Remy Ceillier

Dom Remy Ceillier (1688 in Bar-le-Duc - 1761) was a Benedictine monk of the Lorraine Congregation of St. Vanne. He was the compiler of an immense Histoire generale des auteurs sacres et ecclesiastiques (23 vols., Paris, 1729-1763), being a history and analysis of the writings of all the ecclesiastical writers of the first thirteen centuries. He put trouble and time into the work, and many portions of it are well done. A later and improved edition was produced in Paris, 1858, in 14 vols. Ceillier's other work, Apologie de la morale des Peres de l'Eglise (Paris, 1718), also won some celebrity.

The most valuable portion of the work is that dealing with the Church fathers of the first six centuries. Here the author was able to draw upon the writings of Tillemont, and to use the scholarly Benedictine editions of the Fathers. Charges of Jansenism made against Ceillier in his lifetime and afterwards find no substantiation in his writings, and the treatment accorded to the author and his works by Pope Benedict XIV shows that the pope had no doubts as to his orthodoxy.