Cellot, Louis

CELLOT, LOUIS. - French Jesuit, b. in Paris in 1588, d. there on 20 Oct. 1658. A novice in 1605, he taught letters and Sacred Scripture, was rector at Rouen and at La Flèche, and provincial of France (1654-58).

He had a 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 caused a stir with his theological controversies. He intervened in the struggle between the secular and the regular clergy with the great work De hierarchia et hierarchis (Rouen 1641), directed against Petrus Aurelius (that is, Saint-Cyran) and Hallier. Condemned by the Assembly of the Clergy for certain new or strange propositions, he escaped condemnation by the Sorbonne with a retraction: Propositiones aliquos ex libro De hierarchia (Paris 1641), which he then attempted to soften in his Hararum subsecivarum 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 collection XXXIX, 54). The same fate befell, much later, in 1732, on account of certain appendices, his vigorous Historia Gottschalci praedestinationis (ibid. 1655).

Edmondo Lamalle