Mathijs Lamberigts’ long and prolific research career started with the
study of the controversy between Julian of Aeclanum and Augustine of
Hippo on the issues of human free will and divine grace. This research
interest rapidly came to include all aspects of the turbulent life, the
massive oeuvre, and the complex ideas of the doctor gratiae,
imbedded in the historical, political, socio-economic, religious,
ecclesial, and intellectual context of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Driven by a deep respect for the original sources, and always well
informed about the established scholarship, Lamberigts deployed a
rigorous historical-critical method in his publications. The first
nineteen contributions of the present volume reflect this first love for
Augustinian studies. As illustrated by the cover image, taken from the
famous sixteenth-century Leuven edition of Augustine’s collected
writings, Lamberigts’ historical-critical study of Augustine stands
within a rich and enduring Leuven tradition. The same old print
expresses the gradual expansion of Lamberigts’ research interests, which
came to embrace Augustine’s legacy in the fifteenth-seventeenth
centuries. In fact at the end of the Middle Ages, Augustine and his
doctrine of sin, grace, and free will found renewed interest, even
becoming part of the ideological-religious foundations of Martin Luther
- who was after all an Augustinian friar - and hence of the Reformation.
All parties involved in the religious controversies of this period
appealed to the doctor gratiae to justify their own position.
Lamberigts has always shown a vivid interest in these developments, and
especially in how Augustinian thinking became a doctrinal pillar of
Leuven theology in the Early Modern Era. Consequently, part of
Lamberigt’s scholarly work has focused on figures such as Michael Baius
and Cornelius Jansenius of Ypres, on movements such as Jansenism, as
well as on the Jansenists’ theological adversaries, the Jesuits. Eight
essays of this volume evoke this particular period in church history.
These twenty-seven papers are offered to Mathijs Lamberigts by former
students and colleagues, out of gratitude for his generous personality,
for his inspiring scholarship, and for his academic leadership.
