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, etc. fields that one has embraced.
In art, rigorism becomes mannerism, academicism, technicalism and formalism. In grammar and rhetoric, it becomes purism and pedantry. In law, it abhors epikeia and equity (q.v.), to the point of betraying justice according to the well-known formula summum ius summa iniuria. In morality, besides ignoring epikeia and equity, it disregards excusing, deobligating and exempting causes, impotence, ignorance, error, inadvertence, dispensations and privileges. In religious life, the rigorist adheres to the concept of a God who is a strict and inflexible judge in His justice, to the detriment of His fatherhood and mercy; judges the path to heaven to be exceedingly narrow; makes the yoke of Christ heavy; sees countless sins committed in comparison with acts of virtue performed; and is exceedingly pessimistic about the number of those who are saved. Moreover, rigorism casts shadows over problems concerning the consequences of original sin, predestination, the remission of sins, the manner of treating penitents, the liceity of marriages and second marriages, the right to property, Christian poverty and charity, devotions and, above all, problems of pedagogy, spiritual, ascetical and mystical life, and the debated questions in moral theology regarding conscience (q.v.), as the proximate rule of human acts.
I. HISTORICAL NOTES
It seems that there is no history of rigorism in all its forms in this field, but at all times there have been heretics who have attempted to disturb the sweet and filial confidence of the Christian in God, his Father, and to clip the wings of those striving for the highest goals of perfection. Thus, positions, tendencies and more or less rigorist practices, due perhaps to the most disparate justifications and errors of every kind in the theological and philosophical fields, are found in heretics such as the Manicheans, the Gnostics, the Encratites or abstainers, the Messalians, the Priscillianists, the Cathars, the Patarenes, the Waldensians, the Albigensians, the Fraticelli, the Wickliffites, the Hussites, the Moravian Brethren, Protestants in general (Quakers, Puritans, etc.), the Baians, the Quesnellites, and above all the Jansenists, who have continued to influence in various ways a great part of Christians, if not Catholics. With their doctrines on original justice, Adam’s sin, efficacious grace, freedom and predestination, and with the idea they formed of God, the Jansenists attempted to poison the very sources of Christian piety, casting a thick veil of gloomy and heavy pessimism over everything.
II. MORAL AND THEOLOGICAL RIGORISM
From the moral point of view, rigorism—as laxism, which is its extreme opposite—can be considered as a habit, a mentality, due to an entire set of erroneous principles, or as one of the moral systems that arose from the 16th century onward concerning conscience in a state of doubt and probability. In the first case, one might speak of the conscience that some moralists call strict or rigid, while rigorism, as a distinct moral system, often assumes the name of tutiorism (q.v.).III. MORALITY
The term rigorism, taken in this general sense, contains something blameworthy and culpable, inasmuch as it indicates a lack of understanding, honest accommodation and humanity: it is austerity, but immoderate and inappropriate. Rigorism therefore has nothing to do with the sensitivity of conscience, with the enlightened zeal for God’s rights, or with Christian constancy, which at the proper time and place knows how to renounce part of its own firmness. Since rigorism generally does not hold the just mean and sins by excess against it, it can be said without hesitation that it opposes the virtues of prudence and moderation (q.v.). The consequences of rigorism are easily foreseeable. History teaches that, by making his own yoke too heavy, the rigorist will almost always end up by shaking it off entirely, passing to the opposite extreme of libertinism or falling into despair, due to the extinction of every filial confidence and love toward God and the fierce cruelty with which he arms himself against himself and his neighbor. Finally, one should distinguish between the rigorist system, the rigorist habit, and certain decisions inspired by rigorism, which may be independent of one another, so that one often encounters rigorist decisions among those who are professionally laxist, and vice versa.RIG-VEDA (ṚGVEDA): See VEDA.