Ramon Llull’s Art of Arts

Abstract Llull’s Vita tells us how his original vow to serve God involved a vehement desire to compose the “best book in the world against the errors of the infidels.” A subsequent inspiration, which the Vita attributes to divine revelation, transformed that simple goal into a much more ambitious project, the Great Universal Art of Finding Truth (par. 6, 14). Llull devoted the rest of his career to perfecting the methods of this idiosyncratic symbolico-dialectical system of argument. He recorded the phases of its development in several redactions of the Great Art itself, as well as in scores of other works applying its system to specialized topics of inquiry. A complete account of this massive project remains unwritten. The following summary offers a necessarily simplified explanation, designed chiefly to help my readers understand how the methods of the Great Art inform Llull’s accounts of the arts of eloquence. Ramon Llull’s Great Universal Art of Finding Truth synthesizes a vast range of techniques for private meditation, scriptural exegesis, and apologetic argument into a single system for “discovering” how all knowledge and being reveals divine truth. The general method of this system is comparison or analogy. The Great Art is “universal” and “finds truth” only in so far as it is capable of likening anything known to the Divine Word, which Llull regards as the exemplar of all wisdom.