THE average man has seldom understood the Mystic. He conceives the Mystic Life, with its ceaseless spiritual activity, and its restlessness which knows no stay till it reaches its goal, as a life of tranquillity, if not of indolence and ease. He has no conception of what it really is, and for that, perhaps, he should not be blamed. But not content with misinterpreting the mystic’s life, he presently becomes more daring; he asserts that mysticism is essentially ‘unpractical,’ and that one whose aim is to reach the state of Union with God must necessarily be as a fool in his relations with the world. Here the average man is grossly, inexcusably mistaken. His error has again and again been exposed, confuted, disproved by example after example to the contrary. Yet, for all that, it seems to thrive in the average mind.

Now, if the story of one man’s career could suffice to destroy the mistaken idea that the mystic is an unpractical dreamer, that man would surely be the Majorcan RamÓn Lull, the ‘Apostle of Africa.’ Lull lived far back in the thirteenth century, not long after the days of St. Francis of Assisi, whose disciple he was. He gives us, as it were, a prevision of the splendours of that Golden Age of Mysticism which dawned for Spain three hundred years after his birth. His mystic writings—and especially his BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED—are full of the purest and noblest spirituality, compounded with the quintessence of love. ‘If ye will have fire,’ he cries, ‘O ye that love, come light your lanterns at my heart.’ His famous phrase, ‘He who loves not lives not,’ sums up his inspiration. Yet Lull was no cloistered visionary. His life is full of romance and adventure: so crowded with incident is it that many pages will not suffice even to summarise its principal happenings. His capacities showed the rare combination of scholar and man of affairs: he was both these, and he was also the man of God. To the service of his Master, for Whom alone he lived, and for Whom he died, Lull was able to bring the full and complete tribute of an efficient and active body, a superb mind, and an ardent, unconquerable spirit.

I

RamÓn Lull was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, on January 25, 1235. His father had taken part in the conquest of Majorca from the Saracens some six years earlier, and for his services had received the gift of an estate, which his son inherited. The boy was brought up as a page in the royal court of Majorca, and, in spite of a sound religious education and the interest and favour of the King, he had hardly reached years of discretion when he began to lead a careless and dissolute life. His biographers tell of how the King, to stop his degrading practices, married him to a certain D^a. Blanca PicaÑy, but without thereby reforming him in the least. Lull was chiefly enamoured of a Genoese lady, so passionately that he dared one day to ride on horseback into the Church of St. Eulalia, where she was engaged in devotion. Eventually she herself arrested his intrigues. Receiving from him some gallant verses on the theme of her bosom, she called him into her presence, and, uncovering herself before him, disclosed a malignant cancer by which her breast was slowly being consumed.

This terrible shock marked the first stage in Lull’s conversion. He went back to the palace another man—as taciturn and sombre as he had formerly been gay and jovial. The tradition may well be true that he saw at this time a vision of the Crucified, saying, ‘RamÓn, follow Me’: he himself in some lines of autobiography tells us of five such visions, though when they occurred is not certain. Be this as it may, he turned from his evil life and fixed his affections on God:

When I was grown and knew the world and its vanities, I began to do evil and entered on sin. Forgetting the true God I went after carnal things. But it pleased Jesus Christ in His great pity to present Himself to me five times as if crucified, that I might remember Him and set my love on Him, doing what I could that He might be known through all the world and the truth be taught concerning the great Trinity and the Incarnation. And thus I was inspired and moved by so great love, that I loved no other thing but that He should be honoured, and I began to do Him willing service.[1]

From the first, as these lines significantly bear evidence, Lull’s new ideals were directed towards specific objects. He was set upon the conversion of the Jews and Mohammedans who figured so largely in thirteenth-century Spain. And setting aside emotional methods as resolutely as the idea—so general then—of conversion by force, he began to ponder what he conceived to be worthy means of compassing his aim—a progressive and unanswerable appeal to the reason. A sermon heard on the Feast of St. Francis (October 4, 1266) supplied the spark which kindled Lull’s plans into action. He sold all his land, with the exception of a portion retained for himself and his family, gave up his position of seneschal in the royal palace, and retired first to a Cistercian monastery and later to Mount Randa, near Palma, living there a life of study and meditation with the object of fitting himself to become a missionary to the Moslems.

