by José Higuera Rubio
This is the presentation of the philosophical and literary work of the polygraph of Mallorca, through five representations of the medieval worldview, according to today’s interpretation, which in an equal number of chapters present us with an abbreviated summary of the intellectual profile of one of the most relevant thinkers and writers of the Iberian-Mediterranean region during the 13th century.
The chapters are:
i.) The tree, this representation of knowledge is used as a device for the ordering and portability of knowledge. It is, by far, the most used symbol for learning in the medieval world and in early modern encyclopedias. Today, the tree is an algorithmic method of organizing data, as well as being used in the description of neural networks;
ii.) Chaos is a classical cosmological concept reworked by the medievals to show the compatibility between natural philosophy and the interpretation of Genesis. Llull uses it in this sense during the thirteenth century, an era characterized by a bitter dispute about the eternity of the world and the permanence of matter. Nowadays it is a physical-mathematical concept that structures those phenomena whose parameters are unexpected and irregular. It is a basic category in the prediction of events in biology, meteorology and physics;
iii.) Imagination, or the ability to present images, is a region of the brain in which, according to Aristotelian-Galenic sources, the meeting point between the sensory and imaginative processes of the soul is found. The medieval people appropriated this description of brain physiology and studied the role of imagination in abstraction. The projection of images is a characteristic of our time, given the large number of devices that use this procedure to transmit information;
iv.) Art for the Middle Ages, which follows the Isidorian definition transmitted by Latin sources, is the knowledge of a set of principles oriented towards an end. Art is similar to our current “applied science”, but in the case of Llull the ars starts from the contemplative life to settle in the philosophical-scientific formation, seeking the resolution of theological differences. The medieval conception of art constitutes, because of its purpose and the results proposed by Llull, a great challenge for our idea of innovation on which so much is reflected nowadays;
v.) Dialogue as a literary genre has been reworked by Ramon Llull in different contexts and represented with unusual characters – among whom he included himself – to stage the contact between cultures, nations and historical figures: from hermits to the elements, from meteorological forces to separate intelligences. The elaborate argumentative richness, for each character and dialogue, is introduced by a state of stunned and inclement confusion, denounced by Llull, tinged with unusual and parabolic moments of reflection.