Baltasar Gracián and the glassy friendship, life’s advantageous happiness

Abstract

In the Baltasar Gracián works, friendship represents a very important, decisive, role. The false and adulating friends’ criticisms run along with an enthusiastic view of true friendship. The concept is often found in the Oráculo manual and in the El Discreto, but it is in the Criticón that the Jesuit makes a passionate song to friendship and the relationship between both main characters, Critilo and Andrenio —well-worn use of the amicus alter ego— becomes the ideal tale of two friends in a disgusting world. Within the thick weaving of quotes, historical, mentions to many authors, we can find mainly Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, often transcribed verbatim and, without forgetting the updating of the subject in other styles, Gracián recreates some of the friendship symbols. The many-faced style of the Aragon’s writer, capable of knitting the friendship symbols with those of the caution in order to transform them, seems to direct us, as is the case of the threeheaded Gerión of the well-known prudential tradition, to a wider and forgotten tradition, the one based upon a text by Luciano and a dialogue by Torcuato Tasso, the Toxaris sive amicitia and the Manso overo de l’amicizia.