Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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![]() | Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ![]() |
CASUISTRY
The word casuistry (literally “concern with
individual
cases”) has been used in three different, if
connected
meanings. In its widest sense, it has described a men-
tality which pays closer attention to the
concrete in-
stance than to abstract
generalities. In a narrower
sense, it has been employed to characterize
legal sys-
tems like those of the Anglo-Saxon
countries under
which all-inclusive norms are derived from judgments
in particular lawsuits, instead of being laid down
beforehand in rationally
elaborated codes. In its nar-
rowest sense, it
refers to the use of subtle definitional
distinctions in the handling of
ethico-legal or purely
ethical problems with the aim of drawing fine
dividing
lines between what is permissible and what is not. As
this
technique has at times been applied in order to
excuse crimes and sins and
to exculpate criminals and
sinners, this last usage of the term (at present
the most
widespread) has contracted a definitely pejorative
undertone.
In its best sense casuistry is opposed to inflexible,
literal, or legalistic
interpretation of moral rules; in-
deed casuistry
rejects any attitude which absolutizes
a general and abstract norm and
insists on its all-round
unyielding and quasi-mechanical application, while
at
the same time denying any abatement or adjustment
to changing
contingencies.
The historical appearance of casuistry has always
been dependent on the
existence of its opposite—
ethico-legal or purely legal
absolutism. It is in its nature
a movement with the aim, first, of bridging
the gap
between the abstract and the concrete, the general
norm and
the individual case, and, second, of mitigat-
ing the rigor of the laws which must produce hardness
and hardships
if they are not made somewhat elastic
in their application to particular
problems. It was
casuistry, too, was largely unknown. A sharp distinction
between the Is and the Ought was alien to the ethos
of the Greeks; the grand aim of education was to
inculcate the moral rule, or rather a moral character,
in the heart of the individual; correspondingly, there
was no formulation of moral codes which would con-
front man from the outside, as something essentially
alien to him; and therefore there was no desire to
wriggle out of the clutches of a law, be it law in the
narrower sense of the word or moral law. Everything
was, so to speak, elastic. In an atmosphere of this kind,
casuistry does not unfold; there is just no call for it.
Everything was radically different in the orbit of
Judaism. Here it was part
of the unconscious meta-
physic of the nation
to assume that there was a sharp
and thoroughgoing opposition between the
Is and the
Ought, and that therefore the Ought must confront the
Is as
something superior and demanding, indeed, as
something absolute and
unyielding, for (it was thought)
it was only in this way that the required
minimum
of law-abidingness could be secured. The doctrine of
original
sin was the starting point, and the pro-
mulgation of the Torah or Sacred Law was the answer
to it. The Law,
as laid down in the Pentateuch, was
both too abstract to be immediately
applicable in most
cases, and, especially in its ceremonial regulations,
too
minute and too full of perplexities not to generate a
desire to
make it, on occasions, less stiff and burden-
some. Both facts stimulated the evolution of casuistical
thinking,
even in the earlier stages of Hebrew history.
Later on, both legalism and
its unavoidable adjunct
and opposite, casuistry, received new impetus.
When
the Jews lost their freedom for a time during their
Babylonian
captivity, and when they forfeited it finally
under Titus, the Law became
the very Palladium of
national existence. To let go of it, would have
meant
to lose everything. Therefore the dominance of the
Law was
greatly enhanced. It became inflexible and
formal, and the result was that
life, in an under-
standable
counterstroke, fashioned casuistry as its
logical and political complement
and corrective. The
development of Muhammadanism was somewhat simi-
lar. The Koran embodied law which claimed to
be
divine, i.e., of a validity beyond doubt and discussion.
Yet it was
too simple not to need specification, and
when its rule was extended over
larger areas, it was
not easily applied to all the circumstances which
it
encountered. Law schools appeared, and had to appear,
which
prepared the universal imperatives for local use,
and in the process they
added a very rich and varied
case law to the original revelation. The
science which
they founded and greatly developed was thoroughly
casuistical.
