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Source: "Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 8" by Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.)
LULL, RAMON (b. Ciutat de Mallorques [now Palma de
Mallorca], ca. 1232; d. Ciutat de Mallorques [?], January/March [?] 1316), polymathy.
A Catalan encyclopedist, Lull invented an "art of
finding truth" which inspired Leibniz's dream of a universal algebra four
centuries later. His contributions to science are understandable only when
examined in their historical and theological context. The son of a Catalan
nobleman of the same name who participated in the reconquest of Mallorca from
the Moors, Lull was brought up with James the Conqueror's younger son (later
crowned James 11 of Mallorca), whose seneschal he became. About six years after
his marriage to Blanca Picany (1257) he was converted from a courtly to a
religious way of life, following a series of visions of Christ crucified. He
never took holy orders (although he may have become a Franciscan tertiary in
1295), but his subsequent career was dominated by three religious resolutions:
to become a missionary and attain martyrdom, to establish colleges where
missionaries would study oriental languages, and to provide them with "the
best book[s] in the world against the errors of the infidel."{1}
Lull's preparations lasted a decade; his remaining forty
years (from 1275, when he was summoned by Prince James to Montpellier, where he
lectured on the early versions of his Art) were spent in writing, preaching,
lecturing, and traveling (including missionary journeys to Tunis in 1292;
Bougie, Algeria, in 1307; and Tunis late in 1315), and in attempts to secure
support from numerous kings and four successive popes for his proposed
colleges. During Lull's lifetime only James II of Mallorca established such a
foundation (1276, the year of his accession); when he lost Mallorca to his
elder brother, Peter 11I of Aragon, the college at Miramar apparently was
abandoned (ca. 1292). In Lull's old age his proposals were finally approved by
the Council of Vienne (1311-1312); and colleges for the study of Arabic,
Hebrew, and Chaldean were founded in Rome, Bologna, Paris, Salamanca, and
Oxford after Lull's death. Pious tradition has it that he died after being
stoned by Muslims in Bougie (January 1316[?]), although his actual death is
variously said to have occurred in Bougie, at sea, or in Mallorca; modern
scholars doubt the historicity of his martyrdom. As for his third resolution,
it led to the various versions of Lull's Art - and all his scientific
contributions were by-products of this enterprise.
James the Conqueror's chief adviser, the Dominican Saint
Ramon de Penyafort, dissuaded Lull from studying in Paris, where his age and
lack of Latin would have told against him; he therefore studied informally in
Mallorca (1265[?]-1273[?]). His thought was thus not structured at the
formative stage by the Scholastic training which molded most other late
medieval Christian thinkers; this fostered the development of his highly
idiosyncratic system by leaving his mind open to numerous non-Scholastic
sources. These included cabalism (then flourishing in learned Jewish circles in
both Catalonia and Italy), earlier Christian writers discarded by Scholasticism
(for instance, John Scotus Eriugena, whose ninth-century De divisione
naturae influenced Lullian cosmological works, notably the Liber chaos,
either directly or indirectly and hence also his Art), and probably also Arabic
humoral medicine and astrology. The Augustinian Neoplatonism of the Victorines
also proved important, partly because of its continuing prominence but mainly
because its marked coincidences with both Islamic and cabalistic Neoplatonism
favored the creation of a syncretistic system which was firmly grounded in
doctrines equally acceptable to Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
This fusion occurred after the eight years Lull spent in
Mallorca studying Latin, learning Arabic from a slave, reading all texts
available to him in either tongue, and writing copiously. One of his earliest
works was a compendium of the logic of al-Ghazali in Arabic (1270[?]); it has
since been lost, although two later compendia with similar titles survive one
in Latin, the other in Catalan mnemonic verse. In all, Lull wrote at least 292
works in Catalan, Arabic, or Latin over a period of forty-five years
(1270-1315); most of them have been preserved, although no Arabic manuscripts
have yet been traced and many Catalan and Latin works remain unpublished. His
initial awkwardness in Latin, coupled with his desire that knowledge be made
available to non-Latin-speaking sectors of society, made Lull the first person
to mold Catalan into a literary medium. He used it not only in important
mystical works, poetry, and allegorical novels (none of which concerns us here)
but also to deal with every learned subject which engaged his attention:
theology and philosophy; arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (often mainly
astrology), which, together with music, formed the quadrivium (the higher
division of the seven liberal arts); grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the
trivium); law; and medicine.
