CASTELLION, SÉBASTIEN. - Protestant theologian and anti-Calvinist polemicist, born in 1515 at St-Martin-du-Fresne in the Bugey, died, as poor as he had lived, on 29 Dec. 1563 at Basle. Castellion met Calvin at Strasbourg, and was appointed by him as regent in the college of the city of Geneva. In this position he fell into disfavour with the Genevan council, as he was said to have doubted Christ’s descent into hell and to have made irreverent remarks about the biblical book of the Song of Songs, so that he was refused the post he aspired to, that of Protestant minister at Geneva. This refusal decided him to leave Geneva and go to Basle, where, thanks to the reputation he had gained from his translations of the Bible into Latin and then into French, he obtained in 1552 the chair of Greek at the university.
Among his biblical works there first appeared the dialogues: *Dialogorum sacrorum libri quatuor* (Lyons and Geneva 1540, ’43 and ’45). Then came the translations: *Moses latinus ex hebraeo factus* (Basle 1546), *Psalterium reliquae sacrorum litterarum carmina et precationes* (ibid. 1547) and the *Biblia Veteris et Novi Testamenti* (ibid. 1551), dedicated to King Edward VI of England, while *La Bible translatée avec annotations* (ibid. 1555) was dedicated to Henry II, King of France.
These translations, as Castellion himself was wont to say, earned him hatred and envy precisely from those who should have repaid him with affection. Beza declared his style “intolerable.” Almost down to our own day (1922), Buisson called Castellion’s translation “Savoyard and not at all French,” and Bayle, in the eighteenth century, criticised “Castellion’s affectation,” which led him to use nothing but terms of good Latinity.” For example, he used the word *genius* instead of *angelus*, *lotio* instead of *baptisma*, *respublica* instead of *Ecclesia* and *collegium* instead of *synagoga*.
In the second edition he yielded somewhat to the suggestions of his friends. Unjust, therefore, is the judgement of Henri Estienne, who accused him of not having taken his task as translator seriously at all.
No less famous did Castellion become for his attack on the Inquisition set up by Calvin at Geneva, by which the Spanish doctor Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for his anti-Trinitarian doctrines (27 Oct. 1553). In agreement with others who did not share this extremist act of Calvin and Beza, Castellion wrote his book *De haereticis, an sint persequendi*, published in 1554 under the pseudonym of Martin Bellio: “To kill a man,” he wrote, “is not to defend a doctrine... Servetus had adduced arguments and writings: with arguments and writings he should have been refuted” (ch. 77). The work is now untraceable. Castellion also showed his dissent from Calvin on the doctrine of predestination and election. Calvin, who had already been condemned by Castellion for his intolerance towards Servetus, branded him as a trickster and trouble-maker and wrote against him a pamphlet: *Calumniae nebulonis cuiusdam* (1554); three years later Beza redoubled the attack and, in the title of a similar pamphlet, called him a cunning slanderer (*sycophanta*), but today even Calvinists, who have repudiated the extremes of Calvin’s and Beza’s theology, vindicate the Savoyard humanist.