Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 298 - Renaissance Men - Ramon Llull and Petrarch.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Renaissance Men, Ramon Lull and Petrach. In my first week of graduate school, I found myself at a gathering of philosophers, explaining how I developed an interest in medieval philosophy thanks to my enthusiasm for Dante. A professor of logic who was present said, but Dante wasn't medieval, he was Renaissance. Good grief, I thought, I've only been here for a few days and already they've realized I don't know what I'm talking about. I muttered something about Dante having worked in the early 14th century, which sounds pretty medieval, but I also knew what he meant. Given his admiration for classical literature and his brilliant use of the vernacular, Dante can seem to be not of his time a Renaissance man trapped in the Middle Ages. Nor was he alone in this respect. In these past few episodes, we've been considering figures who prepared the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation, but who were still recognizably medieval in their approach. For all their theological innovations, Jean Gerson and Jean Wycliffe were above all scholastics. In this episode though, I want to look at two authors who were outsiders to the world of scholasticism and whose works would go on to resonate powerfully in the 15th century. The first is Ramon Lull, who might be described as the outsider artist of medieval philosophy, and I do mean artist. He developed a stunningly original method for doing philosophy and science and called this universal method an art. This art could, Lull thought, free humankind from suffering and unite them all under the banner of a single truth. Along the way, he would solve all the questions being discussed at the universities and more problems besides. Yet in the short run, his hopes were largely disappointed. He was unable to persuade the schoolmen of Paris to adopt his art as their new method, and his teachings would be banned twice towards the end of the 14th century, condemned by the inquisitor of Aragon in 1376 and banned at Paris in 1390 thanks to none other than Jean Gerson. This is not to say that Lull had no adherents in the 14th century. His philosophy was promoted especially by his associate Thomas Les Mieziers, who helped him by posing a series of questions on which to test the art and also by undertaking to produce a systematic anthology culled from Lull's vast and varied output. Yet Lull's thought would prove to be more at home in the Renaissance and early modern Europe, when its adherents would include Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and even Leibniz, who admired both the universal ambitions of Lull and the clever system of combinations that drove his method. Inauthentic works ascribed to Lull also made him into a forerunner of Renaissance alchemy and Kabbalistic speculation. Lull's unusual position outside the intellectual mainstream owed something to his origins. He was born in 1232 on the island of Majorca, which had only recently been seized from the Muslims by the Kingdom of Aragon. The multicultural setting of Lull's birthplace would be reflected in his life's work. By his own account, Lull's early years were misspent, but when he experienced visions of Christ on the cross, he changed his ways, converting to penitence, as he put it. He made it his mission to establish definitively the truths of Christianity and thus persuade members of other faiths to convert. In order to speak to a non-Christian audience, he learned Arabic from a slave and composed works of his own in this language while also drawing on knowledge of Arabic philosophical literature as in an early work on logic based on Al-Ghazali's aims of the philosophers. He wrote this in the Catalan language. Though Lull did write in Latin as well, he did so as an autodidact whose style could seem rebarbative to readers who had a more mainstream education. His use of Catalan makes him another founding figure of vernacular literature, the Dante of the Balearic Islands, if you will. A pivotal event in Lull's long and eventful life was his visit to Paris in the late 1280s. Here he had the chance to give public lectures, displaying his art to a scholastic audience. It was only part of a concerted campaign to persuade the Parisians of his orthodoxy and hopefully his genius. Towards this end, Lull also joined in the attacks on the radical Aristotelians dubbed Averroists and even went so far as to write a treatise in defense of the 1277 condemations. Yet his reception was not a warm one. It's been nicely remarked that in Paris, his art met with neither comprehension nor approval. Decades later, in 1309, he would make a more successful trip to Paris. On that occasion, he found a more appreciative audience and was given official confirmation of his orthodoxy, but by then Lull was a very old man, so that he spent most of his career being kept at arm's length by the scholastic establishment. This was a matter of no little frustration to him. He commented at one point, "...my books are appreciated little, and I can assure you