Hispanic Casuistry Studies: Room to Grow

The term "casuistry" (<L casus, case) refers to the practical application of moral principles to specific cases. In the Catholic tradition, casuistry is linked to auricular confession, since the confessor must take the circumstances surrounding an action into account in deciding the gravity of particular sins and assigning penance. The first great stimulus to writing casuistical treatises was thus the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which made annual confession obligatory for all Catholics. The second was the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which, encouraging more frequent communion, strengthened the institutions of confession and penance against Protestant rejection.¹ The typical casuist text was a summa of problematic cases of conscience, to which the author/compiler, citing numerous authorities as antecedents, offered solutions. Through the accumulation of cases and opinions, these collections tended to become ever more voluminous. During the Counter-Reformation, a typical summa was usually organized into the following sections: a survey of the sacraments and the conditions for their efficacy (with emphasis on confession itself); a catalogue of venial and mortal sins, with a chapter for each of the Ten Commandments; and a discussion of penance and excommunication. Meant primarily as a ready reference for confessors, they came equipped with handy indexes to aid in quick consultation.

The ascendency of casuistry began in earnest with Martín de Azpilcueta Navarro's influential Manual para confesores y penitentes (Salamanca, 1556), and lasted one hundred years, until Blaise Pascal ridiculed casuists' excesses in his initially anonymous Lettres provinciales (1656). Largely as a result of this brilliant satire, the term retains to this day a connotation of moral chicanery and laxity. But Pascal's mockery failed to acknowledge casuistry's function as an instrument for extending the Church's active guidance of individual consciences. Early modern Catholicism urgently needed to adjust medieval morality for a broader set of situations arising in a changing world. Greater flexibility was introduced through the doctrine of Probabilism, according to which, given doubts about the best among a range of moral choices, it was permitted to adopt a "less probable" course of action, provided there was at least some basis for thinking it justified. Not all casuists were probabilists, a point to which I will return below; but a probabilistic casuistry was the most adaptable to different professions, social classes, and political circumstances.

Spanish Neo-Scholasticism played a dominant role in the development of casuistry in general and Probabilism in particular. Among the leading casuists after Trent were Dominicans who taught at Salamanca, like Azpilcueta, Domingo Soto, and Bartolomé Medina, who was the first to openly espouse Probabilism. But crucial justifications of that doctrine came from the pens of two Jesuit theologians, Gabriel Vásquez and the great jurist Francisco Suárez. Suárez argued for Probabilism on the grounds that in doubtful cases a confessor must respect penitents' unalienable possession of free will (liberum arbitrium). In this regard, he clearly drew on Molinism, the defense of free will developed by another Neo-Scholastic Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina.

Indeed, casuistry was a Jesuit specialty. From its inception, this order sought to extend the influence of the Church in worldly affairs, including matters of state. Of particular importance for that mission was the Papal license to hear confession anywhere and to absolve sins normally reserved to bishops. Expertise in hearing confession thus became a fundamental part of the Jesuit curriculum, and several leading casuistical treatises of the Baroque period are essentially Jesuit textbooks.² As confessors to the wealthy and powerful, they employed probabilistic arguments to render Machiavellian "reason of state" compatible with Catholic morality. This led to a tendency toward laxism that provoked the outrage of Jansenists like Pascal, and...