Justified True Belief

(●) The courtier who learned Arabic in order to argue with Muslims, and built a reasoning machine to help him do it. + Most medieval Christian writers argued with opponents they could see: a rival master across a lecture hall, a heretic on the other side of a table. Ramon Llull spent fifty years arguing with people who were not in the room, and then, three times, got on a ship to North Africa to find them. He was born on an island that had been Muslim within living memory, and he grew up hearing a second language in the streets of his own city. That fact shaped everything he did. He decided, at about thirty, that the gospel was losing its argument with Islam for a simple and fixable reason: Christians were not making the argument. They did not speak Arabic, they did not know what Muslims actually believed, and when they met a learned objection they answered by quoting saints whom their hearers had no reason to respect. So Llull learned Arabic, wrote in it, read the Muslim philosophers in it, and built a method of reasoning he thought both sides could agree to use before either of them opened a holy book. That method, which he simply called the Art, ran on paper disks that a reader turned by hand to pair one divine attribute with another. It is one of the strangest objects the Middle Ages produced and also one of the most surprisingly modern: the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz read it three and a half centuries later, and historians of computing keep coming back to it. Llull also happens to be the reason Catalan has a philosophical vocabulary at all. He was among the first in Europe to write philosophy and theology in a living vernacular rather than in Latin, and the first to do it in Catalan. About 265 of his works survive.

(●) 1232 AD: Born in the city of Majorca, three years after a Christian army took the island from its Muslim rulers. + In 1229 King James I of Aragon took Majorca from its Muslim rulers, and among the men who came out of that campaign with a share of the land it handed out was a Catalan family named Llull. Their son Ramon was born in the island’s capital, then called simply the city of Majorca and now called Palma, around 1232. Around is the best anyone can do, because he never names the year outright. What he does say, in the account of his life he dictated as an old man, is that he was about thirty when everything turned, and working back from that, with the other dates around it, gives 1232 or 1233. An island taken by force three years before a boy is born is not a tidy place to grow up. The Muslim population did not vanish; a good part of it stayed, as farmers, as household slaves, as neighbours. Arabic was spoken in the markets of a city whose cathedral was being built over a mosque. Most Christian boys of his class learned to ignore all of that. Llull, eventually, did the opposite.

(●) 1257 AD: He married, took a post in the royal household, and wrote love songs. + In 1257 he married Blanca Picany, and they had two children, a son and a daughter. He held a place in the household of the king’s son, the future James II of Majorca, as seneschal: the officer who ran the domestic side of a court, its supplies, its servants, its table. It was a good post for a young man with land and connections. He was also, by his own later account, a thoroughly worldly one. What he wrote in those years were troubadour songs, the courtly love poetry of southern France and Catalonia, most of it addressed to women who were not his wife. A later tradition, which first appears long after his death, fills in a lurid scene: a lady he pursued finally uncovers her breast to show him the cancer eating it, and the shock begins his conversion. It is a good story and there is no early evidence for it. What Llull himself says is shorter and stranger.

(●) c. 1263 AD: Five times, in the middle of writing a love song, he saw Christ on the cross. + He was about thirty, sitting on the edge of his bed one night working on a song for a woman, when he looked up and saw Christ hanging on the cross at his right hand. He was frightened, went to bed, and thought no more of it. Some days later, at the same hour, working on the same song, it happened again. It happened five times in all before he stopped writing songs. What he concluded from it was oddly practical. He decided the visions meant he was to leave the world and serve Christ, and within three months he had worked out exactly what that service would be. Hearing a bishop preach on the feast of Saint Francis, he sold most of what he owned, kept back enough to feed his wife and children, and settled on three purposes he would keep for the rest of his life: to spend that life converting Muslims, dying for it if it came to that; to write the best book in the world against the errors of unbelievers; and to get schools founded where missionaries could learn the languages of the people they were sent to. He then went on pilgrimage to Rocamadour and Compostela and came back meaning to study in Paris. In Barcelona he stopped to put the plan to Ramon de Penyafort, by then a very old Dominican. The Dominicans were one of the new orders of friars, preachers who lived among townspeople and travelled to argue rather than settling inside a monastery for life, and Penyafort had organised the church’s law books and knew as much about missions to Muslims and Jews as anyone alive. There was nobody better to ask. Penyafort told him to go home to Majorca instead. He went.

