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

Today it sometimes seems that tolerance and religion are uneasy bedfellows, if bedfellows at all. What is more, most people, whether personally involved with organized religion or not, would probably presume that the Holy Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and their empires in the early-modern period had no room for tolerance and managed to plant that notion firmly in the heads of Catholics under their jurisdiction. These are precisely the notions that Stuart B. Schwartz attempts to subvert in this committed and scholarly study, which deploys a wide range of Inquisition material dated between the late-fifteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The heart of the book consists of sensitive descriptions and analyses, with much quotation in English translation, of a wide range of cases in which brave individuals—mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Native American—obstinately clung, often at great personal cost, to the idea that all people of goodwill, who led a good life, would achieve eternal salvation, whatever the religion in which they lived. The cases in question involved Christians, Jews, Muslims, adherents of African and American religions, and Goan Hindus.

Schwartz rightly bears in mind that such "universalist" ideas were by no means unknown in medieval Europe, whence the Spanish and Portuguese discoverers and colonists came, but his main material might have been seen in a more accurate perspective if the earlier evidence had been more extensively deployed. The book is more empirical than theoretical in character, and this can be frustrating at times. In particular, the much-debated questions around the validity of Inquisition evidence—always recorded by one side, in the interests of the institution concerned—are not extensively discussed here. It is indeed possible to deploy the trial documents of the Inquisition as sources of biography and social history, but the point still needs to be defended. Other questions that might usefully have been explored more profoundly are the very assumptions concerning the nature of "religion" that formed the basis of the inquisitors' operations. It has long been recognized that there was often very little meeting of minds between ecclesiastical professionals and frequently unlettered prisoners, but although Schwartz acknowledges this, such analysis often fails to impinge on the discussion here of individual cases of "tolerance." An underlying problem, with all this rich and fascinating material, is that the power of dogmatic religious statements, whether deemed orthodox or not, is never questioned within it. It is highly doubtful whether faith and belief can be reduced to intellectual propositions, and it would have been good to see a discussion here of this vital matter.

In sum, this richly textured study is full of fascinating material and rewards the reader with accounts and discussion of some inspiring human stories, ranging over the New World and the Old. Sometimes the chronological range of these sources, when fitted, as in this case, into a thematic scheme that is largely based on geographical location, involves an effect of jumping about in time that can seem slightly confusing. Also, the setting of the evidence in its intellectual and historical context is much stronger and more obvious in the later period, from the European Enlightenment to the abolition of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions in the early-nineteenth century. Thus the book leaves the reader wanting to explore and analyze more, but this is of course the sign of a valuable and stimulating book, which shows that "fundamentalism" is not a good term to use about early-modern religion in Iberia and its colonies, and also that the human spirit is never completely overborne by dogma and repression.