Zeger Bernhard Van Espen - Works

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.