Ramon Llull

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Ramon Llull was a Majorcan lay philosopher, theologian, and missionary, born around 1232 on an island newly taken from Muslim rule and dead in or shortly after 1315. He wrote in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic, and his life’s labor was a single conviction pursued for half a century: that the truths of the Christian faith could be shown to be true by reason, and that such a demonstration, set out plainly enough, might convince Muslims and Jews without recourse to force. He produced on the order of two hundred and sixty works across that career — a body of writing so large, and so single-minded, that it has the quality of a man arguing with the whole of Islam and Judaism at once, page after page, for fifty years.

The conversion and the nine years

The biographical frame is partly his own telling. Late in life, at the Carthusian house of Vauvert near Paris, Llull dictated to a friend the Vita coetanea (1311) — the contemporary life — which remains the principal source for everything that came before the documents. By its account he was a seneschal at the court of James II of Majorca, married to Blanca Picany and the father of two children, and given to the writing of troubadour love verse, when, around 1263, he was interrupted at his work. Five times, on five successive nights, as he sat composing a song to a married woman he desired, he saw Christ crucified hanging in the air before him. He could not finish the song. The voice of his conscience finally told him that the apparitions could mean only that he “should abandon the world at once and from then on dedicate himself totally to the service of our Lord Jesus Christ” (in Anthony Bonner’s translation of the Vita).

Out of that turn came a fixed program, three resolutions that organized the rest of his life: to convert the unbelievers even at the cost of his own death; to write a book — the best book in the world, the Vita says — against their errors; and to persuade kings and popes to found schools where missionaries could learn Arabic and the other languages of the East. He was already perhaps thirty. He then spent roughly nine years (c. 1265–1274) in self-imposed study, learning Latin and, from a Muslim slave he had bought for the purpose, Arabic — a long apprenticeship that ended, by tradition violently, when the slave, having struck him, took his own life in prison. The episode is characteristic of the Vita: the conversion of Islam was, for Llull, never an abstraction but a thing pursued across a real and dangerous frontier.

The illumination at Randa

The decisive moment came around 1274. Withdrawing to contemplate on Puig de Randa, a mountain in the Majorcan interior, Llull received what the tradition calls the illumination — a sudden grasp of the form and method of the work that would occupy him for the next forty years. He saw, all at once, how the truth might be shown: not asserted from scripture, which an opponent could simply refuse, but generated and tested by a mechanism built from premises he already shared. Descending, he set down the first version at the Cistercian abbey of La Real. This is the instrument later ages called the Art — Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem, the compendious art of finding truth — and it would be revised, expanded, and stripped down again across decades and many titles, never abandoned and never quite finished.

The Art

The Art is best understood as two arts, an earlier and a later, which the scholar Anthony Bonner named the quaternary and the ternary phases. The first, running from the Randa illumination to about 1289 and centered on the Ars compendiosa and the later Ars demonstrativa, worked with sixteen of nearly everything and a set of figures lettered A, S, T, V, X, Y, Z. The second, from about 1290 through the great late summaries — the Ars generalis ultima and its digest the Ars brevis — reduced the machine to a cleaner and more powerful form: four figures, an alphabet of nine letters, and nine of each kind of principle. The reduction was not a retreat but a refinement; the late Art does more with less. It is these last summaries, above all, that carried the Art to later readers, who knew it most often simply as the Ars magna, the great art — the name under which Agrippa and Bruno would later take it up.

At the root of both stand the divine dignities — the attributes Llull held to be common ground, more or less, among the three faiths of the Book. In the mature ternary Art they are nine: goodness, greatness, eternity (or duration), power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, and glory. These are not merely names of God. For Llull they are the active structure of reality itself: every created thing exists as a likeness of them, so that to reason correctly about goodness or greatness anywhere is to reason about God’s own perfections, descending the ladder of being from the Creator to the elements and ascending it again. The Art is the formal expression of that double movement.

The nine dignities are paired in the late Art with nine relative principles — difference, concordance, contrariety, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality, minority — the relations that hold the absolute principles in motion. Both sets, together with a set of questions (whether, what, of what, why, how much, of what kind, when, where, with what), are mapped onto an alphabet of the letters B through K, each letter carrying its column of meanings. The figures then put the alphabet to work. Figure A is a single circle of the dignities, every term joined to every other by a line, so that the eye can read off each pairing — goodness and greatness, greatness and eternity, and the rest. Figure T carries the relations among three sets of threes. The third figure is a triangular half-table of all the binary combinations of the letters. And the fourth figure is the famous one: three concentric paper disks, lettered alike, mounted on a common pin so that the inner wheels turn against the fixed outer one. Rotating them brings every ternary combination of the principles into alignment in turn — BCD, BCE, and onward through the whole field — and each alignment is a question to be opened and a small theorem to be drawn out.

