, he asks a candid question: “Is the Christ of the Gospels, whom imagination and love perceive within the limits of a mediterranean world, still able to act as the centre of our prodigiously expanded world?” (24, French edition). Teilhard’s theology—or rather his spiritual teachings—is not entirely ahistoric: there is room in the same book for the “fascinating and unfathomable reality of the historical Christ” (117). But here again, a philosophy (if there is anything philosophical in a paleontologist’s speculations) is the constant and Christology the variable. This is probably the main reason of Teilhard’s (unwilling but undeniable) gnostic temptation. This short addition might interest Rivera.

IX.

Let us go back to the point where phenomenology begins, namely intentionality. Is a purely hyletic (material) phenomenology more than a dream? Anybody who has submitted Henry’s proposal to the test of fair description will admit that there are enstatic experiences. We are here on sure ground. The phenomenon of pain, or the parallel phenomenon of joy, is not (primarily) pain of something or experience of something joyful. Such experiences, if we pay them the attention they deserve, put no object into play: they put me into play, they disclose me to myself (as a suffering self, as a joyful self, etc.). About their reality, we have no objection to level. We do not know whether Maine de Biran would have approved of Henry’s interpretation of his quest of “sens intime.” A conclusion is licit, anyway: what appears to us in experiences of ourselves as “flesh,” as bodies which are an I, is never ecstatic. Henry’s concept of “auto-affection” is paradoxical and provocative, and mostly meant to refuse the constitution of a perpetually ecstatic concept of existence. The secret of life, in Henry, is affective through and through. We can use here Heidegger’s concept of “Befindlichkeit” and state that we “find ourselves” in affective situations. But we must quickly take leave from Heidegger, who ties Befindlichkeit with understanding in such a way that affection is part of a logic of understanding “something”: even if the arch-affection, anxiety, leads to an apt knowledge of no object, but of oneself as a self on its way to death or nothingness, what we are affected by in such an experience comes from outside. A Henryian critique of Heidegger is valid, and a Henryian critique of Scheler is valid as well. Scheler’s concepts of “Fühlen von etwas” and “Gefühl” are coined in such a way that Gefühl is non-intentional and non-cognitive—and we do not need to describe pain in much detail to acknowledge that it is a (a) non-intentional and (b) cognitive phenomenon: the experience of pain includes an understanding of pain. Heidegger has a perfect right to say that all existing acts are affective or partly affective. But he knows of no enstatic access to oneself—and this is counterfactual. Henry’s plea, in a way, is in favour of elementary phenomena. His tactic is not to put intentionality into brackets (it is no reduction in the Husserlian fashion) but to draw our attention toward non-intentional phenomena. And he meets, even if we are sometimes at pain to identify sheer enstasis, with perfect success. We can use the concept of intentionality in a dogmatic fashion: and if we do so, Henry’s proposal is a trivial philosophical heresy. But we can test it: and if we do so, we are led to the conclusion that enstasis—“life,” as opposed to “ek-sistence”—is neither a philosophical dream nor part of a refusal of phenomenology, but—only—a way of being and experiencing oneself that we are perpetually familiar with.

X.

So far, so good, and Rivera’s interpretation of Henry does not collide with what most scholars—and even specialists—would say. Difficulties arise, though, when temptations appear. To phrase them naively, is there some priority of enstasis over extasis? Or some priority of extasis over enstasis? Naive questions give rise to naive prejudices. Extasis, enstasis, both are related in such a way that an ecstatic existence wholly unaware of enstatic phenomena, and a “life” from which extasis would be banned from birth to death, would be sheer fictions. There are ways, plural, of identifying the “sens intime,” or non-intentional self-awareness—I know of no canonical way, singular, of surely getting there. And even if we are not satisfied by exteriority and exteriorizing ourselves, we are not closeted in ourselves: extasis, be it intentional or “caring,” or “using,” is part and parcel of all experience of oneself and the world. One may object against Heidegger’s description of existence—I have raised objections against it. But a sure fact, if one dare use the word “fact,” is that phenomenology does not deal only with “existing” experiences, but deals often and inevitably with cases of “non-existence” or “more than existence,” etc. Not only are existence, extasis, intentionality, perpetually possible; they are always lurking in the vicinity. And yet, our experiences of intentionality, etc., can be perpetually “deconstituted.” I need no more than a toothache to feel myself in a non-intentional way. There are phenomena where hyletic data are lacking any intentional morphè: the project of a material phenomenology, therefore, is faithful to the “things” in the how of their appearing—or rather faithful to a “thing,” the thing we are. Material phenomenology, however, does not and cannot take the whole field of phenomenology by storm. Non-intentional events of consciousness, or purely hyletic phenomena, have the qualities of the real and of the exceptional. And once we have put our finger on this exceptional character, we must add that Henry’s pure interiority, pure withdrawal from the “world,” etc., is always threatened by a remarkable “danger”: extasis, intentionality, are never far from non-intentional phenomena, and perpetually threaten to deconstitute them. There are exceptional experiences. Because of their banality (Maine de Biran’s examples and Henry’s philosophical examples point to phenomena very often unnoticed, we do not pay much attention to what we are doing when doing a minor bodily effort, nor do we when we feel a pain without feeling any need to describe it . . .), we are prone to explore mostly intentionality-involving acts of consciousness (looking at a painting by Kandinsky, after all, is no enstatic experience!). And we must resist a tendency to submit all phenomena to an intentional analysis—the Brentanian and Husserlian description of consciousness is not meant to be used as a straightjacket. But we “exist” more often than we “live.” And existence has a tendency to “endanger” life.—Enough on what I have said elsewhere with some prolixity.

