Epistle

Epistole (Greek: ἐπιστολ, epistolē) is a synonym for letter: a text whose main function is communication between the sender or issuer (the writer who writes and sends it) and the recipient or receiver. The use of the term usually implies a cult register or a literary context (the epistolary genre).

This is now an archaic term, usually restricted in use to teaching letters on ethics or religion; and particularly to refer to the works of the New Testament that receive the name of "epistles", and where those written by some apostles destined for primitive Christian communities are collected. Those traditionally attributed to Paul of Tarsus are known as "Pauline epistles" and the rest with the generic name of "Catholic epistles" (i.e., "universal" or "general").

History

The epistolary genre was common in Ancient Egypt as part of the work of the scribes, and they are collected under the name of Sebayt (instructions), being dated the most ancient in the 25th century B.C. c.

The Greeks cultivated the genre and left an extensive epistolary corpus, which presents notable critical problems. For example, many of the Letters of the philosopher Plato are of insecure attribution; the same occurs with many of the authors gathered in Rudolf Hercher's Epistolographi Graeci (Paris, 1874). Those of Philostratus, Epicurus, Julian are interesting; the correspondence maintained between Saint Paul and Seneca is quite an old forgery; another long-standing fraud is that of the Letters of the Tyrant Falaris, which was completely debunked by the English philologist of the century XVIII Richard Bentley. The Greek-speaking Holy Fathers also left us a very abundant epistolary, for example Saint Basil, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Gregory of Nisa. Also Greek is Demetrius' treatise On Style, dateable between the I century B.C. C. and the I d. C., where gender is defined in paragraphs 223-235. There are no older epistolary theory manuals. There he already formulates the elements of the genre: close to dialogue, but more elaborate.

• Simple style
• Clarity and brevity
• Flexible structure
• Contrary to the genre of speech
• Own topics
• Use of maxims and expressions of friendship
• Adequacy to the recipient

No Roman, despite the assiduous cultivation of the genre in the Empire, stopped but occasionally to specify the genre more until the IV< century, in which Julio Victor's Rhetorica dedicates a brief prescriptive note, which distinguishes business and familiar letters, and the anonymous work Excerpta Rhetorica, from between the 3rd and 4th centuries, which distinguishes between public and private letters, religious or not, personal or foreign, large or moderate. The fall of the Western Roman Empire and the arrival of the Middle Ages fragmented rhetoric to adapt it to new needs, developing specific precepts for the letter (ars dictaminis), poetic composition (ars poetria) and preaching (ars praedicandi). The ars dictaminis appeared in Montecassino and spread rapidly throughout Europe through the schools of Bologna and Orleans. Its mandatory feature is the absolute adaptation to the addressee, with long lists of specific formulas for each social class and the configuration of the approved format of the parts of the letter, modeled on the mandatory discourse of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's De inventione, and the use of figures from book IV of the former. Later, the appearance of the bourgeoisie in the cities forced the genre to be adapted again, as It can be seen in the work of Giovanni de Bonandrea, a forerunner of the changes that the humanists made. Already in the XV century, the different attempts to recover the classic epistolary obligation and, at the same time, to respond to the needs of the new society are shown: Niccolò Perotti, who dedicates his De conscribendis epistolis to the family letter, from agreement with the Ciceronian conception; Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli, who inserts his theory into a mandatory rhetoric of discourse; the failed attempt by Juan Luis Vives; and, finally, the definitive configuration of the humanistic epistolary theory carried out by Erasmus of Rotterdam that covers both the family letter and the official letter and offers formulas and advice for writing the epistle.

In short, Cicero's well-known definition conloquia amicorum absentium, "conversation of absent friends", forces the epistle writer to fill a void in friendship: he asks for an answer, he complains about the lack of news from the other, and specificity, content is requested, although Cicero admits that the letter may not have any, that the first thing that occurs to you be written even if you have nothing to tell, when it comes to family letters or between friends. The letter must be capable of reflecting, for the addressee, the personality of the absent person, so that, through it, knowledge of the author's «ethos» is produced. In addition, absolute frankness is expressed in the letter, as Cicero affirms: epistula non erubescit, "the letter does not feel ashamed" For this reason they are private: they must not be shown, copied or disclosed without permission. The language in which they are written must be adapted to the topics, but in general terms it must be sermo cotidianus: Cicero, Seneca and Pliny recommend it:

«You're complaining that I'll send you uncaring letters. Who speaks with refinement, but who wants to speak with affectation? As it would be my conversation if we were sitting together or passing, simple and light, I want them to be my letters, they have nothing rebuked or false... Let this be our purpose: let us speak what we feel, let us feel what we speak; let our way of speaking be in keeping with our life. He has fulfilled his promise that, when you see it and when you hear it, it is the same» (Seneca, Epistles to Lucilio75. 1-4)

That is why there are frequent irruptions of phrases or words in Greek, set phrases, general maxims, colloquial expressions, diminutives, parenthetical or explanatory expressions, elisions and anacoluts. The feigned dialogue or dialogism is also used. The brevity, the clarity, the use of the imperfect epistolary...