This is what makes the Art a genuine machine for thought, among the earliest in the Latin West. It does not merely store conclusions; it generates the combinations from which conclusions are read. Llull called the procedures evacuating the table and multiplying the figures — exhausting the senses latent in each compartment, then running the wheels to produce the full set of questions a subject allows. From a small, fixed alphabet of primitive concepts the device throws off an unbounded harvest of demonstrations. The point was always combat and conversion: an argument that began only from what a Muslim or a Jew would grant, and moved by its own internal motion toward the conclusions of the faith, leaving the opponent no place to stand. Llull set this combinatorial logic explicitly against the Aristotelian syllogism of the schools, which he judged able only to unfold what was already contained in its premises, never to find anything new.

The books

Around the Art grew a literature unlike anything else of its century, because Llull wrote it for everyone, not only for the schools. The vast early Llibre de contemplació en Déu — composed first in Arabic, then in Catalan — runs to hundreds of chapters of devotion and speculation and is in effect the reservoir from which the rest is drawn. Blanquerna (c. 1283) is a long prose romance, often called the first novel in a Romance language, that follows its hero from the world into the hermitage and at last to the papacy and back to solitude; embedded near its end is the Book of the Lover and the Beloved, a sequence of short verses, one for each day of the year, of the soul’s love for God, cast in the burning idiom of the Sufi mystics whose poetry Llull knew from Arabic. It remains his most widely read work. The Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis — the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men — stages the whole missionary dream as a courteous fiction: a pagan and a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim reason together in a meadow, each setting out his faith by the common method, and the book closes, pointedly, before the gentile says which he has chosen, so that the three wise men resolve to keep disputing. Felix, or the Book of Marvels sends a wondering youth through the orders of creation; the Arbre de ciència — the Tree of Science — recasts the whole of knowledge as a forest of trees whose roots are the dignities themselves. The Desconhort, a verse lament, records the disappointment of a man who has carried his Art to courts and councils and been mostly ignored.

Miramar and the three voyages

The schools were not a metaphor. In 1276, with the backing of Prince (later King) James II of Majorca, Llull founded at Miramar, above the sea on the island’s western coast, a college where thirteen Franciscans were to learn Arabic for the mission; Pope John XXI confirmed it by bull on 17 October 1276. Miramar did not last, but the idea did: Llull pressed it on king after king and pope after pope, and at the Council of Vienne in 1311–12 the Church at last decreed chairs of Oriental languages — Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean — at the great universities, a measure that owes much to his decades of agitation.

He also went himself. The Vita and the documents record voyages to North Africa in pursuit of the disputation he had spent his life designing: to Tunis around 1293, where he debated Muslim scholars and was imprisoned and expelled; to Bugia (Béjaïa, in present-day Algeria) around 1307, where he harangued the crowd in the marketplace, was jailed for six months, and was again put on a ship home. A final journey took him back to North Africa near the end of his life. By a tradition that hardened over the following centuries he was stoned by a mob at Bugia and died of his injuries on the voyage home or soon after reaching Majorca, around 1315 or early 1316, in his eighties. The martyrdom is the one part of the story scholarship treats with real caution — the early and reliable sources do not clearly attest it, and the stoning belongs more to the cult that grew up around him than to the record. What is certain is the restless campaigning, the imprisonments, and a death not long after the last voyage.

The alchemist who never was

A second Llull was invented after his death. From the 1330s onward — the earliest of them, the Testamentum, written in Catalan around 1332, well after Llull was in his grave — a large body of alchemical writing began to circulate under his name. It grew, over the following centuries, into a corpus of perhaps a hundred and forty texts: the Testamentum, the Codicillus, the Liber de secretis naturae seu de quinta essentia, and many more, on transmutation, the philosophers’ stone, and the distillation of a quintessence as universal medicine. None of it is his. The historical Llull condemned alchemy as a fraud in his genuine works, and not one of the alchemical texts can be dated to his lifetime. This pseudo-Lullian corpus nonetheless made him, for the later esoteric tradition, a great adept and a master of the transmutational art — a reputation that traveled through Renaissance occult philosophy and into early modern laboratories quite independently of anything the real man had written, and that proved, for centuries, far more famous than the Art. Modern scholarship, above all the work of Michela Pereira, has disentangled the two: the inventory and dating of the pseudo-Lullian writings established beyond doubt that the alchemical Llull and the missionary philosopher are different men separated by a generation. The connection between his name and the laboratory is in effect a pun on the ars — the combinatorial Art mistaken, by later readers, for the great work of the furnace. (The genuine afterlife of the laboratory belongs to Latin medieval alchemy, not to him.)