XI.

Is some theology eventually useful here? It may be useful if we follow Rivera’s drastic suggestions on what we are when we pray. (A theology which would not understand what we do when we pray would be a very strange one indeed . . .) Contemplation is undeniably ecstatic, be it the contemplation of a work of art or part of a spiritual event, say taking part in the eucharist or practising lectio divina. It is ecstatic and temporal, and temporal as involving a twofold movement, by way of memory and by way of expectation and hope. And it is ecstatic as well conceptualized as a fruitio: as the present rejoicing in what is given to the believer. Little phenomenology is needed here to notice that we are dealing here with general conditions of experience. Memoria, fruitio, spes, do not need to be hastily theologized. A friend of his told me once that visiting a museum (it may have been his private museum) was Henry’s equivalent to attending mass before he became a committed Christian. Henry’s love of Kandinsky was contemplative, as is our love of anything belonging to the realm of exteriority and nurtured in interiority. Contemplation is no property of the believer; but the believer, despite this qualification, cannot escape becoming a “contemplative self.” And once we agree with this slightly trivial pronouncement, theological concepts have a perfect right to appear and overdetermine non-theological experiences. Memory is central in all human experience—but Augustine has much to say about memoria Dei. Protension is part of all constitution of a living present—but when man’s absolute future is a share in eternity, Gregory of Nyssa has much to say about epectasis, a name for man’s openness to, and desire of, the eternal. And if we agree with Heidegger that the present is ruled by the future, to add the theological precision that the key temporal phenomenon, in Christian experience, is a presence (the eucharistic presence) we shall have to subvert Husserl’s constant drive, down to the “C Manuscripts,” to identify the past as that which is no more and the future as that which is not yet. Contemplation—let us take it as synonymous with “spiritual life”—embraces everything in man with an eschatological destiny. As we can describe it, it embraces us here and now, body/flesh and soul/spirit, insofar as we try to exist/live coram Deo, facing God, of course, as beings that very often cannot do better than to exist/live “coram ourselves,” distracted from God by our suffering body or our rambling thoughts. Theologians, when they happen to be interested in spirituality, know that well. And when we speak in a speculative way, short of any power of description, with eschatological anticipations as only foundations of our right to speculate, our last word is that risen man is the measure of everything real in mortal man.

XII.

Eschatological speculation is perilous. Rivera is right to notice that Henry’s philosophico-religious texts are devoid of any eschatology, or defend some sort of realized eschatology: an eschatology which gives no room for hope, because every promise is fulfilled in the “now” of presence to oneself, presence to Christ and Christ’s presence (not to forget other man, perfectly present as well as the object of my compassion). Focusing on the concept of contemplation, at all events, is a wise move. It reminds us that man’s relation to God is ecstatic—epectasis. God, must we waste our time to spell it out, is not “out there”: he is also intimior intimo meo, and Henry knows it very well, only not to stress as well that he is summior summo meo. And here, let us remember that “realized eschatology” was coined by C. H. Dodd, a specialist of the Fourth Gospel, after attending an orthodox service—celebrated somewhere on earth by mortal men. Now, praying man, as we can describe his behaviour, is certainly not risen. He prays in the world, with many opportunities to be distracted from what he intends to do. What he wants is memoria Dei—but oblivio Dei threatens perpetually to rule over his liturgical chants or his liturgical silence. The Fourth Gospel intertwines the earthly Jesus and the risen Christ in such a way that Balthasar’s “theology of the forty days” is our best hermeneutical tool when we try to understand how Christ’s eschatological presence may be granted by the “historical,” or “historic,” Jesus. And one more word will be necessary: we shall have to say that the contemplative self—and we may incarnate this self—lives, between history and eschatology, deep in preeschatological experiences. There is room on our way to death for a perpetual desire of God. There is room on this way, as well, for an eclipse of this desire: the believer is (only) a believer, he does not “see,” and forgetting God is as common with him as remembering him. We know it; and even those who defend a realized eschatology of some brand know it—they just have a queer idea of the eschaton. We know, therefore, that spiritual life is not “risen life” stricto sensu, and that our present experience (of God, of ourselves, of our neighbours) is at its best a “penultimate experience.” The contemplative self will be, ultimately, what it is becoming to be, penultimately, when it tries to exist epectically towards a more than transcendent and more than immanent Absolute, and when it tries to find rest—“quies,” “hèsukhia”—in him. What we can say of the “ultimate” we derive with our acquaintance with the penultimate. The derivation must be careful. There is a preeschatological dimension of prayer. Our prayer involves us as flesh and spirit, or soul. Our flesh cannot be dissociated from our organic body. But here we must remember that our organic body is an object, for the physicist as well as for the physician, and that we have no way of describing a risen body. “Resurrection of the flesh,” a Christian concept with no phenomenological implication, means that anything in us worthy of an eternal destiny will live “definitively.” But it decidedly does not mean that there will be a physical reality of the eschata. The naive “physics of glorious bodies” we stumble on even in Aquinas is part of a past we have no need to resurrect. Thomas, who stuck to “natura abhorret vacuum,” asks somewhere what the bowels of the blessed will be full of. And his answer is “of the noblest humours.” It’s a coherent answer, provided one thinks the question is legitimate. And it is not. “Glory” is no physical or biological reality, nor are we to fancy physicists or biologists performing in the heavenly Jerusalem the task they perform in history. The flesh which is called to eternal life has its objective side in the time of the world, where it appears as “body-flesh,” “Leib-Körper.” Is his flesh called to be an eternal object as well? And will there be eternal objects? Will there be incorruptible atoms? Etc. It is better not to embark on such queer questions. They would evoke queer affirmations.