Ramon Llull theologian, philosopher, poet and alchemist, was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1235 and died in his hometown in 1315. He had received a courtesan training and chivalrous, was Seneschal of Jaime II future king of Mallorca and cultivated courtly poetry
to use, but At the age of thirty, he had a first mystical experience, partly caused by the impression made on him by a Francis of Assisi's sermon (1263), which led him to undertake a life dedicated entirely to the apostolate.
He left his family and his property; he made a pilgrimage to Santa María de Rocamadour, near Tolosa, and to Santiago de Compostela. Advised by Ramón de Penyafort, he continued his training in Majorca, where he learned Arabic, frequented the Cistercian abbey of La Real and dedicated himself to a contemplative life in a cave on Mount Randa.
Early life and family
Llull was born into a wealthy family in Palma, the capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Majorca. James I of Aragon founded Majorca to integrate the recently conquered territories of the Balearic Islands (now part of Spain) into the Crown of Aragon. Llull's parents had come from Catalonia as part of the effort to colonize the formerly Almohad-ruled island. As the island had been conquered militarily, the Muslim population who had not been able to flee the conquering Christians had been enslaved, even though they still constituted a significant portion of the island's population.
In 1257 Llull married Blanca Picany, with whom he had two children, Domènec and Magdalena. Although he formed a family, he lived what he would later call the licentious and wasteful life of a troubadour.
Religious calling
In 1263 Llull experienced a religious epiphany in the form of a series of visions. He narrates the event in his autobiography Vita coaetanea ("Daily Life"):
Ramon, while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air.
The vision came to Llull five times in all, leading him to leave his family, position, and belongings in order to pursue a life in the service of God. Specifically, he realized three intentions: to die in the service of God while converting Muslims to Christianity, to see to the founding of religious institutions that would teach foreign languages, and to write a book on how to overcome someone's objections to being converted.
Following his epiphany Llull likely became a Franciscan tertiary (a member of the Third Order of St. Francis), taking inspiration from Saint Francis of Assisi. After a short pilgrimage, he returned to Majorca, where he purchased a Muslim slave from whom he wanted to learn Arabic. For the next nine years, until 1274, he engaged in study and contemplation in relative solitude. He read extensively in both Latin and Arabic, learning both Christian and Muslim theological and philosophical thought.
Between 1271 and 1274 Llull wrote his first works, a compendium of the Muslim thinker Al-Ghazali's logic and the Llibre de contemplació en Déu (Book on the Contemplation of God), a lengthy guide to finding truth through contemplation.
In 1274, while staying at a hermitage on Puig de Randa, the form of the great book Llull was to write was finally given to him through divine revelation: a complex system that he named his Art, which would become the motivation behind most of his life's efforts.
Missionary work and education
Llull urged the study of Arabic and other then-insufficiently studied languages in Europe, along with most of his works, to convert Muslims and schismatic Christians. He travelled through Europe to meet with popes, kings, and princes, trying to establish special colleges to prepare future missionaries. In 1276 a language school for Franciscan missionaries was founded at Miramar, funded by the King of Majorca.
About 1291 he went to Tunis, preached to the Saracens, disputed with them in philosophy, and after another brief sojourn in Paris, returned to the East as a missionary. Llull travelled to Tunis a second time in about 1304, and wrote numerous letters to the king of Tunis, but little else is known about this part of his life.
He returned in 1308, reporting that the conversion of Muslims should be achieved through prayer, not through military force. He finally achieved his goal of linguistic education at major universities in 1311 when the Council of Vienne ordered the creation of chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean (Aramaic) at the universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca as well as at the Papal Court.
Llull and the Immaculate Conception
Following the favourable attitude of some Franciscan theologians, Llull's position on this subject was of great importance because it paved the way for the doctrine of Duns Scotus, whom he met in 1297, after which he was given the nickname Doctor Illuminatus, even if it seems that he had no direct influence on him. Llull is the first author to use the expression "Immaculate Conception" to designate the Virgin's exemption from original sin. He appears to have been the first to teach this doctrine publicly at the University of Paris.
To explain this Marian privilege, Llull resorts to three arguments:
1 - The Son of God could not become incarnate in a mother who was stained by sin in any way:
God and sin cannot be united in the one and same object... Thus the Blessed Virgin Mary did not contract original sin; rather she was sanctified in the instant in which the seed from which she was formed was detached from her parents.
2 - There had to be a certain likeness between the Son's generation without sin and the generation of his Mother:
The Blessed Virgin Mary should have been conceived without sin so that her conception and that of her Son might have a like nature.
3 - The second creation, is the Redemption, which began with Christ and Mary, had to happen under the sign of the most total purity, as was the case with the first creation:
Just as Adam and Eve remained in innocence until the original sin, so at the beginning of the new creation, when the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son came into existence, it was fitting that the man and the Woman should be found in a state of innocence simpliciter, in an absolute way, without interruption, from the beginning until the end. Should the opposite have been the case, the new creation could not have begun. It is clear, however, that it did have a beginning, and therefore the Blessed Virgin was conceived without original sin.
In a sermon entitled The Fruit of Mary's Womb, Llull states that,
"The blessed fruit of our Lady's womb is Jesus Christ, who is true God and true man. He is God the Son, and he is man, the Son of our Lady. The man, her Son, is the blessed fruit because he is God the Son; for it is true that the goodness of the Son who is God and the goodness of the Son who is man are joined together and united in one person, who is Jesus Christ. And the goodness of the man, Mary's Son, is an instrument of the Son, who is God."
Death
In 1314, at the age of 82, Llull travelled again to North Africa where he was stoned by an angry crowd of Muslims in Tunis. Genoese merchants took him back to Mallorca, where he died at home in Palma the following year. Though the traditional date of his death has been 29 June 1315, his last documents, which date from December 1315, and recent research point to the first quarter of 1316 as the most probable death date.
It can be documented that Llull was buried at the Church of Saint Francis in Mallorca.
Riber Lorenzo states that the circumstances of his death remain a mystery. Samuel Zwemer, a Protestant missionary and academic, accepted the story of martyrdom, as did William Turner, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Bonner gives as a reason for Llull's journey to Tunis the information that its ruler was interested in Christianity—false information given to the Kings of Sicily and Aragon and relayed to Llull.
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