by Andrew Kuiper
1. Introduction
Wilken nowhere claims to give an exhaustive historical survey of figures relevant to his subject. Still, after discussions of Alcuin and Gregory VII, the book suffers a discomfiting abridgement. Peter Olivi and Bartolomé de Las Casas both receive a brief treatment, but for the most part the reader is, at least unconsciously, led to believe that we are waiting for the Reformation where we will resume the themes of religious freedom and conscience first introduced in the patristic era. The school of Salamanca, so immediately relevant to every aspect of this discussion, deserved to have its own chapter in this narrative. And even when the epoch-shifting discussions of early modern Spanish Catholicism are mentioned, as in the treatment of Las Casas, Wilken does not underscore how radical Las Casas’ opposition to Spanish invasion and occupation of Mesoamerica was and his role in shaping the modern discourse of human rights.
Even apart from the contribution of Spanish scholasticism, Wilken omits pre-Reformation figures that recent scholarship has emphasized as contributing significantly to the history of interreligious dialogue. Two figures in particular would have helped round out Wilken’s narrative; the Catalonian Francisican tertiary Raymond of Llull (1232-1315) and the German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) both of whom wrote influential dialogues on peace, persuasion, and the evils of religious violence and persecution.
2. Biography
The poet and novelist Robert Graves saw Raymond’s homeland, the island of Majorca, as an oasis of tranquility and chose to spend the last years of his life secluded there. In the 13th century, however, the island was also a kingdom, and the capital and court of Palma played no small role on the world-stage. Majorca, in the words of Anthony Bonner, was “strategically placed at the center of the commercial wheel of the western Mediterranean” (Anthony Bonner, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader, 1). As a result, Palma, Raymond’s birthplace, was one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan cities in the Middle Ages. Nearby Catalonia was the dominant economic and political force in the region after the collapse of the Almohad empire and Catalan was the lingua franca for many from Barcelona to North Africa. More recently, Raymond of Llull has been rediscovered among scholars of Catalan eager to revive interest in the language after its suppression by Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Not only are Raymond’s writings in Catalan some of the earliest and most expansive texts available; he is also considered to be the author of the first European novel Blanquerna which doubles as the first work of Catalan literature.
His life, according to self-description, was worldly and dissolute. He accuses himself of being at first an aimless troubadour composing romances and of later burying himself in administrative affairs as the seneschal to King James II of Majorca. At some point after his marriage and promotion to majordomo, Raymond was harrowed by multiple visions of Christ crucified appearing suddenly suspended in the air. After many days of these terrifying visions, Raymond resolved to leave the court and his family and to pursue God to the utmost. Following this resolution he became obsessed with the idea of writing a book– “the best in the world”–which would be so lucid and persuasive as to refute the errors of all unbelievers.
Since he did not know how such a book might be written, in the meantime he resolved to accept martyrdom in the attempt to convert unbelievers and to advocate for the establishment of monasteries where Arabic and other languages could be learned. He sought guidance in achieving these goals by going on pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mary of Rocamadour and the tomb of St. James. Eventually he was received among the Franciscans whose charisms were well-suited to his mystical-literary theological style. The Franciscan order, in turn, gained much from the Doctor Illuminatus as he was later called. Before even Duns Scotus (whom he met in 1297), Raymond was publicly defending the Immaculate Conception at the university of Paris. His missionary zeal would lead him to make multiple trips to Tunis and even correspond with the Tunisian king. What began as a quest to write one perfect book swelled to 265 works written in Catalan, Arabic, and Latin. The Council of Vienne followed his recommendation on languages and established university chairs in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic at Bologna, Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca. His status as a polymath and pioneer of information science and computational logic has long been acknowledged but only recently have we discovered that he developed sophisticated treatises on voter-choice and electoral systems that precede developments thought to have emerged a full century later.
3. Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men
Raymond vigorously disagreed with the Dominican mode of apologetics which eschewed rational arguments for proving the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity. His attempt to write the perfectly persuasive book was simultaneously an attempt to develop the perfect ars which through logical, semantic, and metaphysical demonstrations would produce a combinatory method so powerful as to resolve matters of ultimate importance, even religious belief. In the four books of The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men (1274), Raymond provides a modified presentation of his demonstrative method blended with his considerable literary abilities. Scholars and religious historians like Thomas Albert Howard point to this text as a significant moment in the history of interreligious dialogue. What exactly makes it stand out?
