Casuistry (pronounced /ˈkæʒuːɨstri/) is an applied ethics term referring to case-based reasoning. Casuistry is used in juridical and ethical discussions of law and ethics, and often is a critique of principle or rule-based reasoning.[1] The term 'Casuistry' originates from the Latin casus (cases).
Critics use the term pejoratively for the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions (see sophistry). Casuistry is reasoning used to resolve moral problems by applying theoretical rules to particular instances.
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For example, while a principle-based approach might claim that lying is always morally wrong, the casuist would argue that, depending upon the details of the case, lying might or might not be illegal or unethical. For instance, the casuist might conclude that a person is wrong to lie in legal testimony under oath, but might argue that lying actually is the best moral choice if the lie saves a life (Thomas Sanchez and others thus theorized a doctrine of mental reservation). For the casuist, the circumstances of a case are essential for evaluating the proper response.
Typically, casuistic reasoning begins with a clear-cut paradigmatic case (from paradigm, the Greek word παράδειγμα, paradeigma, "pattern" and "example", in turn derived from παραδεικνύναι paradeiknunai, "demonstrate"). In legal reasoning, for example, this might be a precedent case, such as pre-meditated murder. From it, the casuist would ask how closely the given case currently under consideration matches the paradigmatic case. Cases like the paradigmatic case ought to be treated likewise; cases unlike the paradigm ought to be treated differently. Thus, a man is properly charged with pre-meditated murder if the circumstances surrounding his case closely resemble the exemplar pre-meditated murder case. The less a given case is like the paradigm, the weaker the justification is for treating that case like the paradigmatic case.
Casuistry is a method of case reasoning especially useful in treating cases that involve moral dilemmas. It is also a branch of applied ethics. Casuistry is the basis of case law in common law, and the standard form of reasoning applied in common law.
Casuistry takes a relentlessly practical approach to morality. Rather than using theories as starting points, casuistry begins with an examination of cases. By drawing parallels between paradigms, so called "pure cases," and the case at hand, a casuist tries to determine a moral response appropriate to a particular case.
Casuistry has been described as "theory modest" (Arras, see below). One of the strengths of casuistry is that it does not begin with, nor does it overemphasize, theoretical issues. Casuistry does not require practitioners to agree about ethical theories or evaluations before making policy. Instead, they can agree that certain paradigms should be treated in certain ways, and then agree on the similarities, the so-called warrants between a paradigm and the case at hand.
Since most people, and most cultures, substantially agree about most pure ethical situations, casuistry often creates ethical arguments that can persuade people of different ethnic, religious and philosophical beliefs to treat particular cases in the same ways. For this reason, casuistry is widely considered to be the basis for the English common law and its derivatives.
Casuistry is prone to abuses wherever the analogies between cases are false.
Western casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), yet the zenith of casuistry was from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1650, when the Jesuit religious order extensively used casuistry, particularly in practicing the private, Roman Catholic confession.[2] The term casuistry quickly became pejorative with Blaise Pascal's attack on the misuse of casuistry. In Provincial Letters (1656–7)[3] he scolded the Jesuits for using casuistic reasoning in confession to placate wealthy Church donors, whilst punishing poor penitents. Pascal charged that aristocratic penitents could confess their sins one day, re-commit the sin the next day, generously donate the following day, then return to re-confess their sins and only receive the lightest punishment; Pascal's criticisms darkened casuistry's reputation. Since the seventeenth century, casuistry has been widely considered a degenerate form of reasoning. Critics of casuistry focus on its specious argumentation as intentionally misleading.
It was not until publication of The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin,[4] that a revival of casuistry occurred. They argue that the abuse of casuistry is the problem, not casuistry itself (itself an example of casuistic reasoning). Properly used, casuistry is powerful reasoning. Jonsen and Toulmin offer casuistry in dissolving the contradictory tenets of absolutism and relativism: “the form of reasoning constitutive of classical casuistry is rhetorical reasoning”.[5] Moreover, Utilitarianism and Pragmatism commonly are identified as philosophies employing the rhetorical reasoning of casuistry.
