Continental Philosophy Review (2023) 56:505–516

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09623-1

God becoming flesh, flesh becoming divine

Luce Irigaray1

Published online: 24 November 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023

Abstract
What could be the meaning of Christianity on this side or beyond its most tradi-
tional transmission? This paper suggests that it could be an invitation to deify our
flesh instead of despising it. Indeed, the God of Christianity does not remain out of
our physical reach but is incarnate in a human body as a sensitive transcendence liv-
ing among us on this Earth. One of the main challenges for Christians is thus how
to care for, transform, transfigure, resurrect and share their bodies, leading them
from mere somas or corpses to divine fleshes. Jesus gives many examples of such a
behavior towards the body(ies). However, those who are presumed to represent him
and ensure his inheritance neither take into account nor pass on, at least sufficiently,
this crucial aspect of his teaching, and in reality, Eastern traditions introduce us
more to cultivating our sensory perceptions and spiritualizing our bodies. Another
Christian path ought to be the respect for the transcendence of the other as naturally
different, therefore an education of our sexuate belonging, to pave the way towards
the respect for an absolute sensitive transcendence. A surprising thing in the life of
Jesus is also the continual presence of nature, nature as cosmos but also nature that
humans are and share. Nature, which is generally viewed as a major component
in pagan cults, is the most constant factor in the incarnation of the Christian God
and in Jesus’s way of speaking and acting. Now, nature can be shared by all as the
teaching of Jesus and his commandment regarding love, which makes Christianity
a potentially democratic religion capable of crossing cultural boundaries. They are
thus elements in a Christlike legacy which deserve to be considered, as well as
arts and culture that it has inspired, before giving it up to the benefit of sciences,
technique and a life without an absolute sensitive transcendence to which we can
resort in our developing and flowering as human beings.

Keywords Incarnation · Sensitive transcendence · To/the touch · To commune-

communion · Love

Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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1 Introduction

I was born in Europe, where the religion of major importance is Christianity. The
world into which I went and in which I lived was constructed from a thinking, an eth-
ics and an art of Christian inspiration. My environment included monuments, sculp-
tures, images, music and discourses in relation to Christianity. And the culture in
which I was immersed, in addition to strictly religious texts such as the Old and the
New Testaments, was comprised of theologians, philosophers, writers and poets who
were Christian. My subjectivity, my cultural and relational life and their background
were thus impregnated with Christianity from the very beginning.
Behaving as if all that had not existed would not really be serious. Instead, think-
ing about that, trying to understand it historically, interpreting its impact, notably on
philosophy, and more generally on my/our being(s), and bringing out the irreducible
truth that it conveys, shows consideration for my tradition. But it is also suitable
to question the validity of the Christian message, notably in comparison with other
traditions, given that religion is a dimension which is present in almost all cultures
and corresponds to a stage in the becoming of human individual and collective needs
and desires.

2 Questioning the historical interpretation of Christianity

In Christianity, God is generally viewed as what a culture in the masculine consid-

ers to be the best—that is, the most mental, abstract, meta-physical and out of our
reach as humans. And yet if God is presumed to represent the absolute for all of us,
God cannot amount to that but must correspond to our comprehensive being(s). This
seems to be the meaning of incarnation. But Jesus has not been acknowledged as both
human and divine. Hence his being sentenced to death. Hence also the fact that the
longing of mystics for relating to God as a sensitive presence came up against great
suffering instead of giving access to a more absolute blossoming.
The God who is historically ours as Westerners has fewer and fewer followers.
This does not mean that an aspiration after the divine no longer exists for our contem-
poraries, at least from those who aim at a blossoming that sciences and technology
cannot provide for them, those who want humanity to clear the path of a becoming
still to happen, those who hope that the living world is not condemned to disappear
in the near future.
Thus, there is perhaps another possible interpretation of what or whom is des-
ignated as God, an interpretation still to be discovered and to which our evolution
would bring us closer to the positive that it concealed instead of removing us from it.
For what can we appeal to God today? Why can we still have faith in God? Perhaps
the preliminary question about which we must wonder is: For what are we still wait-
ing? What or whom do we want to become? What positive evolution do we will to
achieve? God must represent a potential not yet reached, a supplement with respect
to what or whom we already are and a resource to go beyond.
God cannot be the one whom we imagine from what we already know, even if it
is the best. God is a beyond still to be unveiled and who cannot prevent us from aim-

