RAPIN, RÉNÉ. – Jesuit, humanist, and theologian, born at Tours on 3 November 1621, died in Paris on 27 October 1687.
He entered the Order in 1639 and taught belles-lettres for nine years; thereafter he devoted himself entirely to a writer’s life. A gifted Latin poet and prose writer, he earned the reputation of a new Theocritus through his Eclogue sacrae (Paris 1659), and especially through Hortorum libri IV (ibid. 1665); his Latin courtly compositions, highly esteemed and much sought after, his elegiac poems on the death of illustrious persons, his triumphal odes in honor of Mazzarino and Louis XIV, and the Odurum liber, addressed to Clement IX, also remained famous. His caustic wit was notable in the « querelle des anciens et des modernes » against Fathers F. Vavasseur and P. Mandrun, in which he took the side of the ancients. More valuable and effective, because of their subtlety and mastery of the subject, were his comparative studies in literary criticism of Virgil and Horace, Homer and Virgil, Cicero and Demosthenes, Thucydides and Livy,
Plato, Aristotle, and the Fathers. He also left various ascetical and theological works, including: 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 for the abundance of their information and data: Histoire du jansénisme depuis ses origines jusqu'en 1644 (edited by Abbé Domenech [Paris 1861], who nevertheless produced a mutilated text, full of errors, with names that are unrecognizable) and Mémoires sur l'Eglise et la société, la cour, la ville et le jansénisme (edited by L. Aubineau, 3 vols., ibid. 1865).