RAPIN, RENÉ. - Jesuit, humanist and theologian, b. at Tours on 3 Nov. 1621, d. at Paris on 27 Oct. 1687.
Having entered the Order in 1639, he taught belles-lettres for 9 years; then he devoted himself entirely to the life of a writer. A skilled poet and prose writer in Latin, he earned with his Eclogae sacrae (Paris 1659), and especially with Hortorum libri IV (ibid. 1665), the reputation of a new Theocritus; his Latin courtly compositions also remained famous and much sought after, as did the elegiac songs on the death of illustrious persons, the triumphal poems in honor of Mazarin and Louis XIV, and the Odurum liber, addressed to Clement IX. Noteworthy is his caustic wit in the « querelle des anciens et des modernes » against Fathers F. Vavasseur and P. Mandrun, taking the side of the ancients. More valid and effective, for their refined acuteness and mastery of the subject, were his comparative studies of literary criticism between Virgil and Horace, Homer and Virgil, Cicero and Demosthenes, Thucydides and Livy,
Plato, Aristotle and the Fathers. He also left various ascetic and theological works, among them: L'esprit du christianisme (Paris 1672), La perfection du christianisme, tirée de la morale de Jésus Christ (ibid. 1673); but two works published posthumously remain indispensable even now for their abundance of information and data: Histoire du jansénisme depuis ses origines jusqu'en 1644 (edited by the abbot Domenech [Paris 1861], who however gave a mutilated text of it, full of errors, with unrecognizable names) and Mémoires sur l'Eglise et la société, la cour, la ville et le jansénisme (edited by L. Aubineau, 3 vols., ibid. 1865).
Bibliography5 works
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