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ing at it if this contributes to the achievement of our own potential. Therefore, God
cannot persuade us not to inhabit our body being still beyond its perfect blossoming.
At least it is so if we perceive and treat our body as living and not as an inanimate
matter, a sort of corpse that the spirit drags about as a dead weight to be left as soon
as possible.
From such a standpoint, Christianity is particularly concerned. God became flesh,
not a mere soma or corpse, but flesh, that is, according to me, a body animated by
breath, desire, love, words. And Jesus does not despise the bodies. He gives them
something to eat, cures them, resurrects them, and he touches them with his own
body or with words, but he wants them to be full of love and faith. Surprisingly, those
who are assumed to represent Jesus rarely allude to a concern or a love for bodies
and to their potential. And the flesh that God has become, that Jesus has transfigured
and resurrected as a “temple,” is considered by them to be an occasion of sin more
than a chance of possible deification. They generally keep silent on flesh in the life
of Jesus even if they teach that he is God become flesh, that he is “the word made
flesh,” and that Jesus himself acts with great consideration for the bodies of others.
Preachers, priests, more generally religious people hardly view flesh as a place of
sensitive communion with oneself, with the other(s), with the world and even with
the divine transcendence—that is, not as inert matter but as a body which has gained
a density which allows it to commune with the different other, with the living world
and with the divinity.
Could I suggest that the message of Christianity is not well interpreted, taught
and lived? The “Good News” of God become human being is taken up in a tradition
of sacrifice, of sin and of a transcendence extraneous to terrestrial life. It is still a
question of “something,” according to a subject-object logic, more than of a rela-
tion to “someone” and between “someones,” except in a hierarchical way—which
still has something to do with object(s). Christianity could be interpreted otherwise,
and this would begin with differently understanding the role of Mary in incarnation.
Instead of being a mere receptacle for the “spermatikos logos,” she could be consid-
ered as the one who allows God to become incarnate and so to make humanity divine
through generation.
How could that be possible without the participation of man and woman not only
in procreation but also in the deification of the physical being? Even if it is in a
strange way, sexuate difference intervenes in our tradition regarding the creation and,
above all, the redemption of humanity. The Judeo-Christian tradition does not seem
to completely ignore or despise sexuate difference. No doubt the Holy Spirit must
lead human beings to their blossoming as deified flesh. But it is up to Christians to
become flesh, and not remain only soma, and to commune between fleshes to give
rise to a new humanity instead of disowning their flesh. Each one must become flesh
and make this flesh spiritual in order to commune with a different flesh towards the
incarnation and the flowering of love. This asks us to render the matter of our bod-
ies alive, fluid, porous and to keep it always in becoming. We must endeavor not to
remain or fall back into the opacity of a body-corpse, the life of which confines itself
to subsisting by satisfying needs. We must transform such materiality through desire,
through an amorous sap which converts an opaque solid closed up on itself into a
being open to the other, to the world, and transcendence. We must develop our long-

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ings at a relational and amorous spiritual level without reducing them to aspirations
after self-sufficiency, including the one that God could grant us.
It is not a question for all that of becoming “only one body,” that is, of merely
merging our singularity into a Christian community, but of cultivating the relational
aspects of this singularity instead of keeping it captive and paralyzed through legis-
lating and moralizing discourses. It is not by imposing love on us that love can take
place between us, but rather by developing our amorous longings as spiritual paths.

