Spanish · 1601–1658
Gracián was an Aragonese Jesuit who published almost everything he wrote under his brother's name because his superiors had forbidden him to publish at all. He taught scripture and philosophy, served as an army chaplain at the relief of Lérida in 1646, where the troops called him the Father of Victory, and wrote a series of short, brutal books about how intelligence survives in a world of fools. When he brought out the third part of his allegorical novel El Criticón in 1657 without permission, the order reprimanded him publicly, stripped him of his chair, exiled him to a small house in Tarazona and forbade him pen and ink. He died the next year. Schopenhauer translated his handbook of maxims into German and called it absolutely unique, and Nietzsche said Europe had never produced anything finer in the way of moral subtlety.