Under the Christian dispensation, the area in which
casuistry first made
its appearance, was, not surpris-
ingly,
the activity of the Church which comes closest
to the function and the
practice of the law—the exer-
cise
of discipline, more concretely, the punishment of
sins and sinners. From
the third century onward, a
certain casuistical content is increasingly
characteristic
of Christian literature. Writers like Gregorius Thau-
maturgus and Cyprian give information
about the
penances which it is meet and right to impose where
definite
faults have been committed, and from these
beginnings sprang the
penitential books of later times.
Irish and Anglo-Saxon texts spread far
and wide and
predominated between the sixth and tenth centuries.
These
early Christian casuistical publications aroused
far fewer misgivings than
their later—late medieval
and early modern—pendants.
The reason for this lies
not only in a greater willingness to accept and
to
undergo the rigors of a stern law, but also in the fact
that the
ecclesiastical tribunals were, in every essential
detail, very much like
the secular ones. The bishop's
sentence was seen as parallel to the
judge's; in fact,
he was the judge in his diocese.
His activity in dealing
with penitents was plainly legal. But in the
application
of laws casuistical practices and procedures were, and
were seen to be, entirely justified, indeed, unavoidable.
Everybody knew
and realized that, as the Roman law-
yers had
taught, the salient act of the man on the bench
was subsumptio, i.e., the subsumption of a concrete
case under a
general rule. Cases therefore had to be
carefully distinguished; before subsumptio, there had
to be constructio, an identification of their distin-
guishing marks. It must be remembered here that
the
old penitential procedure was public and formal. That
alone made
it similar to the state's jurisdiction and
covered its methods with the
mantle of legitimacy.
Much changed when the locus of penance shifted
and the forum externum was replaced by the forum
internum, i.e., when the treatment of sinners became
more
private and less formal. When auricular confes-
sion developed, the main function of the father con-
fessor was no longer to sentence the sinner, though
an element of this quasi-legal action unavoidably re-
mained; it was rather to win him over to more moral
modes of
thought and action, to educate him. The
emphasis was less on the past, the
deeds done, than
on the future, the conduct to be expected. This alone
tended to soften the Church's penitential practice, and
to make it more
flexible, understanding, and patient.
Furthermore, in many genuine
penitents, an unreason-
ing fear of hell was
found to be present which produced
a psychological condition of great
discouragement with
consequences which were far from good in any sense
of the word. This pushed the confessional practice
laxity. We can see how and why the word casuistry
received the particular coloring with which it is now
connected. But a further factor intervened. The father
confessor was also a spiritual director. The laity had
recourse to him, not only after a sin had been com-
mitted and had to be counterbalanced and atoned for
by an apposite penance, but even before certain mor-
ally difficult decisions, for instance, when one of the
faithful found himself puzzled as to what the correct
action would be in the given circumstances. The con-
flict of different duties, to give but one example, would
send a man to church to ask guidance of the priest.
These were the famous “cases of conscience” whose
discussion fills the later literature. Many of them, owing
to the complexity of the human condition, were very
knotty indeed. The dog-Latin word casus cnusus for
a besetting problem which seems insoluble and yet has
to be solved was coined to describe such torturing
problems. Thus there arose all that was needed to give
birth to a whole science, the science of casuistry: a
social need, a group of men who had to fulfil it (the
confession-hearing and guidance-giving clergy), and a
host of questions difficult enough to arouse lively inter-
est and to demand sustained ratiocination. We find its
precipitate in the great Summae casuum or Summulae
confessionales which were written after the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215 had decreed that every Chris-
tian was in duty bound to go to confession at least
once a year. The Summa de vitiis of the Dominican
Guielmus Peraldus, was one of the first; Raimundus de
Pennaforte's Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio,
another Dominican work, of similar date (before 1238),
came to join it, and the Franciscan Astexanus d'Asti
added his Summa de casibus conscientiae around the
year 1317. The matter was abstruse enough in itself,
but the well-known Scholastic passion for distinc-
tion-making made it much more so. The busy priests
needed commodious handbooks for quick information
rather than learned tomes, and such a one was provided
when the Summa Silvestrina of the Dominican Sil-
vester Prierias (ca. 1515)—a work arranged according
to alphabetical headings—was put on the shelves next
to the Summa Raimundiana and the Summa Astesana
which had been the main standbys before and remained
so for a considerable time.
