The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

9. A Flesh for Rebirth

  A Flesh for Rebirth The “knowing [con-naissance] of God,” rather than the eternal (John :), leadsus,then,toaskaboutourownbirths—ourspiritualbirth,ofcourse,but also our bodily birth. I myself can relate to my own birth today (a) through my consciousness (given my difficulty in being born), and (b) through my body (given the impossibility of my not having been born). (a) First of all, in my consciousness, and in what language tends to speak of as an absence. In a certain way I was not there, or at least I have the impression of not having been there. My birth, however, is the originary event of my life—from which all my life stems. Nothing remains consciously of what happened, and yet I really did go through it, because I was born. But I can’t ever relate to my passage through my birth except in terms of the past. How then can I speak about it, given the gap that is my quasi-absence during this event from which I issue? (b) Next, by my body, where “speechless experience” forces me to recognize that in, terms of the flesh, I was in some fashion present. Not this time because I know it, but undoubtedly because I feel it. The flesh that constituted me as an infant—in-fans, or without speech (in-fari)—is in fact that same flesh through which I silently elaborate a world, or rather my world. It’s perhaps best just to get on with it, to let it be, this flesh of a human being—given that it is through this body that, without speech, I relate to the world—before all selfhood and yet as the foundation of my  ■ Phenomenology of the Resurrection subjectivity: “We were all infants before we became adults.” To be born is thus to carry in one’s body the actual evidence of the act of birth. And what is true of birth is even truer of the resurrection. I do not know what has been, but I know in the past, in part at least, that I have been through it, when I see myself “born again” or discover myself transformed (consciousness). Moreover, I feel in the present what took place then, not because I speak it but because since this rebirth I set up the world (the body) differently and silently: “Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord” (John :). In our argument so far we have seen how the “world become other” (chapter ), through the metamorphosis of God and of man in him (part II), necessitates a return to the “impassable immanence” of a world without God (chapter ). It was the passage “from time to eternity” (chapter ) that permitted us to pass through that closure that goes “from time to time” (chapter ). The “flesh for rebirth” (chapter ), which suggests that the key question is that of the transfiguration of human beings rather than of the world or time, now brings us to ask again about the “supposed drama of atheist humanism” (chapter ). Not that we found we had to deny the necessary solidity of mankind without God, whether we were talking of the “death of God” or the “death of Christianity” (§). Nor that we needed to return to the disdain of “atheism as seen by the theologian,” which continues to refuse to admit that one could “see otherwise” (§). And again it is not that “the refusal of a ‘why’” makes us think that the believer relaxes on a “soft pillow” of certitude while the atheist remains always in uncertainty (§). It is rather, simply, that the “rebirth (of the flesh)” opens up this time onto another way of being “born to oneself”— or, better, of accepting one’s self, first in terms of consciousness (§), next by the flesh (§), and finally in glory (§).§. Birth and Rebirth The phenomenology of the communion with saints in our Christian relation to the world (§), and the phenomenology of joy in the believer’s relation to time (§), now leads us to a phenomenology of birth, as a way of talking about our resurrected relation to mankind in general as well as to ourselves—as much through our own consciousness (§) as through our own bodies (§). For, we should remember, following in this the precept of Jesus to Nicodemus, we are not “born from on high” except in the way in which we are “born from below”—following an analogic, and not a...