LULL, RAYMOND, BL.

Mystic, missionary, Catalan poet and prose writer; b. Majorca, c. 1235; d. probably Tunis, 1316. He is revered by the Franciscans as Doctor Illuminatus. Though he has never been canonized, his cultus was confirmed by Pius IX in 1858. He was strongly attracted to both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, but he never took Holy Orders; there is a tradition that he joined the Third Order of St. Francis.

Work. Brought up in the southern court of Majorca, Lull had about him something of the troubadour, and he always retained traces of a courtly and chivalrous formation. An English version of his manual of chivalry was printed by William Caxton. From the large Moorish population in Majorca he acquired a knowledge of Arabic, in which he wrote some of his works (though no Arabic texts by him have survived), and an interest in Oriental mysticism. About 1263 he had five visions of Christ on the cross after which he entered on a religious way of life and formed missionary resolutions for which he prepared himself by study. Fruits of these years were the Llibre de contemplació and the Llibre del gentil e los tres savis; the first of these is a mystical and encyclopedic work; the second is in the form of a conversation between a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, and shows Lull already investigating common ground between the three religions that could be used as a basis from which to persuade unbelievers of the truth of the Trinity and the Incarnation. This was to be the grand aim of the Art. Lull was a pioneer in using a romance language (Catalan) for theological and apologetic works.

About 1272 Lull had an illuminative experience on Mount Randa in which he saw the whole universe in its relation to the divine attributes, and the principles of his Art were revealed to him. Soon after, he produced the first version of the Art, his system for the discovery of first principles of knowledge and the reduction of all knowledge to unity. The rest of his life was spent in tireless propagation of the Art and in attempting to interest rulers and popes in his projects. One of these was the founding of schools of Oriental languages in order to assist missionary work. King James II of Majorca was persuaded to establish such a school and although it lasted only a few years, the idea of such colleges took root. Lull's missionary journeys included several visits to Tunis; he had always desired a martyr's death, and according to pious legend he suffered martyrdom by stoning on the last of these journeys.

As a mystic, Lull was in the Franciscan tradition, and he was also influenced by Sufi mysticism. His most remarkable mystical work, Llibre d'amic e amat, has great religious and poetic power, and is well known in English translation as The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. As a philosopher, he belongs in the Augustinian tradition, particularly as developed in the twelfth century. Lull is best understood when it is realized that, although his life was passed in the great age of scholasticism, he was in spirit a man of the twelfth century rather than of the thirteenth, a reactionary toward the Augustinian Platonism of St. anselm of canterbury and the Victorines (see saint-victor, monastery of; victorine spirituaity). He was also somewhat tinged with Neoplatonic influences from john scotus erigena. The actual channels through which some knowledge of the Scotist divine names as primordial causes reached Lull have not yet been identified, though honorius of autun may have been one of the intermediaries.

The Art. Lull evolved many versions of his Art, but its principles remained the same. The Arts were always based on divine attributes or names (Bonitas, Magnitudo, etc.), called by Lull the Dignitates Dei. These were designated by letters of the alphabet that were placed on revolving concentric wheels: through the revolutions of the wheels, combinations of the letters were obtained. The Art could work on all the levels of creation, the angelic world, the world of the stars, of man and his activities, of the animal and vegetable worlds, by abstracting the essential bonitas, magnitudo, etc., on each level. There is a kind of geometrical logic of relation in the Art that uses as its basic figures the triangle, the circle, and the square. The purpose of the Art was always, for Lull, a missionary purpose. By basing the Art on religious conceptions common to Christians, Jews, and Muslims—the divine names or attributes—and on the elemental structure of nature universally accepted in the science of the time, Lull believed that he had an instrument for bringing unbelievers to Christianity. The Trinitarian structure of the Art was its basic characteristic; it was to reflect the Trinity and to be used by all three powers of the soul defined by St. Augustine as the image of the Trinity in man. As intellectus it was an art of knowing; as voluntas an art of loving; as memoria an art of memory.

A large proportion of Lull's extremely numerous works are either expositions of the various forms of the Art or else are related in some noticeable way to it. Even the attractive romances or allegorical novels, Blanquerna (c. 1284) and Felix (c. 1288), are, at bottom, popularizations of it. The Arbre de sciencia (1295), which was very widely known in its Latin version, presents the whole encyclopedia of knowledge schematized as a forest of trees whose roots are the principles of the Art, which could be done on all subjects. The Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus (c. 1305) describes the ascent and descent of the intellect on the ladder of being through the use of the Art.

The vast diffusion of Lullism is only now beginning to be studied in a systematic way. In the Renaissance it took on a new and intense phase of activity, though with a different emphasis, and in the sixteenth century a chair of Lullism was established at the Sorbonne. Lull's use of letter notations for concepts and his attempt to represent movement through his revolving figures are significant features of the Art, the importance of which in the history of method is becoming increasingly realized. Leibniz's schemes for a universal calculus were influenced by the combinatoria.

Feast: July 3 (Franciscans).

Bibliography: m. johnson, The Evangelical Rhetoric of Raymon Lull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West (New York 1996), bibliography. r. lull, Opera Latina, 19, tr. a. linares (Belgium 1993); Raymond Lull's New Rhetoric: Text and Translation of Lull's "Rethorica Nova," tr. m. johnson (Davis, Calif. 1994). l. sala-moulins, La Philosophie de l'Amour de Raymonde Lulle (Paris 1974), bibliography. m. pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull (London 1989). r. herrera, "Ramon Lull: Mystic Polymath," in Mystics of the Book (New York 1993). e. a. peers, Raymond Lull: A Biography (New York 1969), bibliography. f. yates, Lull and Bruno (London and Boston 1982).

[f. a. yates]