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This article examines an argument that has been neglected in the controversy surrounding the Immaculate Conception, namely, the use made of an element from within the Islamic exegetical tradition. Although there is no doctrine of original sin in Islam, Christian authors offered an immaculist reading of a hadith initially ascribed to al-Bukh?r?. The article establishes that the first known author to use it, the Franciscan friar Marquard von Lindau (f 1392), drew the quotations from Nicholas of Lyra's Responsio ad quendam i udeum. He is one of the rare writers to make a clear distinction between the Koran and the Tradition. A corpus of nine Latin texts, three texts in High-Middle German and four tableaux, demonstrates that the argument became established within the controversy, circulated between various religious orders, and was passed down through two distinct branches, the first stemming from the Responsio, the second deriving from a translation of the Koran made by Robert of Ketton. Finally, a study of the different attitudes of Christian authors towards the figure of Mohammed, makes it clear that the conspicuous eulogising or disparaging of Islam is part of a strategy of persuasion similar to that of the exemplum.

In chapter VII of his commentary on Plato's Phaedrus, published in 1496, the Florentine Marsilio Ficino gives a description of the chariot of the soul in which Plato's original image appears supplemented with additions borrowed from other Platonic dialogues, as well as from sources as diverse as Parmenides, Boethius, the Dominican Saint Antoninus and authors from the Cistercian tradition. This article proposes to reconstruct Ficino's vision of the chariot of the soul and, from there on, to highlight the role he assigns to this vehicle, as a model of the human soul, integrating its energies and faculties, and sign of its calling to be the instrument of the return to God.

This study seeks to examine a twofold break that can be observed in Schelling's treatise on human freedom. The first break, a classic yet essential one, is Schelling's argument for the positivity of evil within the complex relation uniting humankind and God in reference to the obscure principle. This positivity of evil is directly contrary to a tradition that generally favoured understanding evil as a simple absence of good, as a fault or lack. The second break, less immediate yet significantly identifiable, concerns the positivity of the risk of evil itself. Such a risk is never stated explicitly, yet it emerges from the new reading of the Investigations proposed in this article. In order to uncover the positivity of the risk of evil, we need to grasp precisely the right way of understanding the positivity of evil itself: namely as the positivity of a very precise metaphysical finality.

Yves Congar was one of the major advocates of the notion of communion in ecclesiology. His entire work could be described as the quest for a convincing way of linking the communional and institutional dimensions of the Church. After the Second Vatican Council, the category of communion takes on a decisive importance in his ecclesiology: adopting Pilgram's expression, ‘the Church is a communion that organizes itself as a society', he attempts to show how law and Church institutions have their place within an ecclesiology of communion.

This article investigates the possibilities for modern atheism opened up by Nietzsche's exclamation, ‘God is dead', beyond the critic of metaphysics of being now regarded as the illusion of a lost world. In doing so, the article develops the atheistic potential contained within the nine hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides, and especially in the last four negative hypotheses. Thus, by moving from being to the One, from an Aristotelian metaphysics to a Platonic or Neo-Platonic Henology, the article explores atheism at new depths, where it is haunted by contemporary crises of identity. If the One is not one, what then of other beings? Plato asks. Are they not dragged into the danse macabre of a second-generation atheism?