Corporal Faith A phenomenological sketch based on Michel Henry

The contemporary discussion of corporeality and embodiment rarely addresses the concept of faith. In this article I draw on the New Phenomenology in order to specify the corporeal conditions of Christian faith - understood as God's self-affection. With reference to Michel Henry and Meister Eckhart, I spell out "the birth of God into the soul's ground" as a movement of life itself animating and affecting the human body, namely as flesh. I then develop the concept of faith in terms of a capacity in which God, as a gift, affects and recognizes himself in a "Sich" of the individual human being. Finally, and correspondingly, I argue for an understanding of sin as oblivion or forgetfulness - a forgetfulness, which is rooted in the denial of the birth of God into the soul's ground as a Son.