(●) 1265 to 1274 AD: Nine years of study, Arabic learned from a slave he owned, and a week on the hill of Randa where his method came to him. + No Muslim scholar was going to teach the language of the Qur’an to a man who announced he wanted it in order to refute Islam. So Llull bought a Muslim slave and studied with him for nine years, which tells you both how seriously he took the task and how little he questioned the arrangement his world handed him. It ended badly, and Llull is the one who tells us how. The slave blasphemed Christ one day while Llull was out of the house; Llull, hearing of it when he came home, struck him in the face. The man brooded on that, got hold of a sword, and one day when he found Llull sitting alone he ran at him and wounded him. Llull had him locked up, could not decide what to do with him, and went off to an abbey nearby to pray about it for three days. He came back to find that the prisoner had hanged himself with the rope he had been tied with. Llull says he gave thanks to God for it, which is the hardest sentence in his autobiography to read. Not long after, he climbed Randa, a flat-topped hill an hour’s walk inland from Palma, and that is where the turn came. He says he had been up there barely a week when, one day as he gazed at the sky, God suddenly gave him the form and method of the book he had promised to write. He did not wait. He went straight down to the monks of La Real, a Cistercian abbey outside the city, and wrote it out: the Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem, the Brief Art of Finding Truth, first of something like a dozen versions he would spend the next thirty years revising. In the same stretch of years he wrote the Llibre de contemplació en Déu, the Book of Contemplation, in Arabic first and then in Catalan: 366 chapters, one for every day of a leap year, and the longest thing he ever wrote.

(●) 1276 AD: He talked a king into founding a school where thirteen friars learned Arabic. + The third of his three purposes was the one an ordinary man could actually arrange, and Llull had been a courtier. He took the plan to the prince he had once served, now King James II of Majorca, who had it checked for orthodoxy by a professor of theology and then paid for it. On 17 October 1276 Pope John XXI confirmed the foundation: a house at Miramar, on the north coast of the island above the sea, where thirteen Franciscans, friars of the order Francis of Assisi had founded some seventy years before, would live and learn Arabic for the express purpose of going to preach in it. Thirteen men is not an army. But nothing quite like it had existed before, and for the next forty years Llull spent his life trying to get it copied. He went to Rome and to Paris and to the courts of Aragon, France and Sicily with a request that never changed: pay for the languages. Kings received him politely. Popes were busy. And the school he kept holding up as the model did not last long itself: Miramar seems to have closed within about fifteen years, and by January 1292 King James II had decided to shut it down. The rest of those years he spent teaching his Art wherever anyone would let him, in Montpellier, in Genoa, in Paris, on Cyprus, and writing at a rate that is hard to credit: the romance Blanquerna (a romance in his century meant a long story told at leisure, carrying its author’s ideas, rather than a love story), the encyclopedic Arbre de ciència, the Llibre del gentil, poems, sermons, treatises on logic, law and medicine, well over two hundred works in all.

(●) 1293 and 1307 AD: He preached in Arabic in Tunis and in Bugia, and was jailed and deported both times. + The first crossing nearly did not happen. At Genoa in 1293, with his books already aboard a ship for Tunis, his nerve failed him. He thought about the death or the lifelong imprisonment waiting for a man who came to argue a Muslim city out of its religion, he let the ship sail without him, and then he collapsed into a sickness of body and mind that lasted for months, convinced he had thrown his whole vocation away. The sickness broke at Pentecost, the feast of the Spirit’s coming, when he had himself carried into the Dominicans’ church in the city. He tells all of this on himself, at length, which is one reason his autobiography is worth reading. He got on the next ship. In Tunis he did what he had planned for thirty years: he found the learned men of the city, told them he had studied the arguments of both faiths and would become a Muslim if theirs proved the stronger, and invited them to reason it out. They took him seriously enough that the authorities imprisoned him and put him on a boat home, and he was back in Naples by October 1293. In 1307, at seventy-five, he tried again at Bugia on the Algerian coast, and this time he simply stood up in the market square and preached. He was seized, and he spent roughly six months in prison there, where he and a Muslim scholar agreed to each write a defence of his own faith, the closest thing to the fair hearing he had wanted all his life. He was put on a ship home before the exchange was finished. The ship was wrecked off Pisa, and Llull got ashore with his life and almost nothing else, sat down, and wrote the book up from memory.

