Louis CELLOT (1658). - French Jesuit, born in Paris in 1588, died there on 20 Oct. 1658. He entered the novitiate in 1605, taught literature and Sacred Scripture, was rector at Rouen and La Flèche, and provincial of France (1654–58).
He achieved notable success with his tragedies and other literary works: Opera poetica (Paris 1630); Panegyrici et orationes (ibid. 1641, various reprints and many partial editions). He then stirred controversy through his theological disputes. He intervened in the struggle between secular and regular clergy with his major work De hierarchia et hierarchis (Rouen 1641), directed against Petrus Aurelius (i.e., Saint-Cyran) and Hallier. Condemned by the Assembly of the Clergy for certain novel or strange propositions, he escaped condemnation by the Sorbonne through a retraction: Propositiones aliqua ex libro De hierarchia (Paris 1641), which he later attempted to soften in his Horarum subsecivorum liber singularis (ibid. 1648). The De hierarchia was placed on the Index in 1642 – donec corrigatur (the manuscript documentation of the case is in the Vatican Library, Barberini fonds XXXIX, 54). The same fate befell, much later in 1732, his vigorous Historia Gorteschulei praedestinationis (ibid. 1655), due to certain appendices.