All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (review)

Abstract

Schwartz, stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. xiii + 336 pp.In this engaging book, Stuart B. Schwartz (George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University) explores early modern popular religious dissidence and toleration in the Iberian Atlantic world. Schwartz conceives of this study as a cultural history of (6), relying on stories about largely unknown common folk, whose doubts and dissenting views about salvation, sex, and other religious issues challenged Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Although Schwartz has drawn his data from Inquisition records in Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, the Spanish Indies, and Brazil, he eschews a quantitative method in favor of presenting serial microhistories of religious nonconformists on both sides of the Atlantic. He argues that these stories show basic patterns and contexts that help explain the widespread prevalence of dissident views by atheists, relativists (who found truth in different religions), universalists (who thought all could achieve salvation), and skeptics. According to Schwartz, these rustic dissenters were everywhere, and by the eighteenth century their views had merged with Enlightenment ideas to produce greater freedom of religion and conscience in the Iberian Atlantic world. The result is a well written and carefully argued book that still leaves its readers in doubt about what these popular dissidents represented: Were they precursors of religious tolerance or just a few unorthodox cranks, denounced by fellow citizens to the Inquisition?Ideas or beliefs that conflicted with Church dogma were propositions (proposiriones), and they were subject to the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Propositions fell into approximately five categories - blasphemy, sexual improprieties, criticisms of the Church or clergy, ideas in conflict with dogma, and offenses against the Inquisition. The Inquisition dealt with these propositions differently over time, depending on contemporary concerns and changing interpretations of dogma within the Church.Many Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity mixed elements of Catholicism with their former faiths. Although some Jews thought that the Law of Moses was the only route to salvation, many others had converted to Christianity and believed that either faith might be acceptable to God. Moreover, Jewish and Muslim converts alike were reluctant to believe that parents and ancestors suffered eternal damnation for their beliefs, as Church dogma instructed. The large morisco population in Iberia frequently became exponents of relativism, either feigning an acceptance of Christian precepts or taking the position that each person could be saved according to his or her own law. Portuguese courts prosecuted the same range of propositions as their Spanish counterparts, but they focused more attention on rooting out crypto-Jews. Schwartz argues that throughout the Iberian Peninsula, however, Old and New Christians, renegade Christians forced to live under Muslim rule in North Africa or Granada (before 1492), and doubters of all sorts (from learned theologians and intellectuals to humble folk) asserted that more than one path existed to salvation, in contradiction to Church law.Heterodox religious thinking, popular dissidence, sexual license and illegitimacy, and religious relativism all thrived in Spanish and Portuguese America, where bureaucratic and social controls remained weaker than in the Iberian Peninsula. …