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.

The instrument he built for this is what later ages called the Art — Ars magna, the great art, revised across many versions over decades. It begins from a short list of divine attributes held in common, more or less, by the three Abrahamic faiths: goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, and the rest. Llull arranged these on lettered diagrams and concentric rotating wheels, so that turning the figures generated every combination of the terms. The result was meant to be a machine for finding and testing truths: a way of reasoning that, beginning from premises an opponent already granted, would lead by its own motion to the conclusions of the faith. It is among the earliest attempts in the Latin West to mechanize thought, and the ancestry runs forward to Leibniz, who studied Llull closely and dreamed of a universal calculus that would settle disputes by computation.

The biographical frame is partly his own telling. A Vita coetanea, dictated late in life, recounts a worldly youth at the Aragonese court, a series of visions of the crucified Christ that turned him from it around 1263, and a subsequent career of writing, pilgrimage, and missionary voyages to North Africa, where by tradition he was stoned and died of his injuries. Much of this is hard to verify, and scholarship treats the martyrdom in particular with caution; what is certain is the immense, restless output — some hundreds of works — and the persistent campaign to have rulers and popes found colleges of Oriental languages for the training of missionaries.

A second Llull was invented after his death. From the fourteenth century a large body of alchemical writing began to circulate under his name, none of it his — the historical Llull condemned alchemy as a fraud. This pseudo-Lullian corpus 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 quite independently of anything he had written. The combinatorial Art itself drew its own occult readers: Giordano Bruno turned the lettered wheels toward an art of memory and a cosmology of infinite worlds.

He was beatified, never formally canonized, and is venerated on Majorca as Doctor Illuminatus, the enlightened doctor. The work that survives him is double in a way he would not have chosen — the philosopher who trusted reason to carry the faith, and the legendary alchemist who never existed.

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