Blessed Raymond Lull (c. 1232–1316)

Palma, an island only just reconquered from Islam

Raymond Lull was born around 1232 in Palma, capital of the island of Majorca, barely three years after the conquest of the island by King James I of Aragon from the Almohad Muslims, in 1229.^[13] His father, also named Raymond, was one of the Catalan knights from Barcelona who took part in that conquest and then settled on the island; his mother was named Isabel d'Erill.^[14] This biographical circumstance is no anecdotal detail: from the cradle, it placed the future missionary in a world of immediate, daily contact with Muslim culture, language and religion — a world of tense coexistence between three communities, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, which he would later make the ground of his entire work.^[15]

Having become a page at the court of King James I, then tutor, seneschal — documentary evidence shows him in this office as early as 1256^[16] — and majordomo of Prince James (the future James II of Majorca), the young Raymond led for some thirty years the worldly life of a Catalan courtier: he composed love songs in Occitan in the manner of the troubadours, and gave himself up — by his own later admission — to a "licentious and worldly" existence.^[17][18] In 1257, he married Blanca Picany, by whom he had two children, Domènec and Magdalena; he would later write for his son an educational treatise, the Doctrina pueril ("Doctrine for Childhood").^[19][20]

Five nights of visions of Christ on the cross (around 1263)

The turning point of his life came around 1263, when he was in his thirties. According to his own autobiographical account in the Vita coaetanea, dictated nearly fifty years later, while he was busy composing a profane love song, he saw appear, five nights in succession, Our Lord Jesus Christ hanging on the cross.^[21][22] This repeated experience shook him so deeply that he drew from it three resolutions that would govern the rest of his life: to give himself wholly to the love of God, to work for the conversion of the Muslims, and to compose "the best book in the world" against the errors of the unbelievers.^[23]

The edifying legend of the sick lady

A later hagiographical tradition, that of Father Perroquet in his Life and Martyrdom of the Illuminated Doctor (1667), enriches this account with an episode that has remained famous in Franciscan iconography: Raymond, still a courtier at the time, was pursuing with his attentions a married and virtuous lady, identified by this tradition as Ambrosia de Castello; to make him measure the vanity of physical beauty, she one day uncovered to him a breast eaten away by cancer.^[24] The same honesty is needed here as for other edifying legends reported elsewhere on Ignispedia: this episode does not belong to the autobiographical core of the Vita coaetanea written by Lull himself, but to a pious tradition several centuries later, handed down by a 17th-century hagiography.^[25] It may be received as a spiritual image of the vanity of the world he was fleeing, without confusing it with a fact attested by the oldest and most reliable source — that of the five visions of Christ on the cross.

Later hagiographical tradition also reports that at the decisive moment, the Christ of that fifth vision inwardly addressed to him a call to follow him^[26] — a pious 17th-century account, not a saying attested by the Vita coaetanea.

Stripping himself bare and the pilgrimages (1265)

After his visions, Raymond sold most of his possessions, set part of them aside for his family, and broke definitively with court life around 1265, in explicit imitation of the model of Saint Francis of Assisi.^[27] He then undertook, as a poor pilgrim, the great Catholic pilgrimages of his time: Our Lady of Rocamadour and Santiago de Compostela, practicing rigorous asceticism and long periods of solitude and contemplation.^[28][29]

It was on returning from these wanderings that he met, in 1265, the old Dominican Saint Raymond of Penyafort, then retired in Barcelona after having governed the Order of Preachers and compiled the canon law of the Church for Gregory IX.^[30][31] On the life and canonical work of this great Catalan elder, see Saint Raymond of Penyafort. Far from encouraging the young convert's missionary impatience, Penyafort advised him to be prudent: to return to Majorca, pray and above all study, before thinking of converting anyone.^[32] This decisive counsel directed Lull's whole subsequent life toward nine years of silent formation rather than immediate action.

