The Iberian Enlightenment: Nature and Significance

To general European historians, accustomed to viewing the Enlightenment primarily in a French or Germanic context, a Spanish or Portuguese Enlightenment may come as something of a surprise. It is, after all, only in recent decades that an Italian Enlightenment has been incorporated into the mainstream of historiography, largely through the work of Franco Venturi. With respect to the Iberian kingdoms, there has been an added confusion – the conflation of Enlightenment and 'Enlightened Despotism'. By contrast, we can hardly speak of a French Enlightened Despotism under Louis XV or Louis XVI, neither of whom has been placed by the historical literature on a similar plane to Maria Theresa, Joseph II and Leopold II in the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy, Frederick the Great in Prussia or Catherine the Great in Russia.

There is a strong tendency in the historical literature of eighteenth-century Spain and Portugal, however, to regard Charles III of Spain and the Marquês de Pombal, acting on behalf of the monarch, José I (1750–77), as examples of Enlightened Despotism, despite some dissent in the former case. This explains why preference has frequently been given in the historical literature to the latter part of the century rather than to the first half, when, nevertheless, the initial intellectual developments, especially in Spain, were taking place. This has also led to a tendency to overlook the antecedents of the Iberian Enlightenment and, as a result, foreign influences are often given greater prominence than is due. In this chapter, we shall set the Enlightenment in its historical and Iberian contexts. We shall try to ascertain why the connection between Enlightenment and Despotism should be so persistent and whether this emphasis on the state has distorted our understanding of the Iberian Enlightenment.

Personnel and Antecedents

In Spain and Portugal, most ilustrados came from the nobility, a variegated and socially diverse body at the apex of the social hierarchy, rather than from a supposed bourgeoisie. As such, they upheld the social values and predominance of noblemen. A significant body of clerics, anxious to reform the Church in both countries and their American dominions, accompanied them, although they never ceased to be a precarious minority within the ranks of the clergy as a whole. At the middle of the tiers of nobility in Spain were the hidalgos. This group had a tradition of royal service in Church and State, since at least the sixteenth century. Several leading arbitristas, early seventeenth-century precursors of the ilustrados, had been hidalgos.

The Castilian arbitristas, among them Martín González de Cellorigo and Sancho de Moncada, had sought the means of restoring Spain's good fortunes in the hard times that followed the stretching of the peninsula's resources during the reigns of Charles V (1516– 56) and Philip II (1556–98). Drawn from a variety of ranks, including noblemen, clerics and officials, they pressed upon the royal government proposals for improvement and reform. Cellorigo, for instance, searched for the answer to the problem of why Spain, despite its advantages, found itself in decline, what was the cause of this and which remedies should be applied. Several government bankruptcies revealed the inadequacy of existing tax systems to respond to accelerating costs and the inability to compete with rival Powers. In such a way, the consciousness of Spanish backwardness entered the mainstream of debate. Eighteenth-century ilustrados showed their debt to their predecessors in taking up precisely this point. That in itself demonstrated the extent to which the Hispanic Enlightenment rested on indigenous foundations, at the same time that it borrowed from external sources.

Eighteenth-century ilustrados also looked back to the broad vision and achievements of the sixteenth-century humanists, such as the Valencians, Juan Luis Vives, Fray Luis de Granada, Mechor Cano and Antonio de Nebrija. Their immediate precursors, however, were the novatores of the last decades of the seventeenth century, who provide the link connecting the humanists, the arbitristas and the ilustrados. This is to say that in Spain there had been and continued to be articulate critics of traditional modes of thought, despite the existence of the Inquisition. Dangers frequently lay only slightly ahead of any argument in favour of a transformation of ways of thinking or the practices of instruction. The humanists, for example, had been tarred with the brush of Lutheranism in the 1520s and 1530s, and the name of Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom they greatly admired, systematically tarnished. In a similar vein, the example of the French Revolution of the 1790s would be used to compromise Iberian reformers, especially after the outbreak of war between Bourbon Spain and the French-Revolutionary Convention in 1793.

The novatores concentrated primarily on scientific method, the practice of medicine and the renovation of history. They adapted philosophical and scientific ideas, already spreading in the rest of Western Europe, to the largely resistant territories of the peninsula. In Spain and Portugal, scholasticism, deriving from Aristotle and moulded into Christianity by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, still commanded the leading place in university, college and seminary. This meant that attempts to reform the curriculum or propose alterations in methods and practice would be met with vigorous opposition. The novatores argued for the primacy of observation and experimentation in the sciences and for a rigorous critical method in all disciplines. Their influence among intellectual circles, limited as those were at the time, could be seen in Madrid, and in several provincial capitals such as Zaragoza, Barcelona and Seville from the 1680s onwards. In short, the new ideas were arriving in Spain some four or five decades before the traditional historiography has supposed. In Madrid, during the 1680s, a tertulia existed in the house of the Marqués de Mondéjar and another in the house of the grandee, Duque de Montellano, President of the Council of Castile, at which other noblemen and some senior concillors joined with professional men to discuss these new developments in knowledge.

