From the point of view of our investigation, ascertaining exactly where Llull got the idea of the Dignities is less relevant than recognizing that “Llull is a Platonist or a Neo-Platonist from top to bottom” (Platzeck 1953: 595). It is important to stress that the Dignities are not produced by the Ars, but constitute its premises, and they are the premises of the Ars because they are the roots of a chain of being.
To understand the metaphysical roots of the Ars we must turn to Llull’s theory of the Arbor scientiae (1296). Between the first versions of the Ars and that of 1303, Llull has come a long way (his journey is described by Carreras y Artau and Carreras y Artau 1939: 1:394), making his device capable of resolving, not only theological and metaphysical problems, but also problems of cosmology, law, medicine, astronomy, geometry, and psychology. The Ars becomes more and more a tool to take on the entire encyclopedia of learning, picking up the suggestions found in the countless medieval encyclopedias and looking forward to the encyclopedic utopia of Renaissance and Baroque culture.
The Ars may appear at first sight to be free from hierarchical structures, because, for example, the divine Dignities are defined in a circular fashion one being used to define the other. The relationships are not arranged in a hierarchical system (though they in fact refer to an implicit hierarchy between things sensitive and things intellectual, or between substances and accidents). But a hierarchical principle insinuates itself into the list of questions (whether something exists, what it is, in what way does it exist, etc.) and the list of Subjects is certainly hierarchical (God, Angel, Heaven, Man, down to the elements and tools). The Dignities are defined in a circular fashion because they are determined by the First Cause: but, it is on the basis of the Dignities that the ladder of being begins. And the Ars is supposed to make it possible to argue about every element in this ladder, or about every element in the furniture of the universe, about every accident and every possible question.
The image of this ladder of being is the Tree of Science, which has as its roots the nine Dignities and the nine Relations, and is then subdivided into sixteen branches, to each of which corresponds a separate tree. Each of these sixteen trees, to which an individual representation is dedicated, is divided into seven parts (roots, trunk, limbs, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit). Eight trees clearly correspond to eight subjects in the Tabula Generalis, and constitute the Arbor Elementalis (which represents the elementata, that is, the objects of the sublunar world made up of the four elements, stones, trees, animals), the Arbor Vegetalis, the Arbor Sensualis, the Arbor Imaginalis (the mental images that are the likenesses of the things represented in the other trees), the Arbor Humanalis (which concerns memory, understanding, and will and includes the various sciences and arts invented by man), the Arbor Coelestialis (astronomy and astrology), the Arbor Angelicalis and the Arbor Divinalis (the divine Dignities). To this list should be added the Arbor Moralis (virtues and vices), the Arbor Eviternalis (the realms of the afterworld), the Arbor Maternalis (Mariology), the Arbor Christianalis (Christology), the Arbor Imperialis (government), the Arbor Apostolicalis (the Church), the Arbor Exemplificalis (the contents of knowledge), and the Arbor Quaestionalis (which includes 4,000 questions on the various arts). But it can be definitively said that this forest of trees corresponds to the columns of the Tabula Generalis, even if we cannot always identify what term corresponds to what other.
As Llinares writes (1963: 211–212):
the various trees are hierarchically arranged, the higher trees participate of the lower. The “vegetable” tree, for instance, participates of the tree of the elements, the “sensual” tree of both, while the tree “of imagination” is constructed on the preceding three, at the same time as it makes comprehensible the tree that follows, in other words, the “human” tree. In this way, in an ascending movement, Ramon Llull constructs a system of the universe and of human knowledge grouped around three central themes: the world, man, and God.… Logic has given way to metaphysics, which is concerned first of all to explain and interpret, since the philosopher considers the primitive and real elements, and through them descends to particular objects, which he studies thanks to them.12
Carreras y Artau and Carreras y Artau (1939: 1:400), followed by Llinares (1963: 208 et seq.), note that an almost biological dynamism is evident in the trees, in contrast with the logical-mathematical staticity of Llull’s Ars in the preceding period. But we have already observed that the mastery of the Ars presupposes a preliminary knowledge that is precisely that conveyed by the trees. At least this is fully the case with the Ars generalis ultima and the Ars brevis, both subsequent in date to the formulation of the Arbor scientiae.
As we saw in Chapter 1, medieval thought has recourse to the figure of the tree (the Porphyrian tree) to represent the way in which genera formally include species and species are included in genera. If we observe just one of the illustrations in the Logica nova of 1303, we see a Porphyrian tree to which Llull affixes both the letters from B to K and the list of Questions. We might be tempted to conclude that the Dignities, and all the other entities of the Ars, are themselves the genera and species of the Porphyrian tree. But it is no accident that the illustration should be entitled Arbor naturalis et logicalis. Llull’s tree is not only logical, but natural too.
A Porphyrian tree is a formal structure. It defines formally the relationship between genera and species. (It is only a didactic convention that in its canonical form it always represents substances like Body or Animal.) The Porphyrian tree is initially an empty tree that anyone and everyone can fill out according to the classification they wish to produce. The trees that Llull presents in his Arbor scientiae on the other hand are “full” trees, or, if you will, representations of the Great Chain of Being as it metaphysically is—and must be. Platzeck (1954: 145 et seq.) is right therefore when he affirms that the analogy between Llull’s trees and the Porphyrian tree is only apparent: “its gradation is not the fruit of a logical framework but of the fact that the dignities manifest themselves, in created things, in different degrees.”
Llull too (Platzeck reminds us) needs a differentia specifica, but it is not an accident (however essential) that can be abstracted from the species under consideration: instead, it represents the degree of its ontological participation. This is why Llull’s criticism (see De venatione medii inter subjectum et praedicatum in Opera parva [Palma, 1744], I: 4) of the syllogism Every animal is a substance, Every man is an animal, Therefore every man is a substance is so interesting. The syllogism seems to be formally valid, but for Llull it is not “necessary” because the way in which man is a substance is marked by the distance between man and the first causes in the descent of the Great Chain of Being (therefore, man is indeed a substance, but only to a certain degree). Llull needs to come up with a “natural medium” that is nonlogical, a sort of immediate kinship. He therefore reformulates the syllogism (and accepts it) as follows: Every rational animal is a rational substance, Every man is a rational animal, Therefore every man is a rational substance. This looks like mere terminological wordplay, but for Llull it is a question of finding a kind of soft affinity among things, with neither leap nor interruption. And here we recognize that rationality is a difference that already divides the substance, that reappears at each step of the ladder, and that is conferred upon man alone through a chain of descending steps.
“The Scholastic logician uses only definitions adapted to the logic of the classes; the Raimondist admits every kind of distinction, as long as they are based on a real relationship between things” (Platzeck 1954: 155).
Llull’s presumed logic is not formal, it is a rhetoric that serves to express an ontology.13
In the light of these remarks it is understandable why on the one hand Llull organizes his Ars so as to find, in every possible argument, a middle term that allows him to form a demonstrative syllogism, but excludes some syllogisms, however correct, even if formally there is a middle term. His middle term is not that of formal scholastic logic. It is a middle that binds by likeness the elements of the Great Chain of Being, it is a substantial middle, not a formal one. This is why Llull is able to reject certain premises as unacceptable, even though the combinatory system makes them imaginable. The middle does not unite things formally, it is in things. Llull’s middle is not the middle term of an Aristotelian syllogism, it does not establish the cause identified by the definition, or the genus under which a species is to be subsumed: it is a “general label” that characterizes every form of participation, connection, kinship between two things, to such an extent that, in the elementary predications of his first and third figures, Llull does not even need to insert a copula. The
