Ramon Llull TOSF (/lʌl/; Catalan: [rəˈmoɲ ˈʎuʎ]; c. 1232[a] – possibly 25 March[1] 1315/1316)[b], sometimes anglicized as Raymond Lully,[2] was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, Christian apologist and former knight from the Kingdom of Majorca.

He invented a philosophical system known as the Art, conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities.

A prolific writer, he is also known for his literary works written in Catalan, which he composed to make his Art accessible to a wider audience.

[7][8][9] Llull was born in Palma into a wealthy family of Barcelona patricians who had come to the Kingdom of Majorca in 1229 with the conquering armies of James I of Aragon.

He narrates the event in his autobiography Vita coaetanea ("A Contemporary 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.

[17]The vision came to Llull five times in all and inspired in him three intentions: to give up his soul for the sake of God's love and honor, to convert the Saracens (i.e., Arabs and/or Muslims) to Christianity, and write the best book in the world against the errors of the unbelievers.

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.

[23] He travelled through Europe to meet popes, kings, and princes, trying to establish special colleges to prepare future missionaries.

Whereas Llull had been met with difficulties during his previous visits to North Africa, he was allowed to operate this time without interference from the authorities due to the improved relations between Tunis and Aragon.

He reduced the number of divine principles in the first figure to nine (goodness, greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory).

Figure T also now has nine relational principles (difference, concordance, contrariety, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality, minority), reduced from fifteen.

The correlatives first appear in a work called the Lectura super figuras Artis demonstrativae (c.1285-7) and came to undergird his formulation of the nature of being.

Llull developed a system of Latin suffixes to express the correlatives, i.e. bonitas (goodness); bonificans, bonificatus, bonificare.

Llull conceived it as an instrument to convert all peoples of the world to Christianity and experimented with more popular genres to make it easier to understand.

Later in his career when he became concerned with heretical activity in the Arts Faculty of the University of Paris, he wrote "disputations" with philosophers as interlocutors.

[42][43] He also created a character for himself and he stars in many of these dialogues as the Christian wise man (for instance: Liber de quaestione valde alta et profunda, composed in 1311).

The roots always consist of the Lullian divine principles and from there the tree grows into the differentiated aspects of its respective category of reality.

Llull also wrote narrative prose drawing on the literary traditions of his time (epic, romance) to express the Art.

The book is divided into ten chapters (echoing the encyclopedic range of the Tree of Science) as Felix gains knowledge of God, angels, heavens, elements, plants, minerals, animals, man, Paradise, and Hell.

One disciple, Thomas Le Myésier, went so far as to create elaborate compilations of Llull's works, including a manuscript dedicated to the queen of France.

[50] It is thought that the influence of Lullian works in Renaissance Italy (coinciding with the rise of neoplatonism) contributed to a development in metaphysics, from a static Artistotelian notion of being to reality as a dynamic process.

[51] In Northern and Central Europe Lullism was adopted by Lutherans and Calvinists interested in promoting programs of theological humanism.

[54] Despite Llull's growing identification with alchemy and Neoplatonic mysticism, others (such as Giulio Pace and Johann Heinrich Alsted) were still interested in the Lullian Art as a universal logic, even in the seventeenth century when Descartes and Ramus proposed competing systems.

[56] Since the 19th century, historical criticism has been well established as to the pseudepigraphic nature of the entire corpus, which in total exceeds one hundred works.

At the end of the 20th century, Professor Michela Pereira revealed an earlier textual matrix, dated around 1332, which has no pseudepigraphic intent in its genesis.

After compiling information about this personage based on what he explains, both in his Testamentum and in the other writings he cites as his own, he has been identified with a man called Raymundus de Terminis (cat.

He was a capitaneo or comitis in Berat and Vlorë, and he did representative work for Robert I of Naples and Philip I of Taranto in commercial operation throughout the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.

However, the best known format, since it was the only one printed until now, is a pseudepigraphic recension dated around 1360-1380 and produced in a Catalan milieu, where some forgers endorsed the work to Ramon Llull.

[66] In 1937 Jorge Luis Borges wrote a snippet called "Ramon Llull's Thinking Machine" proposing the Lullian Art as a device to produce poetry.

[68] Paul Auster refers to Llull (as Raymond Lull) in his memoir The Invention of Solitude in the second part, The Book of Memory.