Sainctes

Summary

[When Bayle uses the word ‘intolerance’ he is sometimes referring to the theory of government which upheld a single public religion and criminalised other sects. Yet sometimes he uses the adjective ‘intolerant’ to mean a bigoted temperament of the sort that incited others to violence. He associated Claude de Sainctes with intolerance in both senses of the word. In Remark (F), Bayle praises Henry IV's politique use of the civil power to quell such incitement to religious hatred and violence, and he urges contemporaries to read the most modern writing on the idea of toleration, including that of Van Paets, de Beauval, Locke, Jurieu, and himself. Posterity, he hopes, of whatever religion, will rise above the hypocrisy of asking if the unorthodox should be executed or ‘merely’ banished.]

Sainctes (Claude de), in Latin Sanctesius, one of the chief polemicists of the sixteenth century, was from Perche [(A)]. He took the habit of canon regular in the year 1540 at the monastery of Saint-Chéron near Chartres and was sent to Paris some time later, where he studied the humanities, philosophy and theology at the college of Navarre. He became doctor of theology in 1555, after which he applied himself to controversy and was admitted into the household of the Cardinal de Lorraine. In the year 1561, he was one of the disputants for the Roman party at the Colloque de Poissy and was afterwards one of the twelve theologians whom Charles IX sent to the Council of Trent.