In the hands of these writers the old legal casuistry
of the primitive
Church changed into a moral casuistry
which offered a rather different face
to the world.
While the casuistical method is, as we have pointed
out,
impeccable in the field of law, it appears, in ethics,
easily as an illicit
bending of general principles, if not
indeed as a playing fast and loose
with sacred impera-
tives. This must be so
especially if “accommo
dation”—the adjustment of a firm law to the
needs of
an individual law-breaker, a “tempering of the
wind
to the shorn lamb,” to use a common
phrase—becomes
in practice the guiding principle. The basic
problem
lies in the fact that the confessional is a tribunal of
love
as well as a tribunal of law. The end pursued in
it is less the conviction
and the condemnation of the
sinner than his reclamation and reconciliation.
To con-
front him with the letter of the law
and to refuse to
make allowances in his personal, perhaps attenuating,
circumstances would always mean to discourage and
often to lose him. On the
other hand, to give way to
special pleading, to set aside obligations and
command-
ments which must needs be
binding on all men, would
lead to a catastrophic undermining of human
discipline
and morality. The casuists tried to do their job without
falling either into excessive hardness (legalism in the
bad sense of the
word) or into excessive softness
(casuistry in the bad sense of the word).
Hence the
ambiguous, problematical reputation which is theirs.
Love
and law can never be totally reconciled in their
conflicting claims. A
synthesis must be attempted in
every age without ever being achieved or
even achiev-
able. The classical casuistic
literature of the later Mid-
dle Ages was one
attempt in this direction.
The permanent character as well as the further
development of casuistry was
deeply influenced by the
ethical doctrines of Saint Thomas Aquinas which
are
set out in the second part of his Summa
theologica.
His moral system, deeply influenced as it is by
Plato
and Aristotle, centers on the concept of “right rela-
tions,” of a justitia generalis, the realization of which
would
bring human society into an ordered and satis-
fying (even morally satisfactory) condition. According
to Aquinas,
all virtues can, in a manner, be reduced
to the basic virtue of
righteousness and/or justice.
These two key words—righteousness
and justice—
suggest a legal, if not, indeed, a legalistic turn
of mind,
and there can be no doubt that in one sense all human
relationships, insofar as they approach the ideal, are
conceived as
norm-informed and norm-determined. Yet
there is another aspect which must
not be missed. Right
and just relationships are not only right and just in
the
minimal sense, in the cold sense, so to speak, they are
also right
and just in the full, the maximal sense, the
sense of closeness and warmth,
indeed, of love. If this
is not always obvious on the face of the texts,
because
Thomas sports a sober mode of expression, it is yet
the inner
substance of his social and moral philosophy.
Law is for him the form,
while love is the appropriate
content. De
facto relations which fully coincide with
the relations which are
expected and demanded de jure,
will
spontaneously generate a spirit of caritas, for
there
is, for Thomas as for Aristotle, a drift in reality which,
of perfection. All tends towards God. God is indeed
the source of all law, but He is also the source of all
love. Law appears therefore in the last analysis as
essentially a means to an end, and the end is the vision
of, and the union with, God, the Value of Values. The
practice of the confessional, from which casuistry
sprang, and which it, in turn, shaped, was in line with
these conceptions. The quasi-legal and casuistical side
of the priest's dealings with the penitent, the con-
structio of his failings and their subsumptio under the
appropriate norms, was merely a preparation for the
prodigal's reconciliation with his outraged father, i.e.,
the reestablishment of a condition of love.
It is only if it is seen within this framework, that
the essence of
casuistry can be recognized and the
whole phenomenon duly appreciated.
Nothing but
error can result if it is considered in isolation. The
inclusive system of moral philosophy which emerged
in and through the great
Summae was bipolar. It con-
sisted of Ascetics on the one hand, and of Casuistics
on the other, and the two belonged together like light
and shadow, or like
the two sides of a coin, each being
meaningless without the other. The
ascetic element
loomed less large in the bulk of the literature, but
not
because it was considered of minor importance; the
reason was
rather that, with its simple and lapidary
pronouncements, it did not need
so much space as its
casuistical opposite whose fine-spun and detailed
dis-
tinctions needed a lot of room for
their due display.
