Continental Philosophy Review 32: 303324, 1999.

1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

SEEKING Printed in the Netherlands.
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 303

Seeking a phenomenological metaphysics: Henrys reference to

Meister Eckhart*

NATALIE DEPRAZ
45 bis, rue Pouchet, 75017 Paris, France

Introduction

One can discern of the presence of Eckhart in foundational German Phenom-

enology, whether it concerns Husserl or Heidegger, by measure of its secret
eminence. In a conversation with D. Cairns, dated 27 June 1932 and dedi-
cated to mystical experience, and more precisely to the authenticity of his
evidence, Husserl indicated this is at least what Cairns reports that he
would be able to take over whole pages of Meister Eckhart unchanged.1
Certain assertions presented in the Vienna lectures also furnish a remarkable
illustration of this eminence insofar as they echo certain Eckhartian state-
ments though without an explicit reference. This one is the most remarkable:
It is only when the mind, ceasing to turn naively toward the outside, returns
in itself and remains in itself and purely in itself, that it can suffice onto
itself.2 As for Heidegger, he dedicates very early on3 several rather dense
pages to Eckhartian mysticism, to the potentialities of thought that it offers in
the context of a dismantling of rationality as determination of objectivity and
of the promotion of a knowledge of unity as living [Erleben] of the abso-
lute. Through this conception of what he calls irrationality in Eckharts
works,4 which is not, by right of the plenitude of multiplicity, what situates
itself before all rationality,5 Heidegger brings to light an experience of the
bracketing [Ausschaltung] of particularities and the form itself, for the gain
of the experience of emptiness as power [potenzierte Leere]; doing this, he
frees up an ethical (ethisch)6 retreat outside multiplicity, outside of particular-
ity [Entmannigfaltigung, Abstoung der einzelnen Krfte in ihrer Einzelheit
und bestimmten Gerichtetheit],7 outside, of temporality, in the eternal now
[ewigen Nu]8 which has detachment [Abgeschiedenheit] as its name, a cen-
tral concept, as he says so well, of the intellectual mysticism of the Rhenian.9

*Translated by Gregory B. Sadler.

304 NATALIE DEPRAZ

One will say that these references in the two phenomenologists works are
fleeting, too late in Husserls works to be able to be inscribed in the project
of phenomenology as a rigorous science, too precocious in the works of
Heidegger to have been able to guide, in a subterranean way, his belated
interiorization [Verwindung] of Metaphysics, which is not a dialectical over-
coming [berwindung]: But one knows that this reference reappears much
later, and in a manuscript that is essential, to say the least, the Beitrge. In
fact, one will see that each in their own way they devote themselves to the
possibility of a phenomenological metaphysics,10 and not the least of which
the Henryian perspective offers a possible dimension.
The questions that pose themselves to us presently number three:

1. To what degree are Eckhart, and the singular speculative mysticism

that he opens, a decisive support in light of the liberation of a
phenomenological metaphysics?
2. In what sense is this irreducible both to classical phenomenology,
static or hermeneutic, and to traditional metaphysics, naive or
ontotheological?
3. How does Henryian phenomenology allow one to give a rigorous sense
to such a phenomenological metaphysics via the deepening of the
Eckhartian thread?

These three questions do not form the three stages of a progression. The
detailed examination of the last one alone will attempt to illuminate, in
turn, both the first and the second. I would like to make apparent how
the original phenomenological advance of M. Henry, sustaining itself on
the trail itself blazed by Eckhart in the West, opens the way to the novel
possibility of a metaphysical experience,11 as an experience of non-dual
passivity (I), which supposes a specific mode of temporalization whose
form, we shall see, is self-antecedence (II), and an act of knowing originarily
non-distinct from affect (III).
Just as in the works of Husserl and Heidegger, the reference to Meister
Eckhart in M. Henrys works is far from occupying, it seems, the place that
philosophers such as Maine de Biran12 or Schopenhauer13 have evidentially
received, in a way somewhat inaugural or even much later, in the discovery
of an originarily self-affected subjectivity.
Although he did not devote a work to Eckhart, M. Henry makes an appeal
to the Rhenian mystic in sections whose significance goes beyond elaborat-
ing on him, and in a manner that does more than eulogize him.14 In his first
work from 1963, the author relies on the mystic15 in order to give all of his
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 305
power to his conception of essence as simple, plenary, and passive unity,
already determined at this stage as life.16 In Cest moi la vrit which ap-
peared in 1996,17 the appeal to Eckhart, taking him up twice, now furnishes a
powerful conceptual scheme to the thought of the self-engendering of life.18
Even if this reference is on the order of a simple footnote, it comes to bring
about the proposed rereading of the Gospel of John. By having present such a
rereading, one will be better able to grasp the importance of the Rhenian
Master since 1963, he who does not cease to draw upon John as a resource in
his sermons. The Eckhartian impulse of Henrys suggestion thus implies a
third-figure, John, who plays the role of mediator between the two.

1. An experience of non-dual passivity

The Essence of Manifestation confers an eminent role upon the Eckhartian

Sermons.19 Aside from the fact that Meister Eckhart is the only mystical and
pre-modern presence in a work that dedicates in other respects, in addition to
Descartes, important analyses to the most well-known representatives of
German Idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, but also in counterpoint,
Kierkegaard), as well as to major phenomenologists of the period (Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), the place that the Rhenian mystic occu-
pies in the economy of the progression is decisive.
Between the two first parts that elucidate the structure of the phenomenon
in a critical manner, and the fourth which interprets the originary essence of
revelation as affectivity, the third part forms a necessary joint where the in-
ternal structure of immanence itself sees itself freed: A bridge is built there
between the critique of intentional or exstatic phenomenality, found lacking
in as much as it always conceals in a residual way a reductive tendency to-
ward objectification, and affectivity brought to fight by an internal revelation
of essence. The bridge in question resides in the analysis of immanence, which
alone assures the internal understanding of affectivity.
Thus, beyond the explicit reference to Eckhart, which only concerns sev-
eral paragraphs of the third section, one can make sense out of the whole of
the analysis of immanence that is generously given there. In our opinion, it is
evident that 37, opening this third part and entitled precisely the inter-
nal structure of immanence forms the crucible of an appropriate apprecia-
tion of the importance of Eckhart for M. Henry. Eckhart is not mentioned
there, but there is an annunciatory anticipation of 39, this mirror of 37
where the figure that remained in the shadows until then appears in full light.
A fecund shadow, however, since it is by the nonmanifest Eckhart that the
306 NATALIE DEPRAZ

Rheneian could appear a little later.