The casuistic method was popular among Catholic thinkers in the early modern period, and not only among the Jesuits, as it is commonly thought. Famous casuistic authors include Antonio Escobar y Mendoza's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), which had enjoyed a great success, Thomas Sanchez, Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter's), Antonino Diana, Paul Laymann (Theologia Moralis, 1625), John Azor (Institutiones Morales, 1600), Etienne Bauny, Louis Cellot, Valerius Reginaldus, Hermann Busembaum (d. 1668), etc. One of the main theses of casuists was the necessity to adapt the rigorous morals of the Early Fathers of Christianity to modern morals, which led in some extreme cases to justify what Innocent XI later called "laxist moral" (i.e. justification of usury, homicide, regicide, lying through "mental reservation", adultery and loss of virginity before marriage, etc. — all due cases registered by Pascal in the Provincial Letters).
The progress of casuistry was interrupted towards the middle of the 17th century by the controversy which arose concerning the doctrine of probabilism, which stipulated that one could choose to follow a "probable opinion," that is, supported by a theologian or another, even if it contradicted a more probable opinion or a quotation from one of the Fathers of the Church.[6] The controversy divided Catholic theologians into two camps, Rigorists and Laxists.
Casuistry was much mistrusted by early Protestant theologians, because it justified many of the abuses that they sought to reform. It was famously attacked by the Catholic and Jansenist philosopher Pascal, during the formulary controversy against the Jesuits, in his Provincial Letters as the use of rhetorics to justify moral laxity, which became identified by the public with Jesuitism; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex and sophistic reasoning to justify moral laxity. By the middle of the 18th century, the name of "casuistry" became a synonym of moral laxity.
In 1679 Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suarez and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication.[7] Despite this papal condemnation, both Catholicism and Protestantism permit the use of ambiguous and equivocal statements in specific circumstances.[8]
Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (d. 1787), founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, then brought some attention back to casuistry by publishing again Hermann Busembaum's Medulla Theologiae Moralis, the last edition of it being published in 1785 and receiving the approbation of the Holy See in 1803. Busembaum's Medulla had been burnt in Toulouse in 1757 because of its justification of regicide, deemed particularly scandalous after Damiens' assassination attempt against Louis XV.
G. E. Moore dealt with casuistry in chapter 1.4 of his Principia Ethica; he claimed that "the defects of casuistry are not defects of principle; no objection can be taken to its aim and object. It has failed only because it is far too difficult a subject to be treated adequately in our present state of knowledge." He also asserted, "Casuistry is the goal of ethical investigation. It cannot be safely attempted at the beginning of our studies, but only at the end."[9]
Since the 1960s, applied ethics has revived the ideas of casuistry in applying ethical reasoning to particular cases in law, bioethics and business ethics, so the reputation of casuistry is somewhat rehabilitated.
A good reference, analysing the methodological structure of casuistic argument, is The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1990), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (ISBN 0-520-06960-9).
CASUISTRY (from the Lat. casus, a point of law), the art of bringing general moral principles to bear on particular actions. It is, in short, applied morality; anybody is a casuist who reflects about his duties and tries to bring them into line with some intelligible moral standard. But morality at different times has worn very different dresses. It has sometimes been thought of as an outward law, sometimes as an inward disposition; and each of these rival conceptions has developed a casuistical method of its own. Believers in law have put their trust in authority or logic; while believers in disposition chiefly look to our instinctive faculties - conscience, common-sense or sentiment. The legal is the older group, and to it the name of casuist is often exclusively reserved, generally with the implication that its methods are too purely technical to commend themselves to mankind at large. But common-sense and conscience are quite as definite guides as logic or authority; and there seems no good reason for refusing to give the name of casuistry to their operations.