Ascetic morality represented a kind of classics,
having
come down from the Old Testament (the Ten Com-
mandments) and the early rigorists such as Tertullian
or Saint Augustine, whereas casuistical morality re-
garded itself as its modern, developmental completion.
The
discipline of Ascetics represented a striving for
moral perfection; it
formulated the moral maximum,
as it were; Casuistics, for its part, showed
in contrast
a search for the moral minimum; it tried to draw the
lowest acceptable line between ethical and nonethical,
e.g., egotistical
conduct, for instance, in economic or
market dealings. Ascetics formulated
its concepts and
commands in terminis,
whereas Casuistics was, and had
to be, much more tentative and vague. One
reason for
this difference was that Ascetics, in majestic isolation
from reality, issued absolute propositions which time
and space would not,
should not, and could not modify,
whereas Casuistics was in the closest
contact with
reality, with the everyday dealings of human beings
with
each other, and tried to cope as best it might
(often greatly hampered by
the ascetic tradition with
which it was yoked together) with the myriads
of
situations and incidents which were encountered from
day to day.
Because of its whole nature, the ascetic
tendency excluded from its statements and develop-
ments every trace of sentiment; it tended to be ration-
alistic; it conceived its doctrines
to be truth in the same
sense as mathematical propositions are the truth.
Be-
tween Is and Ought it saw the same
difference as
between black and white. It was not in these terms
that
the casuistical authors speculated. They saw a
world of grey hues, some
rather dark in complexion,
others rather light, and they believed in the
possibility
of diminishing the black ingredient in the mixture and
increasing the white. This was to be achieved by a
clever strategy, by
elasticity, understanding, forebear-
ance,
patience, and all similar tactics, but also (this
must in fairness be
emphasized) by persistence and
perseverance. If the ascetic moralist was a
quasi-
mathematician, the casuist
was a kind of medical man.
He aimed at providing the right treatment which,
by
slow improvements, would nurse a sickening soul back
to robust
health so that it could feed again on the hard
fare of ascetic morality.
Considered in this fashion, the system of the Summae
represented a microcosm of all ethical philosophizing.
Max Weber, for
instance, divided moral philosophy
into the ethics of principle,
absolutizing ethics (
Gesin-
nungsethik
as he called it—Kant's categorical impera-
tive as archetype), and the ethics of
accommodation,
relativizing ethics (Erfolgsethik—Bentham's utilitarian-
ism as archetype). The former embraced the
maxim
“Let justice prevail though the world perish”
(fiat
justitia, pereat mundus); it was
pure and august and
majestic, but it was essentially divine rather than
hu-
man, a manifestation of the noumenal
world, with the
result that it would be denied what its weaker and
less impressive other self secured, namely success in
practical affairs.
The latter rejected the formula “all
or nothing” and
was satisfied with a little step here
and again a little step there; it was
of the phenomenal
world in which we live, afflicted with its
impurities,
by no means endowed with a grandiose and distant
impressiveness, but a workable technique securing ever
anew petty
improvements. In a word, the latter variety
of ethics based on consequences
(Erfolgsethik) was a
kind of moral
Machiavellism, and this is precisely what
casuistry was in the framework of
the Catholic doc-
trinal system. We can
describe it so, provided of course
we remember that the ultimate aim of the
Florentine
was also the moral regeneration of his city and country.
To the Catholic thinkers themselves, the contrast
which we are trying to
draw and within which alone
the essence and the historical achievement of
casuistry
can be fairly assessed, presented itself in other, though
parallel, terms. Their thought was theological. God
could either be
conceived as king or judge, or he could
be conceived as father or friend.