(●) 1311 to 1316 AD: He won his language schools at the Council of Vienne, sailed for North Africa once more at eighty-two, and died within two years. + In 1311, on his way to a church council that he had been petitioning for years, the old man stopped at the Carthusian house of Vauvert outside the walls of Paris and dictated his life to one of the monks. That short book, the Vita coaetanea or Contemporary Life, is why so much of his life can be told in his own words. It is a defence as much as a memoir, and it stops in 1311. At the Council of Vienne he asked for three things, and he got one of them. He wanted schools of languages; he wanted the military orders melted down into a single unified one; and he wanted action against the philosophers of Paris who he believed were teaching that faith and reason could contradict each other. The languages were the thing he got. One of the council’s decrees ordered chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean, which was the name the West then gave to Aramaic, to be set up at the papal court and at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca. He had been asking kings and popes for exactly that since 1276, and he was eighty when it passed. In August 1314, at eighty-two, he sailed for Tunis again. He was writing there as late as December 1315. After that the record thins out and the traditions take over: the best known of them has him stoned by a crowd at Bugia and dying of it aboard the ship home, and no source from anywhere near his own time reports it. Modern scholars are divided about where and how he died, some placing it at sea or in Majorca and some in Tunis, and they put it in the first months of 1316. His body lies in the Franciscan church at Palma, in a tomb carved for it in 1448.

What He Taught

(T1) There is one method of reasoning that works on any subject, and it is built out of the names of God. + Imagine two dials, one inside the other, each ringed with the same nine words, and a pin through the middle so you can turn them. Turn the inner dial one notch and a new pair of words lines up. Turn it again, another pair. Nine words paired every possible way give you thirty-six pairs, and every one of them is a question you might not have thought to ask. That is literally what Llull’s Art is. The figures in his manuscripts are paper disks, cut and pinned so a reader can turn them by hand, and the nine words are what he called the divine dignities: goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth and glory. He labelled them with the letters B through K so that the reasoning could be done in letters, the way we would do algebra. Pair goodness with greatness and you are asking what it means for goodness to be infinite. Pair eternity with will and you are asking whether an eternal God can choose. Two things make this more than a curiosity. The first is why he picked those nine words and not some other nine. Llull’s wager was that a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim would all grant that God is good, great, eternal, powerful, wise and the rest, for the plain reason that all three of them say so. Build an argument out of nothing but what all three already grant, and none of them can walk away from it by refusing the other side’s scriptures. That was the whole point of starting there. The second thing is what the Art is actually for. It is not a proof. It is a machine for generating questions and for checking that no combination has been skipped, the way a chess player works through the legal moves in a position rather than trusting a hunch about which one looks best. Llull believed that a mind that worked through every combination honestly would arrive at the Christian answers, and he spent forty years rebuilding the machine because he kept finding that readers could not follow it.

(Q) "We have a new method of argument with the unbelievers, by showing them the Brief Art of Finding Truth; and, when they have learned this, we shall be enabled to confound them by this art and by its beginnings." + Source: Ramon Lull, Blanquerna, Book II, ch. XLIV (E. Allison Peers translation, 1926). In the romance, Faith and Truth have come back defeated from the land of the Saracens, which is what Llull’s Europe called the Muslim world, and they go to fetch their brother Understanding, who is lecturing to a room of students. This is what he tells the students. The Brief Art of Finding Truth is Llull’s own first book, the one he wrote coming down from Randa (T1), and "its beginnings" are the nine dignities the Art starts from.

