Casuist. What is a Casuist ? It is a Theologian who, through a long study of the duties of man and Christian, has put himself in a position to remove all the doubts that the faithful may have about their past, present, and future conduct; to appreciate the grievousness before God and before men, of the sins they have committed and to determine the proper reparation.

From this it is apparent that the job of the Casuist is one of the most difficult due to the extent of enlightenment that it assumes, and one of the most important and most dangerous due to the nature of its object. The Casuist holds, as it were, the balance between God and man; he presents himself as the conservator of the sacred trust of the morality of the Gospels; he holds in his grasp the eternal and inflexible ruler by which human actions are measured; he imposes on himself the obligation to apply it impartially; and when he forgets his duty, he makes himself more culpable than someone who sells people their temporal subsistence with false weights and measures.

The Casuist is thus an important person by his station and his character; a man of authority in Israel whose conduct and writings, as a consequence, cannot be too rigorously examined: these are my principles. However, I don’t know if one should endorse the eloquent and formidable pleasantry of Pascal, and the perhaps indiscrete zeal with which other authors, otherwise very able and respectable, pursued, around the middle of the last century, the lax ethics of certain obscure casuists . Doubtless, they noticed only that the principles of these Casuists , gathered together and exposed in the vernacular , could not fail to embolden the passions, always disposed to lean on the most fragile authority. The world did not know that someone had dared to teach that it is sometimes permitted to lie, to steal, to slander, to execute someone for an apple , etc. [1] What need is there for [religious] instruction? The scandal that the denunciation of these maxims gave rise to in the Church was a much greater evil than any these dusty volumes would have caused had they been relegated to the shadows of a few monastic libraries.

In fact, would those who knew about Villalobos, Connink, Llama, Achozier, Dealkoser, Squilanti, Bizoteri, Tribarne, de Grassalis, de Pitigianis, Strevesdorf, and a host of others, have taken their names and their opinions for those of Algerians? For whom were their principles dangerous? For the children who do not know how to read? For the workers, merchants, artisans, and women who can’t read the language in which most of them have written? For the fashionable people who scarcely read the works of their own class? Who have forgotten the little bit of Latin that they were taught in school, and for whom a continual dissipation leaves almost no time to skim through a novel? For a handful of enlightened Theologians who have already made up their minds on these matters? I would really like a good Casuist to explain to me who is the more culpable: the person who expresses an absurd proposition that passes without consequence, or the one who comments on it and thus gives it eternal life.

But after having protested against all desire for a liberty that would be exercised at the expense of the tranquility of the state and religion , can I not ask if the oblivion that I have just proposed with regard to the obscure corrupters of Christian morality, is not applicable to any dangerous author, provided that he has written in the sacred tongue [Latin]? It seems to me that one must either embrace the affirmative or abandon the Casuists . For why should one group deserve more attention than the others? Would the lax Casuists be less pernicious and more reprehensible than unbelievers?

But , someone will say, wouldn’t it be better if there were neither unbelievers nor bad Casuists, and if the works of neither of them were to appear either in the sacred tongue or in the vernacular ? Nothing could be truer, just as we should wish for no illness or evil among men. But sick people and evil people are necessary, and there are illnesses and crimes that the remedies always make worse.

And who told you , he will go on, that it is as necessary to have among us lax Casuists and unbelievers, as the evil and the sick? Don’t we have laws that can protect us from incredulity and laxity?

I am not trying at all to place limits on the ecclesiastical and civil powers: no one respects more than I the authority of laws promulgated against dangerous authors, but I also cannot ignore the fact that these laws existed long before the lax Casuists and their Apologist , and that they did not prevent them from thinking and writing .

I also know that through the glare of procedure, civil laws could wrest miserable productions from the profound obscurity in which they only wished to remain, and that this is precisely what they would have in common with the ecclesiastical laws in the censure of the unknown Casuists , that a malicious denunciation would have made known ineptly.

I would add only that I am not so much asserting an opinion here as posing a question. It is up to wise magistrates charged with the guardianship of the laws, and to illustrious prelates who watch over the faith and the morality of the gospels, to decide in which cases it is better to ignore than to punish, and what are, to borrow the expression of a celebrated author, the precise, necessary, limits within which abuses and scandals must be contained. See Matter [of conscience], Aius-Locutius, and the Journal de Trévoux (November 1751). [2]

Notes:

1. This is a reference to Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711), Satire XII , « On Duplicity, » (lines 295-306), in which he attacks the Jesuits for their casuistry. In this verse Boileau criticizing them for arguing that it was all right for a “priest to sell the Mass three times over,” as well for the state to execute a man for stealing a mere apple.” Boileau wrote this poem in 1705 at the height of the controversy in France between the Jesuits and their theological opponents, the Jansenists, with whom Pascal was also associated.

2. The Jesuits’ Journal de Trévoux can be accessed online through the ARTFL Project. The citation could refer to two different book reviews published in the November 1751 issue: Article CXVII: “Proofs of the Religion of Jesus-Christ, against the Spinozists and the Deists;” or Article CXIX: a scathing review of the first volume of the Encyclopedia itself! On the Journal and its ongoing battle with the Encyclopedia , see https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/journal-de-tr%C3%A9voux.