CASTELLION, SÉRASTIEN. - Protestant theologian and anti-Calvinist polemicist, b. in 1515 at St-Martin-du-Fresne in Bugey, d., as poor as he had lived, on 29 Dec. 1563 at Basilea. C. became acquainted with Calvino at Strasburgo, and was appointed by him headmaster of the college in the city of Ginevra. In this post he fell into disfavor with the Genevan council because it was said that he had doubted Jesus’ descent into hell and had expressed irreverent judgments concerning the biblical book of the Cantico dei Cantici, so that he was denied the position, to which he aspired, of Protestant minister in Ginevra. This refusal induced him to leave Ginevra and go to Basilea, at whose University, owing to the reputation he had acquired through his translations of the Bible into Latin and then into French, he obtained the chair of Greek in 1552.
Of his biblical works, the dialogues first appeared: Dialogorum sacrorum libri quatuor (Lione and Ginevra 1540, ’43 and ’45). Then came the translations: Moses latinus ex hebraeo factus (Basilea 1546), Psalterium reliquae sacrorum litterarum carmina et precationes (ibid. 1547), and the Biblia Veteris et Novi Testamenti (ibid. 1551), which was dedicated to King Edoardo VI of England, while La Bible translate avec annotations (ibid. 1555) was dedicated to Enrico II, King of France.
These translations, as C. himself said, brought him hatred and envy precisely from those who ought to have repaid him with affection. Beza declared their style “unbearable.” Until almost our own day (1922), Buisson called C.’s translation “Savoyard and not at all French,” and Bayle, in the eighteenth century, censured “the affectation of C., who wished to use only terms of good Latinity.” He used, for example, 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. Enrico Estienne’s judgment, accusing him of not having taken his task as translator seriously at all, is therefore unjust.
C. became no less famous for his attack upon the Inquisition established by Calvino at Ginevra, through which the Spanish doctor Michele Serveto was burned at the stake for his anti-Trinitarian doctrines (27 Oct. 1553). In agreement with others who did not share this extremist action of Calvino and Beza, C. wrote his book De haereticiis, an sint persequendi, published in 1554 under the pseudonym Martin Bellio: “To kill a man,” he wrote, “is not to defend a doctrine... Serveto had advanced arguments and writings: he should have been refuted by arguments and writings” (p. 77). The work is now unobtainable. C. also showed his disagreement with Calvino concerning the doctrine of predestination and election. Calvino, who had already been condemned by C. for the intolerance exercised against Serveto, branded him as a cheat and troublemaker and wrote a pamphlet against him: Calumniae nebulonis cuiusdam (1554); three years later Beza intensified the attack and, in the title of a similar pamphlet, called him a cunning slanderer (sycephanta); but today Calvinists themselves, who have repudiated the extremes of the theology of Calvino and Beza, justify the Savoyard humanist.