that plenty of people think me a fool." Lull's response to the incomprehension that greeted his art was to produce a simpler presentation of the system, in what he called a concession to the weakness of the human intellect. For this reason, modern day scholars offering an overview of the art are obligated to summarize it twice, going over the more complex, so-called quaternary version, and then explaining the changes made to get to the stripped-down ternary presentation of the art. I am not going to attempt anything that expansive here, especially because Lull's art is almost impossible to explain without diagrams. Genius, though he may have been, he did not foresee that this aspect of his system would make it hard to present in a podcast. If you want to see the full details, I recommend looking at the article on Lull in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has nice images of the diagrams taken from Renaissance manuscripts. The basic idea of the art is to relate certain general concepts by means of a systematic combinatorial procedure, so as to generate philosophical questions and answers in a novel method of proof. The later and simpler version is the one set out in his most influential presentation, the Ars Brevis. Here and in other treatises, Lull makes extensive use of an alphabetic notation, in this case consisting of nine letters. It's the prominence of multiples of three that gives this system the name ternary. These letters can be used to represent each of the elements of the whole system. They are first used to label a series of nine properties that confer perfection on things, sometimes called by Lull dignities, but here in the Ars Brevis called principles. They include goodness, greatness, truth, power, and so on. The first figure of the art has these arranged around the circumference of a circle, with each property given its letter label and lines drawn between the properties to indicate that each of them is convertible with the others. Thus, something that is perfect in goodness will also be perfect in greatness, truth, power, and all the remaining principles. A second figure introduces relations that can obtain between properties, such as difference, causation, or equality. These are tagged with the same letters used in the first figure. Further chapters, often with accompanying diagrams or tables, explain the definitions of these concepts, their possible combinations, the questions that can be posed about them in light of these combinations, topics to which the art can be applied, and so on. The upshot of all this is to provide a system with four features. The art is inventive, because it can generate questions by asking about combinations of the concepts, like is goodness great, or what is good greatness. It is general, because the topics it covers include all existing things, God and every one of His creatures. It is compendious, because the number of possible combinations is absolutely enormous, in just a few pages giving the reader a basis for generating an almost indefinite number of philosophical queries. And finally, it is demonstrative, because it does not just pose such queries, but also answers them. The way that it does so would be surprising for a scholastic thinker schooled in Aristotle and given the reception Lull received in Paris, apparently unsatisfying as well. The Aristotelians thought that demonstration always proceeds by discovering causes. Lull does include causation in his system, but it is not the engine of his demonstrations. This allows him to avoid a problem of Aristotelian scientific theory, namely that there can be no demonstrations concerning God, as God has no cause. In place of this, Lull devises a method of proof which he calls Demonstration Per Equi Parentiam, which basically means showing that two concepts are equivalent in the sense of being extensionally identical. For instance, greatness is equivalent to goodness, because whatever is good is there by also great. A nice example of this method, and the way it can address central questions in the scholastic culture of his day, would be his proof that the universe is not eternal. He argues that it cannot be, on the grounds that something eternal would be maximally great and would thus be maximally good and thus exclude evil. Yet we see that the universe contains evil. Thus, Lull manages, by presupposing the equivalence of eternity, greatness, and goodness, to prove that the universe is created precisely on the grounds of the presence of evil, which has led many to doubt the existence of God. Another unusual feature of Lull's system, also illustrated by this same argument about eternity, is his idea that it is distinctive of goodness to produce good, and hence of maximal goodness to produce maximal good. In fact, he defines goodness in these terms, stating that goodness is that thing by reason of which good does good. Again, this would strike an Aristotelian as methodologically suspect because it sounds circular. As Lull might say, a circular definition is one that defines something circularly. But he is trying to express the idea that each of his principles, indeed