The Family Epistles in prose by Cicero and the two books of Epistles in verse by the Roman Horace, from the I a. C. One of them, the Epistula ad Pisones, receives the name of Poetic Art, and has been considered for centuries as the normative of literary principles; the Latin poet Ovid also composed numerous letters in verse: the Heroides , fictional letters of famous heroines, and the real ones that make up the collections or epistolaries in verse in which they protest their exile, called Tristia and Pontic. From the Neronian period are the Letters to Lucilio by the Hispano-Latin Seneca, of a philosophical and moral nature; from between the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. of Christ is the Epistolario in prose by Pliny the Younger: nine books with a total of 248 epistles sent to 105 recipients, some of them famous, such as the historian Tacitus or the emperor Trajan; many are famous for the subject they deal with, such as the eruption of Vesuvius in which his uncle Pliny the Elder perished or the one in which he questions the emperor Trajan about the treatment to be given to Christians. From the IV century are two books of epistles in verse by Ausonius.

Biblical Epistles

The Biblical Epistles are the part of the New Testament that consists of letters sent to the first Christian communities by the apostles James, Jude, Peter and John, and also by Saint Paul (the Pauline Epistles).

In the liturgy of the Mass, "the Epistle" or reading of the Epistle is one of its parts, in which a fragment of one of the biblical Epistles is read. The liturgical book that collects these readings is called "epistolario". In the physical arrangement of the parts of the church, "the Epistle" or the "Epistle side" it is the right side (from the point of view of the faithful), as opposed to the "Gospel side."

Literary epistles in prose and verse

In Renaissance humanism, the epistle became an essay literary genre, dignified by a demanding and formal style, very often provided with didactic or moral intent. Petrarch, isolated in the dark centuries, wrote letters to pagan and Christian writers of Antiquity to feel less alone (Cicero and Saint Augustine); Already in the XVI century, Erasmus composed hundreds of epistles, and the Spanish humanists (Hernando del Pulgar, with his Letras, or Fray Antonio de Guevara, with his entertaining Family Epistles) also contributed to the genre. When the poetic form was chosen, it was almost always done in chained triplets (with a real addressee, such as the Epístola a Mendoza by Juan Boscán and the Epístola a Arias Montano by Captain Francisco by Aldana, or with a fictitious and symbolic addressee, such as the Epístola moral a Fabio by Andrés Fernández de Andrada, to cite just two classic examples). More rarely, blank verse was used (Epístola a Boscán by Garcilaso de la Vega). Thus, during the XVI century epistles in prose and verse were lavished due to the communicative and open desire that both genres had and its affinity with the anthropocentric ideals of sociability and Renaissance aesthetics. The subjectivity of anthropocentrism did not always have to have an addressee, since it could be fictitious as a pretext for personal relief. Other times, in prose, the epistle had a mere informative character, such as the Cartas de relación by Hernán Cortés, which narrated the progress of the conquest of Mexico and as such today constitute a historical document. Private and not intended for publication are the Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus, to which the oral and fluent style of their author give a special grace.

Already in the XVII century those of a satirical nature increased, such as the Epistles of the Knight of the Pincer by Francisco de Quevedo, about the stinginess of a gentleman with respect to his lover, or the Satirical and censorious Epistle to the Count-Duke of Olivares, also by Quevedo, where he calls for a political reform and morality of society, no longer in prose, but in tercets. Apocryphal or false are those contained in the so-called Centón epistolario of the bachelor Fernán Gómez de Cibdad Real, attributed to a doctor of the century XV, but composed in the XVII century. Essayistic and scholarly form also took in that century the Philological Letters of Francisco Cascales or those of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

In the 18th century, on the pre-essay model of Cascales, wrote the novator fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo his Erudite and Curious Letters (1742-1760, 5 vols.), small essays less extensive than those he had previously published as discourses (from " discurrir") in his Universal Critical Theater, with the intention of banishing obscurantism and what he called "common errors", recalling the Celebrated Errors of Juan de Zabaleta. He then also wrote a notable epistolary the Jesuit expelled Juan Andrés.

