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Translator: E. Allison Peers

THE BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

THE BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

TRANSLATED FROM THE CATALAN OF RAM?N LULL WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY

E. ALLISON PEERS

LONDON

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE

NEW YORK AND TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

PREFACE More than six centuries have passed since this little Majorcan classic was written, and, so far as I can find, it has never once been translated into English. Such an omission can only be explained by our comparative ignorance of the treasures of Spanish Mysticism, and perhaps in part by the fact that Lull wrote, not in Castilian, but in a little-known though beautiful idiom, that of Catalonia.

On the other hand, I have not allowed myself, through a desire to expound Lull's ideas, to substitute paraphrase for faithful and exact translation. Very few liberties have been taken with the text, and these only where a slight expansion or change of construction has served to bring out the meaning of an otherwise quite obscure word or phrase. Essentially, therefore, the reader has Lull's own vivid and forceful words, with the impediment of a foreign language removed.

E. ALLISON PEERS

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

The average man has seldom understood the Mystic. He conceives the Mystic Life, with its ceaseless spiritual activity, and its restlessness which knows no stay till it reaches its goal, as a life of tranquillity, if not of indolence and ease. He has no conception of what it really is, and for that, perhaps, he should not be blamed. But not content with misinterpreting the mystic's life, he presently becomes more daring; he asserts that mysticism is essentially 'unpractical,' and that one whose aim is to reach the state of Union with God must necessarily be as a fool in his relations with the world. Here the average man is grossly, inexcusably mistaken. His error has again and again been exposed, confuted, disproved by example after example to the contrary. Yet, for all that, it seems to thrive in the average mind.

Now, if the story of one man's career could suffice to destroy the mistaken idea that the mystic is an unpractical dreamer, that man would surely be the Majorcan Ram?n Lull, the 'Apostle of Africa.' Lull lived far back in the thirteenth century, not long after the days of St. Francis of Assisi, whose disciple he was. He gives us, as it were, a prevision of the splendours of that Golden Age of Mysticism which dawned for Spain three hundred years after his birth. His mystic writings--and especially his BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED--are full of the purest and noblest spirituality, compounded with the quintessence of love. 'If ye will have fire,' he cries, 'O ye that love, come light your lanterns at my heart.' His famous phrase, 'He who loves not lives not,' sums up his inspiration. Yet Lull was no cloistered visionary. His life is full of romance and adventure: so crowded with incident is it that many pages will not suffice even to summarise its principal happenings. His capacities showed the rare combination of scholar and man of affairs: he was both these, and he was also the man of God. To the service of his Master, for Whom alone he lived, and for Whom he died, Lull was able to bring the full and complete tribute of an efficient and active body, a superb mind, and an ardent, unconquerable spirit.

RAM?N LULL was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, on January 25, 1235. His father had taken part in the conquest of Majorca from the Saracens some six years earlier, and for his services had received the gift of an estate, which his son inherited. The boy was brought up as a page in the royal court of Majorca, and, in spite of a sound religious education and the interest and favour of the King, he had hardly reached years of discretion when he began to lead a careless and dissolute life. His biographers tell of how the King, to stop his degrading practices, married him to a certain D^a. Blanca Pica?y, but without thereby reforming him in the least. Lull was chiefly enamoured of a Genoese lady, so passionately that he dared one day to ride on horseback into the Church of St. Eulalia, where she was engaged in devotion. Eventually she herself arrested his intrigues. Receiving from him some gallant verses on the theme of her bosom, she called him into her presence, and, uncovering herself before him, disclosed a malignant cancer by which her breast was slowly being consumed.

This terrible shock marked the first stage in Lull's conversion. He went back to the palace another man--as taciturn and sombre as he had formerly been gay and jovial. The tradition may well be true that he saw at this time a vision of the Crucified, saying, 'Ram?n, follow Me': he himself in some lines of autobiography tells us of five such visions, though when they occurred is not certain. Be this as it may, he turned from his evil life and fixed his affections on God:

When I was grown and knew the world and its vanities, I began to do evil and entered on sin. Forgetting the true God I went after carnal things. But it pleased Jesus Christ in His great pity to present Himself to me five times as if crucified, that I might remember Him and set my love on Him, doing what I could that He might be known through all the world and the truth be taught concerning the great Trinity and the Incarnation. And thus I was inspired and moved by so great love, that I loved no other thing but that He should be honoured, and I began to do Him willing service.