To the one conception
other near, loving, and easy to approach. Corre-
spondingly there were two basic psychological condi-
tions with regard to the human attitude to the divinity,
fear of God on the one hand and love of God on the
other. This love of God was not necessarily destroyed,
though it was unavoidably affected, if a sin was com-
mitted, especially a relatively harmless or “venial”
sin. (The distinction between venial or mortal sins was
therefore a constant preoccupation of Catholic moral
theology in general and the casuistical morality which
formed an integral part of it in particular.) The soul
besmirched by sin had to be cleansed, and that cleans-
ing was the task of the confessional. In the confessional,
Ascetics was not of so much use as Casuistics was, as
Gesinnungsethik was not of so much use in the outer,
wider world as was Erfolgsethik. The ascetic approach
threatened, at least in all probability, to shake, abash,
and frighten the sinner and thereby to inhibit the
striving towards the good which he might still bear
within him. The casuistical treatment, however, prom-
ised, or at least raised the hope, that he would be
soothed, comforted, encouraged, and elevated, and
thereby given the energy for a new and more successful
effort towards reintegration in the society of the right-
eous and just. To these differences in basic attitude
corresponded a contrast of more practical importance.
The priest's formal absolution of the sinner was con-
ditional on his repentance, but in the framework of
ascetical absolutism repentance for the love of God
(contritio) was demanded, whereas in the context of
casuistical strategy and education repentance for the
fear of God (attritio) was deemed sufficient. We have
here a curious, but entirely logical, crossing of the lines
of thought. Contrition, the more perfect form of re-
pentance, sees sin as an offense against the loving God,
the father and friend; here Ascetics works with a con-
cept in other ways more congenial to Casuistics; attri-
tion, however, the less perfect form of repentance, with
which the “laxist” casuists were invariably satisfied, was
inclined to define sin as an insult to the highest lord,
the legislator and judge of the world—it borrowed the
theological core-conception of Ascetics. This proves
again that the two halves of the theology and morality
of the Summae form a whole which cannot be severed
without destroying both.
The close systematic connection between ascetic and
casuistic moral theology
would seem to demand,
ideally, an equally close and systematic
cooperation.
In principle, the practical counsels of casuistry should
be derived, by a process of logical deduction, from the
theoretical
propositions of Ascetics. There should, in
other words, be a flawless and
faultless descent from
the universal to the specific. If this had been so, casu
istry could never have broken away from its ascetic
corrective.
On the other side, the firsthand experiences
of the practitioners of
casuistry should have been re-
ported, for the
purposes of reconciliation with, and
incorporation into, the canons of
absolute morality, to
the representatives of dogmatic ethics who would
then
have avoided all possible estrangement from ongoing
reality.
There would thus have been an ever-renewed
ascent from the specific to the
universal. As it was,
this highly desirable cooperation of the two
branches
was only very partially achieved, and the looseness of
their
coherence and coordination brought many and
serious evils in its train. The
ascetic, absolutistic, theo-
retical part of
the system was not sufficiently enriched
and refined by experience, the
casuistical, relativistic,
practical part was not sufficiently kept in
contact with
the direction-giving, standard-ensuring securities of
ultimate principles. In the end there appeared a real
danger in the domain
of casuistry—the possibility that,
in its hands, the
specification and specialized appli-
cation
of general rules essential to social control and
the moralization of
everyday life would turn into their
dissolution—differently
expressed, that casuistry which
up to then had been a relativized
absolutism would
degenerate into an absolute relativism. The trouble
was
partly due to the social factor. Ascetics, in other words,
moral
theory, was mainly cultivated by men more or
less divorced from the world,
by monks at first, by
professors later on. Casuistics was in the hands of
others
who were perhaps too much in contact with the world,
the parish
clergy, who under the pressure of the needs
of their care and cure of souls
might easily drift away
from the high canons which they had learned in
the
seminaries during their youth. This would not have
been too
serious, if the world had been and remained
static. As it was, the pace of
development was greatly
speeded up during the fifteenth century and so the
two
branches, which should never have lost the closest
contact, tended
to be divided by a gap ever increasing
in width and depth. It was
especially economic and
industrial development which created a kind of
no-
man's-land between the two:
partnership agreements
and the dissolution of partnerships in trade, the
division
of profits and inheritances, problems arising from the
complexities of the slowly forming insurance business,
with all its
uncertainties and temptations and the like,
required serious theoretical
thinking through and
equally serious practical solutions. As it was, the
tradi-
tional science of Ascetics had
become too hard and
set in its thought ways, too enclosed in its
inherited
questions and answers, to move with alacrity and
effectiveness into this new and broadening field. There
were notable
exceptions. The Dominican Saint
Antoninus of Florence, for instance, who
died in 1459,
his writings. But, on the whole, the area was left to
the casuists for cultivation, with the result that the
voice of the Church became somewhat uncertain, and
rigorists raised increasingly sharp criticisms which
contributed their mite to the impending Reformation
movement.