The record of Lull’s life in Mount Randa is one not only of prayer, fast and vigil, ecstasy and vision, but of the study of Arabic and the elaboration of his scheme of a book which was to illuminate and convert the world. He believed this Art General to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Once it was sufficiently developed he turned in his practical way to means by which its study could be advanced. To King James II of Majorca were explained the scholar’s vast plans for the conversion of Islam; the King submitted them to one Bertram de Berengario, a professor of theology, and, when satisfied of their orthodoxy, endowed a college in Miramar for the training in sciences and languages of thirteen Franciscan missionaries to the Saracens (1275). Thus one part of Lull’s ideals was realised.

For a short time he remained at Miramar, teaching Arabic and the Art General. But before long we find him lecturing on the Art in Montpellier, which was part of the Majorcan kingdom. Then he is at Rome, where his enterprise is sanctioned by the Pope, and a School of Oriental Languages founded. He spends two years lecturing in the University of Paris, learning all the time as well as teaching. A college is founded in Navarre through King Philip of France. Lull goes farther afield—to Palestine, Egypt, Ethiopia and Morocco. In 1282 we read of his being back in France again, at Perpignan. Success continues to attend him, but not in a measure that can satisfy his ardent soul. Ever burning for more triumphs, he resolves at last to put the lukewarmness of Europe to shame, and to go himself to Africa as an Apostle of the Faith.

After some delay (the chronology of this period is very uncertain[2]) he set sail from Genoa, and landed in Tunis about 1291. Professing only a desire to learn the truth—to convert or be converted as events might prove—he began to debate in public with the Moslems, following his own logical method. He was only too successful. Many of the infidels, attracted by his reasoning, embraced Christianity; but the monarch began to fear for his throne, and before long Lull found himself in prison. Condemned to death for his preaching, he was reprieved by the intercession of a Saracen of influence, and banished from Africa, leaving Tunis amid insults and blows, on pain of being stoned to death should he ever return. For a time he evaded his enemies and remained in the country, but a year of this life showed him its futility, and he returned to Naples. Here he remained writing and teaching for a time; then he went to Rome (c. 1296), attempting unsuccessfully to obtain sanction for new missionary projects; again we find him in Genoa, next in Paris (1297-8), back in Majorca, once more in Genoa (1300), then on a new campaign in Cyprus and Armenia (1300-2), back via Rhodes and Malta, where he made stays, to Genoa and Paris (1303), Palma, Barcelona, Lyon and Montpellier (1305).[3] Here he saw both the King and Pope Clement V. With the former he planned a crusade for the Holy Land, but the latter, much occupied in other affairs, gave him no support.

Everywhere and always evangelisation filled his thoughts. No difficulty or objection, as the records of these years show, could curb his zeal; the thought of imprisonment or torture made no difference to his plans, while to die a martyr’s death when his work should be done was his great ambition. ‘Foolish Lover,’ says an imaginary opponent to him in his little classic, ‘why dost thou weary the body, throw away thy wealth and leave the joys of this world, and go about as an outcast of the people?’ And his reply is the simplest imaginable. ‘To honour my Beloved’s Name, for He is hated and dishonoured by more men than honour and love Him.’

In 1306 Lull determined to make an attempt to preach once more in Africa. At the outset he was successful, founding a school at Bona, where he first went. But on proceeding to Bugia, and beginning to preach in the market-place, he was promptly arrested, all but stoned by the crowds, summarily tried, and imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon with a view to later execution. Something in Lull’s personality, however (or, as some say, the pleas of certain Catalan and Genoese inhabitants), saved him once more; he was even allowed the privilege of a disputation with a Mohammedan champion, and eventually was exiled again in the same year of his leaving Italy.

The ship in which he was returning suffered shipwreck off Pisa, where he landed and remained for two years. In Pisa he wrote a book incorporating his memorable dispute with the Saracen apologist and other experiences in Africa. But it would seem that these experiences had been modifying his belief in intellectual conversion, for he approached Pope Clement V again with proposals for a new crusade. Enthusiasm for crusades, however, was a thing of the past, and neither the Pope nor Italy as a whole gave the scheme any support.

So this dauntless fighter went once more to Paris, which at that time was in the grip of Averroism, and hence provided a new field for missionary effort. Seventy-three years old as he was, Lull lectured, wrote, and taught unceasingly against the infidel philosophy, and won for himself fresh glory, accomplishing in Europe what only physical force withheld from him in Africa. King Philip, his royal admirer, gave him the name of docteur illuminÉ, by which, in one or another of its translations, he is still known to-day.

