Monastic Stories as a Method of Ascetical Casuistry
This talk was given among fellow professors at an annual gathering of moral theology instructors, especially in a seminary context, held at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, MD.
For some years now, conversations with colleagues have circled back to the same concern: our present lack of general, applied casuistry. One of the earlier voices pressing this point was Brian Besong's ACPQ article “Reappraising the Manual Tradition.” The diagnosis is familiar to many in this room: contemporary Catholic moral science — philosophical and theological alike — is strong on first principles and weak on concreteness. We know the well-worn narrative about beatitude, virtue, the Gifts, the integration of dogma and morality, etc. Yet the concrete focus of the casuists is largely absent from our discourse, even in texts written for the formation of priests, for whom the discernment of conscience is a matter of profound vocational importance.
For most of our professional lives, there has been a real disincentive to voicing this criticism: the fear of being accused of reviving a dead legalism or nebulously defined “manualism.” Nonetheless, a Catholic with a sense for the Church’s living tradition is not easily going to write off six centuries of moral theology as a morass of poorly formulated questions and poorly formed consciences. Moreover—and this is the deeper point I want to press today—how can one read the great ascetical authors of the monastic tradition without recognizing a certain “nitty-gritty” casuistry at work? The monastic authors did not, of course, frame the moral life around what is most characteristic of modern Latin casuistry: the troubled relationship between law and freedom. But open the Philokalia or the Evergetinos, and you will not find a grand dogmatic-moral synthesis foregrounded. What you will find is something intensely practical.
It is thinkable—though laborious—that conscience and prudence, rightly-understood casuistry and theosis, can be brought together in a mature moral theology that is at once old and new. Dr. Dugandzic addressed this yesterday from the analytic perspective of the older probabilist logic. My own angle is different: I want to consider the role of narrative and example in the dialectical and rhetorical structure of moral science. The regulative questions in my mind are: what would a Byzantine Catholic casuistry look like? What would be its authorities, and how would they be integrated into a mature theological synthesis today? I will not answer these questions. However, today’s paper is begotten of my own continual pedagogical reflection as an amphibious Byzantine scholastic.
NB: For the present paper, I am going to limit my considerations to the acquired and infused moral virtues. The case of the theological virtues involves wholly unique difficulties as regards the “mean” established by prudence. Because this paper is only meant to be an exploration among peers, I will bracket this further, albeit important, concern.
I consider myself a Byzantine Thomist—one who takes seriously the need for continuity in principles and discipline, even while developing within a unique spiritual-liturgical context. That commitment forces a particular question: where does casuistry fit within the overall explanatory structure of theological science?1 Historically, cases of conscience were organized around the ten commandments or, where the virtues entered, around the requirements of justice—especially in relatively clear commutations. More loosely, they were gathered by topic or by example collections.
This sort of organization, though practiced by some Thomists, is foreign to the explanatory framework of the Summa theologiae. Working through my translation of Lambert Beaudouin’s De conscientia, I became convinced that the proper home for casuistry is within the particular treatises on the moral virtues themselves. It only makes sense to discuss circumstanced acts of a given virtue or vice in the context of the virtue that gives that act its objective structure—liberality, courage, acedia, pride, and so on. This structural relocation, I will argue, is already a significant step toward bringing conscience and prudence, casuistry and theosis, into a genuine synthesis.
The great challenge facing casuistry is that the moral act remains, in an important sense, incommunicable. The command of prudence is the extrinsic formal cause of the will — not a disquisition on reasons for action. One can say with Ambroise Gardeil: there is no prudence written down on paper. The search for replicable methods belongs to art, not prudence. Moral theology in its explanatory mode does not descend into the immediate measuring of particular, personal acts; it seeks to show that something is the case and, where possible, to explain why, through proper causes. Hence every example case carries a degree of irreducible anonymity. Even when grounded in historical fact, moral analysis treats its subject as a generalized individual—an individuum vagum—in a situation that is no one's immediate situation now.