The casuistry of primitive man is uncompromisingly legal. His morality is not yet separated from his religion; and religion for him means the cult of some superior being - the king or priest of his tribe - whose person is charged with a kind of sacred electricity. "His divinity is a fire,which,under proper restraints, confers endless blessings; but if rashly touched, or allowed to break bounds, it burns or destroys what it touches. Hence the disastrous effects supposed to follow a breach of taboo; the offender has thrust his hand into the divine fire, which shrivels up and consumes him on the spot" (Frazer, The Golden Bough, i. 169). Elaborate rules are accordingly drawn up to secure the maximum of benefit, and the minimum of inconvenience, from this sacred fire; and in the application of these rules does savage casuistry consist. At a higher stage of civilization the god is no longer present in person but issues to his worshippers categorical commands. These logic must seize upon and develop as far as they will go; for the breach of some trifling consequence of a rule might mean the loss of the deity's favour. Hence the rise of sacred books among most Eastern peoples. On the Jewish Decalogue, for instance, follows the law, and on the law the rabbinical schools. Some of these will be stricter, and some laxer; but on the whole all tend to "aggravate" the law - down to the point of forbidding the faithful to wear a girdle, or to kill a noxious insect on the Sabbath. Though indeed we might look nearer home than the Talmud for similar absurdities; most Puritan communities could furnish strange freaks of Sabbatarian casuistry. Nor have the Catholics been one whit behind them. Their scholastic doctors gravely discuss whether - since water is the "matter" of baptism - a soul can be made regenerate by milk, or rose-water or wine.
At the opposite pole stood ancient Greece. Here ceremonial Dicotyledons.
casuistry found no place, because there were no sacred books. "Among the Greeks writing never attained the consecration of religion. No system of doctrine and observance, no manuals containing authoritative rules of morality, were ever transmitted in documentary form. In conduct they shrank from formulae. Unvarying rules petrified action; the need of flexibility, of perpetual adjustment, was strongly felt" (Butcher, The Greek Genius, p. 182). For this reason their interest in ethical speculations was all the keener; their great thinkers were endlessly engaged in settling what the relation ought to be between duty and self-interest. Ought one to swallow up the other - and, if so, which should prevail ? Or was it possible to patch up a compromise between them ? The great Stoic philosophers took the austerest line, and held that duty should always and everywhere be our only law. But it was one thing to enunciate such magnificent theories in a lecture, and quite another to apply them in the market-place. Casuistry came to the aid of average human nature - that is to say, pupils began to confront the master with hard cases taken from daily life. And more than one master was disposed to make large - even startlingly large - concessions to the exigencies of practice. This concrete side of moral philosophy came specially into evidence when Stoicism was transplanted to Rome. Cicero's De Officiis abounds in the kind of question afterwards so warmly discussed by Dr Johnson and his friends. Is it ever right to tell a lie? May a lawyer defend a client whom he knows to be guilty? In selling my goods, is it enough not to disguise their shortcomings, or ought I candidly to admit them? Seneca even made the discussion of such problems into a regular discipline, claiming that their concrete character gave an interest in morality to those who had no love for abstractions; while they prevented those who had from losing themselves in the clouds. And M. Thamin maintains that, if his heroes did not form great characters, at any rate they taught the Roman child to train its conscience. But, then, Cicero and Seneca took common-sense as their guide. They decided each problem on its merits, looking more to the spirit than to the letter, and often showing a practical sagacity worthy of Johnson himself. Quite in the great doctor's spirit is Cicero's counsel to his son, to hear what the philosophers had to say, but to decide for himself as a man of the world. Such advice could not be grateful to the philosophers themselves - then a definite professional class, not unlike the "spiritual directors" of a later Rome, who earned their bread by smoothing away the doubts of the scrupulous on all matters intellectual and moral. Their great weapon was their logic; and a logician, as Pascal says, must be very unfortunate or very stupid if he cannot manage to find exceptions to every conceivable rule. In their hands casuistry became the art of finding such exceptions. From the Greek sophists they borrowed ingenious ways of playing off one duty against another, or duty in general against self-interest - leaving the doubter in the alternative of neglecting the one and being a knave, or neglecting the other and being a fool. Or else they raised a subtle distinction between the act and the intention. To get drunk for the sake of the drink was the mark of a beast; but wine was a powerful stimulant to the brain, and to fuddle oneself in order to think great thoughts was worthy of a sage. No doubt these airy paradoxes were not always seriously taken; but it is significant that a common Roman proverb identified "philosophizing" (philosophatur) with thinking out some dirty trick.