It is on the basis of a unnamed but recurrent gesture of radical reduction,
approached in a general fashion as a turn[ing] itself way from opposed to a
direct[ing] itself toward,20 retying what remains with the also very pro-
found gestures in Husserl,21 Heidegger,22 Levinas,23 a gesture at work just as
much, one will see, in the Eckhartian attitude princeps of detachment,24 as
the phenomenologist uncovers the internal structure of immanence. But he
does this by using traits that can seem surprising at the first approach.
These traits are the following, according to the order of their appearance
in 37:

1. poverty (and its synonyms: indigence, becoming-naked, loss);25

2. dis-interest (or abandon);26
3. solitude; 27
4. simplicity (specified in concrete fullness and unity);28
5. non-freedom. 29

These five traits contribute to the liberation of essence as passivity. Each

of them takes up at the same time an essential facet of the transcendental
disposition to engage the reduction and roots itself evidentially in the
Eckhartian preparation of the soul to welcome the Godhead. It is this
double anchoring, both phenomenological and metaphysical, of the
Henryian meditation on immanence that I will attempt to explain for
each of them.

1. Poverty

. . . the essence encloses nothing else, thought which turns itself toward
the essence necessarily turns itself away from all that is other than it . . .
the liberation of the essential is pursued as a retreat [which is not] that of
a provisional renouncement, but of a poverty which chooses itself and
wills itself as essential.30 To cultivate the indigence of essence as radical
experience of self, this is to highlight the necessity of an impoverishment of
self which corresponds exactly to the demands which are at the same time
Eckhartian and Husserlian: the Meister praises interior poverty in his ser-
mon entitled Beati pauperes spiritu;31 Husserl invokes this necessary vow
of poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge at the beginning of the
Cartesian Mediations, when it is a matter of extricating oneself from opin-
ions and prejudices in order to dispose the mind in all transparency to the
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 307
transcendental attitude to come.32 Metaphysics and Phenomenology ratify, in
an inaugural manner, a constituitive disposition of the internal immanent
attitude which M. Henry seeks, and which is defined ultimately, as we shall
see, as a transcendental attitude of non-dual passivity.
Yet, conforming to the recurrent vocabulary of the denudation of self
that one finds equally in M. Henry, to be poor in spirit is in Eckhart no
longer even occupying a place which would still be promising difference,
that is, potential internal discord and opposition. So I say that man should
be so poor that he should not even be or have any place in which God could
work. When man clings to places, he clings to distinction.33 This radical
Eckhartian demand of annihilation of all spatialization of self whatever it
may be, and which M. Henry himself takes up, permits one to understand
the critique that the latter levels at Heidegger and at his highlighting dwell-
ing and the Earth as the ontological place of the return to the source of
self.34 It would be naive, of course, to understand this critique of space, and
of its intrinsic differentiation, as a promotion of identical and abstract unity.
The annihilation of self, to which we will return below, is this dynamic that
puts out of play identity just as much as difference, always suspect of
returning back to opposition. Through the figure of poverty as annihilation
of self, one has here the first appearance of the non-duality of the experi-
ence in question, as dynamic that dismisses both abstract unity and dis-
cordant difference. We shall see that this schema runs throughout the other
traits as well.

2. Dis-interest

Because it wants nothing, because it has neither project nor desire, because
there is nothing in it from which it would be separated, everything in it is in
repose, it is, in this absence of trouble, without anything to divide it,
tranquility in its absolute simplicity. Without doubt, this is how the
essence rests when it no longer goes outside of itself, when, immobile, it
no longer creates anything.35 The formal structure of dis-interest pro-
posed here contains in itself a critique of naive intentionality as objectifying
(of directing oneself toward), and disengages from it a more correct form
where the attention to what is placed at a distance just as much the first
movement to project, itself there as that of abstracting from it by a refusal.
Let us note here, again, the intrinsically non-dual movement of the experi-
ence taken up.
One would have very hastily interpreted the Eckhartian detached soul36
308 NATALIE DEPRAZ

(or even the Husserlian-Finkian dis-interested spectator)37 as these instances

that observe without participating, that contemplate without acting, leading
back to and making of this the comfortable opposition between theory and
practice. But dis-interest has the virtue of being placed outside of this opposi-
tion, without however plucking itself away artificially, but by extricating
itself from its rigidity just enough in order to continue to remain immanent
up to the point of marrying the acting itself with attention. In fact, it is a
matter of assuming this paradoxical turn of a thought that draws its force
precisely in the paradox, and that thus leaves a naive diet of dualizing dis-
tinction:38 In this sense, dis-interest properly understood is the highest inter-
est, in as much as it takes the measure of a often little working oscillation
between the blind immersion in the world and abstract reflection situated at a
distance from the world, in order to engage itself in an active and attentive
practice in this measure.

3. Solitude

The essence reposes in solitude and, because repose constitutes its nature, it is
itself solitude as such.39 Here again, it is not a matter of contributing to the
promotion of a thought of unity and of the individual walled up inside himself
against multiplicity and plurality. Rather, more exactly, the relation of essence
with itself is constitutive of essence, as an interior working of itself, an imme-
diate connection which is relation to self.
Solitude is therefore the internal structure of essence itself. But, it is pre-
cisely this trait of solitude which interiorizes the intersubjective relation for
the purpose of living fully within a structure of internal alterity that Husserl
has in mind when he invokes the radical solitude that the gesture of reduction
reclaims in the Crisis;40 it is that ontological experience which the Rhenian
describes through the metaphor of the castle of the soul, which is not at all
the sign of an encapsulation in oneself, but the apprenticeship of a mastery of
self that passes through absolute receptivity to the other to the point leading
to the extreme of empathy.41

4. Simplicity

The experience of self of Being in its totality determines it in its sim-

plicity and constitutes it because it is precisely the act of presenting itself to
itself. . . . Such a structure in conformity with which it presents itself to
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 309
itself and with which it identifies itself is, nevertheless, nothing other than
simplicity.42 For simplicity, two characters emerge, unity and fullness, both
of them envisaged as processes as not as states. The self-donation of essence
to itself as experience of itself is 1) self-reunion of essence with itself, by
which the unity is nothing isolated, exterior and, consequently, abstract; 2)
self-accomplishment of essence, in which the richness without limit which
is fullness distinguishes itself from all lack solely understood as privation.43
The experience of simplicity summarizes itself thus in the simple feeling of
a fullness,44 which experiences itself in the very discovery of self, distinct
just as much from a polar unity as from a destructured fluidity.
Here, one has a temporal structure of plenary accomplishment that by
virtue of perfection and completion interrupts any schema of linear suc-
cession as much as of instantaneous punctuality: a temporality of antici-
pation of the future in the past, literally of the future anterior which
echoes on the formal plane to the temporalization present in the Eckhartian
Sermons On Accomplishment and The Souls Perfection, or even
The Eternal Birth,45 as to the temporality of the Husserlian genetic
regressive inquiry (Rckfrage), at work notably in the Crisis.

