Lully, Raymond

Born circa 1235 in Mallorca; died circa 1315 in Tunis (?). Philosopher; theologian; Catalan writer.

At the age of 30, Lully gave up the life of a brilliant courtier and poet and entered the Franciscan order, becoming a missionary. He did missionary work in North Africa, where, according to legend, he suffered a martyr’s death. An outstanding expert on Jewish and Muslim theology, Lully was one of the founders of European Arabistics. He introduced the regular teaching of Oriental languages in European universities for the specialized preparation of missionaries. Lully left about 300 works, written originally in Catalan and Arabic primarily but often preserved only in Latin translations.

Lully’s world view was formed under the influence of Franciscanism and the works of Augustine. Polemicizing with the doctrine of Averroism about dualistic truth, Lully held that true knowledge was possible only in the light of revelation. For Lully, the world was the symbol of god, and in each thing were reflected divine “perfections,” the examination of which revealed to human understanding the principles of the action of god in the world. In order to bring such understanding to exhaustive completeness, Lully worked out methods of modeling operations in logic, using symbolic designations of ultimate concepts (in his basic work, The Great Art). This led him to develop the first logical machine and made him one of the forerunners of combination methods in logic.

Lully was the founder and classic writer of Catalan literature and one of the greatest lyric poets of his time (Desconort, the Song of Ramon, and other works); he also wrote the philosophical novella Blanquerna.