3 How to deify our bodies?

What first matters is thus to render our bodies alive and not leave them as inert matter
in a way like corpses. One possible means is to cultivate our senses without viewing
them as mere tools to apprehend the world. Cultivating our senses entails, for exam-
ple, learning to contemplate an element of nature, a living being or a work of art.
This implies not reducing them to objects, not identifying and naming them to gain
mastery over them, but becoming aware of what they bring to us and accepting modi-
fication by them. It is particularly relevant to learn how to act in that way concerning
our sight, because domination by seeing is one founding dimension of our culture.
So, we must obviously also behave with all our senses and free them from their mere
utilitarian use, be it a somatic need or an appropriation for other various reasons.
Cultivating our senses can be a spiritual path if we educate them to linger before
things, above all before living beings, to consider them in their singularity, to let our-
selves be moved and transformed by them while respecting them as others in relation
to ourselves and realizing that every sensory perception results from a being touched:
by light, sound, smell, taste, an other being. If our tradition has overestimated the
role of sight as a means of apprehending the world, it has neglected the importance
of touch, which is more fundamental to our relational becoming. Being part of the
world, but also unifying ourselves, requires a culture of touching-being touched by
what and by whom surround us, by what and by whom we meet. Besides, touch
is the sense which not only can unify us but also unite us with ourselves and with
the other(s) while ensuring respect for our physical belonging and its transcendental
potential if we take account of the otherness of the other(s). It is not by chance that
we imagine God as invisible and the way of being in relation to God as being touch
more than sight. Divine grace touches us without being in any way visible.
We can also deify our body through transforming all the sensitive relations into an
opportunity to contemplate, celebrate, even create without contenting ourselves with
satisfying needs, with appropriating, even consuming, what we meet. Respecting all
that we approach, especially living beings, turns our bodies into a place to enter into
communication or communion, and little by little raises our sensitivity to a transcen-
dental dimension through relating to what differs from us. Before the other is the
Other referring to the absolute transcendence of a God, it is appropriate that we go
through progressive stages of otherness. Then sexuate difference, which more often
than not is viewed as that which makes us sink into mere physical materiality, can
become the privileged place of a transcendental experience which remains sensitive,

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and of the transformation of a body-soma into flesh as the medium of a full amorous
sharing.

4 Desire for/of the other as opening up to transcendence

The desire for the other, but also the desire of the other, is that which can open up our
comprehensive being to the outside while sending us back to ourselves, within our-
selves, as a sensitive being transcending a sensitivity immanent in nature. The desire
for the other, in particular for the sexually different other, is the first awakening to a
both natural and spiritual transcendence. This aspect of the amorous attraction has
been not only underrated but also considered to be a cause of sin and decay. And yet,
such an attraction allows us to leave a withdrawal within ourselves, an immersion in
the materiality of a body-soma, and the limitation to a world of needs and of competi-
tions to satisfy them. The desire for the other is probably that which corresponds to
the advent of humanity as such if it does not merely amount to the reproduction of the
species but is viewed as a passage from needs to desires which transform our bodies
into a place of communication or communion—with ourselves, with the other(s) and
with the world.
The desire for the other reveals us to ourselves as humans if it is not reduced to
assuaging a presumed need, to releasing energy or to abolishing otherness by subjec-
tion or submission, but if it aims at assuming our destiny as a species divided into
two genders. This asks us to acknowledge and cultivate a natural duality, which has
nothing to do with a logical dichotomy—a duality which compels us to constantly
come to terms with the same and the different, a same which needs the different to
develop and become who he or she is.
The difference that the other represents can remove us from a confinement in our-
selves, but also preserve us from dispersing and forgetting ourselves, including by
immersion in a natural or a cultural universe. The desire for the other can be the
guardian of our being human if we respect the transcendence of otherness and the
being that it compels us to be. Beyond the fact that this desire is a crucial stage in
attaining our being human, it is also the path through which behaving humanly not
only towards the other but also towards ourselves and the world can be shaped.