In brief, the narrative centers around a pagan who has no knowledge of God or life beyond this one. His fear of death continually agitates him and disrupts even the simplest of pleasures. He wanders far from his home and encounters five strange and beautiful trees watered by a spring in a meadow. Three sages, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian, journeying together arrive at the same spot. A woman on a palfrey called Lady Intelligence explains to them that the five trees and their flowers are a systematic web of what can be known of the divine nature, created and uncreated virtue, and the path to immortality. Upon seeing the distress of the Gentile, the three sages have pity on him and take turns demonstrating the existence of God, the general resurrection, and the bliss of paradise. Then each of the sages, by turns, attempt to persuade the Gentile of the truth of his specific religion. The dialogue ends without a declaration by the Gentile and an agreement between the three sages to continue their discussion every day until an agreement can be reached on the true religion.
What immediately stands out is the refusal of any easy solution. There is no deus ex machina conversion of the Jew, Muslim, and Gentile to Christianity. Their resolve for continued conversation in no way belies the seriousness of their task. All of the sages agree that error in belief will lead to perdition, but this does not prevent the practice of exquisite courtesy as “each asked forgiveness of the other for any disrespectful word he might have spoken against his religion. Each forgave the other…” (Book of the Gentile, Epilogue). This courtesy combined with conviction is what allows the sages to join forces to persuade unbelievers of the truths they hold in common. Raymond’s model of courtesy is no doubt related to his talent for psychological characterization. The grief of the Gentile first in his despair over death and later in his frustration concerning the diversity of religious sects are rendered effectively and reveal that for Raymond all intellectual effort is to relieve the suffering of the hopeless and confused in this world and the next. Even more striking is the speech of the Jew where, in sympathetic terms, he relates how his people “have long endured this harsh captivity in which we are so insulted and scorned by the Christian and Saracen nations to which we belong and by which we are humiliated and tormented, and to whom we must pay tribute and redemption money every year; and all this hardship we willingly suffer and undergo so that we may love God the more and not leave the Law or the path He has marked out for us” (Book of the Gentile, II.4.2).
Though Raymond was capable of great empathy for those of other faiths, after multiple missionary journeys to Algeria, he grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of interest and response among those he desired to convert. And even if his confidence in his ars never waned, he became increasingly involved in concrete plans for military action and crusades to retake Muslim territory in order to have captive audiences for preaching. This is the same man who wrote that “war, turmoil, ill will, injury, and shame prevent men from agreeing on one belief” (Book of the Gentile, Epilogue). More than that, in The Book of the Gentile Raymond presents violence due to religious differences as a main cause of war. As he has one of the sages say: “Ah! What a great good fortune it would be if, by means of these trees, we could all–every man on earth–be under one religion and belief, so that there would be no more rancor or ill will among men, who hate each other because of diversity and contrariness of beliefs and of sects!” (Prologue). The peace of heaven can inspire peace on earth and the sages agree that “to be at war, killing one another and falling captive to one another” prevents the “praise, reverence, and honor we owe God every day of our life” (Epilogue). Raymond’s writings were never pacifist and always included occasional considerations on crusading but there is a shift in his writings to unambiguous support for large scale invasions after 1292. Some of Llull’s Franciscan brethren, particularly Spiritualist Franciscans like Peter Olivi, soured on the crusades and became convinced that their apocalyptic and prophetic visions were not attainable by military means. At the same time, even though Raymond was also influenced by the apocalypticism of Joachim of Fiore, his support for military invasion was ramping up. His late crusade treatises, while not in direct contradiction to his earlier work, make painfully clear that Raymond was a predecessor and not the early arrival of an understanding of religious freedom.
4. Conclusion
But what of the charge that ecumenism and interreligious dialogue are simply worldly facsimiles of heavenly peace? What of Jeremiah’s haunting accusation against the prophets who “have healed the hurt of my daughter lightly, saying ‘Peace peace’; when there is no peace” (6:14)? Unlike Hobbes and Spinoza or other cynical deployments of toleration, Raymond does think that heaven and hell are on the line and does not allow a monomaniacal concern for political stability to compromise the theological enquiry. And unlike secular deployment of discursive or communicative rationality by Habermas and Rawls, Raymond could never allow a reduction of philosophy to the immanent or the pragmatic occlusion of metaphysics. God desires peace; however, divinely inspired peace is never separated from Christ who comes to cast fire on the earth and drive the moneychangers from the temple. And no one was more intimately acquainted with the unsettling terror of Christ crucified than the eclectic mystical polymath from Majorca who left everything behind to bend the world back to God.