Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull was a logician, a mystic, a missionary, and the father of Catalan literature, and he bound together in one restless life things that almost never meet. He invented a combinatorial Art, a system of rotating diagrams for generating and proving truths, that would later fascinate Leibniz and that stands among the distant ancestors of symbolic logic and of computation; he gave his life to converting Muslims and Jews not by the sword but by reason; and he wrote, in the Book of the Lover and the Beloved, one of the masterpieces of European mysticism. The Middle Ages called him Doctor Illuminatus, the Enlightened Doctor, and produced almost no one else remotely like him.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. Llull wrote some two hundred and sixty works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic. This room reads the Book of the Lover and the Beloved in E. Allison Peers's 1923 translation, public domain by way of the Internet Archive, drawn from Llull's spiritual romance Blanquerna. His great combinatorial Art has no public-domain English translation and is in any case diagrammatic rather than discursive, so the chat describes its mechanism from training knowledge, with that disclosure, and cites the Lover and Beloved by its numbered versets. Expect citations of the form The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, 2.

Life. Llull was born around 1232 on Mallorca, an island newly taken from Muslim rule, into a wealthy family, and lived as a courtier and writer of troubadour verse until, near the age of thirty, a series of visions of the crucified Christ turned him wholly to God. He set himself three lifelong aims: to bring the unbelievers to the faith, to found schools where missionaries could learn their languages, and to write the best book in the world against the errors that divided them. He learned Arabic over nine years, withdrew to Mount Randa where the design of his Art came to him as if in illumination, and spent the rest of a long life writing, teaching, pressing his projects on popes and kings, and sailing again and again to North Africa to debate with Muslim scholars face to face.

Where to begin. Start with the Book of the Lover and the Beloved for the mysticism, then read the romance Blanquerna that contains it, the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men for the interfaith dialogue, and one of the shorter statements of the Art, the Ars brevis, for the method that consumed him.

The Art. His central and strangest invention is the Great Art, a system for demonstrating truth by the orderly combination of a small set of basic concepts. At its core stand the Divine Dignities, the perfections of God, goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, and glory, which Llull held are mirrored throughout the whole of creation. By setting these and other principles on concentric revolving circles, the famous Lullian wheels, and turning them, one could generate every combination of subject and predicate in turn and so explore and demonstrate the truths that follow. It was meant as a universal method, good for every science, and resting only on principles that Christians, Muslims, and Jews hold in common, so that the faith might be shown by reason from shared ground.

A machine of thought. Llull's Art is among the boldest ideas of the medieval world: the reduction of reasoning itself to the mechanical combination of symbols. It reaches forward across four centuries to Gottfried Leibniz, who studied Llull and dreamed in his own De Arte Combinatoria of a universal characteristic and a calculus of concepts that would let disputants settle questions by sitting down to reckon; and through Leibniz it belongs to the long prehistory of symbolic logic, combinatorics, and the computer. In revolving disks of parchment Llull built an early ancestor of the reasoning machine.

Faith, reason, and the mission. Behind the Art lay a conviction Llull drew from Anselm: that even the central truths of faith could be shown by necessary reasons, arguments that any honest mind would have to grant. This is why he could dream of converting Muslims and Jews by demonstration rather than by force, and it set him apart from the more cautious Thomas Aquinas, who held that the deepest mysteries of faith lie beyond the reach of proof. Llull mastered Arabic and the thought of Islam and Judaism, sailed repeatedly to North Africa to argue in person, and pressed the Church until it agreed to found schools of oriental languages for its missionaries. His was a rational and peaceable vision of mission, to be won by argument among equals.

The Book of the Gentile. That spirit shines in the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, in which a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, meeting a despairing Gentile who knows nothing of God, each lay out the case for their faith with courtesy and reason from first principles all can accept. Llull famously leaves the Gentile's final choice unspoken, so that the reader must weigh the arguments instead of being handed the verdict, a striking act of intellectual fairness for its century.

The Lover and the Beloved. And then the mystic. Within Blanquerna Llull set the Book of the Lover and the Beloved, a string of short and luminous meditations, one for each day of the year, on the soul's love for God. The Lover is the soul, the Beloved is God, and the love between them is at once anguish and delight. "Long and perilous are the paths by which the Lover seeks his Beloved," runs one verset; "they are peopled by cares, sighs and tears; they are lit up by love." It is among the loveliest works of Christian devotion, proof that the inventor of the logic machine was also a poet of the soul's longing.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Llull founded Catalan as a language of philosophy and letters, much as Dante would found Italian, and his Art gave rise to a long tradition of Lullism that drew thinkers for centuries. Read now, he is at once a pioneer of formal, combinatorial reasoning and a master of devotion, a combination almost unique in the history of thought. He took from Anselm the dream of demonstrating the faith by necessary reasons and from Augustine the vision of all creation as a mirror of the divine perfections; Nicholas of Cusa gathered and prized his works and carried his combinatorial, coincidence-seeking spirit forward; Leibniz studied his Art and made it part of the prehistory of his universal calculus; his mysticism stands close to that of Meister Eckhart; and his lifelong argument with Islam was an argument with the Aristotelian tradition of Averroes. The Doctor Illuminatus dreamed that reason and love together might bring the whole world to God.