The Muslim slave and the study of languages

Back in Majorca, Raymond Lull devoted some nine years, from 1265 to 1274, to the intensive study of Latin and above all of Arabic, a language he judged indispensable for entering into serious dialogue with Muslims rather than imposing on them a doctrine they would only understand through an interpreter.^[33][34] Around 1265, he bought a Muslim slave to serve as his Arabic tutor; this man died in 1274, but by then Lull had achieved a finished mastery of the language.^[35][36] This method — learning the other's language and thought before claiming to convince him — would remain the distinctive mark of his entire missionary method, in contrast with the idea, widespread in his time, that the conversion of Muslims had to come through force of arms rather than rational persuasion.

The illumination of Mount Randa (1274) and the birth of the Art

Withdrawn as a hermit on the mountain of Puig de Randa, in the center of Majorca, Lull wrote between 1273 and 1274 his first great work, the Book of the Contemplation of God, composed simultaneously in Arabic, Latin and Catalan.^[37] It was there, according to his own autobiographical account, that he received what he presents as a divine illumination: the sudden vision of a system capable of reducing all knowledge to a small number of first principles and of demonstrating, through their mechanical combination, the highest truths of the Christian faith.^[38][39] From this illumination was born his Art (Ars), which he would develop and make ever more complex relentlessly for more than thirty years, in dozens of successive versions — the Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem (1274) and then the Ars demonstrativa (1283) are its first formulations.^[40][41]

The language college (1276)

Drawing on his own experience of learning Arabic, Lull persuaded Prince James, who had become King James II of Majorca, to found at Miramar, between Valldemossa and Deià, a convent-college intended to train thirteen Franciscan friars in Arabic and philosophy for the mission to the Muslims.^[42][43] The project was approved and financed by the Crown, and Pope John XXI confirmed its foundation by a bull dated October 17, 1276.^[44] Lull himself taught there for some ten years: it is, in the history of the Church, one of the very first institutions devoted specifically to the linguistic and cultural formation of missionaries destined for the Muslim world.^[45]

Entry into the Franciscan Third Order

Although he had lived and taught within the Franciscan movement since his conversion, it was in 1295 that Raymond Lull formally joined the Third Order of Saint Francis — the Brothers and Sisters of Penance — a status as a committed layman that allowed him to keep complete freedom of movement for his missionary travels while living out his conversion under a recognized religious rule.^[46][47] On the spiritual family to which he thus attached himself, see The Foundation of the Franciscans and The Franciscan Order. This choice of the Third Order rather than a religious order in the strict sense is consistent with his whole trajectory: until his death, Lull remained a traveling lay penitent, never a cloistered monk nor a priest.

Against Averroism and the "double truth"

Lull's intellectual project makes full sense only in contrast with an academic current of his time, Latin Averroism, which tended to separate philosophical truth from revealed truth to the point of risking, in the eyes of its adversaries, a genuine theory of "double truth." On this controversy and its principal Arab representative, see Averroes. Lull, on the contrary, wanted to show that reason rightly conducted, far from contradicting faith, can demonstrate it — not only for Christians, but for every man of good will, Muslim or Jew, as soon as he accepts the most general premises on which, according to Lull, the three religions of the Book agree: the existence of a single God endowed with perfect attributes.^[48]

The figures, the dignities and the combinations

Technically, the Art rests on a small number of "Dignities" — the first attributes of God such as Goodness, Greatness, Eternity, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth and Glory — represented by letters and arranged on geometrical figures: movable concentric circles, squares, triangles.^[49][50] By turning these figures relative to one another, the user obtains systematic combinations of concepts, meant to produce, question after question, the whole set of true propositions concerning God, creation and the moral life.^[51][52] Lull added to this a theory of Correlatives (every perfection is declined in an active mode, a passive mode and a mode linking the two) and a ladder of being running from God down to the elements, passing through angels, men, animals and plants, each degree participating in the higher one by resemblance.^[53]

An aim always missionary, never speculative for its own sake

One point must be stressed, which posterity sometimes forgets when reducing Lull to a curious forerunner of symbolic logic: in its own intention, the Art was never a gratuitous intellectual game. It was a tool of conversion, designed to equip missionaries facing cultivated Muslim and Jewish interlocutors, in the language schools he never ceased to demand throughout Europe.^[55][56] His missionary novel The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men (1270s) very concretely stages a "Gentile" — a man without religion — listening in turn to a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew expounding and rationally defending their respective faiths, without the author explicitly deciding in favor of Christianity within the text itself, which makes it one of the most original works of interreligious dialogue in the whole Latin Middle Ages.^[57][58]