It is certainly a very significant historical fact that
Martin Luther, when
he burnt the papal bull of ex-
communication directed against him, also threw a
current casuistical
text, a copy of the so-called Summa
Angelica
(1486) of Angelus de Clavasio, into the flames.
In its first stages
(though, as we shall see, only in its
first stages), the Reformation was
decidedly anti-
casuistical. In this
respect, the attitude of Calvin far
outdistanced that of Luther. With his
associated doc-
trines of the total perversion
of man and the incom-
prehensible
majesty of God, he banned, and had to ban,
all ideas of a possible
accommodation of God's com-
mands to the needs
of man: man was simply too low
and mean, too near to zero in value and
importance
to deserve consideration, while God was too high up
and too
far away to concede it. Thus Calvinism became
thoroughly, indeed
passionately, rigorist in moral the-
ory and
practice. This had the understandable and
unavoidable consequence of
driving Catholicism in the
opposite direction. In the great competition of
the
confessional groups for the adherence of men which
ensued,
Calvinism tried to impress by the sternness of
its moral code, the
extremity of its disciplinary com-
mands, while
Catholicism strove to attract by the
mercifulness of its methods, by its
willingness to build
golden bridges for the repentant sinner and keep
the
Church's doors ever open for him. In the realm of social
education, nothing is more characteristic of the con-
trast between the two variants of Christianity than the
fact
that Calvinism returned to open confession and
open condemnation (the stool
on which the culprit had
to stand to hear his failings discussed before and
by
the congregation became almost symbolical), whereas
Catholicism
made confession ever more easy and ever
more private (the confessional box
with its division
between priest and penitent who communicated in
darkness through a grille was now introduced). While
the Church of Rome as
a whole thus moved away under
external pressures from the rigorist toward
the laxist,
casuistical pole in moral theology, developments took
place within her own house which further strengthened
this tendency and
created in the Jesuit Order a power-
ful
internal vanguard of an even more extreme laxist
and casuistical movement.
Calvinism, with its harking
back to the stark ascetical conceptions of
Saint Augus-
tine, aroused an echo in parts of
the Catholic camp,
and the community known to history as the
Jansenists
came into being. One of them, Antoine Arnauld, pub
lished a treatise on the Morale pratique des
Jésuites
(Vol. I, 1669, Vol. II, 1683) strongly
upholding the
rigorist point of view; another Jansenist and even
greater writer, Blaise Pascal, launched in his famed
Lettres provinciales (1656-57) a blistering attack
on the
Jesuits and on all casuistry. But this attack failed. Such
works as Hermann Busenbaum's Medulla theologiae
moralis (1645) and Antonio Escobar y Mendoza's Liber
theologiae moralis (1644) did much more than
merely
maintain themselves in the market: they became
widely
predominant, not to say dominant, handbooks
of Catholic moral guidance. The
former ran through
twenty-three editions during Busenbaum's lifetime
(1600-68), the latter through forty. Busenbaum's text
reached in the end
more than two hundred printings!
The two treatises mark the earlier climax
of casuistry
in the Catholic Church.
Meanwhile the rigorism of the Protestant theologians
was undergoing very
considerable modifications. At
first, rid of the need to hear confessions
and to give
absolution, Luther and the Lutherans could easily
maintain
their original attitude of “no truce with sin.”
