RIGORISM. - Excessive severity, immoderate adherence, tenacity and fidelity in establishing, interpreting and applying constitutions, statutes, laws, general and special rules, as well as an excessive attachment to dogmas, principles and theories in the artistic, scientific, philosophical, theological fields, etc., that one has embraced.
In art, rigorism becomes mannerism, academicism, technicality and formalism. In grammar and rhetoric, it becomes purism and pedantry. In law it turns away from epikeia and equity (v.), to the point of betraying justice according to the well-known formula of summum ius summa iniuria. In morals, besides epikeia and equity, it ignores excusing, releasing and exempting causes, impotence, ignorance, error, inadvertence, dispensations and privileges. In the religious life, the rigorist adheres to the concept of a God who is a rigid judge, inflexible in his justice, entirely to the detriment of fatherhood and mercy; he judges the way that leads to heaven to be extremely narrow; he makes the yoke of Christ heavy, he sees innumerable sins committed in comparison with the acts of virtue performed, and he is extremely pessimistic about the number of those who are saved. Rigorism moreover casts sinister shadows on the problems of the consequences of original sin, of predestination, of the remission of sins, of the manner of dealing with penitents, on the lawfulness of marriage and of second marriages, on the right of property, on Christian poverty and charity, on devotions, but above all on the problems of pedagogy, of the spiritual, ascetic and mystical life, and on the questions debated in moral theology concerning conscience (v.), insofar as it is the proximate rule of human acts.
I. HISTORICAL NOTES
There seems to be no history of rigorism in all its forms in this field, but at all times there has been no lack of heretics who have attempted to disturb the sweet and filial confidence of the Christian toward God his father and to clip its flights toward the highest goals of perfection. Thus positions, tendencies and practices more or less rigorist, due perhaps to the most disparate justifications and to errors of every kind in the theological and philosophical field, are found in heretics such as the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, the Encratites or abstainers, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, the Cathars, the Patarines, the Waldensians, the Albigensians, the Fraticelli, the Wycliffites, the Hussites, the Moravian Brethren, the Protestants in general (Quakers, Puritans, etc.), the Baians, the Quesnelians, and above all the Jansenists, who have not ceased to influence in various ways a great part of Christians, if not of Catholics. With their doctrines on original justice, on the sin of Adam, on efficacious Grace, on freedom, on predestination, and with the idea of God that they gradually formed, the Jansenists attempted to poison the very sources of Christian piety, casting over everything a thick veil of gloomy and heavy pessimism.
II. MORAL AND THEOLOGICAL RIGORISM
From the moral point of view, r. - like laxism, which is at the opposite extreme - can be considered as a habit, a mentality, due to a whole set of erroneous principles, or as one of the moral systems that arose from the 16th century onward concerning the conscience in a state of doubt and probability. In the first case one could speak of what some moralists call a strict, or rigid, conscience, whereas r., insofar as it is a moral system distinct from the others, often takes the name of tuziorism (v.).
III. MORALITY
The term rigorism, taken in such a general sense, has in itself something reprehensible and incriminating, insofar as it indicates a lack of understanding, of honest accommodation, of humanity: it is austerity, but immoderate and inopportune. Rigorism therefore has nothing to do with sensitivity of conscience, with enlightened zeal for the rights of God, with Christian constancy, which at the right time and place knows how to renounce in part its own firmness. Since in general rigorism does not keep to the golden mean and sins against it by excess, one can readily say that it is opposed to the virtues of prudence and moderation (v.). The consequences of rigorism are easily foreseeable. History teaches that, by making its own yoke too heavy, the rigorist will almost always end up shaking it off entirely, passing to the opposite excess of libertinism, or will fall into despair, by reason of the extinguishing of all confidence and filial love toward God and the fierce cruelty with which he arms himself toward himself and his neighbor. Finally, one should distinguish the system, the rigorist habitus, and certain decisions inspired by rigorism, which can be independent of one another, so that one often encounters laxist decisions among rigorists by profession, and vice versa.