Hence, after having constructed a device (quasi-electronic, we might be tempted to say) like the Ars, which is supposed to be capable of resolving any question all by itself, Llull calls into question its output on the basis of a datum of experience (external to the Ars). The Ars is designed to convert Averroistic infidels on the basis of a healthy reason, shared by every human being (of whom it is the model); but it is clear that part of this healthy reason is the conviction that if the world were eternal it could not be good.
Llull’s Ars seduced posterity who saw it as a mechanism for exploring the vast number of possible connections between one being and another, between beings and principles, beings and questions, vices and virtues. A combinatory system without controls, however, was capable of producing the principles of any theology whatsoever, whereas Llull intends the Ars to be used to convert infidels to Christianity. The principles of faith and a well-ordered cosmology (independently of the rules of the Ars) must temper the incontinence of the combinatorial system.
We must first bear in mind that Llull’s logic comes across as a logic of first, not second, intentions, that is, a logic of our immediate apprehension of things and not of our concepts of things. Llull repeats in various of his works that, if metaphysics considers things outside the mind while logic considers their mental being, the Ars considers them from both points of view. In this sense, the Ars produces surer conclusions than those of logic: “Logicus facit conclusiones cum duabus praemissis, generalis autem artista huius artis cum mixtione principiorum et regularum.… Et ideo potest addiscere artista de hac arte uno mense, quam logicus de logica un anno” (“The logician arrives at a conclusion on the basis of two premises, whereas the artist of this general art does so by combining principles and rules.… And for this reason the artist can learn as much of this art in a month as a logician can learn of logic in a year”) (Ars magna, Decima pars, ch. 101). And with this self-confident final assertion Llull reminds us that his is not the formal method that many have attributed to him. The combinatory system must reflect the very movement of reality, and works with a concept of truth that is not supplied by the Ars according to the forms of logical reasoning, but instead by the way things are in reality, both as they are attested by experience and as they are revealed by faith.
Llull believes in the extramental existence of universals, not only in the reality of genera and species, but also in the reality of accidental forms. On the one hand, this allows his combinatory system to manipulate, not only genera and species, but also virtues, vices, and all differentiae (cf. Johnston 1987: 20, 54, 59, etc.). Nevertheless, these accidents cannot rotate freely because they are determined by an ironclad hierarchy of beings: “Llull’s Ars comes across as solidly linked to the knowledge of the objects that make up the world. Unlike so-called formal logic it deals with things and not just with words, it is interested in the structure of the world and not just in the structure of discourse. An exemplaristic metaphysics and a universal symbolism are at the root of a technique that presumes to speak both of logic and of metaphysics together and at the same time, and to enunciate the rules that form the basis of discourse and the rules according to which reality itself is structured” (Rossi 1960: 68).
10.2. Differences Between Llullism and Kabbalism
We can now grasp what the substantial differences were between the Llullian combinatory system and that of the Kabbalists.
True, in the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation), the materials, the stones, and the thirty-two paths or ways of wisdom with which Yahweh created the world are the ten Sephirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
He hath formed, weighed, transmuted, composed, and created with these twenty-two letters every living being, and every soul yet uncreated. From two letters, or forms He composed two dwellings; from three, six; from four, twenty-four; from five, one hundred and twenty; from six, seven hundred and twenty; from seven, five thousand and forty; and from thence their numbers increase in a manner beyond counting; and are incomprehensible. (I, 1)11
The Sefer Yetzirah was assuredly speaking of factorial calculus, and suggested the idea of a finite alphabet capable of producing a vertiginous number of permutations. It is difficult, when considering Llull’s fourth figure, to escape the comparison with Kabbalistic practices—at least from the visual point of view, given that the combinatory system of the Sefer Yetzirah letters was associated with their inscription on a wheel, something underscored by a number of authors who are nonetheless extremely cautious about speaking of Kabbalism in Llull’s case (see, for example, Millás Vallicrosa 1958 and Zambelli 1965, to say nothing of the works of Frances Yates). Llull’s fourth figure, however, does not generate permutations (i.e., anagrams), but combinations.
