This paper was written for a course in Christian missions, which Frye took during his final year at Emmanuel College (1935–36). The following note by Edward Wilson Wallace, professor of missions, appears at the end of the essay: “A thorough piece of work, on which I congratulate you. Fuller reference to Lull’s missionary activities would have rounded out the story.” Frye’s chief sources were Allison Peers, Ramon Lull: A Biography and Peers’s edition of Lull’s The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, both of which are listed in the bibliography at the end of the paper. Frye used the 1923 edition of The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. The page references in the text of the paper as published here, however, are to the more readily accessible revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1945), which differs in a few particulars from the one Frye had at hand. These references are given in square brackets following BL. Frye’s discussion of Lull’s life and works comes almost exclusively from Peers’s biography. I have not noted the places in this book where Frye draws upon Peers, except those instances when he reproduces Peers’s own quotations from Lull: Frye’s use of the biography is easy enough to trace by using the headings in the table of contents and the index of Ramon Lull: A Biography; this book is cited in the notes as “Peers.” No grade is recorded on the typescript, which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 13.
Ramon Lull was born in Majorca, sometime between 1232 and 1236. The Balearic Isles had been taken from the Moors by King James of Aragon some years previously, and those who had fought on the conquering side had been suitably rewarded with gifts of land. Among these was Ramon Lull’s father, of the same name. The boy grew up in what appears to have been the class of minor nobility who followed a king and who, largely through their prowess in arms, were forming an avantgarde of the new social order which eventually destroyed the feudal system. At the age of twelve Lull was sent to the court of the King of Aragon and brought up there as a page. As a result, he became steeped in the troubadour culture of the northwest Mediterranean world which centred in Provence and branched out through Catalonia and Italy: a culture of a highly conventionalized etiquette of love and war. In this atmosphere grew the ideals of chivalry in warfare and the amorous intrigue in love we usually associate with the name of Petrarch. The obvious importance and influence of these traditions on Lull are easy to underestimate, as we are so seldom inclined to associate anything like the court of love or the knight errant with medieval piety. But the chivalric knighthoods of the Templar and St. John orders were settled in the Majorca they had helped to conquer, and the idea of a union of all orders, chivalric, missionary, and monastic, into a single weapon for a united and catholic Church never left Lull. Nor is it possible thoroughly to understand the process of Lull’s conversion without recognizing the influence on him of medieval love conventions. He seems to have first attracted attention as a fashionable courtier, writing light verses and making love to women according to troubadour models. His early life is usually called profligate, but we should beware of the tendency of hagiography to stereotype its subjects. The gay young noble shocked into an intense loathing of his life by a sudden glimpse of its falseness and converted by a divine vision is a fairly standard form which covers a large number of biographies of holy men. One thing seems clear: the young Lull was thoroughly a man of the world and never lost hold of his understanding of it. His love affairs were no doubt carried on according to rule: the lover courts some lady whose virtue is assured by the fact that she is married; the lady is properly cold and coy, the lover is importunate, bemoans his fate, threatens suicide or a crusade, and the lady finally yields. The lady’s honour was affected only if the intrigue became known. The husband was frequently the lover’s best friend and aided the affair in every way he could.
The superb tableau which depicts Lull suddenly halted in the consummation of one of these intrigues by the lady’s exposure of her cancerous breast to him in the presence of her husband is one of those scenes which seems to give us a focus for the spirit of the entire age. The story may be historical or it may be symbolic, but it is not in either case fictitious. If it did not happen to Lull, it certainly represents something that did happen to him and to dozens of others in his time. The whole Middle Ages is in that picture: the haughty idealist’s contempt of the body, the sharp contrast between eternal and temporal love, the dramatic intervention of the grace of God in the soul, the respect for woman and the clear recognition of the dangers she provides for the genius or the saint. Anything so nearly concerned with the conversion of a saint cannot very well be of only incidental importance.
There followed, of course, the usual repentance, then, all the lover’s importunity being transferred to religious devotion, the appearance of Christ urging the surrender of Ramon’s soul; for the conventions of mysticism are almost as stereotyped as those of Petrarchan love. This epiphany naturally convinced Lull that he was destined for the service of Christ, and to a mind brought up on chivalry the missionary enterprise, the adventuring of God’s knight errant, was the first idea that suggested itself. And as the knight errant was supposed to fight the enemies of Christendom, and as the enemies of Christendom at that time meant Mohammedans, Lull prepared at once for his life’s mission, the rationalist crusade for the conversion of the Moors.
