Ramon Llull, the Combinatory Art and the False Llull the Alchemist

Born in Majorca around 1232, a few years after the Christian conquest of the island, Ramon Llull lived as a courtier until a religious crisis which, according to the Life he dictated in old age, was brought on by repeated visions of Christ crucified. From then on he devoted his existence to a single aim: converting Muslims and Jews through rational argument. To achieve it he invented a method that would fascinate Europe for centuries.

The Art

Llull's method, simply called the Ars, was born around 1274 after a period of retreat on Mount Randa in Majorca. It rested on a limited number of principles, such as goodness, greatness, eternity and power, marked by letters and arranged on geometric figures and rotating concentric circles. By combining them systematically, one was supposed to generate every true proposition about God and the world.

Llull reworked the Art many times during his life, up to the Ars generalis ultima, composed between 1305 and 1308, and its abridged version, the Ars brevis. He wrote in Latin, in Catalan and perhaps in Arabic; his Catalan works, such as the novel Blanquerna, are among the first great literary texts in that language and make him a founding figure of Catalan culture.

The Missionary

Alongside his philosophical work, Llull promoted the study of Eastern languages for missionaries. In 1276 he obtained the foundation of a college at Miramar, on the coast of Majorca, where a number of friars learned Arabic. Later he asked popes and kings to establish chairs of languages in the universities, an idea taken up by the Council of Vienne in 1311-1312, which provided for the teaching of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean.

He made several journeys to North Africa to preach and debate with Muslim scholars, and was repeatedly imprisoned and expelled. He died around 1316, perhaps on the way back from Tunisia; the tradition that he was stoned at Bougie is late and finds no confirmation in contemporary sources, although it contributed to his cult.

Llull the Alchemist

A few decades after his death a vast corpus of alchemical treatises attributed to Llull began to circulate. The most important is the Testamentum, composed in the fourteenth century, probably in the 1330s; dozens of other texts followed, forming a true pseudo-Lullian library. In reality Llull, in his authentic works, showed himself sceptical about the transmutation of metals.

The confusion also arose from the method: the letters, figures and wheels of the Art resembled the symbols of alchemical and kabbalistic treatises, and in the Renaissance Lullism, Kabbalah and alchemy were often intertwined. Cornelius Agrippa commented on the Art, Giordano Bruno made it the basis of his memory systems and, in 1666, the young Leibniz took it up in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria.

The case of Llull shows two parallel histories. On one side, an original medieval thinker who sought a universal language for dialogue between religions; on the other, a name used for centuries to lend prestige to treatises he did not write. Europe's great libraries preserve both legacies, often on the same shelves, and only the study of the manuscripts allows them to be told apart.