Several specific genres were already established from an eighteenth-century bilingual edition of Cicero's Family Epistles. They are divided with a thematic-rhetorical criterion into narratories or narratives, "whose purpose is to give news to an absentee"; commendations, commendatories or "letters of favor", to entrust other peoples things; petitions to entrust one's own things; expostulatory those that expose complaints; gratulatory or thanksgiving those that reflect "joy for prosperous events"; hortatory, consolatory those that comfort for some misfortune; funny those that treat mockery and grace; excusatory ones and various matters. That form had, for example, in the XV century, the Letter foreword to Constable Don Pedro of Portugal of the Marqués de Santillana, which is actually a history of the poetry of his time and preceded a manuscript of his works sent to said character. María Romero Masegosa y Cancelada apparently translated Françoise de Graffigny's epistolary novel Lettres d une peruvienne (1747) and published it in Valladolid in 1792 with notes, deletions, and some additional letters. And it is that in the XVIII century the epistolary novel was a highly cultivated genre since Samuel Richardson made it fashionable with his Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748); It will suffice to recall that Montesquieu had used it as a literary resource for socio-political criticism in his Persian Letters (1721), which José de Cadalso imitated in his Moroccan Letters (1789). spreading the ideals of the Enlightenment, and that Choderlos de Laclos also used the genre to condemn libertinism in his Dangerous Liaisons (1782); Voltaire was an indefatigable writer of missives, which always ended with the same sentence: Ecrasez l'infame!. Among those by other Spanish illustrated men, the humorous (and somewhat lurid and scatological) Letters from Juan del Encina (1804) by José Francisco de Isla and the Epistolario by Leandro Fernández stand out. of Moratin; but other times the letters presented great projects of political and economic reform, such as the Economic-political letters (1786-1790) of León de Arroyal or the Letters on the obstacles that Nature, the opinion and laws impose public happiness (1792) and the Letter to the Prince of Peace (1795) by Francisco Cabarrús.

The Spanish XIX century opens with the Six letters to Irénico in which clear and distinct ideas are given of the rights of man (Barcelona, 1817) that Félix Amat wrote under a pseudonym; Social and political content have the Letters from Spain by José María Blanco White, published in his English exile, as well as the Letters of the political laments of a lazy poor thing (1820) by Sebastián de Miñano and, in a reactionary sense, the Critical Letters (1824-1825, 5 vols.) of the Rancio Philosopher. We must also mention the Letters to Elpidio on impiety, superstition and fanaticism in their relations with society (1836) by Cuban Félix Varela. and the Letters from my cell (1864) and the Literary Letters to a Woman (1860-1861) by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer stand out as prose models. As for realism, in addition to Galdós and, above all, Juan Valera, we must mention the collection of Models for letters (1899) by Rafael Díez de la Cortina. Already in the XX century examples are numerous; Due to its opportunistic nature and the controversy it aroused, it is worth remembering the Letter to General Franco by Fernando Arrabal written in 1971 while safe in his French exile.

Epistolary structure

A typical epistle structure includes the following parts:

• Introduction
• Part one, of theoretical-doctrinal character
• Part two, moral exhortation
• Conclusion

Epistolary novel

The epistle can also be used as a narrative mechanism or literary resource that allows writing novels in the form of letters or epistles, an example of epistolary novels are the Proceso de letras de amores by Juan de Segura, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos or the first part of Pepita Jiménez by Juan Valera, as well as such as the novel Poor People and the story Novel in Nine Letters, both by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevski.

Correspondences and letters

Literary correspondence

Literary correspondence is the epistolary exchange between writers, especially notable in some cases (Max Aub).

Scientific correspondence

Scientific correspondence, which dates back to Greek science (Archimedes' letters), was crucial in establishing the concept of scientific publication from the 19th century XVII.

Epistolary

The letters or epistles that constitute a correspondence can be gathered in collections called epistolaries; These can be of different types, depending on whether the letters are grouped by authors, correspondents, themes or dates; the most complete epistolaries also include the epistles written by correspondents, who are often excluded (either because they do not have as much importance, fame or literary quality as the author to whom these collections are consecrated, or because they have not been preserved - it is very difficult for this type of ephemeral literature to have been preserved-).