(ii). The other source is the idea, Neo-Platonic in origin, of the Great Chain of Being (cf. Lovejoy 1936). Primitive Neo-Platonism, taken up in the Middle Ages in more or less tempered form, taught that the universe, entirely divine in nature, is the emanation of an unknowable and ineffable One, through a series of degrees of being, or hypostases, produced by necessity down to the lowest matter. Beings are thus arranged at progressively increasing distances from the divine One, and participate to an ever-decreasing extent in a divine nature that becomes degraded little by little to the point of disappearing altogether on the lower rungs of the ladder (or chain) of beings. From this state of affairs two principles follow, one cosmological, the other ethical-mystical. In the first place, if every step on the ladder of being is a phase of the same divine emanation, there exist relations of similarity, kinship, analogy between a lower state and the higher states—and from this root are derived all the theories of cosmic similarity and sympathy. In the second place, if the emanational ladder, on the one hand, represents a descent from the inconceivable perfection of the One to the lower degrees of matter, on the other, knowledge, salvation, and mystic union (strongly identified with each other in the Neo-Platonist view) imply an ascent, a return to the higher planes of the Great Chain of Being.
This tempered medieval Neo-Platonism will endeavor to reduce as much as possible the identity between the divine nature and the various states of creation, and, with Thomas Aquinas, will finally see the chain in terms of participation (which implies, not a necessary emanation of the divinity, but a free act by which God confers existence on his own creatures; and the stages of the chain are related to each other, not by an inevitable inner likeness, but by analogy. Nevertheless, this image of the Great Chain of Being is always in some way present in medieval thought, even when we cannot trace a direct relationship to Neo-Platonism. We have only to recall that every medieval thinker had meditated upon a text of the third or fourth century, the commentary to the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius, whose Platonic and Neo-Platonic inspiration is obvious. Macrobius places at the top of the ladder of being the Good, the first cause of all things, then the Nous or Intelligence, born of God himself, which contains the Ideas as archetypes of all things. The Nous, contemplating itself and knowing itself, produces a World-Soul, which is diffused—preserving its unity—throughout the multiplicity of the created universe. Not a number, but the origin and matrix of all numbers, the Soul generates the numbered plurality of beings, from the celestial spheres down to the sublunar bodies: “Mind emanates from the Supreme God and Soul from Mind, and Mind, indeed, forms and suffuses all below with life, and since this is the one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in continuous succession, degenerating step by step in their downward course, the close observer will find that it creates all the following things and fills them with life, and since this unique light illuminates everything and is reflected in everything, and just as a single countenance may be reflected in various consecutive mirrors, all things follow each other in a continuous succession, degenerating bit by bit down to the end of the series—so that the attentive observer may seize an interconnection of the parts, from God on High down to the last dregs of things, bound to each other without any interruption” (Macrobius 1952).
There is a passage in Llull’s Rhetorica (ed. 1598: 199) that is practically a literal echo of Macrobius and confirms this basic principle of likeness among the various levels of being, as a result of which what was predicated in the definition of the original Dignities is realized in each being: “things receive from their likeness with the Divine Principle their conceptually defined places that at the same time correspond to their level of being” (Platzeck 1953: 601).
Through a thorough comparison not only of their texts but also of the illustrations that appear in various manuscripts of the two authors, Yates (1960) believed she could identify an unmediated source in the thought of John Scotus Eriugena. It is significant that for Eriugena the Divine Names or attributes are seen as primordial causes, eternal forms on the basis of which the world is configured, and from them there proceeds a primary matter, hyle or chaos, which we reencounter in the thought of Llull, author of a Liber Chaos or Book of Chaos). Along these lines, Yates (1960: 104 et seq.) identifies the first idea of the Ars in a passage from Eriugena’s De divisione naturae, in which fifteen primordial causes are mentioned (Goodness, Essence, Life, Reason, Intelligence, Wisdom, Virtue, Beatitude, Truth, Eternity, Greatness, Love, Peace, Unity, Perfection), but Eriugena adds that the number of causes is infinite and that they can therefore be arranged, for purposes of contemplation, in a series of arbitrary successions (the term Eriugena uses is convolvere, to cause them to rotate, so to speak, and Yates moreover reminds us that Eriugena, like other authors of his time, used the method of concentric circles to define the divine attributes and their combinations—though for contemplative and not inventive purposes). Obviously, the analogy with Kabbalistic procedures does not escape Yates, though she does not attempt to explain it in terms of direct dependence: “We should ask, not so much whether Llull was influenced by the Kabbalah, but whether Kabbalism and Llullism, with its Scotist basis, are not phenomena of a similar type, the one arising in the Jewish, and the other in the Christian tradition, which both appear in Spain at about the same time, and which might, so to speak, have encouraged one another by engendering similar atmospheres, or perhaps by actively permeating one another” (1960: 112; Llull and Bruno. Collected Essays 1982, p. 112).
Maybe Yates allowed herself to be bedazzled by similarities that seem less surprising when we recall that many analogous themes are to be found in other medieval Neo-Platonic texts (of the School of Chartres, for example). But precisely because of this it is undeniable that there are present in Llull’s texts ideas that Eriugena bequeathed to subsequent thinkers. Moreover, in the ninth century, Eriugena had contributed to the diffusion of the treatise by Pseudo-Dionysius On the Divine Names, one of the most important sources of medieval Neo-Platonic thought, at least in its tempered medieval form.
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.