But
this changed as soon as some of them became
advisers to princes and thus
found themselves in the
same positions, or rather the same quandaries, as
their
Catholic counterparts. When Luther himself had to
help Philipp
von Hessen in his marital complications,
he fell back on a typical
casuistical device, the making
of fine distinctions: he counselled that the
Landgraf
should not publicly announce his second
clandestine
marriage, for there was, he argued, a difference be-
tween a public “yes” and
a confidential one. Indeed,
he moved even deeper into casuistry. In the
parochial
sermons there is a passage where he goes so far as to
turn
the tables on the Catholics. The monks, he pro-
nounces, describe all lying as sinful, but there are cases,
such
as those of Nutzlüge and Lieblüge (lying for the
sake of a good cause or for the
sake of love), which
are not to be subsumed under the concept of
sinning,
if they spring from a good heart. In due course, there
appeared a fairly substantial Lutheran literature on
casuistry which
paralleled the works of Busenbaum and
Escobar y Mendoza in most things,
even laxity. We
might mention Johann Friedrich König's Theologia
positiva acroamatica (1664) and Johannes Olearius'
Introductio Brevis in theologiam casuisticam
(1694) as
prime examples. Even in the Calvinist fold, something
like a
casuistical approach made its appearance.
Somewhat stricter, more
penitential in tone and more
edificational in design, it is yet a proof of
how wide-
spread casuistical moralizing was
in the age, and how
real the need for some such bridging of the gap be-
tween the simplicity of abstract rules and the
multi-
plicity of concrete needs is in
any age. Three English
works, all by William Perkins, illustrate Calvinist
of Conscience (1597), and The Whole Treatise of the
Cases of Conscience (1606). Perkins' disciple, William
Ames, wrote De conscientia et eius jure vel casibus
(1630) which could serve as a manual and enjoyed for
a time considerable circulation.
prima facie, one would expect that the
transition
from the age of faith to the age of reason would have
diminished the relish for casuistical disquisitions, but
on closer
inspection the opposite is seen to be the case.
The reason for the
survival, nay continuing vigor, of
casuistry lies in the cause which has
ever produced
casuistry as its effect: the formulation and propagation
of a strongly absolutist, ascetical system of morals. The
conquering
rationalism of the eighteenth century
tended to bring forth precisely such
a system and in
Immanuel Kant we find it perfected and classically
expressed. The imperative on which his ethics rests as
on a rocher de bronze is a categorical, not a hypo-
thetical, imperative. True, even Kant,
though his con-
tact with life was tenuous, had
at least on one occasion
to fall back, under the pressure of circumstances,
on
a technique, the practice of which was a standing
reproach to
casuists: the use of somewhat less than
univocal statements in order to
defend higher values.
When, after his conflict with the Prussian
government,
he promised to abstain “for the future”
(fernerhin)
“totally” (gänzlich) from lecturing on religion, he
cleverly addressed this declaration to “your royal maj-
esty” (Ew.
Königlichen Majestät), in the intention
that
the restrictions he had thus taken upon himself would,
by the
form of words chosen, be confined to the lifetime
of King Friedrich Wilhelm
II. Absolutist in ethics
though he was, he employed here the current casu-
istical distinction between a government
which re-
mains within its legitimate rights and
thus can demand
absolute candor of its subjects, and one which goes
beyond them and may under certain circumstances be
treated differently.
The vogue of Protestant and later secularized ra-
tionalism and the often underestimated spread of
Jansenist
rationalism, which took in rulers like Joseph
II of Austria, but other
formally Catholic princes and
princelings as well, evoked in the eighteenth
century
a new and last flowering of casuistry in the person of
Saint
Alphonsus of Liguori. Alphonsus, the founder of
the worldwide Redemptorist
Order, can best be under-
stood as a
representative of the pre-romantic move-
ment
which protested against the prevalence of ra-
tionalism in thought and human relationships and
called for a
“religion of the heart” to replace the
“head-religion” which controlled orthodoxy and led to
a progressive drying-up of the spiritual life, especially
prayer-life, but
which also affected the handling of sin
and sinners in the confessional.
The parallel between
him and the Wesleys is obvious. As a moral theologian,
Alphonsus strove to transmute cold justice into warm
charity. He had,
however, been trained as a lawyer
and tried to carry out his grand design,
not by pushing
aside the laws which were in force, but by softening
them up, so to speak, from within by introducing into
their practice
principles and policies of love and ac-
commodation, with the result that a highly profiled
system of
casuistry flowed from his pen. The slogan
of the later so-called
sociological school of law was
also his: through the law, always through the law, but
beyond it! Formally, his system, as
laid down, for
instance, in his Theologia
moralis (1756), was a mod-
ernized
version of Busenbaum's Medulla; in substance
it was
both richer and deeper. As Busenbaum had been
the chief target of
Protestant polemics, so Alphonsus
of Liguori became that of the
Enlightenment. He was
said to have no principles at all, but to be
prepared
to use any sophistry to transmute unacceptable into
acceptable, unethical into ethically innocuous actions.