5 Gathering ourselves together

Cultivating our senses and the desire for the other are two means of rendering the
body spiritual. They require us to be able to return to ourselves, within ourselves, and
form a unity from all these relations. This means to live them while respecting the
individuation of each and to become the ones who we are. Our being must evolve to
remain alive.
How can we gather ourselves together while being open to the other, to others
and to the world? In the Christian tradition, they recommend praying or taking part
in religious offices. Does that not amount to going no further than words without a
sufficient involvement of our body? As concerning the cultivation of my senses as a

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spiritual path, it is from the East and by doing yoga that I learned a more comprehen-
sive manner of gathering with myself. Seated cross-legged in a quiet place with lips,
eyelids, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet together, that is, the borders
of one’s body, made of skin and mucus tissues, touching one another, one can reach
a gathering with oneself which is both physical and spiritual. Contemplating images
or sculptures of the Buddha can help to appreciate this sort of gathering. As for me, I
have called that a position of self-affection, which has nothing to do with something
narcissistic or autistic, but is a condition to render our body a both carnal and spiritual
place in which to dwell, to return and to develop without breaking up or getting lost.
One can also gather oneself together in nature. Remaining a moment in nature
without any other aim than being there and communing with nature as living is
another way of collecting oneself. These two modes also represent a stage towards
our accomplishment. Indeed, as I have already called to mind, a living being is never
static; it develops or it dies. Being gathered with oneself as a living being is a suitable
state in order to evolve without contenting oneself with what or whom one already
is. Indeed, to glimpse how to develop, it is important to start from a perception of
oneself as a whole living being.
In relating to the other(s), such a return can first be reached not through relating to
whatever other — to an allos — but to an hetheros, an other who corresponds to an
other of two; that is, an other with whom a tactile reciprocity can exist. This intimate
way of relating to the other involves risks, but it is also the one in/from which we
can experience ourselves as both natural and spiritual beings while opening up to the
other. The potential of the relation between hetheros has been neglected, even forgot-
ten, and it has become an occasion of domination or subjection, notably at the sexual
level, whereas it is the place from which an emerging of our comprehensive being as
human can arise as well as be born again.

6 Reciprocity or communion in transcendence

Reciprocity between beings is, perhaps, the most appropriate path to reach and share
a transcendence which remains sensitive. Indeed, the search for transcendence which
stays at a personal level runs the risk of progressing from the most material to the
most spiritual, from the most physical to the most metaphysical without the body
being involved in such becoming. The divine incarnation represents a way of making
the body a place of the advent of transcendence and its approach by touch. However,
touch in that case, that is touch between Jesus and a human, cannot be truly recipro-
cal, because no human can reach the stage in which Jesus incarnates God, and a com-
plete reciprocity could not exist either because a more absolute transcendence would
rule the mutual touching—besides, the Gospels do not allude to this possibility.
Such transcendental reciprocity can sometimes occur in the relationship between
two human beings who are different, in particular sexually different, and, if the tran-
scendence of each other is respected, this can become an access to an experience of
divine nature. Is it not written in the Gospels that loving one another has something
to do with loving God? Anyways, that could be a way of perceiving how an approach

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to God could remain sensitive and not amount to an experience which is only abstract
and foreign to our terrestrial life and our human existence.
How can reciprocity and communion in transcendence take place? First what mat-
ters is to acknowledge and respect the otherness of the other, our difference from one
another, which means clearing a negative path, a sort of negative ontology, in relation
to the one who we are, intellectually and affectively. Then, a mutual touch, going
from the most external of the skin to the most intimate of the mucous tissues, can lead
us to such an advent if we live an always more intimate communion while preserving
our otherness towards each other. When we reach such a state, the most intimate of
the physical unites with the most absolute of the transcendental, and the most close
with the most distant. This provides us with the experience of a sensitive transcen-
dence, which exists between two humans who are naturally different—and transcen-
dence is, then, of a qualitative and not of a quantitative nature, at least it ought to be
so. The mutual touch can also occur through a sharing of emotions if they are rooted
in our original and natural belonging and are not subjected to understanding. These
experiences presuppose respect for the difference between beings, and reciprocity is
then reciprocity between beings and not between assets or parts of being(s). Besides,
what they entail of sharing between human beings can be a sort of initiation to a tran-
scendental relation to every living being, on the one hand, and to God, on the other.