After a pilgrimage, Lull settled down to study Arabic, giving up a career at the University of Paris and returning from Aragon to Majorca. He was married before his conversion and seems to have had one son. As an exercise in Arabic, he wrote his immense Book of Contemplation,1 a work of overwhelming size, complexity, and variety, which is basically a repudiation of the delights of the world of sense, a satire on the folly of mankind, and a call to the study of religion with a view to spreading the Christian faith among all the heathen. This was followed by the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, one of the finest dialogues of the Middle Ages.2 In it, a Gentile meets a Jew, a Christian, and a Mohammedan, who expound their respective faiths, the Christian, of course, winning the day.
It is in this work that we notice two of the characteristics of Lull that make him so appealing and vital a personality. In the first place, he is as much a scholar and a gentleman as any humanist of the Renaissance. He lets the Jew and the Muslim speak for themselves as well as he can; he has taken pains to acquaint himself with their creeds and, though he obviously prefers the Mohammedan to the Jew, he puts both cases with a moderation almost incredible for that age. His Saracen is given a fine peroration:
“Thou hast heard and understood my words, O Gentile, and the proofs which I have given of the articles of our law; and thou hast heard what bliss there is in Paradise, which shall be thine for ever and eternally if thou believe in our law which is given of God.” And, when the sage had thus spoken, he closed his book, and ended his words, and saluted the two sages according to his custom. [Peers, 95]
Living in one of the most cosmopolitan districts in Europe, Lull is at the crossroads of Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan cultures, and he is well aware that the Christian civilization is less mature in many respects to3 the other two. In the second place, he feels he can afford to be tolerant, because of his absolute confidence that, as Christianity is true, it is bound to withstand the most searching critical investigation, while, as the other religions are false, they are bound to collapse under it. Lull has complete confidence that the end of rational discussion and logical argument is conversion. The truth of Christianity can be demonstrated as clearly as the proposition that two and two make four and not five, and as no one will be obstinate enough to claim that two and two make five, so the force of logic will convert the world to Christ, if the gospel is preached. The crusades have tried to conquer by force of arms; they have failed, and the way of persuasion is left. Lull says in the Book of the Lover and the Beloved:
The Lover asked the Understanding and the Will which of them was the nearer to his Beloved. And the two ran, and the Understanding came nearer to the Beloved than did the Will. [BL, 22]
and he never forsook his faith in the possibility of a completely rational approach to God.
And as long as he retains this naive but noble belief in the infallibility of reason (which, as far as missionary activity is concerned, fails chiefly because it overlooks the fact of original sin and adopts the heresy of the perfectibility of man), Lull is extraordinarily gentle, patient, and tolerant. One magnificent flash of Christian charity is in the Book of Contemplation:
Many Jews would become Christians if they had the wherewithal to live, and likewise many Saracens, if the Christians did them not dishonour. [Peers, 74]
He realizes that the Christians have to achieve peace with themselves and their neighbours, and that their religion cannot be propagated by a crusade, whether a crusade with the quixotic courage of the first or the abominable treachery of the fourth. He says in the Book of Contemplation:
Since the Christians are not at peace with the Saracens, O Lord, they dare not hold discussions upon the faith with them when they are among them. But were they at peace together, they could dispute with each other peacefully concerning the faith, and then it would be possible for the Christians to direct and enlighten the Saracens in the way of truth, through the grace of the Holy Spirit and the true reasons that are signified in the perfection of Thy attributes. [Peers, 73]
Later on he modified this view, as tolerance was too frequently, in the thirteenth century, the same thing as indifference. In 1290 he presented Pope Nicholas IV with a plan for conquering the Holy Land; by one of the grim ironies of history, the following year saw the disaster of Acre and the complete and final defeat of Christian arms in the East.4
After the completion of his Arabic studies, Lull retired to Mount Randa, temporarily suspending his missionary projects till he felt himself spiritually mature. Here he received a mystic illumination which provided him, as he claimed, with the formula for his Ars Magna, his system of dialectic, which he completed in 1274.
Then he returned from solitary contemplation to the world of men. He went to Montpellier, one of the greatest cities of Aragon, submitted his books to the king, and wrote his educational treatises, the Book of the Order of Chivalry and the Doctrine for Boys. The former is the only work of Lull which found its way into our literature before the twentieth century: it was translated into English by Caxton and into Scotch by Sir Gilbert Hay.5 The latter is the usual book of didactic educational treatise common in the Middle Ages, dominated by the general idea that childhood is a dangerous and rather repulsive state of imperfection, to be discouraged as much as possible.
