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 man 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 (1656–1657). 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