7 Love as the only commandment

The main originality of Jesus regarding religious traditions is his teaching love as
the only commandment. This love cannot amount to a moral obligation—which, as
Hegel notes, presupposes subjection to something external to ourselves, and prevents
us from communing with one another. There is no doubt that the love to which most
of Christian preachers refer amounts to a sort of moral duty: to love the poorest, the
weakest. Is that truly the commandment that Jesus asks us to observe? Is it not rather
a matter of a more radical transformation of our being? Christian love, as I perceive
it through the Gospels, is neither mere charity nor mere moral duty. It requires us
to really evolve towards a union of our body with our spirit which overcomes their
traditional separation, their dichotomy and their hierarchy. The question is not only
of loving the inferiors for love of the superiors, of loving the poorest for love of
God, but of loving the other as we love ourselves while respecting our transcendence
towards one another. We long for such transcendence as our aspiration after an abso-
lute or after a God shows. Loving the other as other is aiming at transcendence and
cannot be reduced to a mere moral obligation imposed on us.
Loving the other as different, as transcendent to ourselves, as loving a divine abso-
lute, does not amount only to agape but entails also eros. Contenting ourselves with
agape without eros could remain too moral, paternalistic, or too merely human to be
really Christian. Transcendence is, then, still lacking the desire which aims at it. Lov-
ing the other as other entails longing for transcendence not in a life of the beyond but
as the present humanization of our life.
Love makes such transcendence sensitive, carnal and not only abstract. In this
way it can unite our spirit with our body, something that our traditional ontology did

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not allow us to do. Love unites them by transforming the one and the other. Hence
the fact that it asks a real conversion of us, one which elevates us while rendering us
more humble, deifies us while making us humans, spiritualizes us while taking our
bodies into account. Love introduces us into another world here and now. It modifies
our way of relating to ourselves, to the other(s) and even to God. The latter no longer
represents an absolute power, foreign to us and to our terrestrial life but an absolute
potential, the modes of incarnation of which are revealed by Jesus, as our friend.
Incarnating transcendence while respecting it as such and respecting ourselves can
occur only thanks to love.
God keeps transcendence on hold without making it dependent on any object.
God is the guardian of an absolute potential, including of love. We must aim at this
absolute and attempt to reach it through preserving our love from hanging on to any
object. The energy of our amorous desire must remain free but faithful to its aspira-
tion after transcendence—which has more to do with its quality, in particular its capa-
bility of communing, than with a quantity or intensity. Amorous energy must evolve
from a more somatic to a more psychic and spiritual nature through a progressive
transformation of matter which neither subjects nor abolishes it. Loving God, as lov-
ing our neighbor, cannot amount to going from the physical to the mental, from the
body to the spirit. Rather it calls for a transformation of our comprehensive being, for
the incarnation and the blossoming of our relational belonging, notably of our sexua-
tion, instead of going no further than satisfying our needs in order merely to survive.

8 The Democratic nature of Jesus’s teaching

Another originality of Jesus’s way of behaving is its democratic character. Such an

affirmation will sound strange to our contemporaries. However, it can be checked by
reading the Gospels. Indeed, Jesus chooses as disciples persons without goods but
also without culture. And the same goes with the crowds which surround him and
which he teaches. His teaching does not require people to be rich or cultivated, but to
have faith in him, to have a pure heart and love one another. Apparently, that suffices
to be in touch with the God that he incarnates. This is affirmed in different ways in
the Gospels, and it is also shown through the difficult relations that Jesus has with
those who claim to know how to reach God. According to Jesus’s words, neither their
science nor their spiritual practices are appropriate and it would be preferable to be
a little child to approach God. Besides, to those who criticize him for daring to talk
about God whereas he is the son of a mere carpenter and has not read all the sacred
texts, Jesus responds that the divine truth is familiar to him from the beginning of
time. He also promises that the Holy Spirit will tell us what we have to stay in dif-
ficult situations, notably with those who are presumed to be learned. All this means
that God and the Holy Spirit will be with us or in us if we have faith, a pure heart and
are loving.
In our time, in which sciences and technology prevail, all that may make some
laugh. However, have those who are laughing attempted to have faith, a pure heart
and good will, and to love one another? Perhaps still more than in the past, do not
many Christians believe in persons learned in theology and who refrain from fully