On the accession of James II, who was friendly to Lull, to the throne of Majorca, Lull was encouraged to push forward a project he had long entertained of founding a number of training schools for missionaries. James founded one at Miramar in 1276. The project proved fruitless in the end, and, though Miramar struggled along for about ten years, it never seems to have sent out any missionaries. At Miramar Lull wrote the Book of the Holy Spirit, a rather arid dialogue explaining the filioque controversy from the Roman point of view.6
It is obvious that Lull, with his dream of a great chivalric and missionary Christian order trained in the discipline of Christian theology, was trying to do what Loyola did two centuries later. His failure can be explained, I think, by the fact that an established Church is committed to conservatism and, therefore, to retrenchment and smugness. When Christianity, or any form of Christianity, is associated with an established social order and made respectable, it loses its enthusiasm, which is continually expanding, antisocial, and revolutionary. The more powerful the papacy grew and the more complete the scholastic theology became, the more the missionary enterprise suffered. The Catholic Church, shocked out of its complacency by the Reformation, produced the Jesuits; but the Church of Lull’s time was shocked only by threats to its political or economic interests. Around the turn of the century Europe saw the world order of Christendom visibly cracking apart into national units, and such programs of spiritual conquest and expansion as Lull’s fitted in better with the rising material ambitions of princes than with those of the papacy, which was engrossed in holding on to its declining power. So the remainder of Lull’s life is a disheartening record of interviews with sympathetic but selfish kings, humiliating rebuffs from Rome, and spasmodic missionary journeys. His output of books, of course, never abated.
Lull’s first visit to Rome (1277) was to the friendly Pope John XXI, who had approved the founding of Miramar, but the latter died before his arrival. Nothing much is known of Lull’s life between 1277 and 1282, a period perhaps spent in travel. It was probably in 1283, and at Montpellier, that Lull completed his most celebrated work, the prose romance Blanquerna.7 Blanquerna is a man who leaves his parents to become a hermit and persuades a girl his parents wanted him to marry to become a nun. The heroine rises to be abbess of her convent, and her regimen is fully described. Blanquerna wanders through the world going through a number of highly allegorized adventures, is finally made pope, converts and reforms the world, and retires from the papal chair to become a hermit again—the celebrated abdication of Celestine V is foreshadowed here. As a hermit Blanquerna writes the Art of Contemplation and the lovely Book of the Lover and the Beloved, which are inserted at the end. In the framework of medieval allegory and knight-errant romance Lull has put an intellectual and cultural synthesis of ideas which make Blanquerna a worthy connecting link between Joachim of Floris and the Grail legends of the Middle Ages and the great Utopian writers of the Renaissance—Campanella, More, Rabelais (who ridiculed the Ars Magna) in prose, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser in poetry.
Honorius IV, who succeeded to the papacy in 1285, seems to have been well disposed toward Lull, and it was perhaps at his suggestion that Lull went to the University of Paris, the intellectual capital of Europe, headquarters of the Dominicans, upholders of orthodoxy and the papacy. There he lectured on his Ars Magna and tried to gain Dominican support for his projects, completely without success. He had appealed to this order before, and, discouraged, began to turn toward the Franciscans. Philip the Fair, King of France, gave him the customary support of royalty—good wishes and promises. At Paris, too, Lull wrote his romance Felix, or the Book of Marvels, a description of the wonders of the natural and supernatural worlds to a schoolboy, which is not yet available in English. One of its sections, the Book of the Beasts, is said to be a lively treatment of the medieval beast fable, with occasional Oriental touches.
Returning from Paris to Montpellier, Lull began to commence his appeals to the Franciscans, and with the accession of the first Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV, his hopes ran high. But the disaster at Acre in 1291 discouraged the pontiff, though, as it was largely due to rivalries between Templar and St. John Knights, it established Lull’s point about a unified order. Finally Lull determined to go to Africa, and, though he shrank back the first time, remorse at his cowardice strengthened him still further, and he set sail for Tunis. He attempted, as always, rational discussion, arguing that the monotheism of the Mohammedans would tend to make God purely transcendent, and that the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ were necessary to postulate a divine activity at work in the world. The mob stoned him, and Lull, realizing that they had won the argument, returned to Italy. He lived at Naples, continuing to pour out treatises from his unbelievably prolific pen and making petitions for a program of missionary activity to Nicholas IV, to the wretched Celestine V, and finally, to Boniface VIII.