The Council of Vienne (1311-2) gave Lull another of those opportunities which he was never slow to take. The picture of the venerable missionary at the feet of the Head of the Church, pouring forth his impassioned pleas for those enterprises which authority so hesitated to allow, is indeed a moving one. He painted the glory of recovering the Holy Places, the plight of the Christians in Armenia, and the peril which the Greeks were in from the Turks—themes not exhausted even after seven hundred years. These, however, were but a few of Lull’s representations. The number of his requests which were granted was relatively small, but among them was a wider scheme than any yet sanctioned for a system of colleges for the teaching of missionary languages. This earnest of the continuance of his work must have encouraged beyond measure one who, in the natural course of life, was nearing the end of his activities.

Perhaps it was this, indeed, which inspired him to cross once more to Africa, to brave its terrors and to suffer martyrdom for the Faith at last—as from his conversion he had wished—if it might be the will of God. And the will of God it proved to be. On August 14, 1314, he set out from Palma for Bugia. On his arrival he began his work less openly than before, and for some months contrived to preach secretly, make conversions and confirm the faithful of earlier days. He passed to Tunis, where he had further success, but for some unknown reason was compelled to return to Bugia. Success made him bold. Feeling perhaps that the hour of supreme effort—even if it meant the supreme sacrifice—had come, he threw prudence to the winds, assembled a vast concourse, and, proclaiming himself that same RamÓn who had formerly been condemned in Bugia, he preached once more the faith of the Saviour. This time the crowd broke loose, and not only clamoured for Lull’s death, but took him out of the city and stoned him (June 30, 1315), even as a Jewish mob had stoned the first of Christian martyrs.

Various accounts are given of his burial. It seems that two Genoese merchants begged his body and carried it to Majorca, but some versions have it that a great pyramid of light aided them in their search for it, that life remained in the body until it reached Palma, and that adverse winds forced the vessel, which was making for Genoa, to land at Lull’s birthplace. Here the body was received with the greatest sorrow and mourning, and buried with due solemnity in the sacristy of the convent of St. Francis of Assisi.

RamÓn Lull was beatified by Pius IX. The title-page of his great romance, Blanquerna, calls him ‘Doctor illuminate, Martyr unconquered of Jesus Christ, Master universal in all arts and sciences.’ But in his own country Lull receives the simpler homage of a saint.

II

The foregoing sketch, for all its brevity, will have emphasised more forcibly than much argument the practical and the scholarly sides of Lull’s temperament. We shall say nothing here of the four hundred and eighty-six treatises[4] which he is known to have written, nor of the thousands of other works, no longer extant if indeed they ever existed, with which he is credited. Nor is there need to describe his system and doctrine, at once scholastic and popular in character. The Libre de Amich e Amat, which is here translated, is purely a mystical work, and this essay is concerned with the mystical side of Lull’s mind, so wonderfully illumined by the flame which burnt through his long life of self-sacrifice.

The Book of the Lover and the Beloved takes us from the African preachings and the disputations of the Sorbonne to those long night-watches and days of retreat which must always have accompanied them, but which we are apt to forget in contemplating that form of activity which the world counts greatest. Or the thoughts which the Book gives us may first have come to the young convert in the solitude of his monastery and the retreat of Mount Randa. RossellÓ, who some sixty years ago first published Lull’s poems, interprets a passage from Blanquerna as autobiographical. It may well be so.

Being then in his hermitage he would rise at midnight, and, opening the windows of his cell, would fall to contemplating the heavens and the stars, and praying with all possible devotion, that his soul might be fixed upon God alone.... After long contemplation and much weeping, his custom was to enter the church and ring for mattins, and when his deacon appeared, to help him say them. At daybreak he celebrated Mass with devotion, and spoke of God with his deacon, that on God he might set his love. And as they talked together of God and His works, they both wept for the greatness of the devotion which their argument inspired in them. Then the deacon went into the garden and busied himself with the cultivation of the trees in it, while Blanquerna left the church to recreate his mind which was wearied by the work he had done, to lift his eyes to the hills, and to let them rest on the plains beneath. Feeling rested at last, he would betake himself again to meditation and prayer, and the reading of Holy Scripture or the great book of Contemplation, and so he would be occupied until the hours of Terce, Sext and Nones.... After this he dined ... and went into the garden, visited the spring, or walked in the places he loved most, afterwards giving himself up for a while to sleep in order to gather strength for the labours of the night. On awaking he said vespers with the deacon, and then remained alone, thinking on what pleased him most and was fittest preparation for his hours of prayer. After sunset, he went up to the terrace, and there remained long in devout meditation, his eyes fixed on the heavens and the stars, discoursing with himself on the greatness of God and man’s inconstancies. In this state he remained until he retired to rest, and such was the fervour of his contemplation that even upon his bed he found himself in mystic converse with the All-Powerful.