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accomplishing their human life instead of having faith in the behavior and the words
of Jesus himself? It is true that his teaching invites us to give up all power, even all
assets, and to be confident in what will happen to us, to our being, in such a radical
being lacking of possessions. Few people take such a risk and dare to venture into a
world different from the one that they already came to know and they share with other
people. All the more so since they are generally condemned by Christians themselves
who do not perceive to whom or to what they bear witness and thus destroy them,
especially their souls, even unknowingly. As Jesus also says: They have eyes but do
not see, they have ears but do not hear; that is, they live in a way, even a sensory way,
that cuts them off from the divine of which Jesus is the incarnation, a divine which is
within reach of all provided that they are poor enough to welcome it and experience
its meaning. The question is of being capable of clearing the path to save one’s soul,
and not only one’s body, with faith but without any arrogance. And lingering for too
long a time on criticism can be another manner of destroying our soul. It is prefer-
able to go forward towards the achievement of our flowering. Perhaps, it would be
possible to only suggest that, if men have been the prophets in the Old Testament,
perhaps women are the prophets of the New Testament. Are they not more able to
acknowledge transcendence in a mere living being whereas men view it as the knowl-
edge, possessions and power of an eminent person?

9 Possible meaning of relating to the deity

Relating to the Deity, even to deities, which can take various forms according to
cultures, represents, or ought to represent, aiming at a more absolute potential in
comparison with our current being and development. It means longing for that
which exceeds the world within which we are immersed and which determines us.
This world molds us and we must, in part, conform to it. But we must also consider
aspirations which overstep that which is imposed on us by this world. Becoming
human cannot confine itself to merely obeying that which already takes place, which
is already defined and incarnated by the humanity which preceded us. Becoming
human requires us to transcend that which already exists. We are not human without
being somehow or other prophets of a future. No doubt we must respect that which
humanity has already carried out, but we must also take account of our own aspira-
tions if they are legitimate and correspond to a part of humanity still to be incarnated,
and which can contribute to making blossom our comprehensive being and relating
to one another.
In order that these aspirations should not turn into resentment and powerlessness
to be and become human, we can save them as a potential of which a Deity, includ-
ing our own, can ensure the safeguard. This cannot end in being trapped in a new
closure which would prevent us from pursuing our search for transcendence, notably
for a sensitive transcendence. The one whom we call God must remain the guardian
of our freedom—of an opening in relation to all which limits our longings. God can-
not be appropriated by human beings as a figure which fits their needs, for example,
as a moralizer, or as a guarantor of the patriarchal power. If it is understandable that
an epoch of history entrusts God to compensate for what it is lacking, this cannot

