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Having been responsible for some of the finest universal histories, at the start of the 17th century, the Jesuits developed historical analyses that were based on their theology of grace and characterised by a rich humanism. With apologetic and missionary aims in mind, these analyses were generally directed against Port-Royal Augustinianism, although were sometimes developed in proximity to positions taken up by freethinkers as well. The present article recalls issues concerning the virtues practiced by the pagans and merely moral virtues, the Chinese rites controversy, philosophical sin and the status of pagan philosophers. The bold analyses of these Jesuits are a testimony to their open-mindedness. And yet, unbeknown to the authors themselves, their adventurousness signals a progression towards the Enlightenment and secular morality.

Although they are clearly conscious of holding metaphysically irreducible positions which they have inherited from the past, André Comte-Sponville and Luc Ferry nevertheless share a common desire to do philosophy in a new way: they both seek practical wisdom – or ‘secular spirituality' – rather than theoretical mastery. This idea or project gives rise to two different schematisations: on the one hand, a pacified return on the part of the spirit to the encompassing reality of the life-world, on the other, a judicious expanding of freedom to embrace transcendental human values. The present article attempts to extend this debate by opening it up to a critical awareness of an absolute Other, to which in particular the Abrahamic tradition points, which could once again kindle the quest of human reason for wisdom.

Master Eckhart and Michel Henry are both thinkers who consider birth in a new and original way. They both dismiss birth as a coming to appear in the exteriority of the world; real birth happens internally. Eckhart describes it as the process by which God conceives himself in the depths of the soul; Henry sees it as the movement of Life which, in embracing itself, brings about the immanent origin of the self. For both, the phenomenality of the world must be bracketed out in order for the inner revelation of Life (Henry) or of God (Eckhart) to occur. However, whereas the French philosopher generates a sort of phenomenological dualism between the world and life, the Rhenish mystic carves out a way of passing from one sphere to the other: divine life is capable of emitting its light in the world.

Solipsism poses a problem: it is at once nonsensical – for, like it or not, I cannot doubt the reality of my life so long as the other person exists; and yet coherent at the same time – for it is only myself that I can know as a subject, since I only have access to my own consciousness. It is a contradictory thesis, yet a well-known hypothesis, clearly rejected by philosophers, who nevertheless often espouse doctrines that tend in rather the same direction, it is the worst point from which to begin considering the issue of the other, yet at the same time the only useful reference point for evaluating the thinking that does so. For the true scandal of philosophy no doubt consists in the fact that this issue just cannot be addressed.

In a lecture delivered in 1982, entitled ‘The Beyond and its Parousia' (translated here for the first time into French), Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) sets out to develop some of the most important concepts in his late philosophy, concepts that this text addresses from the point of view of history and its ‘signification'. In combining a philosophy of consciousness with a philosophy of history, Voegelin opposes all immanentist ideologies inherited from the Enlightenment, which thought it possible to dissolve the tensed, ‘in-between' structure of human existence. He seeks to restore to consciousness all its original thickness, illuminating it with the help of the Platonic notions of epekeina and parousia of the epekeina. These enable him, he believes, to grasp adequately once more the ‘in-between' situation that is characteristic of the questioning existence of human beings in the world, as this existence is open erotically to the mystery of being and divine transcendence.