RIGORISMO. — Excessive severity, immoderate adherence, tenacity, and fidelity in establishing, interpreting, and applying constitutions, statutes, laws, and general and special rules, as well as an excessive attachment to dogmas, principles, and theories in the artistic, scientific, philosophical, theological, and other fields that one has embraced.
In art, r. becomes mannerism, academicism, technical formalism, and formalism. In grammar and rhetoric, it becomes purism and pedantry. In law, equity (v.), even to the point of betraying justice according to the well-known maxim summum ius summa iniuria. In morals, besides disregarding epicheia and equity, it ignores extenuating, obligation-removing, and exempting causes, incapacity, ignorance, error, inadvertence, dispensations, and privileges. In religious life, the rigorist adheres to the concept of a God who is a stern and inflexible judge in his justice, to the complete detriment of fatherhood and mercy; he considers the way leading to heaven exceedingly narrow; he makes Christ’s yoke burdensome; he sees countless sins committed in comparison with the acts of virtue performed; and he is highly pessimistic about the number of those who are saved. R. also casts sinister shadows over the problems of the consequences of original sin, predestination, the remission of sins, the manner of treating penitents, the lawfulness of marriage and second marriages, the right of ownership, Christian poverty and charity, devotions, and above all the problems of pedagogy and of the spiritual, ascetical, and mystical life, as well as the questions conscience (v.), insofar as it is the proximate rule of human acts.
I. HISTORICAL NOTES
It would seem that a history of rigorism in all its forms in this field is lacking; yet in every age there have been heretics who attempted to disturb the Christian’s gentle and filial confidence in God his Father and to clip his wings in their flight toward the loftiest goals of perfection. Thus, positions, tendencies, and practices that were more or less rigorist, perhaps arising from the most disparate justifications and from errors of every kind in the theological and philosophical fields, are found among heretics such as the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, the Encratites or Abstinents, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, the Cathars, the Patarines, the Waldensians, the Albigensians, the Fraticelli, the Wicleffites, the Hussites, the Moravian Brethren, Protestants in general (Quakers, Puritans, etc.), the Baians, the Quesnellists, and above all the Jansenists, who have not ceased to influence in various ways a large part of Christians, if not Catholics. Through their doctrines concerning original justice, Adam’s sin, efficacious Grace, freedom, and predestination, and through the idea they gradually formed of God, the Jansenists attempted to poison the very sources of Christian piety, casting over everything a thick veil of gloomy and oppressive pessimism.II. MORAL AND THEOLOGICAL R
From the moral point of view, r. — like laxism, which is its opposite extreme — may be regarded as a habit, a mentality resulting from an entire set of erroneous principles, or as one of the moral systems that arose from the sixteenth century onward concerning conscience in a state of doubt and probability. In the first case, one could speak of the conscience that certain moralists call strict, or rigid, whereas r., as a moral system distinct from the others, often takes the name of tutiorism (v.).III. MORALITY
The term r., taken in this general sense, contains something reproachable and incriminating, insofar as it indicates a lack of understanding, of honest accommodation, and of humanity: it is austerity, but excessive and inappropriate. R. therefore has nothing to do with sensitivity of conscience, with enlightened zeal for the rights of God, or with Christian constancy, which at the proper time and place knows how to renounce part of its own firmness. Since, in general, r. does not keep to the mean and sins against it through excess, it may rightly be said to be opposed to the virtues of prudence and moderation (v.). The consequences of r. are easily foreseeable. History teaches that, by making his yoke too heavy, the rigorist will almost always end by shaking it off altogether, passing to the opposite excess of libertinism, or will fall into despair, owing to the extinguishing of all trust and filial love toward God and to the fierce cruelty with which he arms himself against himself and his neighbour. Finally, a distinction should be made between the system, the rigorist habitus, and certain decisions inspired by r., which may be independent of one another; hence rigorists by profession are often found to hold laxist decisions, and vice versa.#### RIG-VEDA (RGVEDA): V. RGVEDA.