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Liber XXX · Symbols

Liber XXX · Symbols · Chapter IV: Religious Symbols

Ramon Llull and the Lullian Art: Letters, Wheels and Truth

Ramon Llull (c. 1232–1316) and his combinatory Art: the Mount Randa illumination, divine dignities, letters and rotating figures, and Lullism up to Leibniz.

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Ramon Llull (c. 1232–1316) was a Majorcan philosopher, mystic and missionary who, after a period of contemplation on Mount Randa around 1274, devised an "Art" for demonstrating the truths of Christianity to Muslims and Jews by combining letters that stood for the attributes of God. Its circles, triangles and rotating paper wheels made it one of the most original symbolic systems of the Middle Ages, and the tradition it started, Lullism, fed Renaissance magic, the art of memory and, eventually, Leibniz's dream of a universal calculus of thought.

The life of Ramon Llull: courtier, convert and missionary§

Llull was born in Palma around 1232, a few years after James I of Aragon took Majorca from its Muslim rulers in 1229, and grew up in a frontier society where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side. He served at the court of the young prince who became James II of Majorca, married, had two children, and by his own later description wrote vain love songs.

The turning point came, according to the Vita coaetanea (the "Contemporary Life" that Llull dictated to Carthusian monks in Paris around 1311), when he was in his early thirties. While composing a song to a woman, he saw a vision of Christ hanging on the cross; it returned on several nights. He resolved on three aims: to give his life, if necessary as a martyr, for the conversion of unbelievers; to write the best book in the world against their errors; and to persuade popes and princes to found schools where missionaries could learn Arabic. He then spent about nine years studying Latin and Arabic, the latter with a Muslim slave he had bought.

The illumination on Mount Randa§

Around 1274 Llull withdrew to Puig de Randa, a hill in the middle of Majorca. The Vita says that after about a week of contemplation the Lord suddenly enlightened his mind, giving him the form and method for writing the book he had promised against the errors of unbelievers. Later legend added details such as a mastic bush whose leaves bore letters, but the core of the story is Llull's own: the Art was experienced not as an invention but as a gift of illumination.

The first version, the Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem ("Brief Art of Finding Truth"), followed soon afterwards. In 1276 James II of Majorca founded, at Llull's urging, a college at Miramar where thirteen Franciscan friars would study Arabic, approved by Pope John XXI. Llull is venerated as Blessed in the Catholic Church, especially in Majorca.

How the Lullian Art works: dignities, letters and figures§

Llull's starting point was that Christians, Muslims and Jews shared a belief in one God possessing certain absolute perfections. If those perfections were taken as common principles, and if their relations could be displayed systematically, then it should be possible to reason from shared premises to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation by what he called "necessary reasons", instead of relying on scriptural authorities that the other side did not accept.

The divine dignities and their letters§

The perfections, which Llull called dignities, were in the mature form of the Art nine in number: Goodness, Greatness, Eternity (or Duration), Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth and Glory. Each was given a letter from B to K. The same letters also stood, in other tables, for nine relative principles (difference, concordance, contrariety, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality and minority), nine questions (whether, what, of what, why, how much, of what kind, when, where, how), nine subjects ranging from God and the angels down through heaven, humanity and the lower powers of the soul to the elements and instruments, and lists of virtues and vices. A single letter could thus be read on several levels at once.

Fixed and rotating figures§

The letters were arranged on figures. In the Ars brevis of 1308, the most widely copied summary, the first figure (A) is a circle with the nine dignities joined by lines to show that each can be predicated of every other: God's goodness is great, his greatness is good, and so on. The second figure (T) shows the relative principles as three interlocking triangles. The third is a triangular table of the thirty-six pairs of letters. The fourth consists of three concentric circles of letters, the inner two rotating, so that turning them produces every combination of three letters; Llull and his commentators built from these a table of eighty-four columns of ternary combinations. Earlier versions of the Art, from the 1270s and 1280s, used sixteen principles and many more figures, but Llull steadily simplified the system, culminating in the Ars generalis ultima (1305–1308) and the Ars brevis.

To use the Art, a question was translated into letters, the combinations relevant to it were generated, and each combination was "evacuated", that is, unfolded into propositions and further questions that could be argued. Some manuscripts include the rotating figures as working paper volvelles.

The Art in Llull's writings and missions§

Llull was astonishingly prolific: around 260 works are now accepted as authentic, written in Catalan, Latin and Arabic. Among the best known are the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men (c. 1274–1276), in which a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim explain their faiths to a pagan using trees whose blossoms combine the dignities and virtues, and which ends courteously without revealing which faith the gentile chooses; the novel Blanquerna (c. 1283), which contains the contemplative Book of the Lover and the Beloved; and the encyclopedic Tree of Science (1295–1296). He is regarded as the father of Catalan literary prose.