(T2) The articles of faith can be reasoned about with people who do not accept our authorities. + Here is the problem Llull kept running into, and it will sound familiar to anyone who has tried to argue about God on the internet. You quote Scripture; your opponent does not accept Scripture. You quote Augustine; he has never heard of Augustine and would not care if he had. You appeal to a miracle; he says his own tradition has better ones. Every authority you own is an authority he is free to decline, and the conversation dies there. Llull’s answer was to argue from what both sides already hold. An article of faith, in the language of his century, is one of the fixed points of the creed: that God is three and one, that the Son took flesh, that the dead will rise. Llull held that these could be defended by what he called rationes necessariae, necessary reasons, meaning arguments that a fair-minded opponent could not consistently deny while keeping what he already believes about God. If God is infinitely good, Llull argues, and goodness by its nature pours itself out, then an eternal outpouring within God is not a foreign idea imported from a book but something the opponent’s own definition of God is already reaching for. He knew how that would sound, and he put the hardest objection to it into the mouth of his own hero. When Faith tells Blanquerna that she is going to fetch her brother Understanding, who can prove the fourteen articles, Blanquerna answers that faith would lose its merit if the understanding could demonstrate them, and the two of them have to argue the thing out. Late in the same book, answering a cardinal who asks him whether the articles can be demonstrated, he draws the line more finely: there are two kinds of demonstration, he says, the kind nothing can contradict, as when you say that a quadrangle has more angles than a triangle, and the kind that argues from an effect back to its cause and that can be contradicted, and faith belongs to the second. Whether Llull’s own arguments stayed on the right side of that line is the question the church argued about for the next five hundred years.

(Q) "And since the people require arguments and necessary demonstrations, I go to my brother, who has power, by the virtue of God, to prove the fourteen articles." + Source: Ramon Lull, Blanquerna, Book II, ch. XLIII (E. Allison Peers translation, 1926). Faith is speaking to Blanquerna, who has met her on a forest road. She has just come back from the Saracen lands, and she explains why she is going to fetch her brother Understanding: the people there "will not receive the authority of the saints," and the age of the old miracles is over. The fourteen articles are the creed as the schools of the day counted it, seven about God and seven about Christ’s humanity.

(T3) Whoever is sent to a people must first learn their language. + This is the least original-sounding thing Llull ever said and the one with the longest consequences. Today it is the first sentence of every missionary handbook. In 1276 it was a proposal so unusual that getting thirteen friars to study Arabic on a Mediterranean island required a king’s money and a pope’s signature. Llull had two reasons for it, and the second is the interesting one. The obvious reason is that you cannot preach to a man in a language he does not speak. The deeper reason is that you cannot answer an objection you have never heard in its own words. He had read the Muslim philosophers in Arabic; he had worked through al-Ghazali, the Muslim theologian and philosopher whose handbooks were standard across the Islamic world, and made a Latin summary of his logic; he knew what an educated Muslim would say about the Trinity before he said it. That is why his dialogues do not read like other medieval controversy. In the Llibre del gentil a pagan who has never heard of any of the three faiths listens to a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim each state his own religion at its best, and Llull ends the book without telling the reader which one the pagan chose, so that, as the three sages agree at the close, they can keep meeting to reason it out. He was not shy about the model he wanted copied. In Blanquerna, Book IV, ch. LXXX, the hero, once he is pope, orders language houses built throughout the world and endowed well enough to run, "according to the manner of the monastery of Miramar, which is in the Island of Majorca." That is a man putting his own school into his own novel and asking Christendom to notice. The proposal outlived him. Thirty-five years after Miramar he was still asking for it, and at the Council of Vienne in 1312 it was finally written into the law of the whole Western church.

(Q) "I bring thee greetings from the Saracens, Jews, Greeks, Mongols, Tartars, Bulgarians, Hungarians from Lesser Hungary, Cumanians, Nestorians, Guinovins and Russians: all these, and many unbelievers else, greet thee through me who am their representative." + Source: Ramon Lull, Blanquerna, Book II, the Book of Ave Maria (E. Allison Peers translation, 1926). A monk in the romance has taken it on himself to greet the Virgin every day on behalf of everyone who does not. The list is a map of the thirteenth-century world as a Majorcan knew it, and the monk’s request follows straight from it: that her Son would send these peoples ministers who could make him known to them. Llull is putting his life’s petition in the mouth of a praying monk.

