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A very revealing fact is almost lost in translation here, and the key word is ley, or "law." Many of those processed by the Inquisition for their laissez-faire soteriology or agnosticism made no distinction between theology and ethics, that is, between "religion" and "law." In fact, they understood what we call "religion" as a code of behavior rather than as a set of beliefs, and were not only convinced that God offered salvation to all, but that it was offered through ethical norms. Symbols and rituals were a part of God's "laws," and therefore necessary for salvation, but the key element in this pluralistic soteriology was that of faithfulness and obedience to whatever was prescribed by the divine, not the specifics of what was prescribed (or proscribed). In many ways, the tolerant pluralists dragged before the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition were similar to today's Unitarian Universalists, only with a stronger emphasis on the concept of salvation through adherence to a very specific code: they believed in a good and merciful God who could be reached through different paths. Some, of course, had convictions derived from indifference to religion. In any case, for all of these individuals accused of error, "otherness" was not intrinsically evil, much less demonic.
Keeping in mind that the "other" was always close at hand in the Iberian transatlantic world, due to the large presence of descendants of Jews and Muslims and of New World natives who had been forcibly converted, Schwartz admits that tolerance of such neighbors might have had some unique features in Iberia and its colonies. But he also proposes that the kind of tolerant pluralism persecuted by the Iberian Inquisitions could also be found in the rest of Western Christendom, especially after the Protestant Reformation created more "others" than ever before. Unlike Carlo Ginzburg, who made a quantitative leap of faith in his classic microhistory The Cheese and the Worms by arguing that one freethinking miller in a remote corner of Italy was representative of a vast, silent majority, Schwartz is always cautious enough not to make too large a claim about the number of tolerant pluralists.2 He also takes into account William Christian's warning about reconstructing the history of early modern Spain through the eyes of the Inquisition—which, as he says, would be akin to writing American history solely from FBI files.3 But he does suggest repeatedly that what really matters the most is not the number of dissenters but rather what they stood for. As he sees it, their inchoate, street-level acceptance of all religions was an attitudinal substratum of sorts, as essential for the development of the Enlightenment as for the eventual triumph of laws of toleration. In his own words: "All of these people provided the context of tolerance in which the ideas of the Englightenment could flourish … . They were as much the precursors of modernity as their more literate and eloquent contemporaries."
Schwartz's book packs a hefty conjectural punch, but its heart and soul is a flowing narrative that is at once gripping and enlightening. His tolerant deviants seem to be everywhere, and despite vast differences among them, all seem to share a common attitude toward religion, and toward life in general. Given how widely and how deeply he has cast his net (twelve different archives on three continents), it would be immensely difficult to disprove Schwartz's claims. Spain, Portugal, and their colonies seem as awash in tolerant "propositions" as in informers who are eager to report their neighbors to the Inquisition. These doubters are there, no doubt about it; and so are the inquisitors, recording all the challenges to authority in great detail, tending to be relatively lenient in most cases—a far cry from the sadistic monsters imagined by the so-called Black Legend. Tolerance and intolerance relate to one another in this narrative as opposite magnetic charges in an electric motor, keeping things in motion.
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