5. Non-freedom

In general non-freedom belongs to the essence as the very thing which

constitutes it.46 Freedom in effect implies the possibility to leave oneself,
that is, equally, to be delivered to exteriority, which supposes a form of
dependence that immediately relativizes the freedom in question. The essen-
tial experience of self is an assumed experience of non-power, and, in this
sense, the fifth trait already sets in motion a synthetic recapitulation of the
experience of self as a passive non-dual experience. Through the affirmation
of non-freedom as refusal of a power that would be imposition of self on
others (on exteriority), it is the affirmation of a higher freedom that sketches
itself out, that of the interiorization of a finitude tied to the resistance of the
real which itself gives itself in the recurrent assertion of the reduction in all
freedom in Husserl, simply itself which results from the reiterated Eckhartian
affirmation of the impassibility of essence.47
It is time now to come to this global determination of essence as passivity
in M. Henrys works and to the soul as impassibility in Eckhart, a determina-
tion which recapitulates the five traits of which we spoke, which traverses
them through and through in their very utterance, and which gives an account
with intensity of the metaphysical experience in question.48 In the last phase
310 NATALIE DEPRAZ

of the analysis of 37,49 M. Henry takes up again the cardinal meaning of the
experience of self as passive experience by means of a double delimitation of
passivity by relation to 1) activity as mastery and responsibility,50 2) to pas-
sivity as reaction to an exterior reality.51 This passivity emerging from the
reciprocal limitation of activity and passivity gives itself literally as the radi-
cal experience of a power-lessness that is the origin of all power, but
constituitively escaping every structure of power. Thus, the idea-force
experience-force which traverses Eckhartian thought is precisely that of the
power of impassibility, which is not at all indifference which would lead
back to an unilateral interpretation in terms of contemplation, specifically, of
contempt for the world but vigilant welcome exceeding-oneself to the ex-
tent that the intensity of the welcome, of all desire, even of all passion,52 are
interiorized in the very welcome, rather than to the extent that they are elimi-
nated.53 The force derived from non-passion does not eradicate the passion,
but converts it by intensifying it, just as it does not reject action but valorizes
it as modest activity of vigilance to what is.
Can such an experience of powerlessness then still be said to be on-
tological? Is it not the radical antistrophe carried to all thought of being,
which determines itself traditionally in its intrinsic place with ability or
power? 54 There again, the Henryian and Eckhartian approaches con-
verge on a denial of ontology as the determining structure of the meta-
physical experience in question: the exit from the structure of power is
the exit from ontology.55 The relativization of being in the name of the
beautiful experience of re-nunciation [dis-being] of oneself is a con-
stant in the Eckhartian meditation on passivity.56 He is without propri-
ety, he who does not raise any kind of pretension neither on his own me
nor on what is outside of him. . . . The more this poverty is perfect and
disengaged, the more this possession is ours.57 To undo being in one-
self after having relativized all action understood as activism in oneself, is to
break with the omnipotence of the ego as ones own. Such a radical exercise
of renunciation agrees quite directly with the other contemporary
phenomenological perspectives,58 whether it be a matter of Levinas facing
the so-called Husserlian ego or facing the Heideggerian Being, or whether it
is a matter of Derrida facing the Heideggerian mineness, or even J.L. Marion
facing the residual Levinasian idolatry of the Other. Beyond the gnosological,
ontological, ethical, even deconstructive recoverings of this first experience
of becoming-naked as experience of the discovery of self, it is this core of
drastically desubstantialized passivity, where the constructed oppositions an-
nul themselves, that remains and makes sense, and which confers an undeni-
able eminence on the perspective sketched but by M. Henry since The Essence
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 311
of Manifestation.
In order to conclude this first reading of the work of 1963 via the Eckhartian
thread, let us remark that poverty comes again to ready the accomplishment
of the experience of passivity, itself integrative of the five traits mentioned:
A type of intensificating spiral movement makes of poverty at the same time
the initial threshold and the terminal threshold of the experience. These five
traits furnish the specific dimensions of the experience in question which one
can grasp under a synoptic form:
Among these traits, poverty and non-liberty correspond to the position of the
initial and terminal thresholds which form the spiraladic ring in question, and
disinterest and solitude are correlated to the reductive articulate core that

Five thresholds of experience:

poverty disinterest solitude simplicity (non-)freedom
structural epoche reduction temporality ethos
pre-dispostion suspension
Intensification

Integration:
passivity as
power of
powerlessness

constitutes the matrix of the experience. What remains is simplicity whose

specific temporalization we have begun to unveil. It is this trait that domi-
nates, to my understanding, the work of 1996, and which offers the later,
most fecund crystallization to the passive experience already freed.

II. The self-engendering of life and the temporality of antecedence

To crystalize, this could be either to rigidify a living experience, or to allow it

to attain that adamantine force in which its maturity shines forth, a finite
image of perfection. Cest moi, la vrit, by making the Johanic tenor of the
experience described since 1963 reemerge into full light, inevitably produces
this double effect whose ambiguity is the measure of the risk taken. But, it is
without a doubt by exposing oneself that one has the chance to unseal the
aporias deemed insurmountable. The work of 1996 situates itself on this
vertiginous path: its difficulties bear witness to the insight that works there.
Michel Henry and Meister Eckhart share the Johanic thought. It is there-
312 NATALIE DEPRAZ