Christianity swept the whole discussion on to a higher plane. All the stress now fell on the disposition, not on the outward act. The good deeds of a just man were a natural consequence of his justice; whereas a bad man was no whit the better, because he now and then deviated into doing right. Actions, in short, were of no account whatever, apart from the character that produced them. "All things are lawful unto me," said St Paul, "but all are not expedient." And St Augustine sums the whole matter up in the famous phrase: "Have charity, and do as thou wilt." Narrow-minded Christian consciences, however, could not stay long on this level; law was so very much more satisfying a guide than vague, elusive charity. And law in plenty was forthcoming, so soon as the Church developed the discipline of public confessions followed by appropriate penances for each fault. At first the whole proceeding was informal and impulsive enough; but by the 7th century it had grown thoroughly stereotyped and formal. Libri Poenitentiales began to appear - detailed lists of all possible sins, with the forfeit to be exacted from each. As public penance finally decayed, and auricular confession took its place, these were superseded by the Summae de Poenitentia, - law-books in the strictest sense. These were huge digests of all that popes, councils, primitive fathers had decided on every kind of question pertaining to the confessional - what exactly is a sin, what kind of questions the priests must ask, under what conditions he could give absolution. As such, they were eagerly welcomed by the clergy; for a single magistrate, sitting in secret without appeal, necessarily grasps at whatever will lighten his burden of responsibility. Nor was their complexity a stumbling-block. The medieval mind was only too prone to look on morality as a highly technical art, quite as difficult as medicine or chancery law - a path where wayfaring men were certain to err, with no guide but their unsophisticated conscience. What could they possibly do but cling to their priest with a "blind and unexpressed faith" ?
Against this state of things the Reformation was a violent protest. Catholicism increasingly took for granted that a man imperilled his soul by thinking for himself; Protestantism replied that he could certainly lose it, if he left his thinking to another. For it is to the individual conscience that God speaks; through the struggles of the individual conscience He builds up a strong and stable Christian character. "A ma.n may be a heretic in the truth," says Milton in his Areopagitica (1644), "if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would not gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their religion. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasures and his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What does he therefore but resolve to give over toiling, and find himself some factor, to whose care and conduct he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs - some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion with all the locks and keys into his custody, and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, which goes or comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house." Twelve years after the Areopagitica appeared Pascal's Provincial Letters (1656-16J7). These deal with the casuists of the Counter - Reformation in the spirit of Milton, laying especial stress on the artificiality of their methods and the laxity of their results. Not, of course, that they meant deliberate evil; Pascal expressly credits them with good intentions. But they were drawn, almost to a man, from Italy or Spain, the two countries least alive to the spirit of the. Reformation; and most of them were Jesuits, the order that set out to be nothing Protestantism was, and everything that Protestantism was not. Hence they were resolutely opposed to any idea of reform; for to begin making changes in the Church's system would be a tacit admission that Luther had some show of reason on his side. On the other hand, they would certainly lose their hold on the laity, unless some kind of change were made; for many of the Church's rules were obsolete, and others far too severe to impose on the France of Montaigne or even the Spain of Cervantes. Thus caught between two fires the casuists developed a highly ingenious method, not unlike that of the Roman Stoics, for eviscerating the substance of a rule while leaving its shadow carefully intact. The next step was to force the confessors to accept their lax interpretation of the law; and this was accomplished by their famous theory of probabilism - first taught in Spain about 1580. This made it a grave sin in the priest to refuse absolution, whenever there was some good reason for giving it even when there were other and better reasons for refusing it. This principle does not deserve all the abuse that has been lavished upon it. It secured uniformity in the confessional, and thereby protected the penitent from the caprices of individual priests; and by depriving these of responsibility, it forced the penitent back on himself. But the gain was more than counterbalanced by the evil. The less the Church could expect from its penitents, the more it was driven to trust to the miraculous efficiency of sacramental grace. Once get a sinner to confession, and the whole work was done. However bad his natural disposition, the magical words of absolution would make him a new man. As for most penitents, all they cared for was to scrape through by the skin of their teeth. Casuistry might insist that it only proposed to fix the minimum of a minimum, and beg them for their soul's sake to aim a little higher. Human nature seldom resists the charms of a fixed standard - least of all when it is applied by a live judge in a visible court. If the priest must be satisfied with little, why be at the trouble of offering more? For this reason, probabilism found vigorous opponents in Bossuet and other eminent divines; and various of its excesses were condemned by the popes during the latter half of the 17th century. After a long eclipse it was finally re-established, though in a very modified form, by Alfonso Liguori about the middle of the 18th century.