This notorious scoundrel, whom Dante consigned to the very bowels of hell, was the first of the long discreditable line of poisoners, intriguers, and tyrants at Rome who eventually provoked the Reformation. His infamous bull, Unam Sanctam,8 the most arrogant of papal pretensions, was quickly followed by his humiliation at the hands of Philip the Fair of France, an event leading directly to the Avignon separation. Such a man would have little sympathy with Lull. Lull, in despair, joined the Franciscans about 1295. The move has a certain historical importance, for, as the thirteenth century, the culmination of the Middle Ages, was intellectually a Dominican century, so the fourteenth, the beginning of the end, was intellectually a Franciscan one, and Lull, like Scotus and Occam, anticipates the later age where Aquinas and Dante sum up the earlier. St. Francis is one of the greatest emancipators of Western culture, not because of what he was, but because of what he represented. He was a mystic with all the limitations of a mystic, and was culturally and intellectually an obscurantist—literal observance of his precepts would have been pernicious. But he had the strength of the mystic too, the strength of the unanswerable seer of God, the individual to whom has been revealed a truth far higher than any reached by dogma or clerical hierarchy. The influence of such a man, when properly canalized, developed a philosophy which pushed theology into pure revelation— the Franciscan nominalism—released a torrent of self-expression in religion through creative art, specifically the painting of Florence, Assisi, and Siena, and by its popular preaching in the vernacular helped immeasurably in bringing to the middle and lower classes an awakened consciousness of their religion, and in fostering the growth of national literatures, as Lull fostered Catalan. Not only internally but externally the Franciscans were undermining the walls of medieval Christendom, and a Franciscan missionary spent forty years in China.
Lull solaced himself for his defeat at Rome by composing his immense and monstrous allegory of the Tree of Science, along with numerous other works. In 1297 he again went to Paris, and, meeting more rebuffs, wrote the Tree of the Philosophy of Love,9 another didactic allegory and one greatly superior to its fellow, being more completely a literary art form than anything else he wrote, owing to its concentration on the theme of the contemplative life. A rumour that the Tartars had overrun Syria took him to Cyprus in 1301, where he preached against heretics. Boniface died, but his successors were still desperately holding their temporal prerogatives against the French king, and Lull made little headway. In 1306, being again in Paris, he met the greatest living Franciscan, Duns Scotus, then a young prodigy. The meeting brought together the two greatest thinkers of the time and joined the left and right wings of the attack on Thomism, but seems to have had no other than a symbolic importance. The next year Lull went to Africa the second time, was mobbed, imprisoned for a year, holding debates with Moslem savants the while, and banished, being shipwrecked on his way home. He landed at Pisa, where he wrote more books and endeavoured to organize a new military order, the Templars being on their last legs and Lull’s faith in the irresistible persuasion of truth having waned. He journeyed to Avignon (the captivity had commenced) with the proposition that a crusade should be undertaken, starting with a naval attack on Mohammedan ports, in which he was, of course, entirely unsuccessful. Then he went to Paris for the last time.
Here his lecturing proved more popular than ever before; his treatises were examined and highly commended, and his prestige began to grow into something like real fame. Alarmed at the continued spread of the doctrines of Averroës, he put himself at the head of an intellectual crusade against them, and wrote a series of didactic treatises against them. In 1311 a general council of the Church met at Vienne, and Lull went to it to propose for the last time his projects of missionary colleges, chairs at universities for the teaching of heathen tongues, a united military order to carry on the crusades, and the furtherance of scholastic opposition to Averroës. The council adopted most of his suggestions, and that they came largely to nothing is hardly the fault of anything but the fact that the time was out of joint. Lull returned to Majorca, drew up his last will and testament, and, after a visit to Sicily, arrived in Tunis for the third time. The Christian and Moslem worlds were on fairly good terms at the time, and Lull for a while taught and wrote in safety. But a third mob gathered, and ended his long, heroic, unhappy fight for the Christian faith by stoning him to death (1315).
