Nationality Belgian Name Lucien Ceyssens Discipline Historian | Thesis year 1936 Religion Catholic | |
Full Name Willem Maria Ceyssens Thesis title Introduction du formulaire antijanseniste en Belgique. Premier essai (1692-1694) | ||
Lucien or Lucianus Ceyssens OFM (1902–2001) was a twentieth-century ecclesiastical historian who specialised in the history of Jansenism.
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Life
Ceyssens was born in Wijchmaal, Belgium, on 8 October 1902. In 1921 he entered the Order of St Francis, and in 1927 he was ordained priest.
He followed some history classes at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1929–31, and in 1934 was a student at the Faculty of Church History of the Gregorian University in Rome. From 1934 to 1963 he taught at the Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome, except during the years of the Second World War (1940–1945), when he was in Belgium.
As a historian, he had a marked impact on the modern understanding of the seventeenth-century religious controversies between Jansenists and anti-Jansenists. His sympathies were very much with the Jansenists.
In 1963 a Festschrift was published to mark his 60th birthday, Miscellanea Jansenistica offerts à Lucien Ceyssens, O.F.M., and in 1992 a collection of his own articles was published as Le Sort de la bulle Unigenitus to mark his 90th birthday.
He died at Sint-Truiden, Belgium, on 10 April 2001.