Faydit, Pierre

Faydit, Pierre a priest of the French Oratory, was born at Riom, in the Auvergne, in the first half of the 17th century. He was in 1671 excluded from the Oratory for having published, in spite of the prohibition of his superiors, from the Cartesian point of view, a work On the Human Mind (De Mente Humana). While pope Innocent XI was quarrelling with the French government, Faydit, in a sermon on St. Polycarp, preached against the pope, whose conduct he compared with that of pope Victor toward the Asiatic bishops. The view expressed in these sermons he refuted himself in another sermon published at Liege; but in 1687 he again published at Maestricht an extract from his first sermon, with proofs for the facts quoted in it. In consequence of an Essay on the Trinity in which he seemed. to favor Tritheism, he was imprisoned in 1696 at St. Lazarus. Subsequently he was ordered to withdraw to his native city where he continued to compile quarrelsome works, attacking with ridiculous arguments some of the best works of his age, such as Fenelon's Telemaque and Tillemont's Memoires Ecclesiastiques. He died in 1709. -Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Gener. 16:229.