Thus, Lull created a fully developed learned vocabulary
in Catalan almost a century before any other Romance vernacular became a viable
scholarly medium. Almost all Lull's works in such nonliterary fields were
connected in some way with his Art, because the "art of finding
truth" which he developed to convert "the infidel" proved
applicable to every branch of knowledge. Lull himself pioneered its application
to all subjects studied in medieval universities-except for music-and also
constructed one of the last great medieval encyclopedias, the Arbor
scientiae (1295-1296), in accordance with its basic principles.
Yet the Art can be understood correctly only when viewed
in the light of Lull's primary aim: to place Christian apologetics on a
rational basis for use in disputations with Muslims, for whom arguments de
auctoritate grounded on the Old Testament-widely used by Dominicans in
disputations with the Jews carried no weight. The same purpose lay behind the
Summa contra gentiles of Aquinas, written at the request of his fellow
Dominican Penyafort, whose concern for the conversion of all non-Christians
(but particularly those in James the Conqueror's dominions) thus inspired the
two chief thirteenth-century attempts in this direction; the Summa contra
gentiles was finished during the interval between Lull's discovery of his
own calling and his interview with Penyafort. But whereas Aquinas distinguished
categorically between what reason could prove and that which, while not contrary
to reason, needed faith in revelation, Lull advanced what he called necessary
reasons for accepting dogmas like the Trinity and the Incarnation. This gave
his Art a rationalistic air that led to much subsequent criticism. Lull himself
described his Art as lying between faith and logic, and his "necessary
reasons" were not so much logical proofs as reasons of greater or lesser
congruence which could not be denied without rejecting generally accepted
principles. In this respect they were not appreciably more
"rationalistic" than Aquinas's "proofs" that the truths of
faith were not incompatible with reason. But the differences between the two
apologetic systems are far more striking than their resemblances.
Lull regarded his Art as divinely inspired and hence
infallible (although open to improvement in successive versions). Its first
form, the Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem or Ars maior {2}
(1273-1274[?]), was composed after a mystical "illumination" on Mount
Randa, Mallorca, in which Lull saw that everything could be systematically
related back to God by examining how Creation was structured by the active
manifestation of the divine attributes-which he called Dignities and used as
the absolute principles of his Art. Examining their manifestations involved
using a set of relative principles; and both sets could be visualized in
combinatory diagrams, known as Figures A and T. The original
Figure A had sixteen Dignities, lettered BCDEFGHIKLMNOPQR; the
original Figure T had five triads, only three of which (EFG + HIK
+ LMN) were strictly principles of relation, the others being sets of
subjects (God + Creature + Operation, BCD) and possible judgments
(Affirmation = Doubt Negation, OPQ). All early versions had a
proliferation of supplementary visual aids, which always included diagrams
showing the four elements, and-with the obvious exception of Figure T - most
features of the system were grouped into sets of sixteen items, lettered like
the Dignities.
This quaternary base seems to provide the key to the
origins of the Art's combinatory aspect, apparently modeled on the methods used
to calculate combinations of the sixteen elemental "grades" (four
each for fire, air, water, and earth) in both astrology and humoral medicine. A
major simplification in the Ars inventiva (ca. 1289) eliminated
the elemental features, reduced the diagrams to four (unchanged thereafter),
reduced Figure T to the nine actual relative principles (Difference +
Concordance + Contradiction, Beginning + Middle + End, and Majority + Equality
+ Minority) and the sixteen original Dignities to the nine shown in Figure 1.
In still later versions the symbolic letters BCDEFGHIK acquired up to
six meanings that were ultimately set out in the gridlike "alphabet"
of the Ars generalis ultima and its abridgment, the Ars brevis
(both 1308), from which Figure 2 is reproduced. The traditional seven virtues
and seven vices have been extended to sets of nine, to meet the requirements of
the ternary system; the last two of ten quaestiones (a series connected
with the ten Aristotelian categories) had to share the same compartment, since
the set of fundamental questions could not be shortened and still be
exhaustive.