As the fifteenth century is one of the darkest periods in the history of the Christian Church, it is hardly surprising that by that time the rivalry between the followers of Dominic and Francis should have degenerated into squabbles all the more vicious for being petty and mean spirited. A Dominican, Nicholas de Eymeric, hounded the name of Lull all his life, accusing the great missionary of every conceivable heresy, forging (probably) a papal bull condemning his doctrines, and putting a blot on his memory never since erased, for even today Lull is Blessed, but not Saint, Ramon. The Franciscans have loyally defended him, and his influence was strong enough to cause riots in seventeenth-century Rome. He is still Majorca’s greatest son and its patron saint, and he is perhaps the greatest name, both as a thinker and writer, in the history of Catalan literature. As the Catalans have always possessed a national consciousness as ineradicable as that of Poland or Ireland, Lull is the spearhead of the Catalan Renaissance provoked by the regionalist movement in nineteenth-century literature. Lull’s output was tremendous, for there is almost no period in the life sketched above which did not witness the issue of voluminous treatises. But this capital has been increased in two ways. In the first place, his cult has foisted on him an immense number of works written by his followers, who wanted, or unwittingly gained, the authority of his name. In the second place, his expansion into a legendary figure of superhuman intellectual powers and divine inspiration (he had this reputation even in his lifetime, as his title of Doctor Illuminatus shows), together with the accusations of heresy and his Arabic connections, turned him into a magician and the author of innumerable works on alchemy. His actual achievements as a writer are, of course, uneven: undoubtedly he wrote too much and too fast, with a prolixity truly scholastic. Like many others who have achieved literary fame in spite of themselves, he was convinced of the superiority of didactic over imaginative expression, and his more purely literary works, such as Blanquerna, are continually straying off into sterile wastes of prosy and tedious sermonizing. His achievements as a poet cannot be discussed here: he is chiefly famous for his autobiographical poems Desconort (Despair), his long lament at his rejection by Boniface, and the Song of Ramon, and for his long, elaborate hymn on the Hundred Names of God, the “names” being attributes of the divine nature. As a thinker he deserves more extended mention.
Lull was all his life in the thick of the great struggle between Dominican and Franciscan philosophy which eventually ended in the victory of the latter and the overthrow of the Catholic world. Lull, although a Franciscan, cannot be aligned with the nominalists Scotus and Occam; his attack on the Thomist synthesis came from the other side, but was equally corrosive. Aquinas had developed the Aristotelian entelechy into a colossal synthetic principle making for a universal process of organic evolution. Matter is potential; form is actual, and all being tends upward to the actualization of pure form. Now pure form must, of course, be God, and as form is static, it is reached by the intelligence. Consequently, the universe is the working out of a creation of infinite reason. God exists because he is reason; we cannot deny his existence without using reason and, therefore, affirming it. We live in the best of all possible worlds, because it is potentially perfect. But as everything tends toward the pure form of God, it follows that God is unalterable, an intellect toward which all the activity of his will is directed. To the Franciscans this subordination of God’s will was a reflection on his omnipotence. God could do what he liked, and, if so, then theology, the rational approach to God, could not be an inevitable development of philosophy, the rational approach to the world. Thus, after Scotus, philosophy tended more and more to rest on an empiric basis, whether, with the Baconian tradition, this was provided by the organic and applied sciences, or, with the Cartesian, by mathematics. Theology similarly tended to drop its distinction between natural and revealed religion and concentrate on the latter, specifically on the revelation of the Scriptures.10
With Thomism God became, if not exactly immanent, in a sense pantheistic; everything actualizes itself in the pure form which is God; thus, as an easy inference, everything partakes of the nature of God. Nominalism, by the breach it made in the Thomist subordination of will to intellect, established an explicit separation between the human and the divine natures. God’s will is arbitrary and unpredictable, and, therefore, he is a transcendent God: this feeling of God’s omnipotence and inscrutability is brought to its highest point by Calvin. The development of Aristotle made by Averroës, lacking the Christian tradition of the value of the individual personality, combined the faults of both Thomism and Calvinism by its naturalistic interpretation of the entelechic process, according to which truth was recognized as entirely impersonal and nonhuman, so that the process of life tending toward it was conceived as a fatalistic materialism.
