ESPEN, Zeger-Bernhard van. - Belgian theologian and canonist, secular priest, b. at Louvain on 9 July 1646, d. at Amersfoort (Holland) on 2 Oct. 1728. Ordained priest in 1673 and having obtained his degree in law at Louvain in 1675, he there discharged, with rare success, the office of the « leçon de six semaines » (summer course for the holidays); then appointed, at the same University, to the chair of Canon Law, he remained there for nearly half a century, soon winning fame as an eminent teacher and an erudite canonist, consulted by bishops and by princes.
Sympathetic from the outset to the Port-Royal movement, he was not slow to reveal himself a convinced follower of the father of Jansenism. All his numerous publications, three times placed on the index (decrees of the Holy Office 22 Apr. 1704; 14 Nov. 1713; 18 Nov. 1732), prove subtly imbued with that regalist-Jansenist spirit which later formed the basis of the Febronian system, of which van E. is rightly considered the precursor. Nicolò de Hontheim (Febronius) was in fact his disciple at Louvain.
Already in 1707 he came close to being condemned for his errors. In 1725, for having supported the cause of the cathedral Chapter and of the archbishop of Utrecht, Cornelius Steenoven, arbitrarily elected and consecrated in opposition to Rome, he was suspended a divinis, dismissed from his chair and deprived of his academic dignity and prerogatives. In 1727, invited by his archbishop to subscribe to a profession of faith according to the Tridentine formula and to declare his adherence to the bull Unigenitus, he preferred to flee to Holland, first to Maastricht and then to Amersfoort, where he died the following year, at the age of 82, blind.
Apart from their delicate doctrinal position before the Church, the works of van E., and especially his masterpiece: Ius ecclesiasticum universum (Louvain 1700, 11 editions in the first 50 years alone), the work that least reveals the author's errors, undoubtedly possess an undeniable scientific value, both for their content and for their form and method. Van E. may be called a happy precursor of the modern systematic institutional method. His contribution in the historical field of the various canonical institutions is noteworthy.
Besides the principal work already cited and numerous publications of lesser size on various ecclesiastical questions, he also wrote: Tractatus historico-canonicus (Leiden 1603); Brevis commentarius ad Decretum Gratiani (Cologne 1732); Commentarius in canones iuris veteris ac novi (posthumous work, Louvain 1759). Van E. is often cited by Benedict XIV.
Bibliography5 works
Zaccaria da San Mauro