In Protestant countries casuistry shrank and dwindled, though works on the subject continued to be written both in Germany and England during the 17th century. The best known of the Anglican books is Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium (1660). But the Protestant casuist never pretended to speak authoritatively; all he did was to give his reasons, and leave the decision to the conscience of his readers. "In all this discourse," says Bishop Sanderson, one of the best of the English writers, "I take it upon me not to write edicts, but to give my advice." Very soon, however, these relics of casuistry were swept away by the rising tide of common-sense. The 18th century loved to. discuss hard cases of conscience, as a very cursory glance at Fielding's novels (r742-175r) or Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) will show. But the age was incurably suspicious of attempts to deal with such difficulties on any kind of technical system. Pope was never tired of girding at "Morality by her false guardians drawn, Chicane in furs, and casuistry in lawn"; while Fielding has embodied the popular conception of a casuist in Parson Thwackum and Philosopher Square, both of whom only take to argument when they want to reason themselves out of some obvious duty. Still more outspoken is the Savoyard vicar in the Emile (1762) of Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Whence do I get my rules of action? I find them in my heart. All I feel to be good is good; all I feel to be evil is evil. Conscience is the best of casuists; it is only when men wish to cheat it that they fly to logical quibbles." Extravagant as this sentiment sounds, it paved the way to better things. The great object of 17th-century moralists had been to find some general principle from which the whole of ethics could be deduced; common-sense, by turning its back on abstract principles of every kind, forced the philosophers to come down to the solid earth, and start by inquiring how the world does make up its mind in fact. During the last two centuries deduction has gone steadily out, and psychology come in. Ethics have become more distinctively a science, instead of an awkward hybrid between a science and an art; their business has been to investigate what moral conduct is, not to lay down the law as to what it ought to be. Hence they deliberately refuse to engage in casuistry of the old-fashioned sort. Further, it is increasingly felt that ethical judgments do not depend on reason alone, but involve every element in our character; and that the real problem of practical morality is to establish a harmonious balance between the intelligence and the feelings - to make a man's "I think this is right" correspond with his "I feel that it is so." Whether systematic training can do anything to make the attainment of this balance easier is a question that has lately engaged the attention of many educational reformers; and whatever future casuistry may still have before it would seem to lie along the lines indicated by them.
There is an excellent study of the ancient casuists by M. Raymond Thamin, Un Probleme moral dans l'antiquite (Paris, 1884). For the Roman Catholic casuists see Dellinger and Reusch, Moralstreitigkeiten im siebzehnten Jahrhundert (2 vols., Nordlingen, 1889), and various articles ("Casuistik," "Ethik," "Moralsysteme," &c.) in Wetzer and Welte's Kirchenlexicon (Freiburg, 1880-1896). See also the editions of Pascal's Provincial Letters, by John de Soyres (with English notes, Cambridge, 1880), and A. Molinier (2 vols., Paris, 1891). The Anglican casuists are discussed in Whewell, Lectures on Moral Philosophy (London, 1862). For general reflections on the subject see the appendix to Jowett's edition of the Epistle to the Romans (London, 1855). Most modern text-books on ethics devote some attention to the matter - notably F. H. Bradley in his Ethical Studies (London, 1876). See also Hastings Rashdall, Theory of Good and Evil (2 vols., Oxford, 1907). (ST. C.)