A cooler assessment
of his work, however, shows that
his casuistry, as all casuistry, was in
the last resort still
rooted in ascetical thinking. To give but one
example:
he allowed, in certain desperate cases, the use of am-
biguous statements. We may think, for
instance, of a
political prisoner under interrogation by a secret
police
in the shadow of rack and rope. Most moralists, indeed,
most
upright men, would, in these circumstances, per-
mit even downright lying. Not so Alphonsus. The use
of ambiguous
statements was precisely meant to obvi-
ate the
need to lie. The victim was advised, not to
deceive, but to allow the
persecutor (who, morally, had
no right to torture or perhaps even to
question a fel-
low-man) to deceive himself.
Respect for truth was in
a manner preserved by such a stratagem. It is
obvious
from this illustration how the casuistics of Saint Al-
phonsus strove to help in the individual
case without
hurting general law.
With Alphonsus of Liguori, whose Theologia
moralis
was declared unexceptionable by the Congregation of
Rites in 1803, who was canonized in 1839 and pro-
nounced a Doctor Ecclesiae in 1871, and who
thus
marks the later climax of casuistry in the Catholic
Church, the
main history of this variant of moral the-
ology comes to a close. Casuistical works continued
to appear
throughout the nineteenth century, but con-
fessional practice, while still applying the insights of
the
casuists, moved more and more into the middle
of the stream of moral
philosophy, trying to avoid at
the same time the Scylla of a loveless
rigorism and
the Charybdis of an overindulgent laxity.
In this century, in recent decades, casuistry has re-
gained some interest. It was, implicitly and explicitly,
subjected to a new kind of criticism. If it was, in the
past, accused of
betraying the abstract and general in
said to be itself far too abstract and generalizing in
attitude. A leading case is, after all, a kind of genus.
What the casuists did was (though on a lower level
of generalization) exactly what the legalists did,
namely, to subsume an individual instance under a
universal, or near-universal, at least potentially univer-
sal, concept. But, it was argued, moral philosophy is,
or should be, concerned with the absolutely unique,
for not only is every human soul unique, but every
situation in which a soul finds itself when it encounters
a moral quandary is, in principle, unique also. Moral
solutions to moral problems, so “situational ethics”
pleaded, must spring from the unrepeatable decisions
of unrepeatable personalities in unrepeatable situa-
tions. The problem of this new movement in theoretical
ethics would seem to be largely identical with that with
which the classical casuists tried to grapple: how to
extricate men from the clutches of a law which is, and
must be, alien to them, if for no other reason, then
simply because it is a law meant for all and thus not
understanding enough for the needs of any one. As for
casuistry in the traditional sense of the word, the new
discussion has shown up one of its distinguishing marks,
namely to be—in spite of the fact that it is, in such
thinkers as Saint Alphonsus of Liguori, an attempt to
introduce kindness, and indeed emotionalism, into the
legal sphere—itself to some extent a form of legalism
and rationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Joseph Mausbach, Catholic Moral Teaching and its An-
tagonists, trans. A. M.
Buchanan, from the 6th revised and
augmented German ed. (New York,
1914). Joseph Klein,
“Ursprung und Grenze der
Kasuistik,” Aus Theologie und
Philosophie, Festschrift für Fritz Tillmann
(Düsseldorf,
1950), pp. 229-45. Richard Egenter,
“Kasuistik als Christ-
liche
Situationsethik,” Münchner
Theologische Zeitschrift,
1 (1950), 54-65. Paul Ramsey, Deeds
and Rules in Christian
Ethics (New York, 1967).
WERNER STARK
[See also Education; Equity; God; Justice; Law; Love;Rationality; Reformation; Right and Good; Sin and Salva-
tion.]
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