everything in his whole system, is distinguished by its action. For a thing to exist, according to Lull, is for it to produce that which is in accordance with its nature. Thus, he also defines human as that which makes human, as in generating children. Obviously, this is all very different from what we find in other 13th and early 14th century thinkers, yet certain aspects of the art ring familiar bells. His list of principles sounds very much like a theory of transcendentals, those properties that are found in all existing things. Meanwhile, Lull's treatment of God as the maximal case of such perfections or dignities may evoke Anselm's approach to proving God as a maximally perfect being. But Lull's art is not just a reworking of scholastic ideas, it is a genuinely new system whose mechanism of correlative terms and combinatorial possibilities is very different from the categorial logic of the schoolman of his day. The novelty of the method was in keeping with the novelty of his ambition. He wanted to produce a system that could appeal to any intellectual, including the elite among Jews and Muslims whom he hoped to convert. And he did see conversion mostly in these intellectualist terms. Though he supported the Crusades, he thought that such a military undertaking was simply paving the way to conversion through rational persuasion. As one scholar has commented, And of course, Lull's own art was the means by which universal conversion could best be achieved. This attitude is most eloquently captured in a work called The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. It is a dialogue in which a man without religion, who loves only this world, and thus lives in fear of death, meets three scholars, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian. These three learned men use arguments based on the art, here allegorically represented as trees bearing flowers, to convert the Gentile to monotheism. Each of the three then attempts to persuade him of the truth of their own particular religion. Here Lull is, for the most part, remarkably even-handed. Though Judaism and Islam come in for a degree of criticism, all three scholars are shown as being scrupulously rational and as adept practitioners of the art, so that the Jew is allowed to prove God's uniqueness on the basis that his greatness requires infinity and there cannot be two infinite beings. In a surprising conclusion, we do not discover which religion has captured the allegiance of the Gentile, a striking contrast to similar texts of interreligious debate like those written by the Jewish author Judah Halevi and by Peter Abelard. For Ramon Lull, the hope of peace on earth lies in the civil exchange of rational discourse motivated by a feeling of mutual love between humans, and the basis of that discourse is provided by his art. While Lull spent much of his life trying to impress the Aristotelian scholastics at Paris with his innovative system, our second author was distinctly unimpressed by those various scholastics. This was Francesco Petrarca, usually called Petrarch in English. Again and again, he complains that Aristotle leaves him cold, writing for instance that this man whom the scholastics honored as the philosopher was in fact so completely ignorant of true happiness that any devout old woman or any faithful fisherman, shepherd, or peasant is happier, if not more subtle, in recognizing it. Upon reading Aristotle, Petrarca remarked, My mind is the same as it was, my will is the same, I am the same. By contrast, the great Roman authors Cicero and Seneca, are vitals with the sharp burning barbs of their eloquence. This will become a familiar refrain in the 15th century as the humanists celebrate the rhetorical excellence and spiritual impact of classical literature and spurn what they see as the dry technicalities of scholasticism. Indeed, the humanists themselves saw Petrarca as their founding father. Especially the scholars of Petrarca's home city of Florence extolled him as a pioneer like Leonardo Bruni or Giannazzo Manetti whose Lives of Three Illustrious Florentine Poets was devoted to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca. The idea that it was Petrarca in particular who initiated humanism is not implausible. He already had the literary tastes typical of the humanists and also philological expertise as shown by an edition of Livy he produced early in his career. Modern day scholars have questioned this to some extent. They have pointed out that there was a tradition of rhetorically skilled secretaries and notaries, the so-called dictatores, running back to the 12th century, and that a number of other figures were reviving the study of the classics before Petrarca, like the Paduan scholar Albertino Mosato who drew on the ancient historians and the tragedies of Seneca. If the Renaissance humanists insisted on seeing Petrarca alone as the founder of their enterprise, it was perhaps because it was Petrarca who first championed philology and eloquence as a full-blown ideology. This ideology is on display in one of his more philosophically oriented works, The Secret Book. It is a dialogue whose dramatic