We have no wish to add to these few notes a lengthy commentary upon the
substance of a book which, probably for the first time, is accessible
to those who read only English. Scholars have debated over Lull’s
probable debt to sufism, on the one hand, and, on the other, his
influence upon the long line of mystics who have followed him. There is
much still to be said upon these and other topics, much that will throw
fresh light on Spain and Spanish mysticism both. But in this essay
enough has been said of Lull’s life and works to form the indispensable
prelude to his _Book_. For the present, therefore, we prefer to stand
back, and allow Lull’s ardent spirit to work its miracles still. Work
them it surely must. Writing in his native ‘catalan-provenzal,’ that he
might appeal, not to learned men, but to the people, by the people he
is read still. He needs none of the ‘Expositions,’ such as were written
in his own age and as late as the seventeenth century. Here and there
a passage confuses the modern mind by its mediæval subtleties; or the
frequent references to the will, understanding, and memory (so common
in most of the mystics) may puzzle the simple reader until he has
learned to interpret them. But the vast majority of the three hundred
and sixty-six ‘verses,’ put together to be read one on each day of the
year, may still so be read. They speak to the twentieth century as
clearly, picturesquely, and forcibly as they spoke to the thirteenth.
Have we perhaps even more need of their message?
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 Menéndez 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.’
Love impels him to tread the Mystic Way ‘in search of his Beloved.’
Much of his _Book_, therefore, deals with the Mystic Life. But it
has none of the exclusiveness of the _Living Flame of Love_ and the
_Spiritual Canticle_. There are passages for the beginner as well as
for the proficient, parables in three lines for the plain man, sermons
in phrases, reflections which, by their very simplicity, kindle the
devotion of the wayfaring man as he reads them. As we read the brief
records of imaginary conversations between the Lover and ‘those who
asked him concerning his Beloved,’ we can imagine ourselves in some
African coast-town where the stranger who has just landed is being
pressed, by the surging crowd which surrounds him, to give reasons for
his faith. The calm and confident answers supply the secret of Lull’s
power.
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.