Since the beginning of Christian reflection, the concept of flesh has had a vast and often disparate semantics. The first Councils of the Church are proof of this, as well as all the struggles against the most varied heresies. It was Saint Justin who first used the term Incarnation: (Apologia Prima Pro Christianis, no. 32). After that, the road to the Council of Chalcedon was long and fruitful. Michel Henry makes an opportune inversion of Phenomenology and defines, since L' Essence de la Manifestation, his first great work, important concepts of body, individuality, subjectivity, affectivity, immanence, ipseity. Immanence, prior to transcendence, is manifested in subjectivity; subjectivity is the possibility of feeling, of constituting oneself by feeling affected; immanence is the essence of transcendence (L' Essence de la Manifestation, p. 309). The first immanence is affectivity, this feeling affected, feeling oneself without measurement, given in oneself, without previous experience, as manifestation, self-manifestation. The influence of Master Eckhart is very present: whoever wants to contemplate God must be blind (Treatises and Sermons, p. 226). All mediation is unnecessary to access oneself, it is the experience of Life that manifests and founds each Self, it is Truth, it is the arch-subjectivity that reveals itself in the Flesh as pure phenomenological matter. Unique in each Man in the uniqueness of each pathos, as the Parousia of the Absolute, of the absolute Life that is not a concept, an abstraction (Incarnation, p. 193), but a phenomenological experience in which one is surprised as Living, participating in that First Living Self (Paroles du Christ, p. 107), which is the Incarnate Word. The Incarnation of the Word is the generation in the flesh of God and the revelation of God in the flesh (ibid., p. 106).
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