Prudence’s “plasticity,” of course, is not absolute — it admits of degrees. In matters of temperance and courage, virtues of the medium rationis, it is greatest: prudence here regulates the passions of the agent himself in his particular circumstances, introducing real malleability into the mean. What is temperate for me today may not be so tomorrow, and temperance may well be instantiated in a variety of actions, provided my appetites are genuinely ruled by reason. Justice is somewhat different. Here our actions must measure adequately to a given person or institution—the medium rei—and the mean is set from without. In strict commutations this is relatively clear; in the looser equalities of piety, religion, and the like, it becomes considerably more difficult.
However, along the vector of such choices, there are a variety of very honest questions that all of us are asked: What is immodest for someone to wear in public? When does the use of social media become a sin of curiosity or idle chatter? Is it always wrong to enjoy a fine bottle of wine? How should I celebrate feasting during the Church’s feasting seasons? How should I labor against idleness as a cause of sin? When should I depart from my prayer rule in order to serve others? What are cases of idle chatter? How should we relate to those who are of worldly influence?
These are the bread and butter of the moral life. There is something quite wrong with the moral theologian who shrugs and says, “That’s really a question of prudence.” In a certain sense, that answer fits perfectly within what is most problematic in probabilist logic—its perennial temptation toward laxist minimalism: in dubiis, libertas. Everyone in this room who has any influence over the practical reason of others—and I am speaking above all to priests and parents—knows that this response is simply unnatural to the task of those who will answer to God for the formation of others’ consciences.
There is, I suppose, a possible rejoinder: “That kind of advice belongs to personal moral counsel, to which a virtuous person should be docile — but it does not belong to the scientific mode of moral philosophy.” At first glance, this is even tempting. Does not moral science deal with necessary natures, their properties, their proper effects, etc.? The domain of the particular act belongs to prudence, not to the Analytics.
Nonetheless, moral science is concerned with data that have a real purchase on our exercise of freedom. Unlike natural philosophy, mathematics, or metaphysics, moral philosophy and theology are concerned with what human acts ought to be. Justice and temperance, idle chatter and sinful association—these are essences, but essences that measure and command human acts as the extrinsic formal cause of our willing. Moral science cannot be abstracted from the implications of human action in the way that the purely speculative disciplines can.
This is precisely what drives the “moral scientist” toward casuistic considerations. Like every discipline, moral philosophy and theology must turn toward experience to stabilize our grasp of moral essences—we are men, not angels; we need phantasms for our knowledge. But the natures in question are destined to be the measure of human actions. Therefore, the moralist is deeply interested in articulating the cases in which a given virtue can be instantiated. Depending on the particularities of the virtuous medium in question, this will involve more or less description. In the clearest cases, a near-physical description of the action suffices: “You must do this” or “You must never do this.” More often, those phrases carry a qualifying addendum: “in such and such circumstances.” The work of the consideration of particular concrete actions, then, is to probe the degree to which circumstances can be articulated as properly belonging to an act of this or that particular virtue.
Demonstration is demonstration, and dialectic is dialectic. Science is concerned with a defined subject and its per se attributions. Dialectic, by contrast, limits itself to no particular domain — it provides a general method whose principles range across subject matters.2 Yet this does not mean that probable reasoning is foreign to science—or even to discursive wisdom. Opinion is driven out by demonstration once we grasp the per se reason for a conclusion—but science nonetheless makes use of probable reasoning both in via inventionis and in its reflective consideration of various paths toward demonstration. There can, in other words, be a demonstrative "management" of probability — dialectical and rhetorical—within the broader project of elaborating the per se nature, causal structure, and effects of a given reality.
