Baltasar Gracián


Baltasar Gracián y Morales, SJ, better known as Baltasar Gracián, was a Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud. His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Biography

The son of a doctor, in his childhood Gracián lived with his uncle, who was a priest. He studied at a Jesuit school in 1621 and 1623 and theology in Zaragoza. He was ordained in 1627 and took his final vows in 1635.
He assumed the vows of the Jesuits in 1633 and dedicated himself to teaching in various Jesuit schools. He spent time in Huesca, where he befriended the local scholar Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, who helped him achieve an important milestone in his intellectual upbringing. He acquired fame as a preacher, although some of his oratorical displays, such as reading a letter sent from Hell from the pulpit, were frowned upon by his superiors. He was named Rector of the Jesuit College of Tarragona and wrote works proposing models for courtly conduct such as El héroe, El político, and El discreto. During the Spanish war, he was chaplain of the army that liberated Lleida in 1646.
In 1651, he published the first part of the Criticón without the permission of his superiors, whom he disobeyed repeatedly. This attracted the Society's displeasure. Ignoring the reprimands, he published the second part of Criticón in 1657, as a result was sanctioned and exiled to Graus at the beginning of 1658. Soon Gracian wrote to apply for membership in another religious order. His demand was not met, but his sanction was eased off: in April 1658 he was sent to several minor positions under the College of Tarazona. His physical decline prevented him from attending the provincial congregation of Calatayud and on 6 December 1658 Gracian died in Tarazona, near Zaragoza in the Kingdom of Aragon.
Gracián is the most representative writer of the Spanish Baroque literary style known as Conceptismo, of which he was the most important theoretician; his Agudeza y arte de ingenio is at once a poetic, a rhetoric and an anthology of the conceptist style.
The Aragonese village where he was born, Belmonte de Calatayud, changed its name to Belmonte de Gracián in his honour.

''Criticón''

The three parts of the Criticón, published in 1651, 1653, and 1657, achieved fame in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries. It is, without a doubt, the author's masterpiece and one of the great works of the Siglo de Oro. It is a lengthy allegorical novel with philosophical overtones. It recalls the Byzantine style of novel in its many vicissitudes and in the numerous adventures to which the characters are subjected, as well as the picaresque novel in its satirical take on society, as evidenced in the long pilgrimage undertaken by the main characters, Critilo, the "critical man" who personifies disillusionment, and Andrenio, the "natural man" who represents innocence and primitive impulses. The author constantly exhibits a perspectivist technique that unfolds according to the criteria or points of view of both characters, but in an antithetical rather than plural way as in Miguel de Cervantes. The novel reveals a philosophy, pessimism, with which one of its greatest readers and admirers, the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, identified.
The following is a summary of the Criticón, reduced almost to the point of a sketch, of a complex work that demands detailed study.
Critilo, man of the world, is shipwrecked on the coast of the island of Santa Elena, where he meets Andrenio, the natural man, who has grown up completely ignorant of civilization. Together they undertake a long voyage to the Isle of Immortality, travelling the long and prickly road of life. In the first part, "En la primavera de la niñez", they join the royal court, where they suffer all manner of disappointments; in the second part, "En el otoño de la varonil edad", they pass through Aragon, where they visit the house of Salastano, and travel to France, which the author calls the "wasteland of Hipocrinda", populated entirely by hypocrites and dunces, ending with a visit to a house of lunatics. In the third part, "En el invierno de la vejez", they arrive in Rome, where they encounter an academy where they meet the most inventive of men, arriving finally at the Isle of Immortality. He is intelligent and contributed greatly to the world. One of his most famous phrases is "Respect yourself if you would have others respect you."

''The Art of Worldly Wisdom''

Gracián's style, generically called conceptism, is characterized by ellipsis and the concentration of a maximum of significance in a minimum of form, an approach referred to in Spanish as agudeza, and which is brought to its extreme in the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, which is almost entirely composed of three hundred maxims with commentary. He constantly plays with words: each phrase becomes a puzzle, using the most diverse rhetorical devices.
Its appeal has endured: in 1992, Christopher Maurer's translation of this book remained 18 weeks in The Washington Post's list of Nonfiction General Best Sellers. It has sold nearly 200,000 copies.

Critical reception

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica wrote of Gracián that: "He has been excessively praised by Schopenhauer, whose appreciation of the author induced him to translate the Oráculo manual, and he has been unduly depreciated by Ticknor and others. He is an acute thinker and observer, misled by his systematic misanthropy and by his fantastic literary theories".
Nietzsche wrote of the Oráculo, "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety," and Schopenhauer, who translated it into German, considered the book "Absolutely unique... a book made for constant use...a companion for life" for "those who wish to prosper in the great world." A translation of the Oráculo manual from the Spanish by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1892, was a huge commercial success, with many reprintings over the years. Jacobs’ translation is alleged to have been read by Winston Churchill, seven years later, on the ship taking him to the Boer Wars.
In Paris, in 1924, a revision and reprint of the translation into French by Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaie, with a preface by André Rouveyre, attracted a wide readership there, and was admired by André Gide. A new translation by Christopher Maurer became a national bestseller in the U.S. in 1992 , and the English edition, which sold almost 200,000 copies, was translated into Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and many other languages.

Works

The only publication which bears Gracián's name is El Comulgatorio ; his more important books were issued under the pseudonym of Lorenzo Gracián or under the anagram of Gracía de Marlones. Gracián was punished for publishing without his superior's permission El Criticón : but no objection was taken to its substance.