From the first, as these lines significantly bear evidence, Lull's new ideals were directed towards specific objects. He was set upon the conversion of the Jews and Mohammedans who figured so largely in thirteenth-century Spain. And setting aside emotional methods as resolutely as the idea--so general then--of conversion by force, he began to ponder what he conceived to be worthy means of compassing his aim--a progressive and unanswerable appeal to the reason. A sermon heard on the Feast of St. Francis supplied the spark which kindled Lull's plans into action. He sold all his land, with the exception of a portion retained for himself and his family, gave up his position of seneschal in the royal palace, and retired first to a Cistercian monastery and later to Mount Randa, near Palma, living there a life of study and meditation with the object of fitting himself to become a missionary to the Moslems.

Everywhere and always evangelisation filled his thoughts. No difficulty or objection, as the records of these years show, could curb his zeal; the thought of imprisonment or torture made no difference to his plans, while to die a martyr's death when his work should be done was his great ambition. 'Foolish Lover,' says an imaginary opponent to him in his little classic, 'why dost thou weary the body, throw away thy wealth and leave the joys of this world, and go about as an outcast of the people?' And his reply is the simplest imaginable. 'To honour my Beloved's Name, for He is hated and dishonoured by more men than honour and love Him.'

In 1306 Lull determined to make an attempt to preach once more in Africa. At the outset he was successful, founding a school at Bona, where he first went. But on proceeding to Bugia, and beginning to preach in the market-place, he was promptly arrested, all but stoned by the crowds, summarily tried, and imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon with a view to later execution. Something in Lull's personality, however , saved him once more; he was even allowed the privilege of a disputation with a Mohammedan champion, and eventually was exiled again in the same year of his leaving Italy.

The ship in which he was returning suffered shipwreck off Pisa, where he landed and remained for two years. In Pisa he wrote a book incorporating his memorable dispute with the Saracen apologist and other experiences in Africa. But it would seem that these experiences had been modifying his belief in intellectual conversion, for he approached Pope Clement V again with proposals for a new crusade. Enthusiasm for crusades, however, was a thing of the past, and neither the Pope nor Italy as a whole gave the scheme any support.

The Council of Vienne gave Lull another of those opportunities which he was never slow to take. The picture of the venerable missionary at the feet of the Head of the Church, pouring forth his impassioned pleas for those enterprises which authority so hesitated to allow, is indeed a moving one. He painted the glory of recovering the Holy Places, the plight of the Christians in Armenia, and the peril which the Greeks were in from the Turks--themes not exhausted even after seven hundred years. These, however, were but a few of Lull's representations. The number of his requests which were granted was relatively small, but among them was a wider scheme than any yet sanctioned for a system of colleges for the teaching of missionary languages. This earnest of the continuance of his work must have encouraged beyond measure one who, in the natural course of life, was nearing the end of his activities.

Perhaps it was this, indeed, which inspired him to cross once more to Africa, to brave its terrors and to suffer martyrdom for the Faith at last--as from his conversion he had wished--if it might be the will of God. And the will of God it proved to be. On August 14, 1314, he set out from Palma for Bugia. On his arrival he began his work less openly than before, and for some months contrived to preach secretly, make conversions and confirm the faithful of earlier days. He passed to Tunis, where he had further success, but for some unknown reason was compelled to return to Bugia. Success made him bold. Feeling perhaps that the hour of supreme effort--even if it meant the supreme sacrifice--had come, he threw prudence to the winds, assembled a vast concourse, and, proclaiming himself that same Ram?n who had formerly been condemned in Bugia, he preached once more the faith of the Saviour. This time the crowd broke loose, and not only clamoured for Lull's death, but took him out of the city and stoned him , even as a Jewish mob had stoned the first of Christian martyrs.