fore on this common ground that one can address the status of the reference
to Eckhart in Cest moi, la vrit by connecting it to the appropriation
already worked out since 1963, and in order to evaluate the evolution of
and the differences between them. The mention of the Rhenians works do
not intervene except in chapter 6 of the itinerary, entitled Man as Son of
God, after M. Henry had closely taken up the interior and reciprocal
relation of the Father and the Son as a relation constituitive of the struc-
ture of non-manifested revelation.59 What is at the center is no longer the
internal relation puts into play man as the singular living being. M. Henry
approaches this second internal relation as that of the relation between the
Archi-Son engendered by the Archi-Son. There is therefore a double imma-
nent relation of engendering: 1) of the Son by the Father; 2) of the Sons by
the Archi-Son. In both cases, is it a matter of an self-engendering to the
degree that the Son engendered by the Father, as the Sons engendered by
the Archi-Son are already there in the Father in one way, in the Son in
another. Life is that structure of self-engendering which requires a specific
temporalization, connected to a singular mode of inter-subjectivation. 1)
The immanent relation of the Father and the Son redefines time by placing
at a distance irreversibility just as much as futurition: Time is an self-
generation originarily anticipated of the Son with the Father; the
intersubjectivity tied to this temporality is not, then, the encounter of an
exteriority nor even fusional empathy, but the co-generation, the interior
reversibility of the Father and the Son; 2) the immanent relation of the
Archi-Son to living human beings leads, we shall see, to an inter-
subjectivation which is co-singularization/ipseitization, and to a temporal-
ity reconceived as the arrival of a surprise originarily anticipated but never
fore-seen as such, as a singular un-expected.
These two relations, of co-appartenance and of co-dependence, are crys-
talized in the speculative expression of the Sons in the Son.
In this respect, Eckhart comes to the point under consideration: He of-
fers a support of intelligibility of the structure of self-engendering which
dynamises and consequently temporalizes that which the structure of self-
revelation could still have of being static, figurative, visual, that which the
structure of self-engendering could still contain of the formal.60 If, on this
basis, M. Henry can mobilize without difficulty the decisive concept of
self-affection by connecting it to the analyses and to the results of 1963, it is
here that he deploys a genetic sense of self-affection.61 The essential point of
the context of the reference to Eckhart is the bringing to light of the singular-
ity of the self as living transcendental Self: In as much as, in the self-
movement by which life does not cease in itself [en soi] and to experience
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 313
itself, an Ipseity and thereby a Self builds itself up, in as much as this experi-
encing of itself is an effective one, is necessarily this one, the Self engendered
in this self-movement of Life is also itself an effective one, it is necessarily this
or that, a singular self and by essence different from every other. Myself, I am
this singular self engendered in the self-engendering of absolute Life, and I am
only this.62
If the self is not at all particular but singular, it is that it derives its concrete
unicity from the absoluteness of Life: only the absolute is one, unique; only
the absolute is concrete, because it collects itself beginning at itself and with-
out being limited to the exterior; on the other hand, if Life is universal and
not general, it is because it receives its plenitude of efficacy from each self.
It is this relation in the form of a chiasm of self and life that M. Henry brings
back to Eckhart in two transposed statements whose internal variation pro-
duces the reciprocity of the chiasm: 1) Life self-engenders itself as myself.
If with Meister Eckhart and with Christianity one calls Life God, one will
say: God engenders himself as myself ;63 2) In such a way, life traverses
each of those whom it engenders in such a way that there is nothing in him
which is not living, and nothing either which does not contain in itself this
eternal essence of Life. Life engenders me as itself. If with Eckhart and
with Christianity one calls Life God, one will say: God engenders me as
himself. 64 Beyond the de-onto-theo-logizing substitution of God of Life,
which confers a phenomenologically metaphysical and no longer solely theo-
logical sense to the approach, what is in play here is the sudden variation on
one utterance for another: 1) Life self-engenders itself as myself; 2) Life
engenders me as itself. The first movement described is that of a
singularization, the second that of an universalization. In both cases, life is
the first mover of the movement in play; in the first, the singularity of me/self
presses its intensified density into the internal self-engendered movement of
life; in the second, the singular self is passively carried by life that traverses
each one. In both cases a passivity of the singular self is brought to light by
relation to life, which differentiates itself in ipseity, personalized, for it is
densified by life (as myself), and in flux, in the accusative, for it is carried
by life (life engenders me). Only the general structure of self-engendering
that M. Henry mobilizes beginning with the Eckhartian statements permits
the double and intimate close link of the singular living Self and Life to
appear, and this, in the name of a quest of singularity experienced in an
immanent way, against the abstraction of a Life thought as separated.
Other notions come to emphasize this temporalizing dynamic of the en-
gendering of self in life and of the engendering of life in each self, notably,
beyond generation, the notion of birth. For it is precisely on the occasion of
314 NATALIE DEPRAZ

an analysis of birth as second birth that the second reference to Eckhart

appears. The leading thread of the interrogation carried by this reference is
the following: In what sense can the second birth, such as it is thematized by
Eckhart,65 and such as it is taken up again by M. Henry,66 be said to be a
transcendental birth?67
This connection between second birth and transcendental birth is ex-
plicitly assumed by M. Henry at the end of Chapter 8, which opens
precisely on the chapter dedicated to The second birth (Chapter 9),
and where the culminating reference to Eckhart finally appears: if it is
true that in his transcendental birth he has not come in-himself except
within the proper coming in-self of absolute life would this not be to
born a second time? But can man be born a second time?68 In order to
understand this the re-explanation of the problematic of self-engender-
ing of life, it is fitting to tie together two references with which M. Henry
converses with a doubled proximity of a distance: 1) Husserl; 2) Saint
John in the mirror of Eckhart.

1. The possibility of transcendental birth is assured from a strictly

Husserlian point of view after one sets to work the reduction of the Krper
to Leib, and that this reduction be deployed in an originarily intersubjective
mode where the other makes my body appear to myself as lived body incar-
nated in the same moment when I reveal to the other his corporeity as flesh.
Transcendental birth is then, in a constitutive manner, an inter-subjective
birth, literally a co-birth of one to the other, of thou to me.69 This transcen-
dental co-birth is approached by Husserl, in one place at least, as a second
birth (Zweite Geburt), in the sense that it is not a matter of the single natu-
ral, empirical, or biological birth, but of a lived birth, or better, co-lived
which can deploy itself without founding itself on the first: This birth is
second in the order of appearing, it is second while being completely primor-
dial since its lived dimension makes a phenomenon possible for me, that
which cannot be the first birth, of a biological order. The second birth can in
effect make the object of an self-apparition to myself.70