But this is not the only difference. The text of the Torah is approached by the Kabbalist as a symbolic apparatus that speaks of mystic and metaphysical realities and must therefore be read distinguishing its four senses (literal, allegorical-philosophical, hermeneutical, and mystical). This is reminiscent of the theory of the four senses of Scripture in Christian exegesis, but at this point the analogy gives way to a radical difference.
For medieval Christian exegesis the hidden meanings are to be detected through a work of interpretation (to identify a surplus of content), but without altering the expression, that is to say, the material arrangement of the text, but, on the contrary, making a supreme effort to establish the exact reading (at least according to the questionable philological principles of the day). For some Kabbalistic currents, however, reading anatomizes, so to speak, the very substance of the expression, by means of three fundamental techniques: Notarikon, Gematria, and Temurah.
Notarikon is the acrostic technique, Gematria is made possible by the fact that in Hebrew numbers are represented by letters of the alphabet, so that each word can be associated with a numerical value derived from the sum of the numbers represented by the individual letters—the idea is to find analogies among words with a different meaning that nevertheless have the same numerical value. But the possible similarities between Llull’s procedures and those of the Kabbalists concern Temurah, the art of the permutation of letters, and therefore an anagrammatical technique.
In a language in which the vowels can be interpolated, the anagram has greater permutational possibilities than in other tongues. Moses Cordovero, for instance, wonders why in Deuteronomy we find the prohibition against wearing garments woven out of a mixture of linen and wool. His conclusion is that in the original version the same letters were combined to form another expression which warned Adam not to substitute his original garment of light with a garment of snakeskin, which represents the power of the demon.
In Abulafia we encounter pages in which the Tetragrammaton YHWH, thanks to the vocalization of its four letters and their arrangement in every conceivable order, produces four tables each consisting of fifty combinations. Eleazar of Worms vocalizes every letter of the Tetragrammaton with two vowels, using six vowels, and the number of combinations increases (cf. Idel 1988b: 22–23).
The Kabbalist can take advantage of the infinite resources of the Temurah because it is not only a reading technique, but the very process by which God created the world (as was already stated in the passage from the Sefer Yetzirah quoted above).
The Kabbalah suggests, then, that there may be a finite alphabet that produces a dizzying number of combinations, and the one who took the art of combination to its utmost limit is precisely Abulafia (thirteenth century) with his Kabbalah of names.
As we saw in Chapter 7, the Kabbalah of names, or ecstatic Kabbalah, is practiced by reciting the divine names hidden in the text of the Torah, playing upon the various combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, altering, separating, and recombining the surface of the text, down to the individual letters of the alphabet.
For the ecstatic Kabala, language is a universe unto itself, and the structure of language reflects the structure of reality. Therefore, conversely to what happens in the Western philosophical tradition and in Arab and Jewish philosophy, in the Kabbalah language does not represent the world in the sense that a significant expression represents an extralinguistic reality. If God created the world through the emission of sounds and letters of the alphabet, these semiotic elements are not representations of something preexistent, but the forms on which the elements that compose the world are modeled.
A linguistic form that produces the world, and a series of symbols that can be infinitely combined, without the interference of any limiting rule: these are the two points on which the Kabbalistic tradition substantially differs from Llull’s Ars. As Platzeck (1964: 1:328) remarks: “Llull’s combinatory system, as a pure combination of concepts, is wholly inspired by the rigid spirit of Western logic, while the kabbalistic combinatory system is a philological game.”
10.3. Llull’s Trees and the Great Chain of Being
If Llull’s ideas did not come from the Hebrew Kabbalah, where did he get them from?
An admiring reader of the Catalan mystic, Leibniz (in his 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria) asked himself why Llull had stopped at such a limited number of elements. Given that the virtues are traditionally seven (four cardinal virtues and three theological), why did Llull, who increases them to nine, not go
