Images or Idols?
A European Debate Imported to India
Francis X Clooney
Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, Massachusetts
Moderated by
Rinald D’Souza
Researcher, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa
Saturday, 15 November 2025 | online
10:30 CET ROME ● 15:00 IST GOA ● 18:30 JST TOKYO
The European debate over idolatry in the era of the 16th-17th century conflicts between Roman Catholics and early Protestants was heated and complicated. From a Protestant perspective, the criticism of idolatry was rooted in the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” and its reverence for the radical mystery of God who cannot be known in images. From a Roman Catholic perspective, the commandment did not forbid the veneration of authentic symbols of God, Jesus, and the saints, but simply prohibited worship of the images themselves. Ordinary people needed images, and the Incarnation of the Son of God made image-veneration permissible for Christians, if understood properly. But this debate took on new meaning and force when played out in India in the 16th-18th centuries. Protestant missionaries held that Hindu images, like Catholic images, were merely idols, to be banned. Catholic missionaries held that while in India too simple people clung to images of the divine, Hindu images were wrong because they depicted imperfect or immoral beings improperly called “gods”. Much ethnographic work was done on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant debates, as missionaries tried to interpret the worship they observed. But the missionaries needed yet lacked sophisticated Hindu input since, despite the presence of native informants, they had little access to Hindu theologies of the worship of images (arcā, vigraha) as “sacramental signs” of the divine persons. Their theologies were not challenged by Hindu theologies. Would the missionaries’ view of idolatry have changed, if they had access to Hindu theologies of image worship? Examples will be drawn from the Tamil treatises of the 17th century Jesuit Robert de Nobili SJ and, on the Hindu side, the contemporary Śrīvaiṣṇava theology of material images (arcā).
Francis X Clooney joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in 2005, where he is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology. He earned his doctorate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1984 and taught for 21 years at Boston College before coming to Harvard. From 2010 to 2017, he directed Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Clooney’s scholarship focuses on theological writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India and on the emerging discipline of comparative theology, which explores theological learning across religious boundaries. He has also written on Jesuit missionary traditions, early Jesuit reflections on reincarnation, and the practice of interreligious dialogue today. Among his major works are Thinking Ritually (1990), Theology after Vedanta (1993), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (2010), and His Hiding Place Is Darkness (2013). His recent publications include Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics (2019), Western Jesuit Scholars in India (2020), and St. Joseph in South India (2022). His memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story, appeared in 2024. A festschrift honouring him was published in 2023. He served as President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (2022–23) and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Scranton and Le Moyne College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (2010) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025).
Rinald D’Souza is a historian of religion and society in modern South Asia. He researches on twentieth-century Christianity in South Asia, particularly on the cultural history of the Jesuits in the subcontinent. He is interested in the cultural role and practices of religion in the production of social identities. Rinald is currently associated with the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa. He has co-edited the volumes, Public History of Goa: Evolving Politics, Culture and Identity (2019) and The Jesuits, Goa and the Arts (2023), besides contributing to academic journals. He edits and publishes the academic resource, historiadomus.net
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