Eco: Lullian Kabbalism, 2
Jan Amos Komensky, or Johann (John) Amos Comenius (1592-1670), from Opera didactica omnia, Amsterdam, 1657. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.
“Numerology, magic geometry, music, astrology and Lullism were all thrown together in a series of pseudo-Lullian alchemistic works that now began to intrude onto the scene. Besides, it was a simple matter to inscribe kabbalistic terms onto circular seals, which the magical and alchemical tradition had made popular.
It was Agrippa who first envisioned the possibility of taking from the kabbala and from Lull the technique of combination in order to go beyond the medieval image of a finite cosmos and construct the image of an open expanding cosmos, or of different possible worlds.
In his In artem brevis R. Lulli (appearing in the editio princeps of the writings of Lull published in Strasbourg in 1598), Agrippa assembled what seems, at first sight, a reasonably faithful and representative anthology from the Ars magna.
On closer inspection, however, one sees that the number of combinations deriving from Lull’s fourth figure has increased enormously because Agrippa has allowed repetitions.
Agrippa was more interested in the ability of the art to supply him with a large number of combinations than in its dialectic and demonstrative properties. Consequently, he proposed to allow the sequences permitted by his art to proliferate indiscriminately to include subjects, predicates, rules and relations.
Subjects were multiplied by distributing them, each according to its own species, properties and accidents, by allowing them free play with terms that are similar or opposite, and by referring each to its respective causes, actions, passions and relations.
All that is necessary is to place whatever idea one intends to consider in the center of the circle, as Lull did with the letter A, and calculate its possible concatenations with all other ideas.
Add to this that, for Agrippa, it was permissible to add many other figures containing terms extraneous to Lull’s original scheme, mixing them up with Lull’s original terms: the possibilities for combination become almost limitless (Carreras y Artau 1939: 220-1).
Valerio de Valeriis seems to want the same in his Aureum opus (1589), when he says that the Ars “teaches further and further how to multiply concepts, arguments, or any other complex unto infinity, tam pro parte vera quam falsa, mixing up roots with roots, roots with forms, trees with trees, the rules with all these other things, and very many other things as well” (“De totius operis divisione“).
Authors such as these still seem to oscillate, unable to decide whether the Ars constitutes a logic of discovery or a rhetoric which, albeit of ample range, still serves merely to organize a knowledge that it has not itself generated.
This is evident in the Clavis universalis artis lullianae by Alsted (1609). Alsted is an author, important in the story of the dream of a universal encyclopedia, who even inspired the work of Comenius, but who still–though he lingered to point out the kabbalist elements in Lull’s work–wished to bend the art of combination into a tightly articulated system of knowledge, a tangle of suggestions that are, at once, Aristotelian, Ramist and Lullian (cf. Carreras y Artau 1939: II, 239-49; Tega 1984: I, 1).
Before the wheels of Lull could begin to turn and grind out perfect languages, it was first necessary to feel the thrill of an infinity of worlds, and (as we shall see) of all of the languages, even those that had yet to be invented.”
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 130-2.
