Ramon Llull

When I was at school, the Middle Ages were best known as the age of the Crusades, a period of prolonged warfare and usually with no clear end. Richard Coeur de Lion, king of England at the end of the 12^th century was perhaps the best known warrior from England and France (he ruled half of it). In 1212 the Castilians won a great victory at Las Navas de Tolosa and marched into Andalusia, to conquer the second city of the Muslim world, Córdoba. And in 1229 Jaume of Aragon conquered Mallorca, although the earlier El Cid has perhaps caught the common imagination most through Charlton Heston’s role in the film of that name.

A common saying among Christians during the time of the Crusades was, “the only good Saracen is a dead Saracen”. Most of Christendom regarded force as the best way to deal with the Muslim threat. Evangelising them was virtually unheard of among Christians.

But one man stands out as different. Ramón Llull, born in 1232, was the son of one of those warriors who conquered Mallorca, but by the time he came of age fighting on the island was history and he saw conquest in terms of how many women he could seduce. A playboy of his time, he also became enamoured of love songs and ballads.

Then one hot summer’s day in 1263, somewhat like Paul on the road to Damascus, he began to have visions of Christ and was strangely converted and his lifetime goal from that day on was to see the ‘Infidel’ converted, not killed. He wrote many books on this subject and on other theological issues, covering a broad range of theology – not always appreciated by the establishment. And in addition to these works he continued to write about love, now attempting to demonstrate how much God loves the world.

In doing so, not only did he reach a much broader audience in his day, but he did so in a way not done for centuries, writing in the people’s language, in his case Catalan. He was thus the first person to write seriously in a Romance language and became the father of the Catalan language and in a sense of all European written languages.

Llull’s interest in converting the heathen was only matched by his desire to ‘rechristianise’ the ‘Christians’ of his time, considering them also subject to the rule of sin in their life.

Llull was greatly influenced by Francis of Assisi, a man whose attempts to win by love had won many hearts a century earlier. But Llull was also convinced that we can use apologetics to explain and demonstrate the truth of the gospel. Many of his works are aimed in this direction, although few modern Christians would actually share all his theology and arguments.

Today we who consider ourselves European Christians also need to take to heart the message and mission of Llull. We find ourselves again in a world which is on the verge – however much politicians attempt to deny it- of a crusading culture.

Christians are keen to defend our own interests, whether against the onslaught of atheism, or of Islam. We are fighting battles against discrimination and abortion at home and against the persecution of the Church abroad. These are indeed important issues and cannot be neglected. But we need to take a different view, seeing our fellow Europeans as people gripped by sin and in need of the salvation only repentance and faith in Christ can bring. And we need to see the need of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa in exactly the same way, people for whom Christ died, needing someone to tell them the Good News.

Llull was a man of great influence, working hard to persuade the leaders of his time, even though he never got real support and had almost no impact on the hearts of Muslims. His use of the Catalan language (as opposed to Latin) as a serious means of communication paved the way for the development of European languages – and perhaps therefore of the development of the European Nation States, each with its own language – or almost so. To this day, where a language is commonly shared, many other cultural attitudes and traditions are equally shared. Those lands which use more than one language are constantly feeling the strain, as is particularly noticeable at present in the Catalan situation within Spain.

But today his message about Islam again needs to be drawn to our attention, despite the difficulties this entails. To use the hippie slogan: Make Love, not War! And if you look beyond the headlines, you might well find that indeed Christ is being considered by many Muslims suffering the excesses of others in their part of the world.

It is my belief, O Christ, that the conquest of the Holy Land should be accomplished in no other way than as Thou and Thy apostles undertook to accomplish it — by love, by prayer, by tears, and by the offering up of their own lives. (Quote from Lull in The Modern Churchman (edition unknown) p. 331)

Lull worked hard to gain support for his ideas, although with scarce results. At the end of his life, Llull could also write:

I have laboured for forty-five years to gain over the shepherds of the Church and the princes of Europe to the common good of Christendom (Ibid p.332)

Perhaps we also need to take seriously the need to persuade our political and religious leaders of the possibilities of a different approach to Islam. Llull continued committed to the end to his cause. In 1315 Llull travelled to Tunis to preach the gospel, and the legend goes that he was killed at the hands of the ‘Saracens’. The truth is more likely that he made it home, albeit without much success for his efforts. He is buried in Mallorca.

Chris Mathieson, BA Hispanic Studies

Sources: Various unpublished documents, The Modern Churchman, (1911?) article – edition unknown, Wikipedia and TV Documentary in Catalan, 25^th November 2015.