We are all living in the world of materiality, and we can be caught up with the world. But ‘God took flesh and lived among us’ is the message of Christmas. Levinas says, “The incarnation of human subjectivity guarantees its spirituality.” He wrote again, “Only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify it. Signification, the-one-for-the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood.” Morality is carnal rather than ethereal. The demands of the other are concrete, real, particular. The suffering of others becomes my own suffering: a suffering for the other’s suffering. No face can be approached with empty hands and closed home.
The Cartesian maxim “To search for no knowledge other than what could be found within myself” sounds valid. In this radical awareness, whereby self-givenness should be ultimately understood as pure self-presence. The turn towards being-in-the-world eventually leads to a form of alienation. It is a Marxian word where one ends up being caught up in an exterior life, forgetful of a genuine understanding of a true, interior self. Man must turn his attention to a mode of self-givenness, which does not presuppose a relationship with the world. This self-givenness comes prior to any subject-world correlation, just as the essence of man cannot be found in exteriority or visibility, but in a radical and absolute interiority or invisibility: The relation between the world and our life is here proposed under the form of a radical opposition between the visible and the invisible. “The knowledge is not truly a transcendental, an a priori condition of all possible experience, if it always requires what is wholly other than itself: the sensation, the impression.”
What the Greeks called pathos –passion is the essential form of affect. Pathos is the condition for any existence which is free from any form intentionality. Life itself is understood as originally an auto-affection; which means that affection is a self-relation completely immanent and radically self-sufficient. Ultimately, it is the essence of that which manifests itself. M. Henry wrote, “Before thought,… a Revelation is at work, which owes them nothing but which they all equally assume. Before thought, before the opening of the world and the unfolding of its intelligibility, absolute Life’s Arch-intelligibility fulgurates, the Parousia of the Word in which it is embraced.” The first givenness is a mysterious finding. Religious faith is not something which is connected with a transcendent gift, but, on the contrary, comes about from the fact that Life is given to itself through this auto-affectivity. God and Life itself, as united in this pathos of auto-affectivity. It remains in the capability to read one’s own interiority. “Word became flesh,” as the latter generates its flesh through its own pathos, as auto-affection, in its radical immediacy. Thus Christ’s flesh and the self consciousness gives the assurance of my own divine experience within the pathos, which resides outside of the world. The possibility of a language which does not belong to the world, but the “other site where the Word of Life speaks.” The true meaning of Life is wholly separate from that which the world generates. It depends on how well one can read the revelation within.
Christianity is the essential truth and how “by some mysterious affinity is suitable” for believers “to the point that it alone is capable of assuring them salvation.” The Truth of Christianity has no relation to the truth that arises from the analysis of the texts or their historical study. The New Testament texts offer us access to the Truth, to that absolute Truth of which the corpus speaks. Christianity faces scepticism today precisely because this difference is unacknowledged and, as a result, ends up in a “ruinous confusion” between the Truth of Life and the truth of the world. Ultimately what this entails is that if the scriptures remain ensnared within the world, they end up losing their power to present a Truth which is of a different kind—radically interior. Interiority does not reveal itself in the world’s exteriority as it is impossible for it to be grasped and understood through any categories pertaining to the world, thus remaining completely concealed and detached from it. The unique manifestation of absolute subjectivity must be characterized as an invisible revelation.
The Body is an “advent of consciousness”, the very first possession of the subject and the place of conscious life which owes itself where the subject realizes the condition necessary for any inwardness. Subjective sensibility is already identified as giving and breaking; disposed and exposed to wound, outrage and persecution. The other’s suffering becomes my own suffering: a suffering for the other’s suffering.