The most distinctive characteristic of Lull's Art is
clearly its combinatory nature, which led to both the use of complex
semimechanical techniques that sometimes required figures with separately
revolving concentric wheels-"volvelles," in bibliographical parlance
(see Figure 3)-and to the symbolic notation of its alphabet. These features
justify its classification among the forerunners of both modern symbolic logic
and computer science, with its systematically exhaustive consideration of all
possible combinations of the material under examination, reduced to a symbolic
coding. Yet these techniques taken over from nontheological sources, however
striking, remain ancillary, and should not obscure the theocentric basis of the
Art. It relates everything to the exemplification of God's Dignities, thus
starting out from both the monotheism common to Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam and their common acceptance of a Neoplatonic exemplarist world picture,
to argue its way up and down the traditional ladder of being on the basis of
the analogies between its rungs-as becomes very obvious in Lull's De ascensu
et descensu intellectus (1305). The lowest rung was that of the elements,
and Lull probably thought that the "model" provided by the physical
doctrines of his time constituted a valid "scientific" basis for
arguments projected to higher levels. Since this physical basis would be
accepted in the scientific field by savants of all three "revealed
religions," he doubtless also hoped that the specifically Christian
conclusions which he drew in the apologetic field would be equally acceptable.
It even seems likely that what hit him with the force of a divine
"illumination" on Mount Randa was his sudden recognition of such a
possibility.
There is no evidence that Lull's Art ever converted anybody,
but his application of the combinatory method to other disciplines (begun in
the four Libri principiorum, ca. 1274--1275) was followed by
numerous later Lullists; the Art's function as a means of unifying all
knowledge into a single system remained viable throughout the Renaissance and
well into the seventeenth century. As a system of logical inquiry (see Lull's Logica
nova [1303] for the strictly logical implications, disentangled from other
aspects), its method of proceeding from basic sets of preestablished concepts
by the systematic exploration of their combinations-in connection with any
question on any conceivable subject-can be succinctly stated in terms taken
from the Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666) of Leibniz, which was
inspired by the Lullian Art: "A proposition is made up of subject and
predicate; hence all propositions are combinations. Hence the logic of
inventing [discovering] propositions involves solving this problem: 1. given a
subject, [finding] the predicates; 2. given a predicate, finding the subjects
[to which it may] apply, whether by way of affirmation or negation." {3}
Recent research has concentrated on the clarification of
Lull's ideas, the identification of their sources, and the nature of their
influence on later thinkers - especially Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno.
Major advances in all these fields have taken place since the 1950's, but much
more research is still required. The specific origins of Lull's doctrines
regarding the elements, whose importance has been fully recognized only since
1954 (see Yates), are particularly significant. A proper exploration of the
antecedents of his Opera medica is a prerequisite for establishing
Lull's final place in the history of Western science. In this connection it must
be mentioned that although Lull himself was opposed to alchemy (but not to
astrology, a "science" he sought to improve in the Tractatus novas
de astronomia [1297]), his methods had obvious applications in the
alchemical field and they were so applied in a host of pseudo-Lullian
alchemical works, most of them composed more than fifty years after his death.
These works explain the traditional (but false) "scientific" view
which made him "Lull the Alchemist."
NOTES
{1} Vida coetanea. The Latin (dictated by Lull [?],
probably 1311) says "book," which doubtlessly agreed with Lull's
original resolve; the plural, in the fourteenth-century Catalan text
(modernized in Obres essencials, see I, 36), would better fit the series
of "improved" versions of the Art itself, which first took shape
almost ten years after Lull's conversion.
{2} References to an Ars magna in later centuries
are usually either to the definitive Ars magna generalis ultima (1308)
or to Lull's system in general. The alternative title of the first version
recalls Roger Bacon's Opus maius (1267); the connections between Lull
and Bacon have yet to be investigated, but many resemblances may well be due to
common Arabic sources.
{3} "Propositio componitur ex subiecto et
praedicato, omnes igitur propositiones sunt combinationes. Logicae igitur
inventivae propositionum est hoc problenia solvere: 1. Dato subiecto
praedicata. 2. Dato praedicato subiecta invenire, uiraque cum affirmative, turn
negative" (G. W. Leibniz, op. cit. [in text], no. 55, in Sauntliche
Schriften and Briefen, 2nd ser., I [Darmstadt, 1926], 192).
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