setting is by now familiar, as in Boethius' Alain of Lille or Marguerite Porret, a fictional version of the author is confronted by the female personification of an abstract idea, in this case truth. But she doesn't have much to say. Mostly, truth just presides over a dialogue between the autobiographical character Francesco and Augustine, another of Petrarc's favorite classical authors. Indeed, The Secret Book is inspired especially by Augustine's own dialogues, while the character of Francesco seems to be modeled on the young Augustine of the Confessions, riven by doubt and seeking spiritual peace. In Petrarc's dialogue, Augustine teaches Francesco that only virtue leads to happiness, and that since virtue and sin are always subject to our will, unhappiness is actually voluntary. This teaching sounds very much like that of the ancient Stoics, a debt Petrarc explicitly recognizes in the dialogue. Augustine now diagnoses Francesco's weaknesses in regard to the seven deadly sins. Fans of Hellenistic philosophy, or of Augustine himself, will thrill at the psychological insight and nuance of these sections. Petrarc notes the perverse pleasure one may take in one's own depression, and is forthright in lamenting his own tendencies towards pride and ambition for literary glory. This is also one of those rare philosophical dialogues that is genuinely a dialogue. Francesco is depicted as spiritually imperfect, but he's also allowed to push back against Augustine's unrelenting morality with points that the reader is apt to find persuasive. This is especially so in a section on love, in particular Petrarc's love for Laura, the muse who inspired his writings in much the way that Beatrice inspired Dante. Appropriate to Petrarc's highly developed sense of literary artifice, scholars disagree about whether Laura was a real person. When Augustine rails against lust and attachment to mortal beings, Francesco insists that it is Laura's virtuous soul that he loves and not her body. It's not an easy point for Augustine to resist, given his own praise of virtue and emphasis on the concerns of the soul over those of the body. Nonetheless, he argues, it is God alone and no creature who is the correct object of our love, a position for which Augustine is indeed the most appropriate possible mouthpiece. Another reminiscence of Hellenistic thought is Petrarc's vision of philosophy as a kind of medicine for the soul rather than the body. Being Petrarc, he sees books as the most powerful source of treatment. But which books? He is refreshingly dismissive of the philosophical bromides that have appeared so often in ancient and medieval literature, for example the slogan that the earth is like a tiny point in the context of the vast universe. Francesco does not find that meditating on this impedes his desire for worldly fame as it is meant to. It helps more to read his beloved Seneca and Cicero, but even here the effect is temporary. He finds himself sliding back into bad ways of thinking as soon as he closes the books. Augustine recommends taking careful notes while reading, advice that Petrarc in fact followed himself, as we know from the marginal annotations from still surviving manuscripts that belong to his library. Here we have a typically medieval practice of caring for the soul by meditating on texts, yet the texts in question are now those of Roman pagans rather than the Bible. Or, as my professor at Notre Dame might have put it, Petrarc was not medieval, he was Renaissance. He gives us a final illustration of the point I've been making, if not belaboring, over these past few episodes. Even as typically medieval phenomena like scholasticism carried on into the 15th century with figures like Jean Guéson, so the currents of thought and literature we associate with the Renaissance already appeared in the 13th century with Lull and the 14th century with Petrarc, Boccaccio, and yes Dante. Remember too that some scholars see figures of the 12th century as anticipating the Renaissance. The humanist values of Petrarc were, to no small degree, already espoused by John of Salisbury. So often hailed as a new beginning in philosophy, as in art and culture, the rebirth of classical culture in the 15th century was also a continuation of the medieval age. That's something we'll be in an excellent position to appreciate when the time comes thanks to our look at the transitional figures covered in this and the past several weeks. But the Renaissance is not quite the next thing on our agenda. Still on our to-do list is another medieval culture, one that is routinely overlooked by historians of philosophy, but not of course by this podcast, by Xantium. We'll be moving on to Byzantine philosophy very soon. Before that, though, we'll be getting one more chance to look at the continuity between medieval thought and later periods of philosophy, as I speak next time to Robert Pasnow about how the themes of medieval scholasticism survived into early modern philosophy. And then there will be the little matter of celebrating a milestone in the podcast as we reach the 300th episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.