First missions and teaching in Paris

Between 1285 and 1289, Lull stayed in Rome and then taught at the University of Paris, where he frequented the Collège de Sorbonne and formed lasting intellectual friendships, notably with the canon Peter of Limoges and above all with Thomas Le Myésier, canon of Arras who would become his most faithful disciple and the posthumous popularizer of his work.^[59] On the medieval university world that welcomed him on several occasions (1286–1289, then again around 1297–1299 and 1309–1311), see The University of Paris and Scholasticism.^[60] It was also in Rome, during those years, that he wrote two of his major literary works, the novel Blanquerna and the collection Felix or the Book of the Wonders of the World, which make him the true founder of narrative prose in the Catalan language.^[61] His Blanquerna was translated into English as early as 1926 by E. Allison Peers (London, Jarrolds), a sign of its early reception in the English-speaking world.^[62]

In 1291, he finally went to Tunis for his first great direct mission to the Muslims, disputed publicly with local scholars, but was finally expelled and had to return to Naples.^[63][64] He returned to Tunis around 1304–1305, corresponded with the local Hafsid ruler, then undertook a voyage to Cyprus around 1300–1302, in the context of the retreat of the last Latin states of the East.^[65][66]

The imprisonment of Béjaïa (1307) and the Rex Bellator project

In 1307, Lull was imprisoned for six months in Béjaïa (Bougie, in present-day Algeria), then was shipwrecked off Pisa while returning to Europe.^[67] Between 1292 and 1309, he also developed a politico-military project, the Rex Bellator ("warrior king"): uniting the military orders of the Temple, the Hospital and the Teutonic Knights under the authority of a single Christian prince, in order to reconquer the Holy Land by way of North Africa and Egypt.^[68] This project never saw the light of day, but it reveals a lesser-known aspect of his thought: contrary to the image of absolute pacifism sometimes attributed to him, Lull did not entirely exclude the use of force against the Muslim powers in the Holy Land — while placing his missionary priority, for its part, resolutely on the side of persuasion and not coercion. In a prayer addressed to Christ relayed by the Franciscan tradition of the Secular Third Order, he held that the Holy Land should be reconquered only as Christ and his apostles had won it: not by arms, but by love, prayers and the outpouring of tears and blood^[69] — a paraphrase, the exact work of Lull not being named by this relay.

The Council of Vienne (1311–1312)

In 1311, Lull took part in the three sessions of the Council of Vienne, the fifteenth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. On this council as a whole — suppression of the Order of the Temple, disciplinary reform, definition on the soul as the form of the body — see The Council of Vienne (1311–1312). There he pleaded, as he had done since Miramar, for the creation of chairs of Oriental languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic) in the great universities and at the Curia; his biographers largely credit him with inspiring the conciliar canon that effectively ordered the foundation of such chairs in Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Salamanca and at the Roman Curia, even though the text of the decree itself does not name him.^[70][71] His request for a new military crusade, on the other hand, was not taken up by the council.^[72] It was also in 1311, at the charterhouse of Vauvert near Paris, that he dictated his autobiography, the Vita coaetanea, at the age of 79.^[73]

Like his contemporary Blessed John Duns Scotus, Raymond Lull insistently defended, in several of his writings, the privilege of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, a theological position that was not yet unanimously received in his time.^[74] On the genesis and dogmatic definition of this Marian doctrine, see The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This Marian insistence, combined with the boldness of some of his philosophical and theological formulations, would precisely contribute to drawing upon him, a few decades after his death, the suspicions of the Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich.^[75]

The last voyage to Tunis (1314–1315)

Around 1314, at over eighty years of age, Raymond Lull undertook a final missionary voyage to Tunis, perhaps encouraged by correspondence between King James II of Aragon and the Hafsid caliph raising hopes of an openness to conversion.^[76] His last known and dated writing was composed in Tunis in December 1315.^[77]