Such a background as this we must almost of necessity assume in a life at once so active and so spiritual. No doubt Lull was able often to spend weeks, or at the least days, in some sacred retreat, and draw from God and from Nature strength and inspiration for his endless tasks. To these seasons of refreshing, it may be supposed, we owe his mystical writings.

Of Lull’s verses many are narrative or doctrinal: the hymns entitled ‘Hours of Our Lady St. Mary’ (Horas de Nostra Dona Sancta Maria), for example; the ‘Sin of Adam’ (Lo Peccat de n’Adam), written ‘at the request of the King of Majorca’; the short ‘Song of RamÓn’ (Lo Cant de RamÓn), and above all the ‘Medicine for Sin’ (Medicina de Peccat) and the purely didactic verse ‘Application’ of the Art General. The collection of a hundred songs on the Names of God (Els Cent Noms de Deu), on the other hand, is more mystical than doctrinal, and suggests, in matter as well as in title, the mystical treatise ‘Of the Names of Christ’ (De los Nombres de Cristo) written almost exactly three hundred years later by the Salamancan friar, Luis de LeÓn. Mystical too, as well as autobiographical, is the dialogue poem El Desconort, ‘made in his old age,’ though its spirit is that of disillusion at the refusal of those in high places to help forward his schemes of evangelisation. But neither of these has either the strength or the beauty of the collection of prose poems here translated, a collection which forms part of the novel-like Blanquerna, Lull’s chief contribution to mystical literature.

His chief contribution it is, mainly, though not entirely, by virtue of the sections entitled the Art of Contemplation and our Book of the Lover and the Beloved. Blanquerna, as a whole, is a somewhat fantastic, and in places extravagant, religious romance—a religious Utopia, if parallels to it must be found, or a Catholic Pilgrim’s Progress. The story is of a certain gallant and wealthy youth named Evast, who marries a beautiful and virtuous girl called Aloma. They live together in great piety and happiness, but have no children, until Aloma in her sorrow prays to God, and a boy, Blanquerna, is born to them. The child is brought up with great care, and in the fear of God; and when his father sees that he is a youth of discretion, he resolves to devote himself to the religious life. Aloma, however, disapproves, saying that they can both serve God best in the state to which He has called them; they decide in the end to lead lives of greater austerity in their home, and to give Blanquerna the oversight of the household. But, on proposing this to the boy, they find that he has resolved to become a hermit.

Aloma is grieved, and endeavours to marry Blanquerna to a beautiful girl called Cana. Blanquerna’s reply is to persuade Cana to become a nun, while he himself retires to the desert to carry out his resolve. The story then describes circumstantially and with some prolixity the lives of Evast and Aloma after Blanquerna has left them; it passes on to Cana, who eventually becomes abbess of her convent; and finally, after some long digressions upon convent life, to the later history of Blanquerna, which occupies the rest of the romance.

The second book of Blanquerna deals with the hero’s life before he is ordained priest and rises to the rank of abbot in the monastery which he has entered. A digression follows, entitled ‘The Book of Ave Maria,’ purporting to be an account of the devotions to Our Lady which the hero established. The third book presents him as a bishop, and the fourth as pope.

The various religious ideals presented by Lull in succession lead up to the great ideal of his life: the evangelisation of the world. Blanquerna’s supreme aim as pope is to strive ‘that all infidels and schismatics may be brought into the union of the Holy Catholic Faith.’ His cardinals are quaintly named after the clauses of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, and every clause is expounded so as to illustrate the activity which the Church should show in converting the heathen.

To the court of the Pope comes at length a jester,—one RamÓn the Fool,—none other, of course, than Lull himself. ‘I would be as a fool,’ he says, ‘to do reverence and honour to Jesus Christ, and by reason of my exceeding love I would know no measure in my speech.’ Thus disguised, the author can write much which he might not otherwise have dared to put into words. And above all he can deliver himself of the shame he feels because the Head of the Church will grant so little aid to those who aim at following Christ’s last recorded command to convert all nations.

The story ends with the decision of Blanquerna, the pope now grown old in the service of the Church and the conversion of the heathen, to renounce his high office, retire to a hermitage, and devote his last days to contemplation and prayer. His new life is described in detail, and it is interwoven with this description that we come upon the Book of the Lover and the Beloved and the Art of Contemplation.