(T4) All the reasoning is for the sake of love, and love is what does the reasoning. + It would be easy to file Llull as a man who turned faith into a logic puzzle. Then you read the Llibre d’amic e amat, the Book of the Lover and the Beloved, and the file will not close. It sits inside Blanquerna, where the hero, having risen to be pope, resigns the office to live as a hermit and writes a book of one short verse for every day of the year. The Lover is the soul, the Beloved is Christ, and the verses are two or three lines each, half of them questions. The man who drew paper disks of the divine attributes wrote this, in the second verse of the book: "Long and perilous are the paths by which the Lover seeks his Beloved. They are peopled by cares, sighs and tears. They are lit up by love." The two halves of him are not in tension, and he says so directly. Love, for Llull, is not what you fall back on when the argument runs out; love is what makes a mind keep working at something it has not yet understood. His nine dignities are not abstractions he admired from a distance. They are the names of someone he was in love with, which is why he could spend nine years on a grammar and think of it as courtship.

(Q) "Foolish Lover, why dost thou weary thy body, throw away thy wealth and leave the joys of this world, and go about as an outcast of the people?" "To honour my Beloved’s Name," he replied, "for He is hated and dishonoured by more men than honour and love Him." + Source: Ramon Lull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, verse 11 (E. Allison Peers translation, 1923). The question is the one his relatives, his creditors and half the courts of Europe must have put to him for fifty years, and this is the only answer he ever gave. "Foolish Lover" is not an insult he resented; he called himself Ramon the Fool in book after book.

(Q) "And so earnestly did he desire to comprehend Him that he strove with his reason to understand all things that were said of Him. And therefore was the love of the Lover for ever between belief and understanding." + Source: Ramon Lull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, verse 192 (E. Allison Peers translation, 1923). The whole verse begins by saying that the Lover loved so much that he believed everything the Beloved revealed to him, and then adds this. Between belief and understanding is exactly where Llull lived, and it is also exactly where his critics thought he had wandered too far in one direction (T2).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church took his language schools, and they became the ordinary way missions are done. + The Council of Vienne decree of 1312 is the clearest thing Llull left behind. Chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean at the papal court and at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca: one old man’s forty-year petition, written at last into the law of the whole Western church. Honesty about the result matters as much as the decree does. Most of those chairs were never properly filled, and the Arabic ones in particular seem largely to have stayed on paper. But the principle did not go away, and that is the part worth watching. Two centuries later the missionary orders going out to Asia and the Americas took the learning of languages as the first task rather than an afterthought, and the grammars and dictionaries they produced are among the things that outlasted them. The debt was still being paid in the twentieth century. When Samuel Zwemer, a Protestant working among Muslims in Arabia, wrote a life of Llull in 1902, he called him simply the first missionary to the Moslems, which is a Reformed missionary thanking a Catholic layman across six hundred years. Tradition calls that layman a Franciscan tertiary, someone who lives under the friars’ rule without joining the order, and the early record does not actually say he took it. What the record does say is that the Franciscans buried him and kept his memory, and the name has stuck ever since. There is a second thing the church received from him that he never asked to be thanked for. Llull wrote philosophy and theology in Catalan when educated men wrote them only in Latin, because he wanted the shopkeepers of Palma to be able to read the arguments. Catalan literature begins, more or less, with him.

(†) The Art found its readers among philosophers rather than missionaries. + The people Llull built the Art for, the scholars of Tunis and Bugia, mostly did not want it. The people who did want it were Europeans, and not the ones he had in mind. Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century cardinal and philosopher, was the first great collector of Llull. He gathered manuscripts, copied many of them out in his own hand, and the library he left to Kues, the Moselle town he came from and is named after, still holds them; his own thinking about how finite minds reach an infinite God carries Llull’s fingerprints. Two centuries later Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, not yet twenty, wrote De arte combinatoria (1666) with Llull’s Art openly in view, and went looking for what he called a universal characteristic: a notation in which reasoning could be carried out by calculation, so that two men who disagreed could sit down and work it out the way two accountants settle a column of figures. That is Llull’s wager, three and a half centuries on, put into symbols instead of paper wheels. Which is why Llull turns up in histories of computing, and it is worth being careful about what the claim amounts to. He is not the inventor of the computer, and the popular accounts that say so are overreaching. What he did do was take the ancient idea that reasoning is a skill and treat it instead as a procedure: a fixed alphabet, fixed rules for combining it, and a guarantee that if you turn the wheel all the way round you have not missed a case. Nothing quite like that had been tried in the Latin West before him.

