Entre o 'ímpeto secularizador’ e a ‘sã teologia’ : tolerância religiosa, secularização e ilustração católica no mundo luso (séculos XVIII-XIX)

Abstract

This thesis is the result of an investigative work on the formulations and defense of religious tolerance in the Catholic Enlightenment of Portugal, to a greater extent, but also touching on some transits with Brazil. It is assumed that the secularization process through which the Iberian kingdom passed, during the eighteenth century, was a fundamental element of articulation of previous strands of defense of greater religious tolerance with debates pertinent to the Enlightenment. In this way, this religious tolerance was the product of quite complex syntheses, presented in typical spaces and sociabilities of the Seventeenth and were, in some way, agents of change in a reality marked by vigilance in matters of opinion and religion. Such formulations of religious tolerance were part of the more radical or more moderate forms of tension inherent in the struggle for a “religious field” – understood here as legitimate access to the so-called “assets of salvation” in Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, which encompass from recognized and authorized interpretations of the Scriptures to religious rites and precepts –, thus forming a fundamental critical substrate for thinking about the dissolution of some basic institutions of the Ancient Regime.