Works
Van Espen was a lucid and clarifying expositor of the discipline of the ancient Church. His work Jus canonicum universum was a huge treatise, arguing that the Catholic Church was fundamentally conciliar. The author is accused, not without reason, of having borrowed considerably from the works of his predecessors, notably from Louis Thomassin.
He collected the most recent legislative decisions of the Church and discussed them with judgment. He had also the merit of showing with precision the special law of Belgium. Pope Benedict XIV recognized his authority in this matter.
On the other hand he was a strenuous defender of the Gallican theories, on the right of religious authority and of the civil power. It may be added, however, that he exalted and combated in turn all power, even the civil power. He exalted the power of the bishops in order to lessen that of the religious orders, and the rights of an extinct chapter in order to combat the powers of the Pope. He gained for himself unpleasant notoriety in the Jansenist conflicts, by denying the importance of the famous distinction between right and fact with regard to the doctrine of Cornelius Jansen; he declared that it was of little consequence to admit that Jansen had taught the propositions condemned by the Bull Unigenitus (1713) provided the doctrine itself was rejected.
The best edition of the works of Van Espen, all of which are on the Index, is that published in four volumes at Louvain, 1753. A fifth volume, "Supplementum ad varias collectiones operum", was published at Brussels in 1768, and contains numerous biographical details.
Read more about this topic: Zeger Bernhard Van Espen
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
—Edmund Burke (1729–97)