Ramon Llull

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Ultimate General Art, the Book of the Gentile and the Book of the Lover and the Beloved.

The first intention

Llull begins with what a human being is for. The first intention of every person is to know, love and honour God for his own sake; the second intention is everything else, the world, its goods and one's own works, used for the sake of the first. Every disorder in a life, and in a society, comes from turning the two round, so that God is sought for the sake of the world. His whole Art is built to serve the first intention: to show the mind the truth about God so clearly that the will is moved to love it.

The dignities

God has nine dignities, which are the principles of the Art: goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth and glory. In God each is real and each is all the others: his goodness is great, his greatness good, his power wise, his wisdom eternal, and so through every pairing, for in him nothing is divided. Every creature bears their likeness in its measure, having goodness, greatness, duration, power and the rest in a finite way, so that the whole of creation can be read through them.

The Art names them by letters, B for goodness, C for greatness, and so on to K for glory, so that they can be combined like the letters of an alphabet.

The relations

Beside the dignities stand nine relations, drawn as three triangles: difference, concordance and contrariety; beginning, middle and end; greater, equal and lesser. Anything at all can be weighed by them. One asks of a thing how it differs and how it agrees, where it begins and ends, what in it is greater and what lesser, and the dignities and the relations together make a net in which every question can be caught.

The turning wheels

His best-known figure is three circles, one inside another, each marked with the nine letters, the inner two turning, so that every combination of three letters can be read off in turn. Each combination makes a question to be examined by ten rules, which ask whether a thing is, what it is, of what it is made, why it is, how great, of what kind, when, where, how, and with what. The Art applies them to nine subjects, from God and the angels down through the heavens, the human being, the powers of imagining, sensing and growing, the elements and the tools of art.

The rule for finding the truth is that it lies where the principles agree. Whatever answer gives the greater nobility to God and keeps his dignities in concord is to be held true; whatever sets them against one another is false. So a mind that turns the wheels honestly is led from combinations of letters to conclusions about God, the soul and the world that it can defend before anyone.

The correlatives

Each dignity, rightly understood, acts, and every act has three parts: something that acts, something acted on, and the acting. Goodness in act has its doer of good, its receiver of good and its doing of good, and Llull coined words for the three. Since God's goodness is infinite and eternal, it cannot be idle; it must act eternally within God himself, and so the three are in God from eternity. This is his road by reason to the Trinity, offered to Jews and Muslims as an argument to be weighed, not as a decree to be obeyed.

Courtesy in disputation

He meant to convince by necessary reasons, never to force. In the Book of the Gentile a pagan philosopher, in despair at the thought of death, wanders into a forest and finds three wise men, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim, resting by a spring where five trees grow, their flowers written with the dignities, the virtues and the vices. Lady Intelligence has given them the rules of the trees. Each wise man sets out his faith in turn, the others listening without interrupting, and the pagan comes to know God.

At the end the wise men leave before he can say which faith he chooses, so that each of them may go on seeking the truth with the others, and they agree to meet and dispute again with the same courtesy until they are of one mind.

The lover and the Beloved

The Book of the Lover and the Beloved gives the same Art to the heart. Its short pieces, one for each day of the year, are written, Blanquerna says, after the manner of the Sufis, who speak words of love and brief examples that move people to devotion. The lover is the soul and the Beloved is God, and their exchanges are riddles of love. They ask the lover whose he is, and he answers, love's; of what he is made, of love; who bore him, love; where he was born, in love; how he lives, by love. A bird sings in the garden of the Beloved, and the lover tells it that even if they cannot understand each other, love understands them both, for in its song he sees his Beloved.

The paths by which the lover seeks the Beloved, the book says, are long and perilous, peopled with thoughts, sighs and tears, and lit by love. Its paradoxes are meant to be read one a day and turned over, a day's meditation each.

Every estate reformed

In Blanquerna the same first intention reforms every estate of life. Its hero lives it as a son, as a monk and abbot, as a bishop and as pope, setting right in each office what had turned from God to the world, and ends as a hermit in contemplation, where the Art and the love of God become one practice.