This sort of managed dialectic is already present in the older probabilist conception of casuistry. I will leave the details to our colleague's paper and the discussions connected to it—remarking only that the notion of probability invoked in those older casuistries stands in need of some critical revision.3
There is, however, a particular kind of dialectic—and rhetoric—that is native to moral subject matter: the method of the apophthegmata, the anecdotes and stories of the monastic tradition. The example questions I raised earlier were chosen with an eye to some “hypotheses” laid out in the Evergetinos — an eleventh-century Orthodox compendium of patristic texts, compiled by Paul of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis, and republished by Macarios of Corinth and Nicodemos the Hagiorite, the compilers of the Greek Philokalia.4 Think of the Evergetinos as a topically organized gathering of patristic texts, each dedicated to a particular “hypothesis” in the moral life — structurally akin to the stages of John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent, to Cassian's Conferences, and to other collections of monastic sayings. Western works such as Alphonsus Rodriguez's Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtue carry something of the same savor.
Discursive moral science is a habitus that perfects our ability to judge truth as illuminated by first principles in a given order — and that illumination reaches deep into the structure of moral actions. Yet given the intrinsic contingency of moral acts, it is unsurprising that we encounter a dialectic of similarities and comparisons as we descend into particular cases. As theologians, we should attend carefully to the loci theologici that manifest the methods of such a dialectic. The narrative structure of the apophthegmata is, I would argue, precisely an exercise of this logic. When asked how one should grow in the virtue of Christian silence, it is quite sound to proceed—under the light of the virtue-principles ordered to wayfaring beatitude—by way of “holy anecdote”: your situation may differ considerably from the cases gathered here, but attend carefully and you will begin to see the similarity, and perhaps articulate just how the virtue of Christian silence is to be incarnated in your own circumstances.5
This kind of dialectic—and rhetoric—is not an optional supplement to moral-scientific discourse. It is a necessary moment within this discourse. Rather than being relegated to pious reading or to a schizophrenically separated “ascetical theology,” the apophthegmata represent an integral unfolding of the habitus of discursive theology itself. Given the role of the Fathers, theologians, and casuists as theological logici, it is entirely fitting that the moralist draw upon the writings of saintly figures—whether in the apophthegmata themselves or in the persons of their compilers—especially in matters as probable and contingent as these. In our present search for a sound replacement for casuistry, this genre deserves a recognized place within the explanatory-scientific structure of a theology that discursively seeks understanding of the revealed mysteries.
I am not suggesting there are no other modes of knowing the mysteries of faith and that which they illuminate. But the particular vocation of the Thomist school is, above all, fidelity to the objective structure of discursive theological science — and this is among Thomas's most important institutional and methodological contributions.↩︎
Because the Aristotelian notion of dialectical logic is not discussed much, I have put together some notes and readings on this subject at https://www.athomist.com/articles/introduction-to-dialectical-logic.↩︎
For an introduction to this topic, see my translation of Ambroise Gardeil’s work on probable certainty (https://www.athomist.com/s/Gardeil-Probable-Certainty-FULL.pdf) as well as a number of the scholastic works mentioned in the bibliography attached to the text cited in the previous footnote.↩︎
The interested reader can consult the translation of the Evergetinos published by the Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies.↩︎
The reader who is familiar with the discussions concerning the “practically practical” sciences in Maritain and Simon, as well as the relationship between the vocabulary of the mystics and that of the speculative theologian (cf. Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, Labourdette, Journet, Congar), will recognizing some very important points of connection. I have chosen to side-step these topics, for the sake of simplicity in this brief paper. However, there is a kind of fruitful interaction between what I have said here concerning ascetical authors, and the claims that the aforementioned authors make regarding the “practical vocabulary” of the mystics and of “moralists.” One will doubtlessly have a sense that there are overlaps between what I say here and some of the “narrative” and “exemplarism” discussions of the past decades (and perhaps even works like that of Toulmin, though his thought seems to occupy a space that combines my concerns and those of Dr. Dugandzic). In addition to the relevant authors (e.g. MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Zagzebski, et al.), also see Stephen Chamberlain, “Literary Knowledge: Story as a Kind of Science,” in Facts are Stubborn Things, ed. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: The American Maritain Association / CUA Press, 2018), 80–94.↩︎