2. The metaphysical theme of the second birth is found formulated in the

first place in the Johanian utterance, taken up at a dedicated to the second
birth: It is the anguished question of Nicodemus when he holds his noctur-
nal conversation with Christ: How can a man be born when he is old? Can
he enter a second time into his mothers womb and be born again? (John,
3:4).71 It emerges from this interrogation that the second birth is not a bio-
logical birth, strictly corporeal in the organic sense. This point is radicalized
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 315
by Eckhart in the thematic of non-birth, which is not, as for the gnostic
Marcion, a negation of birth, but on being born, but on the contrary sets in
motion a novel temporality, forever being born incessantly,72 which founds
itself precisely on the rejection of biological birth as an unique and
unreiteratable event. For it is precisely this reference to Eckhart that M.
Henry takes up in his turn with respect to the Son understood as the Archi-
Son: He has found again the Power from which he is born and which itself
is not born. He is born a second time. In this second birth he has rediscovered
the life in such a way that from then on he will no longer be born, and it is
true to say that in this sense he is non-born (Meister Eckhart, Trait et
sermons, op. cit., p. 258).73
Thus, the common structure that phenomenology and metaphysics liberate
by converging on each other is one of a reiterable (because incessant) tempo-
rality of the engendering of oneself, of which the metaphysical theme, of the
second birth of course (not as a gnostic negation of birth), supplies the pre-
liminary, of which the phenomenological experience of transcendental birth
offers a methodical experiential structuration. Transcendental birth comes
then to proffer a concrete tenor to temporalization as a form of an intrinsic
self- and co-generation: the incessant being born to oneself makes of the
general form of self-anticipation a tangible experience of renewal of self by
the welcome of the un-expected, always possible at each instant.
It remains at the present and this is not the least of the tasks to connect
the experience of non-dual passivity, whose five traits we have taken up, to
this concrete temporality of self-antecedence. Only an elucidation of
self-affection will be able to procure such a phenomenological connecting.

III. The intensification of knowledge by affect

It is fitting at the present to return to The Essence of Manifestation where

one finds exposed, in the third part of the work, the thesis of self-affection.
We will take up this re-reading beginning with the paragraphs this time
explicitly dedicated to Eckhart, situated at the end of the third part.74
The knot of the interrogation can be formulated in this way: Is there
an incompatibility between the Henryian primacy of self-affection and
the Eckhartian highlighting of intelligence?75 In other words, is it a matter of
two different mysticisms, one affective, and one speculative?76 While this
differentiation may be pedagogically useful and theologically necessary, it
will be incumbent on us to show how, on the plane of a phenomenological
metaphysics, the distinction of affect and knowledge is avowed to be factical.
316 NATALIE DEPRAZ

Before approaching this point, which touches on 40, let us stick to the
paragraph that precedes it, and resituates for the first time the Eckhartian
perspective in that of M. Henry. On a plane less phenomenal (as in 37) than
structural, the author works to disengage the grand phenomenological axes
of the Eckhartian work. What is found specified there, eight times, are the
different modalities of a re-taking up of Eckhart that clearly operates by be-
ginning with the distinction between theology and metaphysics. The knot
of them is without any doubt the distinction between God and the God-
head.77 In effect, the Godhead is the passive and non-formal essence of
God, which, as active, resorts to theology or traditional metaphysics78
(we read: onto-theo-logy); it is the proper foundation of God, his inti-
mate experience. The other points order themselves there, up to the point
of echoing the three questions in respect of which the Rhenian Master
was judged heretical and condemned at Avignon: 1) creation; 2) the
identity of essence between the soul and God; 3) the refusal of exterior
works. In fact, 39 is deployed as a strictly transcendental movement of
seeking the conditions of the possibility via their implication of I. The
ontological identity of the essence of the soul and God (pp. 309312); II:
conditions of this identity, where love sees itself relativized in favor of
denudement understood as poverty and humility at the same time (pp. 312
315); III: the structure beneath identity: the articulated immanence of the
divine absolute, where the essence is the non-formal foundation (pp. 314
317); IV: unity as indifference to difference (pp. 318319); V: the virginal
birth as temporality of antecedence, according to the mixed model of crea-
tion as preexistence (Thomas, Eckhart) and as genesis of the Word (Scottus
Erugina) (pp. 319320); VI: distinction between God and the Godhead, the
heart of the argument (pp. 320322); VII: the non-dual unity as condition for
the possibility of identity (pp. 322324); VIII: passivity as fullness and sweet-
ness, absence of desire and of will, which phenomenalizes the complete struc-
ture into a full circle (pp. 324326).
Beginning here, one can make the community of thought between Eckhart
and Henry in relation to knowledge appear.79 Two classic traits of knowledge
are put out of play by each other: 1) representation; 2) exteriorization. In
phenomenological terms, one remains subjectivist, the other objectifying.
Both of them are without a doubt necessary as preparatory supports for knowl-
edge in the strict sense, but both of them remain extremely limited. In order
better to discern the strong sense in question, it is the Johanian reference that
serves as the essential mediation. In John, knowledge is essentially life. But,
for Eckhart, the purest knowledge is apprehended as the taste of God, in
conformity with an entire theological tradition that finds, in Gregory of Nysa
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 317
for example, one of its eminent representatives.80 Pure knowledge is pas-
sive knowledge before cognoscibility: the soul tastes God himself as he
was before he ever took upon himself the forms of truth and knowledge. 81
The privileged knowledge is therefore affective knowledge, knowledge of
the heart and not of the rational mental: nothing gets to him [man] without
. . . going through Gods sweetness.82 If man is essentially one who knows,
that is, in the Eckhartian terms taken up by M. Henry a theognostic [ein
Gottwissender Mensch],83 this knowledge puts into play the deepest affective
fibers of man, that is, a grace whose taste is the first vibration. It is in this
way that the phenomenologist can take up in his turn the Eckhartian distinc-
tion between twilight knowledge by images, representative and discur-
sive and daybreak knowledge, which proceeds from a perception of
God in his own taste.84
This is to bring to light an affective sensibility of a quality such that it
pricks the senses themselves: the perception purifies itself in gustation, vi-
sion goes back to the source of the most penetrating vision. The agent
which makes us conscious of seeing should rank above the agent of
vision itself, affirms Eckhart, as M. Henry cites.85
Here is then the deep signification of the critique of consciousness in
Eckharts works:86 to liberate in the last moment a purified form of
knowledge which frees us from God. I pray God to liberate me from
God, for my essential being is above God. A radically de-onto-theo-
logising movement of the Eckhartian metaphysics that disrupts God as
notion or concept in favor of his intimate experiential approach, an ap-
proach whose first phenomenological basis remains precisely the affec-
tive structure of taste of God. Ultimately, the renunciation of all knowledge
as absolute loss of oneself, that which one has been able to call learned
ignorance or annihilation of self87 defines the radical phenomenological
experience, its secret basis,88 where the experience of life proceeds
from an essential disposition of becoming-naked.
To conclude, one can take up again the principal traits of the experi-
ence freed in this way by M. Henry:

1. a passivity which dis-engages the factical opposition of activity and

passivity by highlighting its non-duality. The acme of this is formalized
in the oxymoronic structure of paradox and finds its ultimate point of intelli-
gibility in the power of impassible detachment.

