Abstract
Michel Henry (d. 2002) was an enigmatic, marginal, and almost cult-like figure among 20th-century French thinkers, offering an original philosophical vision that transcends and incorporates questions and issues long separated in modern thought and life: here mysticism, religion, ethics, aesthetics, politics, economics, and the unconscious are organically and intelligibly articulated through the reunifying force of a singular insight (as expressed in his early magnum opus, The Essence of Manifestation, 1963). His oeuvre explores and develops this insight through a series of deeply creative revisionist readings of a handful of major Western philosophers (Descartes, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud), artists (Kandinsky), and religious figures (his ‘Christian trilogy,’ a sustained reading of the implications of the life and words of Jesus Christ, is a sort of consummation of his lifework). All of this (and more: four novels and several manifesto-like works on the university and political-economic systems should be noted) is based on his radical modification of phenomenology as inherited from Husserl and Heidegger: if phenomenology in these two figures and their heirs has focused its analyses of appearing on the structure of intentionality as ‘consciousness of this or that,’ a second manner of appearing, a foundational one, has been obscured, that of life, which is non- or pre-intentional—its appearing is, purely immanent, wholly identical to that which appears. And it is within Henry’s investigation of the order of the transcendental relation of these two kinds of manifestation, objective intentionality and auto-affectivity, that the ‘contemplative’ or theological self explored by Joseph Rivera in this book emerges. This is a highly constructive theological treatment of Michel Henry’s thought, which reads more like the work of a seasoned philosophical theologian than it does a revision of a dissertation.
Rivera’s task is to understand the theological foundations of Henry’s deep insight into the selfhood of the self and to engage with it critically in order to develop an account of the human person that gets a handle on and surpasses some of Henry’s more glaring theological bêtises (in light of the standard of mainstream Christian tradition). He pursues this work through three part-divisions of two chapters each. Part One is concerned with preliminary considerations and offers both a laudatory sketch of the phenomenological tradition within Western philosophy, framed by special reference to Descartes’s and Nietzsche’s foundational accounts of the subject and a reading of phenomenology’s ‘basic problems’ as articulated by Michel Henry. Against this background the reproduction of Henry’s thought is unfolded in Part Two. If Part One is a solid introduction to modern Western philosophy with the phenomenological tradition at its center, Part Two is a general interpretation of the major contours of Henry’s thought that makes his sometimes perplexing but always thought-provoking philosophy both understandable in its major motivations and intelligible in its significance. Part Three leads the reader into the constructive ‘phenomenological theology’ that Rivera offers, wholly indebted to Henry’s basic proposal but also critically revising it in fundamental ways. The starting point for this revision is the discernment of the core problems in Henry’s thought that would condemn any substantial theological appropriation of him to be malformed. As Rivera puts it in the introduction: Henry is unable ‘to account positively and theologically for the ineluctably temporal and bodily states of the self’ (p. 8). Henry sees the self as a ‘child of God,’ born out of and rooted in the play of Trinitarian life, but his critique of intentional alterity disallows this true self’s presence in the world except in the mode of shadow and illusion. The major difficulty is therefore to accept Henry’s major insight about the transcendental auto-affectivity of life but also to permit the envaluation (the ‘goodness’) of human worldliness (temporality and embodiment) that is—classically speaking—non-negotiable for Christianity.
Rivera’s sophisticated answer involves the appeal to a central component of the Christian vision, eschatology. Here the whole game unfolds. Rivera attempts to integrate the interior subjectivity of life that eclipses this world of appearances with the self inserted in the cosmic drama between temporal and material birth and death. The theological or contemplative self (the self as it is essentially, as it is before God) is an ‘eschatological self’ therefore that reaches, through the kenotically incarnate Christ, from the womb of this world into the Uncreated Life of the Holy Trinity within which it is (so to speak) suspended. If Henry sees the human Self as a necessary and immediate result of the Son’s arrival to himself in the affective Presence to Self of the Father, Rivera subtly, yet in a deeply traditional way, appeals to the classical Greek category of ‘participation’ in order to preserve the Creator–creature distinction basic to any Christian account: the ‘self and its outward narration in the world’ is a temporal ‘participation in the dynamic interplay between Father, Son and Spirit’ through their ‘hypostatic distinctions manifest in creation’ (p. 329). This metaxological clarification is developed through an appeal to St Augustine’s classical explication of the temporal, bodily, radically creaturely, contingent yet engraced self as intrinsically ordered—as a sacramental, ecclesial and ultimately resurrected self—to a final beatitude of life in God from which it originally has sprung and by which it has never ceased to be sustained even through this historical drama of disordered alienation that marks the human experience. Some modern re-appropriations of the Greek logic of participation to re-express a similar ‘naturally supernatural’ Augustinian vision—such as Henri de Lubac or John Milbank—do not substantially appear on the surface of the text, but it would be interesting and important to bring Rivera’s (post-)Henrian phenomenological theology into conversation with them, particularly in order to analyze the material on time, memory, and the Eucharistic body and the ecclesial body in Chapters five and six, which is worthy of patient reflection.
A final note: it would seem clear after reading Rivera’s richly rewarding book that Michel Henry’s thought, despite some of its troubling theological aspects, has much to say to Christianity. But this conversation might be deepened, perhaps dramatically, through triangulation with other religions. It is not hard to imagine that Michel Henry may become a valuable resource in contemporary comparative theology—for example, between the deep, classical philosophical thinking of Christianity and Hindu Advaita Vedanta (or another philosophical monotheism), on analogy, say, to the role already historically played by the use of other mystical-philosophical minds of the West like Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross. Can Henry’s account of the divine provenance of human ipseity be fruitfully correlated with the Vedantic distinction between cosmic and meta-cosmic selves, of atman and Atman? Can Henry’s account of the true Self as wholly in excess of the cosmic horizon, as conditioned only by the unconditioned bliss of joy in the divine auto-affection, be compared to Sankara’s interpretation of the Upanishadic identification of Atman with Brahman, the unchanging reality of infinite (self-)awareness and beatitude that alone is? Can this correlation open a new chapter in the dialogue between these two major intellectual-religious traditions? To the heart of the question, of the self in and beyond this world, is where Rivera takes readers in this book.
It is this possibility, precisely out of Rivera’s daring expansion of Henry’s philosophy of the body as ‘mystical phenomenon with endless depths,’ that makes The Contemplative Self an important work in present-day theological discussions. Indeed, Rivera may be a trustworthy launching point for such a foray into this deeper and theological territory.