TO THE

B E N E V O L E N T R E A D E R.

The Lullist Factions.

The persecutions of Llull.

An ornate woodcut drop cap 'C' begins the text, intricately decorated with foliate and scroll motifs.

Celebrated at all times has been the lawsuit and controversy between Ramon Llull original: "Raymundum Lullum"; a 13th-century Majorcan philosopher and mystic and the Peripatetic school Followers of Aristotle, driven by the sharpest skirmishes. Indeed, by those things which he promised in that Art which he calls Great and Inventive of Truth, he filled the world with such great admiration that there is scarcely any eager follower of such recondite learning found in the Academic wrestling-grounds who has not spent the powers of his intellect either in explaining or in refuting it. Some, having written vast commentaries upon it, believed—not without benefit to the Literary Republic The "Republic of Letters," the international community of scholars—that they had most deeply illuminated whatever was obscure and enveloped in Cimmerian darkness; yet they acted in such a way that they only added darkness to darkness. Certain others, swelling with a Thrasonic spirit Boastful or bragging, after the character Thraso in Roman comedy, boasted that they intimately mastered the Art rather than actually fulfilling it in practice. There were not lacking those who, since they either did not penetrate the more hidden recesses of the Art, or judged with difficulty that the Art could be converted to some human use desired until now, were driven headlong by an impulse of despair; they condemned the Author in public writings, exploded with a thousand kinds of reproaches, as if he were liable for the crime of imposture and false-craft original: "ψευδοτεχνίας" (pseudotechnias). This went so far, indeed, that his most celebrated dogma was torn apart into open factional divisions, finding many and noble patrons and most eager defenders of this teaching; but on the other hand, it found even more—I will not say followers of a new doctrine—but rather most haughty cavilers and sharpest antagonists. Those Lullists who follow the dogmas of the Author do not only extol him to the Heavens with marvelous titles of praise as a man full of holiness and religion—inasmuch as he led a certain exotic life, removed from all necessity of human fellowship, on Mount Randa—but they assert that there, absorbed in the contemplation of divine matters, he acquired this admirable kind of learning more truly by celestial light and the dictation of the Holy Spirit than by intense study or innate sagacity of mind and labor. On this account, they assert him to be all-knowing original: "πανεπίσημον" (panepisemon) and God-taught original: "θεοδίδακτον" (theodidakton); these things Nicolas Caussin A 17th-century Jesuit scholar, a supporter of Llull, pursues more fully in his life of the same, described in an elegant and polished style. Nevertheless, there arose in later times several "Aristarchuses" Severe critics, named after the Greek grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace of a more bitter mind, who, attacking this innocent man with harsher critical marks, pricked him in such unworthy ways that, beyond the sin of imposture and trickery, they were not ashamed to imprudently accuse him also of the nefarious crime of heresy and Necromancy. I, in so perplexed a...