2. a temporality formally structured as self-antecedence of oneself and inces-

sant and always surprising reiterability of the event of birth to the self as
318 NATALIE DEPRAZ

mobile and inexhaustible superabundance.

Passivity and temporality are seen to be renewed through this in their
phenomenological structuration, by the intercession of intersubjectivity
founded anew, as co-generation, and effectuated in self-affection itself
This is deployed in a final way as an act of knowledge which is a know-
ing, and whose ethical virtue emerges from a vigilant welcome, emotion-
ally tinted, in an undissasociable manner, as co-suffering and co-enjoyment.

Notes

1. D. Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976, p.
91:LXII Conversation with Husserl, 27/6/1932: Husserl spoke of mysticism. Every
genuine evidence has its right. The question is always of the Tragweite <range, scope>
of any given evidence. This applies also to the particular evidence the mystic has.
Whole pages of Meister Eckhart, Husserl said, could be taken over by him unchanged.
He doubts however the practical sufficiency of mysticism. The awakening from the
mystical experience is likely to be a rude one. On the other hand the insight into the
rationality of the world which one gains through true scientific investigation remains
through all future experience. The difference is furthermore, one between passive
enjoyment and work. The mystic neglects work. Both are necessary.
As every evidence has its right, the proper attitude toward religion is tolerance
towards all genuine religion. See also, regarding the relation between mystical cer-
tainty and phenomenological certainty, Ms. A VI 10.
2. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.,
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, David Carr trans. finds a surprising
anticipation of this formulation in the sermon of Eckhart consecrated to detachment:
perfect humility curves itself underneath all creatures by which man leaves it
towards the creature; but detachment remains in himself. For, however remarkable
such an exit from oneself might be, to remain in oneself is, however, something even
greater Matre Eckhart, Sermons-Traits, Paris: Galimard, 1942, 1987 (for the pref-
ace of J.-P. Lombard, p. 20).
3. M. Heidegger, Phnomenologie des religisen Lebens, Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, GA 60, 1995, pp. 315318. Cf. on this point, J. Caputo, The Mystical
Element in Heideggers Thought, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Cf. also the
Beitrge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (manuscript from the years 19368), GA
65, Frankfurt: Klosteman, 1989.
4. Op. cit., p. 315. Such is the title of the paragraphs dedicated to Meister Eckhart:
Irrationality in Eckharts works.
5. Op. cit., pp. 315316.
6. Op. cit., pp. 315, 318.
7. Op. cit., p. 316.
8. Op. cit., p. 318.
9. Ibid.
10. Regarding such critiques, cf. in those which concern Husserl, A. Diemer, Die
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 319
Phnomenologie und die Idee der Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft, in Zeitschrift
fr philosophische Forschung, 1959, vol. XIII, 2 and A.L. Kelkel, Rflexions
husserliennes, Etude philosophiques, 1959, no. 4. Cf. also our clarification of the
meaning to accord to the expression of phenomenological metaphysics:
Mtaphysique scientifique et empirisme transcendental, given in the course of the
doctoral seminar of M. Haar in February 1996, published in Epoch.
11. Cf. L. Landgrebe, Phnomepologie und Metaphysik, J. Wahl, Trait de mtaphysique,
et G. Vallin, La perspective mtaphysique.
12. Philosophie et phnomnologie du corps chez Maine de Birain, Paris, P.U.F., 1965.
13. Gnalogie de la psychanlyse, Paris, P.U.F., 1985.
14. The Essence of Manifestation, The Hague, Nijhoff, trans. Girard Etzkorn, p. 309. In
the last bit of 38, which opens on the paragraphs expressly dedicated to Eckhart, M.
Henry expresses himself in this way: Such an understanding, which is identically
that of the internal structure of immanence and of the original essence of revelation
. . . is hardly ever encountered in history unless, however, it is found in an excep-
tional thinker whom they used to call, and with good reason, a master: Eckhart.
15. Op. cit., Section III, 39, 40, and 49, pp. 309326, 326335, 424-437 respec-
tively.
16. Op. cit., p. 285. Implied in this positivity as constituting it is the relation of the
essence with itself. It is a relation such that in it the essence rejoices concerning itself,
has the experience of itself, reveals itself to itself in that which it is, such as it is. That
which has the experience of self, that which enjoys itself and is nothing other than
this pure enjoyment of itself, than this pure experience of self, is life.
17. Cest moi la vrit, Pour une philosophie du Christianism. Paris, Seuil, 1996.
18. Op. cit., Chapter 6.: Lhomtne en tant que Fils de Dieu, pp. 132133; Chapter 9:
La seconde naissance, p. 214.
19. M. Henry refers to the edition which appeared from Aubier in 1942, end entitled
Traits et sermons, in the translation of F.A and J.M. (Reference of The Essence of
Manifestation, op. cit., p. VIII) or of M. de Gandilac (Reference of Cest moi la vrit,
op. cit., p. 132); We ourselves refer to the edition which appeared in the translation of
Paul Petit from Gallimard, also in 1942, but which was not printed at that time (reed.
In 1987). We have not consulted the Latin Sermons, and for two correlative reasons:
1) Our current of analysis is here the Henryian reading of Eckhart, not Eckhart for
himself; 2) we opt for a non-Scholastic reading of the Rhenian, at work in the Ger-
man texts more than in the Latin corpus. In this light, we take for ourselves the
formula of R. Schrmann: If the Latin work places the beacons on the route, the
German work is compatible with the procession. (ST, p. IV). Nevertheless, one can
refer to the complete German edition, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, Stutt-
gart, Kohlhammer (since 1954), as well as to the works of the CNRS group, who,
under the direction of F. Brunner, are working on a complete French edition. [Trans-
lators note: there are several English translations of Eckharts works, some being of
selections only, and there is some degree of controversy as to the faithfulness of
certain translations. The most complete edition, that of C. de B. Evans (Meister Eckhart,
London: John M. Watkins, 1924), has been superseded in part by the recent transla-
tion by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Ser-
mons. Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, New York: Paulist Press, 1981. Since
the significance of the citations of Eckhart is their meaning within the work of M.
320 NATALIE DEPRAZ