Lull was not an Aristotelian, for he fought Averroës unremittingly, as we have seen; and he was persecuted for heresy by the Dominicans after his death. Nor was he a nominalist, for he was completely convinced of the possibility of a rational approach to God. It seems most logical, on the whole, to consider him as one of the great Christian mystics whose philosophical position is perhaps best described as Neoplatonic. Like most mystics, he tended to see religion as communication between the individual soul and the divine spirit. These two must be similar in essence; for the one is absorbed into the other: it is this doctrine which makes mysticism a heresy to Calvinists and, therefore, marks Lull off from the Scotists who anticipated Calvin:
The Lover beat up on his Beloved’s door with blows of love and hope. The Beloved heard His Lover’s blows, with humility, piety, charity and patience. Deity and Humanity opened the doors, and the Lover went in to his Beloved. [BL, 26]
Deity and Humanity met, and joined together to make concord between Lover and Beloved.11
and, even more explicitly:
Whether Lover and Beloved are near or far is all one; for their love mingles as water mingles with wine. They are linked as heat with light; they approach and are united as Essence and Being. [BL, 27]
Now this reaction to Scotism drove Lull back beyond Thomism. For with Aquinas God was perfect and man was part-way up on the scale of actualizing possibilities striving toward fulfilment in him. Man and God are not the same in essence; man is lifted to God through the agency of higher organizations, which include the Church, the sacraments, angels, and saints, and in general the redemptive work of Christ and the regenerative activity of the Holy Spirit. Lull saw man as essentially an intelligence, and as truth takes no account of individuality, the duty of the religious man is first to free his intelligence by cutting away the world and the flesh:
The Lover was all alone, in the shade of a great tree. Men passed by that place, and asked him why he was alone. And the Lover replied: “I am alone, now that I have seen you and heard you; until now, I was in the company of my Beloved.” [BL, 27]
—and then to merge his human intellect into the divine:
Between Hope and Fear, Love made her home. She lives on thought and, when she is forgotten, dies. So unlike the pleasures of this world are her foundations. [BL, 22]
The religious life is eremitic and, therefore, ascetic: this is connected with the significant fact that Lull, like most ascetics, upheld the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which Aquinas denied.
From the Thomist point of view, therefore, Lull erred, not on the anti-rational side of nominalism, but on the other extreme of identifying human and divine natures: the usual heresy of mysticism. Of course, men being imperfect and, therefore, driven to activity while God is perfect and changeless, it follows, if man and God are the same in kind, that man has the power of free will to take the initiative. Lull recognizes that this would have been impossible without the Incarnation, but as regards the religious life since it occurred he is a thoroughgoing Pelagian:
Love gave himself to any who would receive him; and since he gave himself to few and inspired few with love, as he was free and had not been constrained, therefore the Lover cried out on Love, and accused him before the Beloved. But Love made his defence and said: “I strive not against free will, for I desire all lovers to have the greatest merit and glory.” [BL, 58]
The will of the Lover left him and flew to the Beloved. And the Beloved gave it into the captivity of the Lover, that he might use it to love and serve Him. [BL, 59]
Most mystics have a tendency to underemphasize the rational approach to God, but Lull’s strong insistence on it led him to see the perplexing tangle of the world as an elaboration of very simple mathematical principles. He had the idea of the Pythagoreans and the whole occultist tradition that followed them that the world was basically mathematical rather than organic, complicated rather than complex. This feeling in Lull’s case arose from his conviction of the absolute intelligibility, and, therefore, simplicity, of the nature of God, for as mathematics supplies the most irrefutable demonstrations in life, it has frequently appeared to various thinkers (Plato, Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Leibnitz, even Pascal) the best approach to the understanding of the divine nature. Such an approach usually fails by overlooking the continual reforming, regenerating activity of God in history: it has as a rule been more congenial to monotheists like the Jewish or Mohammedan thinkers than to those who genuinely believe in a Trinity or an Incarnation. Lull escaped some of these stumbling blocks, but, as he was not even a mathematician, he adopted the Pythagorean belief that cardinal numbers represented the ultimate formulae of the construction of the universe. Like them, he saw an infinite symbolism in numbers. In the Book of Contemplation, for example, the nine “distinctions” or divisions of book 1 represent the nine heavens; the thirteen of book 2, Christ and His apostles; the ten of book 3, the physical and spiritual senses, and so on, similar schemes being repeated in most of Lull’s more elaborate works. This recalls, of course, the whole Pythagorean tendency of the Middle Ages: the endless threefold associations with the Trinity, the juggling with seven, and the kabbalistic fourfold symbolism based on the tetragrammaton. It is hardly surprising, therefore, if Lull should have believed in the possibility of reducing the world of concepts in a similar way. He was close enough to Thomism to believe in the real existence of universals, and so proceeded in his Ars Magna to expiscate the elements of thought. The gist of the scheme of the Ars Magna is as follows. All possible objects of knowledge are reduced to nine categories: God, angel, heaven, man, the imaginative, the sensitive, the negative, the elementary, the instrumental. All relations in which these objects exist are reduced to nine predicates: goodness, magnitude, duration, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory. All possible questions concerning them are reduced to nine: Whether? What? Whence? Why? How large? Of what kind? When? Where? How? Probably nine was chosen because it is the number of the universe, which is a ninefold sphere, and the complete twenty-sevenfold scheme is the cube of three, the divine nature being threefold. These are placed in concentric circles, one is fixed, the other two revolve, and so by permutation and combination we get a series first of all possible questions, then of all possible answers. This is a genuine dialectic, and if it does not work, it has yet to be proved that any dialectic will; we have not yet stopped evolving dialectic, and we probably never shall. Lull’s attempt haunted men’s minds for centuries, particularly the minds of Raymond Sebonde, the subject of Montaigne’s great essay, and Giordano Bruno.12 Humanity learns by trial and error, and anyone who makes a genuine trial is not wholly in error.