Three medical innovators became leading figures among the novatores: Juan de Cabriada, Diego Mateo Zapata and José Lucas Casalete. Casalete became the holder of a Chair at the University of Zaragoza. Cabriada, who originated from Valencia, practiced medicine in Madrid in the reign of Charles II (1665–1700). His Carta filosófica médico-chymica of 1687 complained that Spain was the last country in Europe to receive news of the latest developments in experimental method in Physics and Chemistry. Zapata, born in Murcia, had been educated at the Universities of Valencia and Alcalá de Henares, and Published Verdadera apologia en defensa de la medicina racional filosófica in 1690, which reinforced the arguments of Cabriada for the scientific method in medicine. He became a founding member of the Regia Sociedad de Medicina y Otras Ciencias in Seville in 1701. In Madrid, Zapata reached the top of his profession and lived comfortably. He possessed a rich library, which contained the works of the Spanish humanists as well as the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Bacon, Boyle, Hobbes and others. Zapata, however, was accused of being a crypto-Jew in 1721 and subjected to 4 years of investigation by the Inquisition of Cuenca, which was at the same time examining cases of heresy. Although not found guilty, he was stripped of half his property and banished from Madrid for 10 years. Onslaughts such as those were designed to impoverish, ostracise and silence men with new ideas. Zapata, however, renewed the attack with the Ocaso de las formulas aristotélicas, forecasting the downfall of aristotelianism, in 1745, the year of his death.

Nautical science and cartography had played a crucial role in Portuguese overseas expansion from the fifteenth century onwards, as is widely recognised, but problems presented by the establishment of factories or merchant-colonies by Europeans in tropical lands have not received the attention due to them. The medical element, for example, has rarely been absent in the Portuguese imperial dominions, where merchants, naval personnel and colonists were exposed to tropical diseases. As in Spanish America, the Jesuits played a significant role in discovering and disseminating the use of remedial plants. They were not alone in the examination of natural cures. Garcia de Orta's Colóquio dos simples e drogas da Índia appeared in manuscript in 1563 and was printed in Antwerp 4 years later. It became the first work to systemise the knowledge and application of medicinal plants, which the Portuguese found in India. Both the Portuguese and Spanish drew much knowledge from indigenous sources in the Americas and Asia, and in the Portuguese case from their African territories as well. It laid the basis for later development during the Enlightenment, when in both Monarchies increased attention was, as we have seen, given to hygiene and treatment. The indigeous origin of much knowledge considerably modifies the idea that Europe provided the only source.

During the eighteenth century, both Monarchies, beset by intense foreign competition, expressed an urgent need to know more about their overseas territories on a scientific basis. Portugal and Spain, despite their structural problems and, for the latter, the loss of most of its European territories, still ranked among the Powers. Their vast American empires reinforced this perception. Yet, at almost every level, both were vulnerable. The ministers of Philip V (1700–46) in Spain and João V (1706–50) in Portugal, working on the basis of previous reforms, attempted, against odds, to reform their respective Monarchies to a level of capability that could withstand foreign pressures. During the second half of the century the modes of thought and practice developed in more technically advanced European societies and associated with the Enlightenment stimulated and transformed earlier investigations. Strategic necessities combined with the application of scientific teaching. We shall in due course discuss the scientific expeditions that both governments sponsored for the collection of data and the despatch of samples to the metropolitan capitals.

The Portuguese physician from Évora, José Rodrigues Abreu (1682–1755), graduate of the University of Coimbra, who accompanied the in-coming Governor of the Captaincy of São Paulo and Minas de Ouro, António de Albuquerque, not only produced a valuable study of the Brazilian mining zone but published in stages between 1733 and 1752 a four-volume Historiologia médica. This work, the result of observations on medical practice during his 8 years in Brazil from 1705 to 1713, formed part of a general European reformulation of medical science away from traditional attitudes still based on Galen's fundamental principles. Abreu became Chief Physician of the Armed Forces in 1714 and then the king's doctor. He belonged to the group of reformers associated with the Cardinal João da Mota e Silva (1685–1749), the king's principal advisor from 1736, and Martinho de Mendonça (1693–1743), all of whom came from distinguished noble families. Abreu was elected in 1750 to membership of the Iberia Medical Academy in Oporto. Mendonça, for his part, became one of the founding members of the Portuguese Royal Academy of History, which the king had established in 1720. He also spent time in Brazil, chiefly as an administrative and fiscal reformer in Minas Gerais in 1734–7. As the Brazilian gold boom petered out by mid-century, the Portuguese government, for example, commissioned two mineralogists, Manuel da Câmara and José Vieira Couto, to proceed to Minas Gerais in order to discover how the mining industry there might be revived. At the same time, Brazilian students were encouraged to turn their attention to metallurgy, when they came to the Portuguese University of Coimbra, which in following decades would pass through a major process of regeneration. At times, they might pass from Coimbra to other European universities where expertise was available. Although themselves well-born, few of these reformers could have expected key positions at Court without the support and friendship of Portugal's leading noblemen such as the Conde de Ericeira, the Visconde de Vila Nova da Cerveira, or the Marqueses of Abrantes and Alegrete, and such leading clerics as the Cardinal da Mota. Even so, they remained straws in a fierce traditionalist wind.

