Probst regards Lull as in advance of his age in his use of observation and experimental science and his knowledge that the world was round and acquaintance with the mariner’s compass.[2736] This knowledge, however, he really shared with his times and we can scarcely regard him as a precursor of Columbus nor even quite as an equal of Roger Bacon in these respects, exaggerated as we believe the estimates to be which have often been made of Roger’s importance. But Probst shows a similar tendency to exaggerate the scientific importance of Lull at the expense of his period.
His Art Universal.
Lull’s chief original contribution to medieval learning bore scant relation indeed to the methods of observation and experiment. His famous Art came to him as a sudden inspiration in the midst of long study and reflection and was, he and his followers believed, received by direct divine illumination. Hence his title, “the illuminated Doctor.” In reality the method of his Art leads us to infer that it occurred to him by some process of sub-conscious association with the employment of the planisphere in astronomy or the use of a revolving wheel and tables of combinations of letters of the alphabet such as we have noted in the geomancies and modes of divination ascribed to Socrates, Pythagoras, and other philosophers. Lull’s idea seems to have been the invention of a logical machine which would constitute the same sort of labor-saving device in a scholastic disputation or medieval university as an adding machine in a modern bank or business office. By properly arranging categories and concepts, subjects and predicates in the first place, one could get the correct answer to such propositions as might be put. Another advantage of this method would be that a sceptical Arab, who might refuse to listen to or view with suspicion the verbal arguments of a missionary, would be irresistibly convinced of the truth of the doctrines of Christianity by this machine, or at least mechanical method, which would impress him as impartial and reliable Lull’s diagrams and mechanical devices included a tree, intersecting triangles, and concentric circles divided into compartments, of which one rotated something like the planet; in the signs while the other remained stationary like the sphere of the fixed stars.
Circular figures employed in theology.
In questions of theology a circle was employed whose center stood for God while its circumference divided into sixteen “chambers” representing kindness, grandeur, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory, perfection, justice, beneficence, pity, humility, dominion, and patience. One hundred and twenty more “chambers” were formed by combining pairs of the foregoing. Another circle shows the rational soul in the center represented by four squares and has its circumference divided into sixteen compartments representing appropriate qualities. A third circle, devoted to principles and meanings, enclosed five triangles in a circumference of fifteen compartments; while a fourth circle divided fourteen compartments of its circumference between the seven virtues and seven vices respectively rendered in blue and red. Other “figures” dealt with predestination, fate, and free-will, truth, and falsity. The following is a specific instance of the way in which these were combined. When the rational soul is troubled and uncertain in the circle of predestination, because the chambers of ignorance and merit, science and fault, mingle together, it forms a third figure representing doubt.
Figure of a tree used in medicine.
In medicine the figure of a tree was employed. At its roots a wheel divided into quarters signifying bile, blood, phlegm, and atrabile. The tree had two trunks, on one of which bloomed the principles of ancient medicine. Its first branch, the natural, bore seven flowers: the elements, complexions, humors, members, faculties, operations, and spirits; and four figures dependent on these, namely, ages, colors, shapes, and sexes. The second non-natural branch produced six flowers: air, exercise, food and drink, sleep and activity, emptiness and surfeit, and the accidents of the mind. The third bough, or contrary to nature, had three flowers: disease and its causes and results. The other main trunk had two boughs. One divided into hot and cold, moist and dry, and the four degrees of each. The other bore three triangles and a square. The red triangle represented the source, the middle, and the end; the green triangle stood for difference, agreement, and contrariety; the yellow triangle comprised majority, minority, and equality.[2737] The square divides into four colors: red for being; black for privation; blue for perfection; green for imperfection.[2738] Such are some of the diagrams of the Lullian art, intended presumably to be worked by cranks or levers. There is really nothing magical about them; they are purely mechanical and representative and illustrative. But in their make-up they are certainly suggestive of a Gnostic or Ophite diagram or of a geomantic wheel, and possibly may sometimes have been suspected of being magical by outsiders.
Lull and alchemy.
The use of the word “Art” for this logical machinery and graphic method of Raymond Lull perhaps also led to the notion that he was an alchemist and exponent of the Hermetic art. Various works of alchemy were ascribed to him but are regarded as spurious; perhaps some of them are by the Jew, Raymond of Tárrega, already mentioned. No work of alchemy is mentioned in the lists of his writings drawn up in 1311 and 1314,[2739] and the sixth part, devoted to metals, of his Libre de les Maravels is unfavorable to alchemy.[2740] In his Latin Questions Soluble by the Demonstrative or Inventive Art he again adduced reasons against transmutation.[2741] De Luanco has collected other passages from Raymond’s undisputed works unfavorable to alchemy and the alchemists.[2742] We have seen, however, that a writer may criticize most or all other alchemists sharply and question various doctrines and methods of alchemy and yet have his own way of getting around the difficulties whether theoretical, such as the permanence of species, or practical. There is therefore something to be said for the position of Barber who, while recognizing that the treatises current under Raymond’s name are spurious, adds, “We can well believe that he wrote as well as thought on alchemy.”[2743] And it was Berthelot’s opinion that while the works ascribed to Raymond are spurious, “nevertheless it is incontestable that those writings were composed by persons who believed themselves his disciples.”[2744] These spurious works were in existence at an early date and Raymond is cited as an alchemist from the fourteenth century on.
His attitude to astrology.