The Uses of Resipiscere in the Latin of Erasmus

The subject of this paper is the conflict over language and meaning which surrounded Erasmus of Rotterdam s attempt to create a new Latin translation of the New Testament. In the 1519 edition of the Novum Instrumentum, Erasmus chose to translate a Greek verb rendered almost universally in English as repent with the Latin resipiscere. In part, this was controversial simply because Erasmus had replaced the traditional Latin poenitentiam agere, one the chief scriptural sanctions for the sacrament of penitence. But the debate over penitence is only a beginning. Taking contemporary responses to the translation as a starting point, this paper explores the larger role of resipiscere in Erasmus s prose. In his educational works, satires, and correspondence, Erasmus employs resipiscere in contexts that give the word a burden of meaning much broader than anything in either medieval or classical standards of usage. Where Cicero and Livy use resipiscere to describe a recovery from an irrational state of mind or even from unconsciousness, Erasmus goes beyond this. In Erasmus’s prose, resipiscere characterizes a recovery from active deception and a process of questioning authority which tests the boundaries of the classical usage. By comparing the range of values Erasmus bestows on resipiscere, this paper demonstrates how his distinctly humanist approach to language reflects much more than his re-evaluation of classical Latin. It sets Erasmus’s use of the word in the larger context of his tendency to equate sin with error and refer to the teachings of Christ as a sort of heavenly wisdom or divine philosophy

Art · Art history · Cicero · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Erasmus · Humanism · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Sociology · Theology · Classics · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity