Page 11 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 64

we are talking about, we will ?nd it surprisingly evanescent … always receding
from our sight.4 If we focus on that which we can see, looking at things as they
show themselves in this world, we don’t in fact see life. We can look at living
beings, living organisms, but we don’t see the life in them. And when we try to
do so, we end up examining things that appear, that show themselves: neurons,
electric currents, amino acids, cells, chemical properties, all the things with
which biology deals—everything apart from life itself.

With our attention focused on things as they appear in this world, life
simply becomes the lowest common denominator, applying not only to human
beings, but also to protozoa and bees—as if such things can tell us what life is!
If we want to say, yes, such things are living beings, but human beings are more
than that, then we would probably say, following a tradition that goes back to
the beginning of human thought this, that human beings are more than living
beings, that humans are living beings endowed with logos, with reason and lan-
guage, and today we would no doubt add creativity, being in relationship, and
that hold a ?ourishing human life means the enjoyment of all this and more.

Thinking we know what life is—that which we already live—when we
hear Christ saying that he has come that we might have life and have it abun-
dantly (John 10:10), we risk thinking that Christ has come so that we might
have more of what we already have, that our de?nition of a ?ourishing human
life is already su?cient, though perhaps needing to be tweaked a little bit, to
make it more moral or ethical (according to our dictates of what we think is
moral) and we will probably fall into thinking that eternal life will be a con-
tinuation of the kind of life that we think we now live—that which we give so
much of our time to supporting—but now set free from all the worries that
beset us daily in the struggle for survival, so that we can ?nally enjoy, unbur-
dened, all that we have.

But if we take this path, to accept this de?nition of life—as the lowest
common denominator for all living beings—and that we humans are more than
simple living beings, having further dignity in all those things in which we pride
ourselves, then we would also have to say that life is less than human, or even
stronger, that life is inhuman. This is not, however, how Christ speaks, the
Christ who says: “I am life” (John 11:25, 14:6); the one who speaks of others as

4 Mark See esp. Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans., Susan
Emanuel (Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 2003). Cf. Christina M. Gschwandtner,
“How do we become fully alive?: The Role of Death in Henry’s Phenomenology of Life,” in Behr
and Cunningham, ed. The Role of Life in Death.

9