1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 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 on 3 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 Biran 12 or Schopenhauer 13 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 mystic 15 in order to give all of his 305 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 307 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 soul 36 308 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 309 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 311 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 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- 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 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 313 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 315 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 metaphysics 78 (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 317 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 self 87 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 319 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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 321 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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). 323 SEEKING A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS 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.