Chapter 5 - Spiritual and Temporal Power in Raymond Llull’s Arbor scientiae

Summary

RAMON LLULLHAD a complex and multi-faceted thirteenth-century intellectual profile, which gave him an eminent position in the cultural history of the Late Middle Ages, so much so that his scholastic accolade was Doctor Illuminatus. He was simultaneously a poet who experienced court life, a man of letters attentive to social issues, a philosopher, and Christian theologian who tried by means of reason to prove the truth of faith, a mystic, a Christ apologist, a scientific writer, and an encyclopaedist who enquired into the laws of creation. Mixing these profiles, he was able to suggest a specific way to understand and promote the Christian ideology adapted to contemporary human society through what he called the “Tree of Science.”

The Importance of the Arbor scientiae within Llull's Literary Output

The events in Ramon Llull's life are suffused with his strong character, his constant involvement in the frenetic evangelization activity which took him travelling untiringly around the Mediterranean, prompted him to form personal bonds with popes and sovereigns, and generated an extraordinary volume of work (around two hundred and fifty writings are mentioned) in Latin, Catalan, and Arabic. In the face of such a vast volume of work critics generally identify a series of works considered especially representative of the author's thought and focus on them, thus applying a selection process in the light of the fact that it would otherwise be problematical to deal with the full range of ideological and thematic issues appearing in such a rich corpus. This explains why Llull's Arbor scientiae has not been accorded the attention paid, for example, to Libre de contemplació, Libre d’Evast e d’Aloma e de Blanquerna, Doctrina pueril, Libre de les meravelles, his work promoting the Crusades and, his work on logic, the Ars magna. The presence, however, in European libraries of a considerable number of manuscript versions of Arbor (in addition to Latin, versions in exist in, sometimes incomplete, Catalan, French, Castilian, and even Hebrew) is indicative of the fact that in the past this work must have reached a wide readership.