Le repli du religieux. Les missionnaires jésuites du XVIIe siècle entre la théologie chrétienne et une éthique païenne

The Retreat of the Religious Sphere: Jesuit Missionaries in the 17th Century between a Christian Theology and a Pagan Ethic. I. G. Županov. The aim of this essay is to show how the issue of indifferent rites, adiaphora (i.e. actions, beliefs, ceremonies, objects that are not necessary for salvation) and the distinction between the "religious" and "political" took shape in the early 17th century in acrimonious Jesuit exchanges concerning the Madurai Mission in the heart of the Tamil country (South India). The doctrine of adiaphora, already amply used by the Reformation theologians to denounce the universalist pretensions of the Catholic Church and at the center of the seventeenth-century political debates in England, perfectly served Jesuit theory (and practice) of accommodation. By associating certain Hindu rites and customs with adiaphora, the missionaries opened a space of freedom for multiple cultural translations and ethnographic redefinitions. It also revealed a vast area of rhetorical indeterminacy that brought into question the boundaries of truth and representation. "Pagan" life-cycle ceremonies in particular were easily defined as adiaphora and as such removed from the theological and, to a certain degree, from the ethical domain. Religious relativism was just a step ahead.Županov Iñes G. Le repli du religieux. Les missionnaires jésuites du XVIIe siècle entre la théologie chrétienne et une éthique païenne. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 51ᵉ année, N. 6, 1996. pp. 1201-1223