The stoning of Béjaïa: pious tradition and historical criticism

The oldest and most widespread tradition — taken up by Father Perroquet in 1667, by the Breviary of the Franciscan Third Order and still today by many hagiographical notices — reports that in 1315, while preaching publicly in Béjaïa (Bougie), Lull was said to have been assailed by a hostile crowd, stoned and left for dead, before being picked up by sailors (Greeks or local Christians depending on the version) and dying shortly after, either aboard the ship carrying him back to Majorca, within sight of his native island, or shortly after his arrival.^[78][79][80] It is this tradition that earns Lull, in part of Catholic hagiography, the title of martyr. The missionary Samuel Zwemer, in his 1902 biography, reports the public stoning on June 30, 1315, and already notes that biographers are divided between death on the very day and rescue by his friends — himself holding the first version to be the best authorized.^[81]

Contemporary critical historical research, however, calls for great caution regarding this account. The work of modern Lullist specialists shows that the traditional account of martyrdom at Béjaïa cannot be established with certainty: several elements suggest a confusion between a real episode — a riot in Béjaïa in which Lull, already elderly, was indeed nearly stoned during an earlier voyage — and his very last voyage to Tunis, of which we know only that he died before March 25, 1316, with no contemporary source confirming the fatal stoning of that last stay.^[82][83] It is possible, on this critical reading, that he simply succumbed to the exhaustion of a last voyage undertaken at a very advanced age.

This uncertainty in no way detracts from the Church's recognition of his holiness: whether he died a martyr in the strict sense or of exhaustion after a life of missions, Raymond Lull remains, in either case, a man who literally gave his life to his vocation to his last breath. He is buried in the convent of Saint Francis in Palma de Majorca, where a monumental tomb was raised to him in 1448.^[86] The official cultural itinerary Route Ramon Llull in Majorca points out there the Gothic sepulchre housing his remains, attributed to Francesc Sagrera and dated 1487.^[87]

Nicholas Eymerich and the disputed bull of 1376

Six decades after his death, Lull's work became the target of a relentless persecution led by the Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich, who drew up a list of more than five hundred propositions drawn from his writings and judged erroneous by him.^[88] On the more general functioning of the institution Eymerich thus served, see Answering the Objection from the Inquisition. A university commission chaired by the Dominican Bernat Ermengol did conclude that a bull exists, but held that the incriminated propositions are not found as such in Lull's authentic works — which already suggests, from the 14th century onward, that Eymerich may have distorted the texts he claimed to judge.^[89] In 1376, a bull attributed to Gregory XI, the Conservationi puritatis, nevertheless ordered all Lullian writings to be gathered for examination and anyone claiming them to be reported; the Art was also condemned in 1390 by the University of Paris.^[90]

The rigor required by such a dossier is needed here: recent academic work, notably that of the scholar Perarnau on the history of the inquisitorial dossier, concludes that this bull of 1376 was in reality a forgery, fabricated by Eymerich himself to give pontifical authority to his own campaign against Lullism.^[91] Far from being a definitive and uncontested magisterial condemnation, the episode of 1376 appears therefore, in the light of contemporary research, as the abuse of a zealous inquisitor rather than as an assured doctrinal judgment of the Church on the substance of Lull's thought.

The absolution of 1416 and the influence of Lullism

Despite the fragility of its foundation, the accusation weighed heavily for a long time: the suspicion of heterodoxy hung over Lull's name for a good part of the 15th century, to the point that theologians who nevertheless owed him much, such as the Catalan Raymond Sibiuda or the German Nicholas of Cusa, avoided openly citing their debt to him.^[92] A sentence of absolution nevertheless came in 1416, formally lifting the censure weighing on his writings.^[93] Active Lullist schools survived throughout the 15th century in Majorca and Barcelona, and the movement gained new vigor in the 16th century when Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros had a chair for the study of Lull's thought created at the University of Alcalá, then one of the great intellectual centers of Golden Age Spain.^[94]

An immemorial veneration confirmed in 1847

As with other great figures honored long before any centralized Roman procedure, the cult of Raymond Lull was maintained without interruption in Majorca and Catalonia from the Middle Ages, without a classical canonization process with recognition of miracles in the modern sense of the term.^[95] Pope Pius IX, wishing solemnly to confirm this centuries-old veneration, proceeded on September 11, 1847 to an equipollent beatification — a pontifical confirmation of an immemorial cult, not an ordinary procedure with a miracle — by a mechanism comparable to that followed, nearly a century and a half later, for Blessed John Duns Scotus.^[96][97]

The still open question of canonization

Despite several attempts by the Franciscan Order in the 17th and 18th centuries to obtain his canonization, Raymond Lull remains today still blessed, and not a canonized saint.^[98] His cause was never formally closed, and the veneration he continues to enjoy, particularly in the Balearics and Catalonia, keeps its liturgical memory alive.