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The application of general principles of morality to definite and concrete cases of human activity, for the purpose, primarily, of determining what one ought to do, or ought not to do, or what one may do or leave undone as one pleases; and for the purpose, secondarily, of deciding whether and to what extent guilt or immunity from guilt follows on an action already posited.
Being merely a science of application, casuistry must be based on the principles and established conclusions of moral theology and ethics. These normative sciences it presupposes; to them it is ancillary; and strictly speaking it is distinct from them. It does not define objective morality, nor the objective circumstances that modify morality, nor the psychological conditions that fix motive and consent; but, borrowing from the moralist the principles that determine these elements of a volitional act, its inquiry regards the extent of their presence or absence in a given case. Neither does it establish the existence of moral obligation; but, assuming the precepts of morality as already established, its only office is to determine the subjective morality of an individual act. In subordination to the sciences which it subserves, its sphere comprises the whole range of man's free activity. The decisions of the casuist are right or wrong, therefore, in so far as they are or are not in accord with a science of morality, which is itself a right interpretation of the natural or positive laws promulgated by the Supreme Legislator of the Universe. They are of no worth, when based on an arbitrary or purely self-sanctioned autonomous philosophy of conduct.
Since the special function of casuistry is to determine practically and in the concrete the presence or absence of a definite moral obligation, it does not fall within its scope to pass judgment on what would be more advisable, or on what may be recommended as a counsel of perfection. It leaves these judgments to the sciences to which they belong, particularly to pastoral and ascetical theology. The prudent director of consciences, however, being more than a casuist, ought in giving advice to make use of these other sciences in so far as they are applicable. Should he fail to do so, the blame cannot be attributed to casuistry.
The necessity of casuistry and its importance are obvious. From the nature of the case, the general principles of any science in their concrete application give rise to problems which trained and expert minds only can solve. This is especially true regarding the application of moral principles and precepts to individual conduct. For, although those principles and precepts are in themselves generally evident, their application calls for the consideration of many complex factors, both objective and subjective. Only those who unite scientific knowledge of morality with practice in its application may be trusted to solve promptly and safely problems of conscience. Personal, social, commercial, and political experience proves this abundantly. Moral education requires long, patient, and delicate training, and few acquire it without the aid of casuistry. The objections that are urged against casuistry arise from misconception of its purpose and scope, or from errors and abuses that have sometimes accompanied its practice. The former are sufficiently disposed of; the latter no more discredit its legitimate use than the corresponding difficulties which may be raised against therapeutics or civil law impair the value of these sciences. Historically considered, casuistry in some form or other is as old as human conscience. Wherever civilization has developed along moral lines, there the casuist has been for the interior forum of conscience what the judge was for the exterior forum of civil legality. The scope of this article, however, is confined to Catholic casuistry. The history of this may be divided into three periods:
During this period, though there are no works treating of casuistry in a formal and scientific way, practical applications of Christian morality to the conduct of life are numerous and continuous; first, in the works of the Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers, in the decisions of popes and bishops, and in the decrees of councils; later, in the Scriptural commentaries, the Books of Sentences, and the Penitential Books.
After the Fourth Council of Lateran the reduction to a scientific form of the casuistic doctrine, which had been gradually developed and elaborated during the patristic period, began concurrently with an awakening interest in theological studies and the apostolic activity of the now flourishing mendicant orders. The work of the Dominican, Raymund of Pennafort, entitled "Summa de Poenitentia et Matrimonio", and published about 1235, opened an era in the scientific study of casuistry, and fixed the manner of treatment which the science retained for over two hundred years. Two other books exercised an influence during this period on the formation of scientific casuistry: The "Summa Astesana", published in 1317 by a Franciscan of Asti in Piedmont; and the "Summa Pisana", written by the Dominican Bartholomew of San Concordio, or of Pisa (d. 1347), which treated casuistic subjects alphabetically, and was the first of a long series of similar works. The "Summa Summarum", of Sylvester Prierias, O.P. (d. 1523), practically brings the age of the great "Summists" to a close. St. Antoninus, O.P., of Florence (d. 1459) is notable in his period for his "Summa Confessionalis" and "Summa Confessorum", which were followed by many more manuals of a like kind. He was probably the first who treated moral theology as a distinct science, and thus prepared the way for that closer union of treatment between it and casuistry which finally obtained in the following period.