The former is by far the simpler and more appealing of the two, the Art of Contemplation being considerably longer and full of doctrinal teaching. It is, nevertheless, still read, less for its didactic passages than for its close relation with the whole romance, its mystical aspect, and in particular its prayers, which are of great beauty. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved is mystical throughout. It was written, the author himself declares, ‘that the hearts of men might be moved to true contrition, their eyes to abundance of tears, and their wills and understandings to loftier flights in the contemplation of God.’ How well it attains its object, and how truly it reflects the mystic’s being, the reader must judge.

III

We have no wish to add to these few notes a lengthy commentary upon the substance of a book which, probably for the first time, is accessible to those who read only English. Scholars have debated over Lull’s probable debt to sufism, on the one hand, and, on the other, his influence upon the long line of mystics who have followed him. There is much still to be said upon these and other topics, much that will throw fresh light on Spain and Spanish mysticism both. But in this essay enough has been said of Lull’s life and works to form the indispensable prelude to his Book. For the present, therefore, we prefer to stand back, and allow Lull’s ardent spirit to work its miracles still. Work them it surely must. Writing in his native ‘catalan-provenzal,’ that he might appeal, not to learned men, but to the people, by the people he is read still. He needs none of the ‘Expositions,’ such as were written in his own age and as late as the seventeenth century. Here and there a passage confuses the modern mind by its mediÆval subtleties; or the frequent references to the will, understanding, and memory (so common in most of the mystics) may puzzle the simple reader until he has learned to interpret them. But the vast majority of the three hundred and sixty-six ‘verses,’ put together to be read one on each day of the year, may still so be read. They speak to the twentieth century as clearly, picturesquely, and forcibly as they spoke to the thirteenth. Have we perhaps even more need of their message?They speak of elementals. Like his great successors St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, Lull knows no Master but his Beloved, Jesus Christ; he surpasses them perhaps in this, that he is never unmindful of the world his Beloved came to save. His is no cloistered love. He could never say, with St. John of the Cross, ‘Live in the world as though there were in it but God and thy soul.’ Ringing for ever in his ears is the Beloved’s last command.

Never was ‘Love’s regal dalmatic’ worn with more grace and fitness than by this ‘jester,’ this ‘fool of love.’ It is no compliment to Lull to call him, as the great scholar MenÉndez Pelayo does, a ‘Spanish Jacopone da Todi.’ Jacopone, it is true, sang of love with unsurpassable fervour:

But Lull, who, like Jacopone, owed most of his fervour, under God, to St. Francis, has a note of his own, no less deep, no less pure. His key is perhaps in that eloquent definition, which has been slightly expanded in translation that the full force of every phrase may be felt:

‘What meanest thou by love?’ said the Beloved. And the Lover answered: ‘It is to bear on one’s heart the sacred marks and the sweet words of the Beloved. It is to long for Him with desire and with tears. It is boldness. It is fervour. It is fear. It is the desire for the Beloved above all things. It is that which causes the Lover to grow faint when he hears the Beloved’s praises. It is that in which I die daily, and in which is all my will.’

Lull might well have written, as did a late Franciscan, John of the Angels, of the ‘Triumphs of the Love of God.’

Love impels him to tread the Mystic Way ‘in search of his Beloved.’ Much of his Book, therefore, deals with the Mystic Life. But it has none of the exclusiveness of the Living Flame of Love and the Spiritual Canticle. There are passages for the beginner as well as for the proficient, parables in three lines for the plain man, sermons in phrases, reflections which, by their very simplicity, kindle the devotion of the wayfaring man as he reads them. As we read the brief records of imaginary conversations between the Lover and ‘those who asked him concerning his Beloved,’ we can imagine ourselves in some African coast-town where the stranger who has just landed is being pressed, by the surging crowd which surrounds him, to give reasons for his faith. The calm and confident answers supply the secret of Lull’s power.

Then we come upon some quaintly-worded, paradoxical phrase which only reflection will illumine and meditation make real. And we know that we are following in the path of Lull when he composed his treatise. For it was the fruit, not of subtleties, but of silence. ‘He would engage in prayer,’ runs the preface, ‘and meditate upon God and His virtues, after which he would write down the outcome of his contemplation.’ And again, more concretely: ‘At midnight he arose, looked out upon the heavens and the stars, and cast away from him all thoughts of the world.’

So, between meditation and prayer, he wrote this masterpiece in little, signed it with his Beloved’s Sign, and sent it out to a world which he longed to save. It has been potent in the past, and we may believe that it will be so again. For it is as eternal and universal in its appeal as the Ideal Life which it extols. Nurtured by experience, watered by faith, it is rooted and grounded in love.