The afterlife of the Art

The genuine afterlife ran through the Art itself, and it was extraordinary. Across the later Middle Ages the wheels were read less as a tool of conversion than as a general science of knowledge, a key that might unlock any field at once — the long tradition that grew up around them is Lullism. Nicholas of Cusa, who built his own theology on a knowing that begins by admitting its ignorance, owned and heavily annotated a collection of Llull’s works and drew on them deeply. In the sixteenth century Cornelius Agrippa wrote a commentary on the Ars brevis that was printed some fifteen or sixteen times between 1531 and 1651, and Giordano Bruno devoted five works to Llull — four of them to the Art — turning the lettered wheels toward an art of memory and a cosmology of infinite worlds. In 1598 the Strasbourg printer Lazarus Zetzner gathered Llull’s logical works together with the commentaries of Agrippa and Bruno into an anthology that became a quiet best-seller, reprinted through the seventeenth century, with a copy reaching the library of Isaac Newton.

It was in that Strasbourg edition that the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz read the Art, and out of it wrote his first published work, the Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666). The lineage runs from Llull’s revolving disks to Leibniz’s lifelong dream of a characteristica universalis — a symbolic language in which reasoning would become calculation, and disputes be settled, as he put it, by sitting down to compute. How much credit Llull truly deserves for that descent is argued: Bonner notes that the Art is generative not in Leibniz’s sense of building complex concepts out of simple ones, but in the narrower sense that all manner of demonstrations can be drawn from a finite set of primitives. The kinship is genuine and the debt loose, both at once. What endures is the audacity of the first attempt — that a missionary on a Majorcan mountain set out to convert Islam and Judaism by turning lettered wheels, and that the same wheels, four centuries on, seeded the dream of a reasoning that could compute.

He was beatified, never formally canonized, and is venerated on Majorca as Doctor Illuminatus, the enlightened doctor — the title that fixes the whole of him to the single morning on the mountain. The work that survives him is double in a way he would not have chosen: the philosopher who trusted reason to carry the faith across the deepest divide of his world, and the legendary alchemist who never existed.

Scholarship and editions

The modern study of Llull rests on a critical-editorial foundation a century in the making, and a good deal of his world is now hosted in plain text.

• Anthony Bonner, ed. and trans., Selected Works of Ramon Llull, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1985), abridged as Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader (Princeton, 1993). The standard English gateway to the primary texts, including the Vita coetanea, the Book of the Gentile, and the principal versions of the Art. https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/bonner-anthony

• Anthony Bonner, The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull: A User’s Guide (Leiden: Brill, 2007). The indispensable technical reconstruction of how the figures actually work, distinguishing the quaternary and ternary phases and tracing the line through Agrippa, Bruno, and Leibniz. Bonner’s freely hosted English supplement to the volume is published by the Llull DB at the University of Barcelona. https://www.ub.edu/llulldb//docs/Supplement%20english_LLULL%20DB.pdf

• R. D. F. Pring-Mill, El microcosmos lul·lià (Palma, 1961), the study that recovered the metaphysical architecture of the Art — the dignities, the correlatives, the ladder of being — behind its diagrams; foundational and still cited. Summarized for the Anglophone reader in the SEP entry below. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/llull/

• Josep Enric Rubio Albarracín and the Centre de Documentació Ramon Llull (Universitat de Barcelona), Llull DB, the online catalog of the authentic corpus, its manuscripts and editions — the working census of what Llull actually wrote. https://www.ub.edu/llulldb/

• Michela Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1989), the study that inventoried the pseudo-Lullian alchemical writings and established that none of them is by Llull. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Alchemical_Corpus_Attributed_to_Raym.html?id=82yxAAAAIAAJ

• J. N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), the major reconstruction of the immediate reception — how the Art and its author were read and disputed in the generation after his death. https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/o/oxford-warburg-studies-owos/

• Amador Vega and Anthony Bonner, “Ramon Llull: The Art of Inventing Truth” (IEMed, Quaderns de la Mediterrània), a compact scholarly account of the conversion, the illumination, and the missionary Art. https://www.iemed.org/publication/ramon-llull-the-art-of-inventing-truth/

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