Henry, we retain the citations of the French sources and add, where possible, English
sources.]
20. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit. 37, p. 281.
21. To turn oneself away from the object in order to return towards the act which aims at
it (sich umkehren) is the very paradigm of the Husserlian reductive gesture.
22. Leading back (Rckfhren) of the being to Being is the proprium of the Heideggerian
reductive gesture.
23. To undo the Said in order to make the Saying arrive, or further to ruin the represen-
tation in order to free the epiphany of the face is another way of practicing the reduc-
tion, according to accents closer to uncloaking (Abbau) of idealities in the Crisis or
of Heideggerian destruction (Destruktion) of metaphysics.
24. Du dtachement (Von der Abgeschiedenheit), op. cit. p. 20. On Detachment
Colledge and McGinn translation, pp. 285294.
25. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., pp. 281282.
26. Op. cit., p. 284.
27. Op. cit., pp. 284285.
28. Op. cit., pp. 285286.
29. Op. cit., pp. 291293.
30. Op. cit., p. 282.
31. ST, p. 137. Evans translation, pp. 217221, Colledge and McGinn translation, pp. 199
203. Like Detachment, Beati pauperes spiritu is considered by some as inauthentic.
But, it is remarkable that these two attitudes, detached and poor, form precisely for M.
Henry the matrix of the general disposition to welcome the metaphysical experience in
question: 1) the radical gesture of reduction is structurally homogenous to Eckhartian
detachment; 2) the attitude of poverty is announced in a manner princeps: in that re-
spect, it is cardinal.
32. . . . anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life
withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all
the sciences that up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom [sagesse]
is the philosophers quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self
acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can an-
swer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights. If
I have decided to live with this as my aim the decision that alone can start me on the
course of a philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian
Meditatations, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Trans. Dorion Cairns. [Translators note: the French,
as N. Depraz cites it, has jai donc par la mme fait le vu de pauvret en matire de
connaissance.]
33. ST, p. 138. Colledge and McGinn translation, p. 202.
34. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., p. 282.
35. Op. cit., p. 284.
36. ST. Du dtachement, pp. 2123, where impassibility is defined as this pure noth-
ing which is, not void, but fullness. Evans translation, Detachment, pp. 340348,
Colledge and McGinn translation, On Detachment, pp. 291292.
37. Cf. First Philosophy II of Husserl and the Sixth Cartesian Mediation of Fink.
38. Cf. with respect to the functioning of the paradox in Eckhart and, more generally, in
mystical thought, J. Zap, Die Funktion der Paradoxie im Denken und sprachlichen
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 321
Ausdruck bei Meister Eckhart, Cologne, 1966, and M.A. Sallis, Mystical Languages
of Unsaying, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994. Cf. as well the
homologous role of the oxymoron in Gregory of Nysa, with the commentaries of J.
Danilou in Platonisme et thologie mystique, Paris: Aubier, 1944. One can think that
the experience of non-duality expresses itself most precisely in the figures of para-
dox and of oxymoron.
39. Op. cit., p. 284.
40. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 184, where
Husserl attacks solitude as returning to the source of plurality and by thematizing the
positively paradoxical structure. The epoche creates an unique sort of philosophical
solitude which is the fundamental requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this
solitude, I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from
the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by
accident, as in a shipwreck, but nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that soci-
ety. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total, community of co-subjects
in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the per-
sonal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privi-
lege of the I-the-man-among-other-men.
41. ST. De la naissance temelle, II; De la perfection de lme, pp. 6872 and 73
79, and Des deux chemins, where the relation of powers and essence as relation of
an internal motive plurality of essence is analyzed in a recurrent manner. Evans trans-
lations, The Eternal Birth, pp. 2025, The Souls Perfection, pp. 306308, and
The Twofold Way, pp. 390396.
42. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., pp. 289290.
43. Op cit., pp. 286289.
44. Op. cit., p. 289.
45. ST, pp. 13, 36, 68. Evans translation, pp. 306, 320. [Translators note. No sermon or
tractate corresponding in title to On Accomplishment is to be found in either Eng-
lish translation.]
46. Op. cit., p. 292.
47. Op. cit., p. 187: . . . To learn how one can effectively keep ones interior free.
48. In respect to this paradoxical structure of the phenomenological experience where
power experiences itself as impassible passivity, cf. our Phenomenological reduc-
tion and the political, Husserl Studies, Vol. 12 no. 1, 1995.
49. Op. cit., pp. 281298.
50. Op. cit., p. 294. Here in the internal structure of the original essence of revelation,
interior to the original relationship of Being to itself, all domination, every faculty of
acting or effecting, everything which habitually presents itself as the foundation of a
responsibility of imputability, as an origin or a cause, every possibility of assuming
and of taking an attitude, all cease.
51. Op. cit. p. 294: First of all, passivity could not designate, as Descartes wanted, the
action of a foreign reality. . . . Thus a radically incorrect, even though traditional,
understanding is cast aside according to which passivity, within its own relationship,
is necessarily extended to something other than itself which is imposed on it, given,
and with regard to which it henceforth determines itself, in the fact of being af-
fected by something else, in order to be what it is, namely passive.
52. Without a doubt, this line of force is not absolutely proper to Eckhart, to the degree
322 NATALIE DEPRAZ