This belief in the elemental nature of numbers forms, we have said, an essential element in most occult thinking, in astrology, in numerology of all kinds, in kabbalism, in magic. Alchemy is the one branch of occult thinking which excludes it. It rests on the Aristotelian entelechy we have dealt with in connection with Aquinas: the mineral world is the most completely material, and, therefore, the least actualized; all earths are to metals as matter to form; the other metals bear the same relation to gold, and the transmutation of all metals into gold is symbolically connected with the regeneration of mankind. Thus, its premises are quite consistent with Thomism; too consistent to win the approval of Aristotle’s great opponent. “Unam metallum in speciem alterius metalli convertinon potest,” says Lull. And again: “concluditur quod Alchymia non sit scientia, sed sit figmentum.”13 This definitely disposes of any attempt to prove Lull an alchemist.
The quality of mysticism in the Book of the Lover and the Beloved is rather difficult to define. It seems an extraordinarily airy and abstract mysticism: it continually soars upward without difficulty. The Lover and the Beloved have their lovers’ quarrels, but there is almost nothing of the intense agony, the profound humiliation, the symbolism of a descent into hell and a rise through purgatory that we find in all the mystics who have gone through what is called the dark night of the soul. Only one passage hints of a katabasis, and that very lightly:
The Lover set forth over hill and plain in search of true devotion, and to see if his Beloved was well served. But everywhere he found naught but indifference. And so he delved into the earth to see if there he could find the devotion which was lacking above ground. [BL, 25]
The symbolism of the two lovers is said to be Mohammedan in origin; but against this must be set the fact that with the Islamic thinkers the symbolism is usually more explicitly sexual: the soul of the Lover is feminine to the spirit of the Beloved, as we have it so frequently in the female mystics, Madame Guy on and Saint Teresa. There is a complete absence of sexual symbolism in Lull; all communication is on a purely contemplative plane. The only thing that seems to me to recall Sufi teachings is the sense that the beauty of the world is the most direct and central representation of the nature of God:
The bird sang in the garden of the Beloved. The Lover came and he said to the bird: “If we understand not one another’s speech, we may make ourselves understood by love; for in thy song I see my Beloved before mine eyes.” [BL, 24]
The Lover rose early and went to seek his Beloved. He found travellers on the road, and he asked if they had seen his Beloved. They answered him: “When did the eyes of thy mind lose thy Beloved?” The Lover replied: “Since I first saw my Beloved in my thoughts, He has never been absent from the eyes of my body, for all things that I see picture to me my Beloved.” [BL, 26]
An extraordinary sympathy with the natural world runs all through the book. Sometimes the symbolism is more conventional:
The Lover went into a far country seeking his Beloved, and in the way he met two lions. The Lover was afraid, even to death, for he desired to live and serve his Beloved. So he sent Memory to his Beloved, that Love might be present at his passing, for with Love he could better endure death. And while the Lover thought upon his Beloved, the two lions came humbly to the Lover, licked the tears from his eyes, and caressed his hands and feet. So the Lover went on his way in search of his Beloved. [BL, 39]
The theme of the harmless lion runs in mystic literature from the Book of Daniel to the Pilgrim’s Progress.14
The three roads of mystic contemplation are those of the will, the understanding, and the memory:
The Lover and the Beloved were bound in love with the bonds of memory, understanding and will, that they might never be parted; and the cord with which these two loves were bound was woven of thoughts and griefs, sighs and tears [BL, 42],
and the end of contemplation is achieved neither through suffering (though the disciplinary value of that is clearly recognized) nor in joy, as with a more conventional Christianity, but in that mystic extasis in which joy and sorrow are surpassed in a fervour of devotion too concentrated to permit of any emotional criticism:
The Lover lay in the bed of love: his sheets were of joy, his coverlet of griefs, his pillow of tears. And none knew if the fabric of the pillow was that of the sheets or of the coverlet. [BL, 42]
