All can be saved: religious tolerance and salvation in the Iberian Atlantic world

Abstract

I agree with a colleague who stated in a recent congress in Madrid: "The book by Stuart Schwartz demonstrates how secularization and modernity can be found where they are not expected."Indeed, All Can Be Saved is an in-depth study of popular ideas about salvation and religious tolerance in a broad region that is usually identified with intolerance and Inquisition: the early modern Iberian World.While the first impulse that drove Schwartz to write this book was the reading of the classic The Cheese and the Worms (1976) by Carlo Ginzburg, the choice of the area of Portugal, Spain and their colonial dependencies in America is not just a provocation, but the consequence of the author's long familiarity with Iberian history.A major scholar of Latin American studies, Schwartz is well known for his innovative studies about early modern Brazil, its administrative institutions, the social history of sugar cane economy and slavery.His passage to cultural and religious history fits in a pattern of neoliberal interpretation of the Western civilization between the discovery of America and the French Revolution.Written in a pleasant narrative style, rich in captivating stories and details, the book deals with a wide range of propositions concerning religion, beliefs and justice, recorded by the Inquisition: even if expressed by common people, assertions like "each person can be saved in his or her religion," claims for tolerance towards the victims of inquisitors or popular violence, as well as other generic statements that indicated thoughts which dissented from orthodoxy and the unquestionable authority of the Catholic Church, would be "the key to understand how the formalized theories of toleration, the great texts of Bayle, Locke, Voltaire, and others, eventually became part of the general intellectual and political life of modern Europe" (243).Therefore, those obscure men would have been "precursors of our world."Schwartz's conclusion crowns a book which challenges our knowledge of the history of Western civilization and general convictions about the genesis of the present world at least in three ways: first, it shows the relevance of folk culture in the shaping of religious tolerance by comparison with the attitudes of the elites, ideas diffused by print and the changes provoked by international trade; second, it stresses that the Iberian World had a very special place in this story, even if cases like those analysed by Schwartz were not limited to that region; and finally, the Atlantic area emerges as an ocean of tolerance, contrasting its traditional representation as hell itself, conveyed by missionaries worried about the difficulty of evangelization, as well as by ancient and modern detractors of colonialism and slavery.The book is divided into three parts of diverse lengths.The first section (Iberian Doubts) is composed of four chapters on the societies of the Iberian Peninsula, reflecting on the similarities and differences between Spain and Portugal, as well as focusing on the religious sensibility of the Old Christian majority, ethnic minorities (Conversos and Moriscos) and foreigners.The second section (American Liberties) devotes three chapters to the aspects that would have made the New World a special breeding ground for religious tolerance, freedom of conscience and coexistence among different peoples and cultures.The third section (Toward Toleration) deals with the relationship between popular tolerance and the values of toleration and equality professed by thinkers and philosophers during the age of Enlightenment.This final part is shorter than the previous, and includes only two chapters, the second of which is a sort of general conclusion of the book.In the trials of Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions Schwartz found several stories of artisans, millers, farmers, sailors, soldiers and other popular workers (mainly men), who made claims for an old dream-the possibility of salvation for each one-criticizing forced conversions and punishments meted out by ecclesiastical courts.Limited by a certain incoherence, these statements would have been evidence of what a part of common people thought.Schwartz does not hide his fondness for what he considers a subculture of tolerance shared by relativists, universalists, sceptics, atheists and dissidents in general, who reveal that there were opportunities for tolerance even in an intransigent and fanatic society as the early modern Iberian was.