ABSTRACT
Ramon lull was a missionary, burning with zeal to convert Moslems and Jews to Christianity. Born about 1234 in Majorca, he began life as a courtly troubadour but was converted to a life of missionary effort by a vision in which, so he believed, the great Art which bears his name was revealed to him. He was to write hundreds of books about the Art and to propagate it with tireless energy until his death in 1316. The Art was based on religious conceptions common to all the three great religions; that God is good, great, wise, and so on. The Lullian Arts are all founded on such divine attributes or Names. And they were also based on scientific conceptions then universally accepted, on the structure of the cosmos as understood in the Middle Ages, and particularly on the four elements in their combinations. The two assumptions of the Art, the religious basis in the Divine Names or attributes and the cosmological and elemental basis, were fused in the enormously complicated workings of its figures, and Lull firmly believed that if only unbelievers would sit down with Christian Lullists – they can be seen sitting together in rows under Lullian trees in early illustrations – to work the Lullian figures, their conversion would infallibly follow.
