The foregoing sketch, for all its brevity, will have emphasised more forcibly than much argument the practical and the scholarly sides of Lull’s temperament. We shall say nothing here of the four hundred and eighty-six treatises[4] which he is known to have written, nor of the thousands of other works, no longer extant if indeed they ever existed, with which he is credited. Nor is there need to describe his system and doctrine, at once scholastic and popular in character. The Libre de Amich e Amat, which is here translated, is purely a mystical work, and this essay is concerned with the mystical side of[12] Lull’s mind, so wonderfully illumined by the flame which burnt through his long life of self-sacrifice. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved takes us from the African preachings and the disputations of the Sorbonne to those long night-watches and days of retreat which must always have accompanied them, but which we are apt to forget in contemplating that form of activity which the world counts greatest. Or the thoughts which the Book gives us may first have come to the young convert in the solitude of his monastery and the retreat of Mount Randa. Rosselló, who some sixty years ago first published Lull’s poems, interprets a passage from Blanquerna as autobiographical. It may well be so.
Being then in his hermitage he would rise at midnight, and, opening the windows of his cell, would fall to contemplating the heavens and the stars, and praying with all possible devotion, that his soul might be fixed upon God alone.... After long contemplation and much weeping, his custom was to enter the church and ring for mattins, and when his deacon appeared, to help him say them. At daybreak he celebrated Mass with devotion, and spoke of God with his deacon, that on God he might set his love. And as they talked together of God and His works, they both wept for the greatness of the devotion which their argument inspired in them. Then the deacon went into the garden and busied himself with the cultivation of the trees in it, while Blanquerna left the church to recreate his mind which was wearied by the work he had done, to lift his eyes to the hills, and to let them rest on the plains beneath. Feeling rested at last, he would betake himself again to meditation and prayer, and the reading[13] of Holy Scripture or the great book of Contemplation, and so he would be occupied until the hours of Terce, Sext and Nones.... After this he dined ... and went into the garden, visited the spring, or walked in the places he loved most, afterwards giving himself up for a while to sleep in order to gather strength for the labours of the night. On awaking he said vespers with the deacon, and then remained alone, thinking on what pleased him most and was fittest preparation for his hours of prayer. After sunset, he went up to the terrace, and there remained long in devout meditation, his eyes fixed on the heavens and the stars, discoursing with himself on the greatness of God and man’s inconstancies. In this state he remained until he retired to rest, and such was the fervour of his contemplation that even upon his bed he found himself in mystic converse with the All-Powerful.
Such a background as this we must almost of necessity assume in a life at once so active and so spiritual. No doubt Lull was able often to spend weeks, or at the least days, in some sacred retreat, and draw from God and from Nature strength and inspiration for his endless tasks. To these seasons of refreshing, it may be supposed, we owe his mystical writings.
Of Lull’s verses many are narrative or doctrinal: the hymns entitled ‘Hours of Our Lady St. Mary’ (Horas de Nostra Dona Sancta Maria), for example; the ‘Sin of Adam’ (Lo Peccat de n’Adam), written ‘at the request of the King of Majorca’; the short ‘Song of Ramón’ (Lo Cant de Ramón), and above all the ‘Medicine for Sin’ (Medicina de Peccat) and[14] the purely didactic verse ‘Application’ of the Art General. The collection of a hundred songs on the Names of God (Els Cent Noms de Deu), on the other hand, is more mystical than doctrinal, and suggests, in matter as well as in title, the mystical treatise ‘Of the Names of Christ’ (De los Nombres de Cristo) written almost exactly three hundred years later by the Salamancan friar, Luis de León. Mystical too, as well as autobiographical, is the dialogue poem El Desconort, ‘made in his old age,’ though its spirit is that of disillusion at the refusal of those i............