A feast between June 29 and 30

Hagiographical and liturgical sources do not agree perfectly on the exact date of his feast: Nominis and several Catalan calendars place it on June 29, while the Franciscan Third Order traditionally celebrates it on June 30.^[99][100] This slight divergence, frequent for ancient cults never unified by a centralized Roman procedure, calls into question neither the antiquity nor the solidity of his veneration.

The father of Catalan prose

By the sheer volume and quality of his work in the vernacular — the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, the novel Blanquerna, the collection Felix, the Tree of Science — Raymond Lull was the first author to use a Romance language, Catalan, to expound philosophical, scientific and theological thought of a scholarly level, hitherto reserved for Latin.^[101][102] He forged on this occasion a largely unprecedented abstract Catalan vocabulary, and his prose work would fix for centuries the norms of standard Catalan writing.^[103]

From Leibniz to Borges: the thinking machine

On the strictly intellectual plane, the Lullian Art enjoys a posterity that far exceeds the circle of historians of medieval theology. The great German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz explicitly acknowledged, in his own early work, his debt to Lull's combinatorics for developing his project of a characteristica universalis and his ars combinatoria — a universal formal language capable, according to Leibniz, of reducing all reasoning to a calculation.^[104][105] Historians of mathematics today rank Lull, on this account, among the direct forerunners of modern combinatorics and, more distantly, of the very idea of the logical machine.^[106] In the 20th century, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges devoted to this "thinking machine" an essay that has remained famous (1937), and the Catalan painter Salvador Dalí integrated diagrams directly inspired by the Lullian Art into his pictorial work.^[107]

Contemporary memory: the Any Llull of 2016

In 2016, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his death, the Generalitat of Catalonia and the government of the Balearic Islands jointly declared an "Any Llull" (Lull Year), coordinated by commissioners Joan Santanach for Catalonia and Maribel Ripoll for the Balearics.^[108] More than three hundred events — academic conferences, exhibitions, concerts, editorial and educational projects — were organized between November 2015 and November 2016 across all Catalan-speaking territories, with the cooperation of the universities of Catalonia, the Balearics and Valencia and of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans.^[109] This contemporary mobilization, carried by cultural and academic institutions far more than religious ones, testifies to the singular place still occupied today by this blessed of the 13th century: at once a figure of holiness venerated locally, father of Catalan literature and an international scientific object of study of the very first rank, with two great programs of critical edition of his complete works still active, the Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina (ROL) and the Nova Edició de les Obres de Ramon Llull (NEORL).^[110][111]

• bienheureux-jean-duns-scot — the Scottish Franciscan blessed, a contemporary of Lull, whose beatification follows a comparable equipollent mechanism.
• saint-raymond-de-penyafort — the Catalan Dominican who advised the young convert to nine years of study before any mission.
• la-fondation-des-franciscains and ordre-franciscain — the spiritual world of the Third Order to which Lull belonged from 1295.
• saint-francois-dassise — the founder whose radical stripping Lull imitated after his conversion.
• dogme-immaculee-conception — the Marian doctrine Lull defended, like his contemporary Duns Scotus.
• averroes — the philosopher whose Latin reading nourished the "double truth" controversy which Lull's Art meant to answer.
• concile-de-vienne-1311-1312 — the council where Lull pleaded for chairs of Oriental languages.
• comment-repondre-a-lobjection-de-linquisition — the functioning of the institution which, through the inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich, pursued his work after his death.
• luniversite-de-paris-et-la-scolastique — the medieval university world where Lull taught on several occasions.
• saint-junipero-serra — the Majorcan Franciscan missionary whose formation, centuries later, is attached to the Lullian academic heritage of Palma.