Memory is, therefore, essential because it alone preserves the continuity of devotion. At times Lull seems almost to draw the Platonic inference of anamnesis: that all our contemplation is recollection, and that we exist as ideas of God:
They asked the Lover: “Whereof is Love born, whereon does it live, and wherefore does it die?” The Lover answered: “Love is born of remembrance, it lives on understanding, it dies through forgetfulness.” [BL, 43]
Lull is much more sure of the power of man to lift himself to the contemplation of God than any follower of Paul or Augustine would be, and it is easy to see that for him the test of the religious life is good works rather than faith, particularly the supremely voluntary gesture of martyrdom; for it is obvious that the decision to be a martyr for Christ was made long before even the first visit to Africa:
They asked the Lover what sign the Beloved bore upon His banner. He replied: “The sign of One dead.” They asked him why he bore such a sign. He answered: “Because He was once crucified, and was dead, and because those who glory in being His lovers must follow His steps.” [BL, 37]
Perhaps by the tests of the world Lull is a failure. As a philosopher, his dialectic is not the divinely inspired instrument of truth he thought it. As a missionary, he failed to reclaim any part of the Islamic world, even the North Africa from whence Augustine had sprung. As the organizer of an order, his dreams were ignored and faded away; his project for missionary colleges came to nothing; the Christian world rushed forward to its great cataclysm unheeding. He saw his Aristotelian opponents given more authority than ever. He himself gained after death the reputation of a sorcerer, a dabbler in the black art, a disseminator of superstition, a charlatan, and a heretic. But for seventy years he fought without once giving up; when one project for the advancement of his faith came to nothing, he started another, and when he gave his life at the end, he did so with an unalterable conviction that those who fight for the true God are never defeated; that however futile and quixotic they may appear to the world, God is using them in the advancement of his purpose. It is much easier to be a great man if the age will respond to one’s greatness: Luther always had powerful support behind him; Lull was almost as isolated as Athanasius for most of his long life.15 Somehow or other, all good actions are conserved and carried on; all evil ones separated out. Such was Lull’s faith.
The birds hymned the dawn, and the Beloved, who is the dawn, awakened. And the birds ended their song, and the Lover died in the dawn for his Beloved. [BL, 23]
1. Ramon Lull By Allison Peers. London (Macmillan: S.P.C.K.), 1929.
This looks like the nearest thing to a definitive biography of Lull in any language. It has completely superseded the two following works and is a book of thorough and complete information, excellent writing, and broad sympathies.
2. Raymond Lull, the Illuminated Doctor. By W.T.A. Barber. London (Charles H. Kelly), 1903.
A minor work, of little importance now, said in the Peers bibliography to be inaccurate. Mr. Barber makes out a case for Lull the alchemist.
3. Raymund Lull, First Missionary to the Moslems. By Samuel M. Zwemer. New York (Funk and Wagnalls), 1902.
A fairly readable but somewhat antiquated account, disfigured by a violent antimedieval and antischolastic prejudice.
4. Raymund Lully, Illuminated Doctor, Alchemist and Christian Mystic. By A.E. Waite. London (W. Rider and Son), 1922.
Mr. Waite, perhaps the greatest living authority on occultism, makes out a good case for a pseudo-Lull who was one of the greatest alchemists between Geber and Cornelius Agrippa and lived in the fourteenth century somewhat later than the genuine Lull, spending much of his life in England. The author rather spoils this thesis by attempting to show that the pedant who wrote the Ars Magna cannot be the fervent mystic who wrote Blanquerna.
The Cambridge Medieval History, vols. 5, 6, and 7, provided the historical background for the essay, and Windelband, History of Philosophy, the intellectual and philosophical. The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics has a useful article on Lullism, and the Catholic Encyclopedia, an irritating but somewhat amusing attack by Thomist orthodoxy standing on its dignity. The Encyclopaedia Universal Illustrada has separate entries for Raimundo Lullio and Ramon Lull, but my Spanish is not equal to deciphering either.
5. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. Translated from the Catalan of Ramon Lull with an introductory essay by E. Allison Peers. London (Macmillan: S.P.C.K.), 1923.
All quotations from Lull in the essay are from this work, unless otherwise stated.