Contenu du sommaire

The figure of the monkey in ancient Greece appeals both to the historian of the imagination, who is captivated by this creature whose iconographic study remains embryonic, and to the religious anthropologist, who is tempted to see in it an emblematic expression of Greek ontological and religious concepts. While the animal's introduction into the Mediterranean region, like some of its figurative representations, owes much to the East, the imagery surrounding monkeys, imbued with the mysteries of representations of passage, owes its particular contours to Greece in the first millennium BC. The monkey, a mirror for mankind, certainly presented a theological issue and this introductory study (conceived of in juxtaposition to philosophical debates on Darwinism) will attempt to shed light upon it.

The issue of human free will was debated in Muslim circles since the end of the 7th century and was resolved in favour of divine predestination in the 9th century classical Hadith compilations. Man's control on his own actions was regarded as conflicting and competing with the All-Mightiness of God and therefore violating His oneness. Except for brief references, there are no writings left expounding this controverted standpoint with the exception of the epistle of Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (m. 728). The first part of the article is concerned with the presentation of the epistle. The second part with the story of the prophet Ezra, “the first to talk about predestination” according to the Islamic tradition.

Élie Merlat is one of the most important theoreticians of absolutism. Nevertheless his work Traité du pouvoir absolu des Souverains is neither a book of political thought nor of political theory. It is a book of theology deeply impregnated with Christian piety and charity. His aim is to help his cruelly persecuted Huguenot brothers not to endanger their salvation.

From 1912 until his death in 1976, the painter Jean-Jacques Gailliard, a member of the New Jerusalem Church, a methodist movement inspired by Swedenborg's mysticism, created ‘swedenborgian' art, a vast corpus of paintings, liturgical objects, sketches, including theoretical or literary writings as well. Within the study of the connections between the Avant-Garde and Esotericism, this paper aims to understand the framework and the meanings of this relationship. How did the emerging abstraction search for meaning in esoteric thought, and how did esotericism view/use the representation? How, within the context of sacred art, is ‘rendering visible' compatible with … thought of the invisible?