The 13th-century ‘thinking machine’ of Ramón

Llull
09.22.2016
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Books
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Occult
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Jorge Luis Borges
Ramón Llull

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_13th_century_thinking_machine_of_ramon_ll
ull

Ramón Llull, via Alchetron. The ribbon in his mouth says Lux mea est ipse dominus,
“My light is the Lord himself”

There’s an exhibition at Barcelona’s CCCB called “The Thinking Machine: Ramon Llull
and the ars combinatoria,” up through December 11. Including work by Arnold
Schönberg, Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, Leibniz, Italo Calvino, John Cage, and
Salvador Dalí, the show makes its case for the influence of the Catalan philosopher
Ramón Llull (1232-1316, sometimes anglicized “Raymond Lully”), who might be
credited with inventing the first computer, or its primitive ancestor.

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 via inexhibit.com

I first became aware of Llull and his contraption in Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-
Fictions, which reprints “Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine,” an article Borges wrote for
El Hogar Magazine in 1937. Borges gives the most lucid description of the machine I’m
aware of, starting with its simplest, two-dimensional form, a circle divided nine times:

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It is a schema or diagram of the attributes of God. The letter A, at the center, signifies the
Lord. Along the circumference, the letter B stands for goodness, C for greatness, D for
eternity, E for power, F for wisdom, G for volition, H for virtue, I for truth, and K for
glory. The nine letters are equidistant from the center, and each is joined to all the others
by chords or diagonal lines. The first of these features means that all of these attributes
are inherent; the second, that they are systematically interrelated in such a way as to
affirm, with impeccable orthodoxy, that glory is eternal or that eternity is glorious; that
power is true, glorious, good, great, eternal, powerful, wise, free and virtuous, or
benevolently great, greatly eternal, eternally powerful, powerfully wise, wisely free,
freely virtuous, virtuously truthful, etc., etc.

I want my readers to grasp the full magnitude of this etcetera. Suffice it to say that it
embraces a number of combinations far greater than this page can record. The fact that
they are all entirely futile—the fact that, for us, to say that glory is eternal is as rigorously
null and void as to say that eternity is glorious—is of only secondary interest. This
motionless diagram, with its nine capital letters distributed among nine compartments and

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linked by a star and some polygons, is already a thinking machine. It was natural for its
inventor—a man, we must not forget, of the thirteenth century—to feed it with a subject
matter that now strikes us as unrewarding. We now know that the concepts of goodness,
greatness, wisdom, power, and glory are incapable of engendering an appreciable
revelation. We (who are basically no less naive than Llull) would load the machine
differently, no doubt with the words Entropy, Time, Electrons, Potential Energy, Fourth
Dimension, Relativity, Protons, Einstein. Or with Surplus Value, Proletariat, Capitalism,
Class Struggle, Dialectical Materialism, Engels.

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Then, Borges moves on to the more elaborate version of Llull’s thinking machine—the
one with three revolving disks, illustrated below:

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If a mere circle subdivided into nine compartments can give rise to so many
combinations, what wonders may we expect from three concentric, manually revolving
disks made of wood or metal, each with fifteen or twenty compartments? This thought
occurred to the remote Ramón Llull on his red and zenithal island of Mallorca, and he
designed his guileless machine. The circumstances and objectives of this machine no
longer interest us, but its guiding principle—the methodical application of chance to the
resolution of a problem—still does.

[~snip]

Let us select a problem at random: the elucidation of the “true” color of a tiger. I give
each of Llull’s letters the value of a color, I spin the disks, and I decipher that the
capricious tiger is blue, yellow, black, white, green, purple, orange, and grey, or
yellowishly blue, blackly blue, whitely blue, greenly blue, purplishly blue, bluely blue,
etc. Adherents of [Llull’s] Ars magna remained undaunted in the face of this torrential
ambiguity; they recommended the simultaneous deployment of many combinatory
machines, which (according to them) would gradually orient and rectify themselves
through “multiplications” and “eliminations.” For a long while, many people believed
that the certain revelation of all the world’s enigmas lay in the patient manipulation of
these disks.

http://ldysinger.stjohnsem.edu/@texts2/1276_lull/01_lull-introd.htm#ARS_MAGNA_

Bl. RAMON LULL (also Llull) (c.1233–c.1315)

lay missionary
and philosopher Third-order Franciscan, beatified by Pius
IX. Of well-to-do parents, Llull was born in Majorca,
which had recently been recovered after three cents. under
Islamic rule. He was educated as a knight and became
seneschal to the son of James I of Aragon, later James II of
Majorca. He married and had two children. At the age of 30
he had a vision of Christ crucified, which led him to devote
himself wholly to His service. His chief mission was the
conversion of Islam. On the advice of St Raymond of
Peñafort he remained in Majorca studying Arabic and
Christian thought for nine years. During this time he
composed his first work, the ‘Book of Contemplation’; it
was written in Arabic and translated into Catalan. This