The first hundred years of this period are characterized by a splendid development of theological sciences, due to the ecclesiastical reformation begun and carried out by the Council of Trent, to the institution of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, and to the intellectual activity evoked in defence of the Church against the pseudo-Reformation of Luther and of contemporaneous heresiarchs. In this progress casuistry shared. Besides the various "Summae Casuum" which were published, the great theologians of the time, in commenting on the second part of the "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, treated fully and profoundly casuistical questions regarding personal, social, political, and religious duties, regarding the mutual relations of states, and regarding the relative rights of Church and State. During this time moral theology finally attained the dignity of a special science, and became the explicit basis of casuistry. Prominent in bringing about this development were John Azor, S.J. (d. 1603), whose "Institutiones Morales" was printed at Rome in 1600; Paul Laymann, S.J. (d. 1635), who published at Munich in 1625 his "Theologia Moralis"; and Hermann Busembaum (d. 1668), whose "Medulla Theologiae Moralis" became the text for the celebrated commentaries of Claude La Croix, S.J. (d. 1714), of St. Alphonsus Liguori, and in our time of Anthony Ballerini, S.J. The progress of casuistry was interrupted towards the middle of the seventeenth century by the controversy which arose concerning the doctrine of probabilism. This controversy might have been conducted with scientific calm and finally disposed of by the Holy See, but by the injection into it of Jansenistic fanaticism, sophistry, and satire, real issues were confused, and an embittered strife arose, which for nearly two centuries disturbed Catholic schools. The effects on casuistry were deplorable. Two extreme schools, the Rigorists and the Laxists, came into being, and centred attention upon themselves. The vast body of conservative theologians were practically ignored, or charged with laxity because they did not hold the opinions of a narrow school. The Laxists were taken as typical casuists, and because some of them were Jesuits, Jesuit morality became a byword of reproach. The tenets of both Rigorists and Laxists were repeatedly condemned by ecclesiastical authorities; nevertheless the repute of sane casuistry suffered not only among the enemies of the Church, but even to a degree among Catholics also. So much so, that, by the middle of the eighteenth century the very name of casuistry became a synonym for moral laxity -- a signification it yet unfortunately retains in the minds of many whose information on the subject is drawn from prejudiced sources. When Jansenistic rigorism seemed to have attained a permanent triumph, especially in France and Spain, relief was obtained through Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (d. 1787), the saintly founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. By recalling casuists to the study of their classic authors he restored casuistry itself to the place its importance and dignity demanded. His first publication was the "Medulla Theologiae Moralis" of Hermann Busembaum, S.J., with annotations. In eight successive editions this work was enlarged and improved, until it became a synopsis of casuistical literature. The last edition, entitled "Theolgia Moralis", was published in 1785, and received the approbation of the Holy See in 1803. In 1871 Pius IX proclaimed the saintly author a Doctor of the Church. The after-history of casuistry is one of peace and development along the lines laid down by St. Alphonsus.
   | ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'': - Dictionary of the History of Ideas |
| | Accountancy as computational casuistics - Accountancy as Computational Casuistics |
| | Casuistry - Catholic Encyclopedia - CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Burgundy |
| | Summary of casuistry by Jeramy Townsley - Casuistry--A Summary |
| | Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas - Casuistry - Adler On Casuistry |
| | 1911 Encyclopedia - C/CA/CASUISTRY.htm - LoveToKnow 1911 |
| | Casuistry - Online Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy - Online Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy |
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