All Can Be Saved

Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World

Bibliographic Data

ID2808523
AuthorsJonathan Schorsch (0000-0002-9662-1607, Columbia University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume89
Issue4
Pages687-689
Publication date2009-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2009-056
OpenAlexW2325566398
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Stuart Schwartz, one of the preeminent historians of the colonial Iberian world, analyzes a persistent “subterranean” stream of religious tolerance, relativism, skepticism, dissidence, criticism, and indifference. Inquisitions notwithstanding, a remarkable array of individuals expressed distrust of ideologies proffered by ruling elites, their institutions and practices, such as religious exclusivism or coercion, the political creation and maintenance of stark class hierarchies, and the modern Gesamtkunstwerk, racism. People dared to dispute many of the Catholic Church’s claims to holiness, perfection, and control; some even contested the church itself. One of the motifs woven throughout the book is the heretical yet evidently not uncommon idea that even non-Christians who live well in their own religion are loved by God and might achieve salvation.Schwartz announces at the outset the ways in which his study differs from its predecessors. He explores tolerance in the Iberian world, certainly a counterintuitive locale, even while it was under the sway of the Counter-Reformation. He focuses on popular attitudes rather than high-culture texts from scholars and public figures, using the records of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions to access the beliefs of “ordinary” individuals, which supposedly would be impossible from the more controlled productions of literary texts and cannot be done in other countries lacking similar institutions of surveillance.The narrative unfolds more or less chronologically. Schwartz begins in the Iberian Peninsula with matters mostly Jewish and Moorish; he then discusses Christian renegades and others who had had contact with Islam abroad. Next he moves to the colonies and their novel demographic and conceptual miscegenation, where Native Americans and Africans began figuring in the scheme of things. (Particularly fascinating is Schwartz’s reading of the seeming willingness of Portuguese settlers in Brazil to collaborate and even intermarry with the heretical Calvinist Dutch when the latter occupied parts of the colony.) He then takes in the increasingly global eighteenth century, the growing predominance of rationalism and reasons of state, and the transformation of heterodoxies into reformist programs. Finally, Schwartz compares Hispanic critical heterodoxies with those of the rest of Europe.It is impossible to detect a single origin for the heterodox ideas Schwartz describes. Some have ancient pedigrees; others came from books, the wrong kind of books or the right kind read wrongly. While many notions circulated orally, others were strengthened by travel abroad or contact with other kinds of people. Schwartz reads expressions of tolerance for “other religions” as a countertendency to the Reconquista and later Catholic imperialism. Universalism also resulted from recurrent daily contact with other peoples, which “created a common ground of understanding and acceptance” (p. 53). Schwartz shows that religious tolerance, indifference, or doubts were hardly the monopoly of individuals from dominated groups. Indeed, some Portuguese Old Christians seem to have gone so far as to warn New Christians about inquisitorial activity and hide them, even smuggle them out of the country. Intriguingly, men comprised the overwhelming majority of those accused of dissidence, though Schwartz believes this reflects inquisitorial foci rather than a real-world gender differential. Hispanic tolerance, according to Schwartz, did not stem from expediency or self-interest, as it often did elsewhere in Europe, but from “genuine conviction and sense of justice” (p. 250). Nonetheless, Hispanic tolerance remained a decidedly minority affair and ultimately failed, in contrast to its continental parallels, which blossomed into official toleration and Enlightenment statecraft. Attitudinal change arrived in the Hispanic world due to commercial desires, political pragmatism, and the military intrusion of external forces.Schwartz argues, along with much recent scholarship, against the separability of high and low or elite and folk cultures. Do these many and varied dissidents or doubters relate to one another? Schwartz thinks “they perhaps represented a subculture” of sorts (p. 173), yet he wisely refrains from constructing a tendentious history. Elsewhere he wants to distinguish between “defensive strategies” of dominated ethnic groups in defending their own putatively superseded religions, and “statements of tolerance or relativism” (p. 175). Yet throughout, statements by converso or Morisco are treated as the latter, not the former. Other questions remain. Are religious toleration, indifference, and confusion linked, psychologically or culturally? While one gets the sense that Schwartz sees heterodoxy as somehow progressive, many of the given examples of culturally syncretistic magic appear problematic even if polyglot, alternative but hardly inevitably progressive. Another question regards modalities of consciousness. It is not clear whether the kinds of statements Schwartz excavates and collects reflect “belief,” a term seen increasingly by scholars as rather slippery, or are merely situational utterances. Are all unorthodox statements expressions of “resistance” to forms of authority, or are some merely rationalizations, jokes, boasts, angry outbursts, or sincere cases of ignorance? Are “beliefs” actions or states of mind? The difference between these modalities made an analytical difference to the inquisitors but does not seem to matter in this text.Nonetheless, this well-written survey makes an important addition to the study of the intertwined history of religion, politics, and popular culture in Europe and its overseas colonies that Alfred Crosby called Neo-Europe

Ancient history · Atlantic World · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious Education and Schools

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