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period of his life culminated in a vision on Mt. Randa
(c.1274), in which the form in which he was to set out his
ideas was revealed to him; he worked this out in his ‘Art of
Finding Truth’. In 1276 he persuaded James II to set up a
place of study at Miramar in Majorca where 13 Franciscans
could study oriental languages.
The next decade of his life is obscure. From 1287 onwards,
when he made his first visit to Paris, he was engaged in
constant travel, visiting the courts of France, Aragon, and
the Pope, trying to win support for his plans for converting
Islam, elaborating his ideas, and writing a large number of
books and tracts. On three occasions he went on missions
in N. Africa. His one practical success was the decree of the
Council of Vienne (1311–12) establishing studia of oriental
languages in five universities. The often repeated statement
that he died a martyr’s death at Bougie in N. Africa, stoned
by the populace, does not rest on any contemporary
evidence.

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ARS MAGNA

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 Lull’s basic aim in his writings was the conversion of
Islam and of the Jews, ‘that in the whole world there may
not be more than one language, one belief, one faith’
(Blanquerna, c. 94). With this aim he elaborated an
approach by which he hoped to convince them by rational
argument, without recourse to the authority of Scripture. In
his Art (in its final elaboration, Ars generalis ultima,
finished in 1308), he attempted to relate ‘all forms of
knowledge (including religious belief) to the manifestations
of God’s “Dignities” [i.e. Divine Attributes] in the universe,
taking for its point of departure the monotheistic vision
common to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and their
acceptance of a broadly Neoplatonic exemplarist world-

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picture, and arguing … analogically up and down “the
ladder of being” ’ (R. D. F. Pring-Mill).
In his exposition Llull made extensive use of diagrams
and of the representation of philosophical terms by letters
of the alphabet, which, rightly combined, could, he held,
provide the solution to any problem. He had no training in
the scholastic theology of the universities and his works
seemed difficult and strange to many, but for a few they
had a strong attraction, and his writings were widely
diffused. Among those whom he influenced was Nicholas
of Cusa.
As a mystic Llull has been considered the forerunner of
St Teresa and St John of the Cross. His conception of the
mystic life centres in the contemplation of the Divine
perfections, which is achieved by the purification of
memory, understanding, and will, and results in action for
the greater glory of God. He was one of the most ardent
defenders of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle
Ages. His cult, which developed soon after his death, was
hindered by the ecclesiastical authorities owing to the
difficulties in his teaching, but it was approved by Pius IX
in 1847. Interest in him has been steadily growing in recent
times.
Opera Latina, ed. F. Stegmüller (1–5, Majorca, 1959–
67); cont. by H. Harada, OFM, and others (CCCM 32–9;
75–80, 111–15, 180A, 180B, 180C, 181–2, etc.; 1975 ff.).
Obres, ed. M. Obrador y Bennásar and others (Majorca,
1906 ff.). Obres essencials, ed. M. Batllori, SJ (2 vols.,
Barcelona, 1957–[60]), incl. Life. Liber Predicationis
Contra Judaeos, ed. J. M. Millás Vallicrosa (Madrid and

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Barcelona, 1957). Eng. trs. from the Catalan by E. A. Peers
of his Blanquerna: A Thirteenth-Century Romance (London [1926]), The Book of the Lover and
the Beloved (ibid., 1923), The Art of Contemplation (ibid., 1925), The Tree of Life (ibid., 1926)
and The Book of the Beasts (ibid., 1927). Eng. tr. of Selected Works, with valuable introds., by A.
Bonner (2 vols., Princeton, NJ [1985]). The principal authority for his life is a contemporary Life
surviving in Lat. and Catalan. Lat. text ed. B. de Gaiffier, SJ, in Anal. Boll. 48 (1930), pp. 130–
78, with refs. E. A. Peers, Ramón Lull: A Biography (1929). E. W. Platzeck, Raimund Lull:
Sein Leben, seine Werke, die Grundlagen seines Denkens (Bibliotheca
Franciscana, 5–6; Düsseldorf, 1962–4). J. N. Hillgarth, Ramón Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-
Century France (Oxford Warburg Studies, 1971). M. D. Johnston, The Spiritual Logic of Ramon
Llull (Oxford, 1987); id., The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull (New York and Oxford,
1996). Raymond Lulle et le Pays d’Oc, with introd. by M.-H. Vicaire (Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 22
[1987]). E. Longpré, OFM, in DTC 9 (pt. 1; 1926), cols. 1072–141, s.v., with full bibl. R. D. F.
Pring-Mill in EB (1968 edn.), 13, pp. 173 f., s.v. ‘Llull, Ramon’; A. Bonner and C. Lohr in Dict.
Sp. 13 (1988), cols. 171–87, s.v. ‘Raymond Lulle’.

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