Nicolás Antonio (1617–84) was among a handful of Spanish historians, notably Manuel Martí, dean of Alicante cathedral and mentor of Gregorio Mayáns i Síscar (1699–1781), and Juan de Ferreras, a provincial parish priest who moved to Madrid in 1697, who were attempting to apply the critical method. Ferreras wrote a 16–volume history of Spain to the reign of Philip II, which encouraged Philip V to appoint him Royal Librarian at the Escorial Monastery-Palace. Sevillian by birth, Nicolás Antonio spent the years 1654–78 in Rome and then the rest of his career in Madrid. His Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, which departed from the traditional type of chronicle, came out in two parts 1672 and 1696, the first listing and evaluating Spanish and Spanish-American writers since 1500 and the second discussing Spanish literature until 1500. Martí, who spent the years 1686–96 in Rome, edited the second volume of Antonio's Bibliotheca. The Marqués de Mondéjar had also lived in Rome, where he came in contact with Jesuit scholarship compiling the lives of the saints. Martí, made his acquaintance there and may have become familiar with historical work of the French Benedictine, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), at that time. This formed the background for his studies of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish historians. Antonio wrote his Censura de historias fabulosas in Madrid but it remained in manuscript form, perhaps because it criticised the methods and findings of long-established historians.

François López argues that the activities of these novatores indicated a change taking place in Spain during the later seventeenth century in the mental processes and epistemological criteria of several of the leading intellectuals. He views them as the 'first indications of the Enlightenment'. Even so, they faced, as their successors would, the onslaught of aggressive dogmatism from their outraged opponents.

The Bourbon dynasty, which had acceded to the Spanish throne in 1700, retained Italian connections, not the least of which was the Kingdom of Naples. In Valencia, scholars also looked to Italy for intellectual inspiration. Critical history in the Italian territories had roots in the work of Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750). In Valencia, Gregorio Mayáns became a leading figure in the revival of learning from the 1720s. He followed Muratori's method with considerable interest. He created a local storm when he criticised Juan de Mariana's Historiae de Rebus Hispaniae (1592–1623), the generally accepted text, for over-reliance on the chronicles. Mayáns followed in the footsteps of Nicolás Antonio, whose Censura he encountered when Royal Librarian in 1733–9. Mayáns's fellow Valencian, Francisco Pérez Bayer, edited this earlier work under commission by Charles III, and Mayáns himself published Antonio's Censura in Valencia in 1742. It earned him the opprobrium of the Council of Castile, which confiscated the book for 6 months, while it was examined for unorthodox doctrines. History was clearly not neutral. On the contrary, it had quickly become a major battleground between innovators and traditionalists. Antonio Mestre comments that 'history became converted into an instrument of reform'.

Benito Gerónimo Feijóo (1676–1764), the Benedictine monk from Orense in Galicia, whose writings have frequently been seen in much of the historical literature as the original source of the Spanish Enlightenment, spent his novitiate and mature years in the Monastery of Samos, not far from the border with the province of León. Even so, publication of his Teatro Crítico Universal (1726–39) was paid for by one of the greatest financiers of the Spanish Court, Juan Ignacio de Goyeneche. Feijóo dedicated the first volume to him and another volume to his son, Francisco Xavier. The Teatro Crítico consisted of 117 discourses on a range of topics. Its significance lay in the singling out of new methods of thinking through analysis. Feijóo, a Professor of Theology at the age of thirty-three, read French and English authors, disseminating critically their ideas in his own writings from 1726 onwards. He gave up teaching in 1739, declining an American bishopric, and concentrated on writing. Five volumes of Cartas eruditas followed the Teatro crítico until he stopped writing in 1759, already in his eighties. These Cartas consisted of 165 letters and two discourses replying to commentaries arising from the Teatro. Although wary of the possible attentions of the Inquisition in the Spain of his time, Feijóo's critical method encouraged later generations, as José María Blanco White would comment. Feijóo's writings represented what Maravall has called 'the first Spanish Enlightenment', a discreet and moderate endeavour to integrate Spanish intellectual life into that of the rest of Western Europe. He showed no criticism of religion, but shared with the Valencian ilustrados the growing reaction to the continuing predominance of the scholasticism founded in Aristotle throughout the Spanish educational system. Like them, he saw no contradiction between educational reform and Catholic doctrine. Common throughout the Spanish Enlightenment, right from these early days, was the championship of the scientific method already pioneered abroad.