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become a way of conceiving God once and for all. The Deity must remain, for each
and for the community, a beyond securing the possibility of a becoming yet to be
achieved.
If some religions—among them, Christianity—focus on physical death, the one
that those who represent the Deity ought to endure somehow or other, they worry too
little about the psychical and even the spiritual death which is imposed, including by
them, on those, above all women, who are in search of their path towards the abso-
lute. Their way of being in search of their accomplishment and of humanity is badly
heard, encouraged, supported; instead, their spiritual longings are generally despised
and condemned because they are different from those presumed to be valid. And yet
the latter more often than not amount to aspirations after an abstract and humanly
inaccessible transcendence, regardless of the sensitive transcendence that incarnation
ought to mean.
In fact, longing for the absolute must keep a margin of freedom. Each can and must
search for how to answer it in its tradition but also in others. Jesus himself invites his
disciples to go beyond him, and he says that he must leave them to let the Holy Spirit
come to them. Personally, I admit that, in the Christian tradition, art brought to me
more concerning incarnation than many religious offices and preachings. A few, not
all, Christians have also passed on to me something of this message and they are the
most beautiful personalities that I have ever met. It is in great part thanks to them I
consider that Christianity deserves attention, respect and faithfulness.
Other traditions, in particular Eastern traditions which relate to yoga, have helped
me to perceive why Christianity merits our loyalty too. I have been taught to cultivate
breathing and sensory perceptions by these traditions and they allowed me to glimpse
and try to cultivate that which is most suitable for the development of my subjectiv-
ity in the tradition which prevails in Europe. These traditions can complement each
other, the one contributing to making the body more spiritual and the other to devel-
oping subjectivity, notably its relational components, which are, unfortunately, too
little considered in the West.
Traditions in which religion above all relates to nature, and are often described
as pagan, can also contribute to our spiritual becoming. Such an aspect is very pres-
ent in Jesus’s life, but it is ignored by most of the Christians. However, what the
Gospels tell us about Jesus almost always takes place in and in relation to nature—a
star announces his birth and a sort of long eclipse of the sun his death; he prepares
himself for achieving his undertaking in the desert; the heavens open at the moment
of his baptism; he meets and gathers his faithful in nature and often teaches them with
examples borrowed from nature; he cures with natural elements; he withdraws to
pray or rest in nature; he crosses the lake or the sea, and orders the storm to die down;
his breath, made of air, gives life to bodies and souls, and he likens his body and his
blood to fruits of the earth. But what preacher invites us to pray in nature as Jesus
himself did? What divine office takes place in nature, there where Jesus gathered
crowds and taught them? What preaching tells us Jesus’s life in such a way?
And also: What responsible religious person incites the faithful to love one another
without resorting to a mediator or a doctrine of which they would be representatives?
What priest passes on the “Good News” of God become flesh without condemning
flesh instead of revealing that it can be the place of our deification? Why is the event

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of incarnation so badly taught and lived? Could it be because its potential is foreign
to and beyond that which a meta-physical culture has made us?

10 Provisory last suggestions

Keeping expectation of a God or the possibility of a divine grace requires a place to

be open for such an advent. It is not mainly a question of a letting appear to sight or
spirit, but rather of arranging in ourselves a space-time in which breath and touch are
reserved, perhaps as a soul. This asks our spirit not to be paralyzed and paralyzing by
a theory or a doctrine, and that spirit to make room for an alive body and also draw
inspiration from it. The reason for which we turn towards God cannot be the result
of a paralysis in a closed world but of a freedom of our global being in search of its
blossoming.
In the middle of the constructed universe in which we are living, such an opening
can be obtained through the contemplation of an element of nature and/or through the
meeting with another living being respected as such, which brings us back to our own
existence as living beings. The opening can also result from a desire, notably between
human beings which are sexually different. If this desire is mutual and takes account
of the transcendence of otherness, it can make a room in which not only the meet-
ing can happen but also where longing for a more absolute transcendence can arise.
Desire reveals and safeguards the space that difference creates on the condition that it
is aspiration after transcendence. However, this longing for transcendence emerges in
our most intimate and closest being. As such it is not easily perceived and respected.
Resorting to God cannot be substituted for it but can help us to acknowledge and
preserve its existence—notably if God is what or who is closest to us, as Hölderlin
says—and vice versa. This needs God not to be an abstract human creation denigrat-
ing our flesh but instead a keeper of it, who supports its possible flowering as a stage
of our own but also our mutual incarnation. Then God represents a supplement of life,
of flesh, of freedom thanks to which we can move, take shelter and recover energy to
develop without hanging on the Deity in a paralyzing way. If God means an absolute
potential, nothing and no one can figure or symbolize it. The only suitable attitude is
to remain always available for a more in relation to that which already exists, for an
additional becoming in which the advent of a God could happen somehow or other
and we can evolve towards a more complete accomplishment of our being.
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Authors and Affiliations

Luce Irigaray1

Luce Irigaray
towardthinking@gmail.com

1
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France

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