The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (review)

Camille Wells Slights, 777T Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. xix + 307 pp. $21.00. by P.G. Stanwood This long book aims to describe the importance and general currency of casuistry in seventeenth-century England, on the one hand, and then to show by analogy, on the other, that Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton responded to a common mode of seeing and feeling experience in terms of "cases of conscience." Camille Wells Slights means "to show how the casuistical view of morality as problematic action to be analyzed in terms of divine law, particular circumstances, and individual conscience permeates the ethical and political thought of the time and also how this habit of mind informs major fictional works" (p. 298). Slights is very selective in the works she chooses of her four writers, but she spares us no chance of missing any real or imagined points of contact between the "casuistical paradigm" and such different works as (interalia) Julius Caesar, The Temple, and Samson Agonistes. The term "casuistry" now brings to mind quibbling for its own sake, with a mainly pejorative value, like "sophistry." "Moral theology" certainly sounds better, but this expression, sometimes used alternatively, barely appears in Slights's book. This is unfortunate because some clarification of these terms and of their related history would have helped to give more sense to the first two chapters of her book, on "The Tradition" and "Method as Form." Moral theology is the genus of which casuistry is the species or the particular application. General principles of Christian conduct, whose precepts are contained especially in the Old Testament Commandments and in the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament, speak to the whole of moral behavior; but these principles must be brought to specific cases, and the larger code applied in individual circumstances. Slights is quite right in saying that "casuistry is the process of applying fundamental moral principles to the activities of daily living" (p. 3), yet she might have related casuistry more clearly to the wider theological and traditionally Christian world of which it is a part. 42 BOOK REVIEWS Casuistry received its most notable development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with distinctive contributions from English writers such as William Perkins, Jeremy Taylor, Robert Sanderson and others, whom Slights discusses; but one should realize from reading this book (and does not) that moral theology (accompanied by some kind of casuistry) exists from the beginning of the Church. Slights might at least have given recognition to the patristic teachers — ClementofAlexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Cyril ofJerusalem, Augustine, and the two Gregories. And was not St. Ambrose responding to Cicero's De Officiis, a pagan guide to behavior? And what is the position of Aristotle? Or of St. Thomas Aquinas and those who followed him? The English writers on "conscience " knew their roots and their sources, and doubtless Slights knows them, too. The point is that one should not write about casuistry in the seventeenth century without giving some attention to the intellectual world beyond England. Slights, of course, is not writing the history of moral theology and casuistry. This ground is familiar and it is already full; but we should expect some larger historical perspective than we get from a book that calls itself The Casuistical Tradition. Nevertheless, Slights succeeds in reminding us of the currency of casuistical writing in seventeenth-century England and demonstrates with considerable thoroughness the force especially of Robert Sanderson's "Case of the Engagement," not so much the product of a legalistic mind but of one which shows how "the motives from which a man acts, the information available to him about the circumstances of a proposed action and its consequences, and a standard of moral value are inextricably bound together" (p. 59). Now this kind of practical divinity was common in the period under review, and Slights's contention is that it affected the manner in which dramatists and poets (that is, writers of "fictional works") conceived the situations of their characters. Having set the theoretical background of the book in the rather narrow way I have suggested and paraphrasing much of Sanderson's inelegant book, Slights...