Baltasar Gracián

Works

• 1647The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence

  Three hundred aphorisms with commentary on how to act wisely in a world of appearances: know oneself and others, keep reserve, choose the right moment.

• 1651The Critic

  An allegorical novel in three parts (1651–57) in which Critilo, the man of reason, and Andrenio, the man of nature, travel through the stages of life and the illusions of the world.

Position

Gracián is on the map as a moralist of the Spanish Baroque. His books start from a world in which, as the “Pocket Oracle” puts it, things pass for what they seem rather than for what they are, and they teach the art of acting in it: self-knowledge, reserve, timing, the cultivation of a person who can hold their own at court and in society. Readers have long disagreed whether this is a technique of success or a Christian and Stoic prudence for a deceptive world; the books contain both, and “El Criticón” ends in desengaño, the disillusionment that sees through the world’s illusions. In “Agudeza y arte de ingenio” he gave a theory of conceptismo: wit grasps hidden correspondences between things and expresses them in concise concepts. Translations spread his work across Europe, the Oracle in French as “L’Homme de cour” (1684); Schopenhauer translated it into German and valued “El Criticón” highly; Nietzsche also referred to Gracián, and Sergio Santiago Romero (2017) reads the “scientific cheerfulness” of the Oracle as anticipating Nietzsche’s figure of the free spirit. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in “Truth and Method” (1960), discussed Gracián’s concept of taste as a source of the ideal of social cultivation. Andrenio’s awakening on an island has been compared to Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan”; whether Gracián knew that story directly is disputed.

Life & context

Baltasar Gracián was born on 8 January 1601 in Belmonte near Calatayud in Aragon, the son of a physician. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1619, was ordained priest in 1627 and taught philosophy, theology and rhetoric at Jesuit colleges in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, among them Calatayud, Lleida, Gandía, Huesca and Zaragoza. In Huesca the scholar and collector Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa became his patron. His books appeared mostly under the name of his brother Lorenzo and without his order’s permission: “The Hero” (1637), “The Politician” (1640), a treatise on wit (1642, enlarged in 1648 as “Agudeza y arte de ingenio”), “The Discreet Man” (1646) and the “Pocket Oracle” (1647). In 1646 he served as an army chaplain in the campaign for Lleida. The three parts of “El Criticón” followed in 1651, 1653 and 1657; only “El Comulgatorio” (1655), a book of meditations for communion, bore his own name. After the third part of “El Criticón” his superiors reprimanded him publicly, removed him from his chair of Scripture in Zaragoza and sent him to Graus. He died in Tarazona on 6 December 1658.

Further main works

• The Hero (El Héroe, 1637)
• The Discreet Man (El Discreto, 1646)
• The Art of Wit (Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 1648)