He taught the Art in Paris and Montpellier, lobbied popes and kings for missionary colleges, and travelled at least three times to North Africa, where he was expelled from Tunis in 1293 and imprisoned in Bougie (Béjaïa) in 1307. At the Council of Vienne (1311–1312) he saw one of his long-standing aims partly realised when the council decreed that teachers of Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and "Chaldean" (Aramaic or Syriac) be appointed at major universities. He died in 1315 or early 1316; the story that he was stoned to death by a crowd in Bougie is a later martyr legend that most historians treat with caution.

Scholars have long debated what Llull owed to his non-Christian neighbours. Parallels have been proposed with the Islamic doctrine of the divine names, with Sufi devotion (Llull himself said the Book of the Lover and the Beloved followed the manner of the Sufis), and with Jewish letter mysticism of the kind found in Sefer Yetzirah and the gematria traditions. None is a simple source, but together they show the Art in conversation with all three faiths; see also Sufism: Mystical Islam.

Pseudo-Llull: alchemy, kabbalah and an occult reputation§

Llull himself rejected alchemical transmutation, but within a few decades of his death a large alchemical corpus circulated under his name. The Testamentum, composed in the fourteenth century, became one of the most important texts of medieval alchemy, and more than a hundred alchemical treatises were eventually attributed to "Raymundus Lullus", whose prestige and use of letters and figures made the attribution plausible to readers. A pseudo-Lullian treatise on kabbalah also circulated in the Renaissance. These works explain why Llull appears in early modern lists of great alchemists, a story outlined in Western alchemy: a history.

His orthodoxy was disputed too: in the 1370s the Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich attacked Lullism for claiming to prove articles of faith by reason, and the condemnations he obtained were contested for centuries.

Lullism from Cusa and Agrippa to Bruno and Leibniz§

In the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa collected and annotated Llull's manuscripts, and Renaissance thinkers saw in the Art a key to universal knowledge. Pico della Mirandola compared the ars combinandi with kabbalah, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published a commentary on the Ars brevis alongside his Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Giordano Bruno wrote several works on the Lullian Art from 1582 onwards and fused its rotating wheels with the classical art of memory, producing vast combinatory systems of images; texts such as On the Shadows of Ideas and the Thirty Seals show the result.

In the seventeenth century the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher published his Ars magna sciendi (1669), a Lullian encyclopedia of combinations, and the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz acknowledged Llull in his Dissertation on the Art of Combinations (1666), the seed of his later project for a universal characteristic in which reasoning could be done by calculation. Llull is therefore often named as a distant ancestor of formal logic and computing, a claim historians accept only loosely.

Modern scholarship on Ramon Llull§

The modern rediscovery of Llull as a central figure owes much to Frances Yates, whose essays from the 1950s placed him at the root of Renaissance Hermetic and mnemonic systems; her approach is discussed in Frances Yates and the Hermetic tradition. Paolo Rossi traced the link between Lullism and the art of memory, while Anthony Bonner's editions and his guide to the Art made the system intelligible to non-specialists. Llull is now studied as philosopher, mystic, novelist and pioneer of interreligious dialogue. For the history of symbolism he matters because his figures are working instruments rather than decorations: letters and geometric forms are used to think with, alongside the other diagrammatic traditions surveyed in Religious Symbols.

Frequently asked questions§

What happened to Ramon Llull on Mount Randa?§

According to the account he dictated late in life, Llull retreated to Mount Randa on Majorca around 1274 and, after several days of contemplation, received a sudden illumination giving him the form and method of his Art. He wrote the first version of the Art shortly afterwards.

What is the Ars magna of Ramon Llull?§

"Ars magna" (Great Art) is the common name for Llull's system of reasoning, which assigns letters to divine attributes and other concepts and combines them on fixed and rotating figures. Its final versions are the Ars generalis ultima and the shorter Ars brevis, both completed in 1308.

Was Ramon Llull an alchemist?§

No. Llull rejected transmutation, but after his death more than a hundred alchemical treatises were falsely attributed to him, including the influential Testamentum. Historians call these works pseudo-Lullian.

Why is Llull linked to Leibniz and computing?§

Leibniz cited Llull in his 1666 essay on combinations, and both men imagined reasoning as the systematic combination of basic concepts. Historians see Llull as an inspiration for this idea rather than a direct forerunner of modern logic or computers.

Sources and further reading§