(†) His orthodoxy was fought over for five centuries, and Majorca never let him go. + Sixty years after his death the trouble started in earnest. In 1376 Nicholas Eymerich, the Dominican inquisitor of Aragon and a formidable enemy, obtained a papal condemnation of a long list of propositions drawn from Llull’s works, most of them turning on the claim that the articles of faith can be proved (T2). The document’s authenticity was disputed almost at once and has been disputed ever since, and in the end it never stuck. His own island would not have it. The Majorcans defended their man, a chair of Lullian doctrine was endowed there, and Lullism, which is simply the name for the school of readers who took up his Art and his method, carried on being taught on Majorca and at Barcelona, Valencia and Alcalá. The confusion was not helped by a small industry of forgery. From the fourteenth century onwards alchemists put Llull’s name on their own books, and a large body of alchemical writing circulated under it for four hundred years. None of it is his; the real Llull denied outright that one metal could be turned into another, which is the one thing the alchemists most needed to be true. But it muddied his reputation badly enough that sorting the real corpus from the false one took scholars until the twentieth century. Rome eventually settled the matter in his favour, at least as to his life. Pope Pius IX confirmed his cult in 1847, cult being the old technical word for the public honour a church pays a holy man, the feast day and the visited tomb rather than anything sinister. And so he is honoured as Blessed Ramon Llull, carrying the title tradition gave him and nobody can now trace to its first giver, Doctor Illuminatus, the enlightened teacher.

(†) Where his own record will not carry him: he claimed more for argument than argument can bear, and he was willing to use force to get a hearing. + Two things in the record are his own doing rather than a later reader’s invention, and both come straight out of the primary sources. A fair account has to say them. - Necessary reasons. Thomas Aquinas, his near contemporary, held that the Trinity and the Incarnation cannot be demonstrated from reason alone, and that a Christian who claims to demonstrate them does the faith harm, because the unbeliever will conclude that we believe on such flimsy grounds as these. Llull knew that objection and did not accept it, though he could state it better than most of his critics did: in Blanquerna it is his own hero who says that faith would lose its merit if the understanding could demonstrate the articles (T2). The trouble is that across two hundred works the line he drew there moves about, and a great many of his arguments claim more than he allows for when he is being careful. Scripture’s own posture is the one Peter describes: "but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect," (1 Peter 3:15). That is a command to have reasons ready. It is not a promise that the reasons will compel, and faith remains faith on the far side of them (Hebrews 11:6). - Force. Llull never stopped believing in argument, but he did not believe in it alone. From 1292 onward he wrote a series of crusade treatises, the Liber de fine of 1305 and the Liber de acquisitione Terrae Sanctae of 1309 among them, in which a military campaign clears the way for the preachers, and at Vienne he asked the council to merge the military orders under one commander. Nearer home, he obtained a licence from the king of Aragon in 1299 to preach in the synagogues and mosques of the kingdom, with Jews and Muslims required to attend and to answer the preacher’s questions. In Blanquerna he goes further and has his ideal pope assign teachers of Latin and of the Scriptures to the Jews and Muslims living under Christian rule, to be learned within a set time, with punishment for those who do not learn. A hearing taken by compulsion is not the free hearing the Llibre del gentil imagines, and the apostles were given other weapons (2 Corinthians 10:4) and another manner (1 Peter 3:16). It is worth saying what this does not cancel. Llull had spent decades insisting that Muslims be answered rather than merely fought, at a time when almost nobody was saying it, and he went to Bugia alone and unarmed at seventy-five to do it himself. The contradiction sat inside one man, as contradictions do.