Various accounts are given of his burial. It seems that two Genoese merchants begged his body and carried it to Majorca, but some versions have it that a great pyramid of light aided them in their search for it, that life remained in the body until it reached Palma, and that adverse winds forced the vessel, which was making for Genoa, to land at Lull's birthplace. Here the body was received with the greatest sorrow and mourning, and buried with due solemnity in the sacristy of the convent of St. Francis of Assisi.

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.

Aloma is grieved, and endeavours to marry Blanquerna to a beautiful girl called Cana. Blanquerna's reply is to persuade Cana to become a nun, while he himself retires to the desert to carry out his resolve. The story then describes circumstantially and with some prolixity the lives of Evast and Aloma after Blanquerna has left them; it passes on to Cana, who eventually becomes abbess of her convent; and finally, after some long digressions upon convent life, to the later history of Blanquerna, which occupies the rest of the romance.

To the court of the Pope comes at length a jester,--one Ram?n the Fool,--none other, of course, than Lull himself. 'I would be as a fool,' he says, 'to do reverence and honour to Jesus Christ, and by reason of my exceeding love I would know no measure in my speech.' Thus disguised, the author can write much which he might not otherwise have dared to put into words. And above all he can deliver himself of the shame he feels because the Head of the Church will grant so little aid to those who aim at following Christ's last recorded command to convert all nations.

They speak of elementals. Like his great successors St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, Lull knows no Master but his Beloved, Jesus Christ; he surpasses them perhaps in this, that he is never unmindful of the world his Beloved came to save. His is no cloistered love. He could never say, with St. John of the Cross, 'Live in the world as though there were in it but God and thy soul.' Ringing for ever in his ears is the Beloved's last command.

Never was 'Love's regal dalmatic' worn with more grace and fitness than by this 'jester,' this 'fool of love.' It is no compliment to Lull to call him, as the great scholar Men?ndez Pelayo does, a 'Spanish Jacopone da Todi.' Jacopone, it is true, sang of love with unsurpassable fervour:

Amor, amore, tanto tu me fai, Amore, amor, che nol posso patire; Amor, amore, tanto me te dai, Amor, amore, ben credo morire; Amore, amore, tanto preso m'hai, Amor, amore, famme 'n te transire; Amor, dolce languire, Amor mio desioso, Amor mio delettoso, Annegame en amore.

But Lull, who, like Jacopone, owed most of his fervour, under God, to St. Francis, has a note of his own, no less deep, no less pure. His key is perhaps in that eloquent definition, which has been slightly expanded in translation that the full force of every phrase may be felt:

'What meanest thou by love?' said the Beloved. And the Lover answered: 'It is to bear on one's heart the sacred marks and the sweet words of the Beloved. It is to long for Him with desire and with tears. It is boldness. It is fervour. It is fear. It is the desire for the Beloved above all things. It is that which causes the Lover to grow faint when he hears the Beloved's praises. It is that in which I die daily, and in which is all my will.'

Lull might well have written, as did a late Franciscan, John of the Angels, of the 'Triumphs of the Love of God.'

Then we come upon some quaintly-worded, paradoxical phrase which only reflection will illumine and meditation make real. And we know that we are following in the path of Lull when he composed his treatise. For it was the fruit, not of subtleties, but of silence. 'He would engage in prayer,' runs the preface, 'and meditate upon God and His virtues, after which he would write down the outcome of his contemplation.' And again, more concretely: 'At midnight he arose, looked out upon the heavens and the stars, and cast away from him all thoughts of the world.'

So, between meditation and prayer, he wrote this masterpiece in little, signed it with his Beloved's Sign, and sent it out to a world which he longed to save. It has been potent in the past, and we may believe that it will be so again. For it is as eternal and universal in its appeal as the Ideal Life which it extols. Nurtured by experience, watered by faith, it is rooted and grounded in love.

THE BOOK OF THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

FOOTNOTES:

Lull is said to have been enticed to England by King Edward I, who believed him to have the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. But this story has no sure foundation.

Less than half of these works are theological. The remainder deal with the most diverse subjects, such as metaphysics, logic, ethics, physics, medicine, mathematics, and chemistry.

Works of Lull himself.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Superscripted characters are preceded by a carat character: D^a.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

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