Ramon Llull

Life and Ministry

Ramon Llull was born at Palma de Mallorca around AD 1232, the son of one of the Catalan knights who had taken the island from the Almohads with King James I of Aragon a few years earlier. He was a courtier and troubadour of the Mallorcan court until his conversion around AD 1263, when (he later said) five repeated visions of Christ crucified during his attempts to write a love-poem caused him to abandon court life. He gave away his property, was tutored in Arabic by a Muslim slave he had purchased and freed, and devoted the next fifty years to a single project: the systematic conversion of the Muslim world by reasoned argument from shared philosophical premises. He invented the Ars magna — a combinatorial logical system intended to demonstrate the truths of the Trinity and Incarnation from premises Muslim and Jewish philosophers would accept — and traveled repeatedly to North Africa as a missionary, learning Arabic, debating with the imams of Tunis and Bougie, and publishing in three languages.

Circumstances of Death

Llull's third mission to North Africa, undertaken at the age of about eighty-three, ended at Bougie (modern Béjaïa) in present-day Algeria around AD 1315 or 1316. The earliest account, the Vita Coaetanea written by his disciples on the basis of his dictated reminiscences, reports that he was attacked by a Muslim mob in the streets of Bougie for his open preaching and so beaten with stones that he was left for dead. A group of Genoese merchants, finding him still breathing, took him aboard a ship bound for Mallorca; he died on the voyage, or shortly after landfall, around the end of AD 1316. The precise details of his death remain disputed by his early biographers, but the consensus of the sources — Llullian and external — is that he died as a consequence of injuries received while preaching to Muslims in Bougie.

Legacy

Llull is the patron of philologists, Arabists, and missionaries; he is the founder of European Arabic and Hebrew studies (his pressure on the Council of Vienne in AD 1311 established Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldean chairs at five European universities); he is the first medieval European philosopher to write in his vernacular as well as in Latin, and one of the founders of Catalan literature. His combinatorial logical method became, through Leibniz's reading of it in the seventeenth century, an ancestor of modern symbolic logic. His witness declares that the gospel does not stop at the borders of Christendom and that the calling of the Christian intellectual is to reach across the philosophical lines drawn between civilizations. Eight centuries after his death his books are still studied at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, less than a mile from where his bones rest in the Basilica of Sant Francesc in Palma.