that it forms the privileged relief of a number of spiritual traditions. All the same, it is
found there with an unaccustomed intensity.
53. ST, Du dtachement, p. 22: Now you may ask what detachment is since it is in
itself so excellent. Here you should know that true detachment is nothing else than
for the spirit to stand as immovable against whatever may chance to it of joy and
sorrow, honor, shame and disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands before a little breath
of wind Colledge and McGinn Translation, p. 288; De la naissance temelle, p.
51: Your suffering [is] your highest acting; De la perfection de lme, p. 77:
His powerlessness is precisely his greatest power; De la sortie de lesprit et de son
retour chez lui, p. 118: God works, the God head does no work, there is nothing to
do; in it is no activity. It has never envisaged any work. God and Godhead are as
different as active and inactive. Evans translation, pp.143, 194 finally: to be active
in inaction.
54. It suffices here for our purposes to mention the decisive character of the attribute of
omnipotence in the Cartesian understanding of God. Cf. regarding this J.L. Marion,
Sur la thologie blanche de Descartes, Paris, P.U.F., 1981.
55. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., pp. 297298.
56. ST. Comme une toile du matin, pp. 124125; Du ds-istement de soi-mme,
pp. 193196. Evans translation pp. 210214, 238241; in this respect the Levinasian
analysis of the passivity of the face of the other exposed to and as theft of myself
corresponds equally to such an attempt of de-ontologization, but it rests upon, con-
trary to M. Henry, a first Ethics; Heidegger himself has without any doubt opened the
way in this sense, with all of the difficulties connected to the remaining complicity of
the onto-theo-logic theme with fundamental ontology itself. The works of A. de Libera,
notably, have already largely shown the non-onto-theo-logic character of Eckhartian
metaphysics. (cf. Matre Eckhart Paris, une critique mdivale de 1onto-tho-logie,
coll. CNRS, Paris, P.U.F, 1984.)
57. ST. p. 196.
58. As with the Asian traditions. Cf. the work of Rudolf Otto on Eckhart and Shankara
entitled West-stliche Mystik, Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung, Gotha,
Leopold Klotz Verlag, 1929, as well as that of Ueda Shizuteru, Die Gottesggburt in
dem Durchbruch zur Gottheit. Die Mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und
ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus, Gtersloh, Mohn, 1965. See
finally our article Le spectateur phnomnologisant: au seuil du non-tre at du
non-agir, in Actes du Colloque Eugen Fink de Cerisy-la-salle (2330 July, 1994)
(N. Depraz and M. Richir, eds.) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.
59. Cest moi, la vrit, op. cit., chapter 5, pp. 9899: Before Abraham came to be, I
am (John, 8, 58), p. 98; The reason of the radical Before, of the non-temporal
Before of Christ, is Christ himself who gives it in the language of phenomenological
apodicticity: . . . Because thou hast loved me before the Creation of the world. . .
(John, 17, 24); . . . And now do thou, Father, glorify me with thyself, with the glory
that I had with thee before the world existed. (John, 17, 5) (emphasis Deprazs), p.
99. [Translators note: a translation, on my part, of Henry, with the exception of the
Scriptural quotes, these taken from the Confraternity Edition.]
60. Certainly, since 1963, the structure of internal revelation is already apprehended as
engendering of the Son by the Father, but, it is true, in a still static mode (Op. cit.,
40, pp. 332335).
 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 323
61. Op. cit., p. 133: Let us introduce then a decisive concept, which would have had to
be earlier, in as much as it governs the philosophical intelligence of the essence of
life, the concept of self-affection.
62. Op. cit., p. 132.
63. Op. cit., pp. 132133.
64. Op. cit., p. 133.
65. ST. pp. 3940 (with respect to the second birth as incessant birth of the soul in God).
Cf. P. Gire, Mtaphysique, thologie, et mystique chez Matre Eckhart, in Penser la
religion (J. Greisch, ed.), Paris, Beauschne, 1991, p. 94, n.34.
66. Cest moi. la vrit, op. cit., chapter 6, p. 133.
67. Originally an Husserlian expression. Cf. on this point N. Dipnes, Natre soi-mme,
Alter no. 1, 1993.
68. Cest moi la vrit, Op. cit., p. 191.
69. Cf. N. Depraz, Transcandence et incarnation, le statut de lintersubjectivit comme
altrit soi, Paris, Vrin, 1995, chapter V.
70. Hua XIV, no. 1 (Summer Semester 1921) p. 6 This alien flesh, as given in exteriority
and given in this as according to a first birth as an external thing, must therefore be
before all translated, that is, must experience a second birth in the conception as
flesh, flesh constituted in interiority and leading with itself an entire interiority of
consciousness and an ego, as completing itself thereby as an animal and human
being.
71. Cest moi, la vrit, op. cit., p. 191.
72. ST. De la naissance ternelle, pp. 36 and 39; Le livre de la consolation, p. 202:
Le non-n donnant naissance. Evans translation, pp. 2025, 308312.
73. Cest moi la vrit, op. cit., p. 214.
74. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., 39, 40 and 49.
75. Regarding the divine noetic in Eckharts works, see P. Gire, art. cit., p. 88 sq.
76. M. Henry uses the term mystic twice with regard to Eckhart, and in a sense that is
both fully positive and non-naive, since he lends him quotation marks. That is to
say that our author takes the term mystic in a non-strictly religious sense, but rather
properly metaphysical: Is not the radical stripping of man, understood as the con-
dition for the presence of god in him, the fundamental theme and at the same time
the final meaning of the mystique of Eckhart? (The Essence of Manifestation,
op. cit., 39, p. 312); To those who would condemn him as if, duped by his enthu-
siasm and also perhaps by his love, Eckhart had, in his claim of identifying crea-
ture with god, as it were exaggerated the feelings and ideas which suggested
themselves to his mystical soul, there would be lacking only one thing, the under-
standing of his thought. (Op. cit., p. 319). With respect to the relation between
mysticism and metaphysics. See S. Breton, Mtaphysique et mystique chez Matre
Echkhart, in Recherches des sciences religieuses, Vol. 64, 1976, as well as P. Gire,
art. cit.
77. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., 39, pp. 320323.
78. Op. cit., p. 321.
79. Op. cit., 41.
80. Gregory of Nysa, Treatiste on Virginity, and J. Danilou, Platonisme et thologie
mystique, Doctrine spirituelle de Grgoire de Nysse, Paris: Aubier, 1944.
81. Eckhart (T, 131) cited by M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., p. 328.
324 NATALIE DEPRAZ

82. Eckhart (T, 131) cited by M. Henry, op. cit. , p. 329.

83. Op. cit., p. 329.
84. Op. cit., p. 330.
85. Op. cit., p. 331.
86. Op. cit., 49.
87. Cf. the Sermon entitled Paul rose from the Ground (Surexit Saulus de Terra): Paul
rose from the ground wide-eyed, beholding nothing. I cannot see what is one. He
saw nothing, to wit, God. Evans translation, p. 62. See as well regarding this, R.
Schnman, Matre Eckhart ou la joic errante, Paris: Denel, 1972, and M.A. Sells,
Mystical Language of Unsaying, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press,
1994, which begins its analysis precisely by the Eckharts apparently paradoxical
phrase cited above.
88. The Essence of Manifestation, op. cit., p. 459.