THE RETREAT OF THE RELIGIOUS SPHERE - JES UIT MISSIONARIES IN THE 17TH-CENTURY BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND A PAGAN ETHIC

The aim of this essay is to show how the issue of indifferent rites, a diaphora (i.e. actions, beliefs, ceremonies, objects that are not nece ssary for salvation) and the distinction between the ''religious'' and ''political'' took shape in the early 17th century in acrimonious Jes uit 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 pretension s of the Catholic Church and at the center of the seventeenth-century political debates in England perfectly served Jesuit theory (and pract ice) of accommodation. By associating certain Hindu rites and customs with adiaphora, the missionaries opened a space of freedom for multipl e cultural translations and ethnographic redefinitions. It also reveal ed a vast area of rhetorical indeterminacy that brought into question the boundaries of truth and representation ''Pagan'' life-cycle ceremo nies in particular were easily defined as adiaphora and as such remove d from the theological and, to a certain degree, from the ethical doma in. Religious relativism was just a step ahead.