RAMÓN LULL, DOCTOR ILLUMINATUS, was a missionary to the Muslims whose thought was nevertheless saturated with Islamic ideas.
Ramón Lull was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, in 1235 and brought up as a page in the royal court. He led a carefree life of pleasure. One day, lusting after a Genoese lady and wanting her badly, he rode his horse into the church of Eulalia where she was praying. She turned him away, but one day she responded to verses he had sent her by summoning him to a tryst. When he arrived, without warning she exposed her breast to him — it was being eaten away by a malignant disease.
This shock marked the beginning of the process of Lull’s conversion. It helped form his view of the world as a place of oscillating extremes, where appearance might well mask their opposites. In his most famous book, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, he asks, ‘When comes the hour in which water that flows downwards shall change its nature and mount upwards?’ He talks of the Lover falling among thorns, but how they seemed to him like flowers and a bed of love. ‘What is misery?’ he asks. ‘To get one’s desires in this world… If you see a Lover clothed in fine raiment’, he says, ‘sated with food and sleep, know that in that man thou seeest damnation and torment.’ The scent of flowers brings to the Lover’s mind the evil stench of riches and meanness, of old age and lasciviousness, of discontent and pride.
Lull wrote of mounting the ladder of humanity to glory in the Divine Nature. This mystical ascent is achieved by working on what he calls the powers of the soul — feeling, imagination, understanding and will. In this way he was helping to forge the deeply personal form of alchemy that, as we will see, would be the great engine of esoteric Europe.
In one of his harsher sayings he said: ‘If thou speaketh truth, O fool, thou wilt be beaten by men tormented, reproved and killed’. While preaching to the Muslims in North Africa he was set upon by a crowd, led out of the city and stoned to death.
FRANCIS WAS BORN INTO A WORLD WHERE serfs suffered extreme poverty and where the deformed, the aged, the destitute and lepers were treated with utter contempt. The wealthy clergy made a good living out of the serfs and persecuted anyone who disagreed with them.
In 1206 Francis was a rich young man in his twenties in Assisi in Italy. He was leading a carefree and heartless life, avoiding all contact with hardship, holding his nose if he saw a leper.
It is impossible not to see the parallels with the life of Prince Siddartha.
Then one day he was out riding when his horse suddenly reared up and he found himself looking down at a leper. He dismounted and before he knew it was grasping the leper’s bloody hand, and kissing the supurating cheeks and lips. He felt the leper withdraw his hand, and when Francis looked up he saw the leper had vanished.
He knew then that, like St Paul on the road to Damascus, he had had an encounter with the risen Christ.
Francis’s life and philosophy were turned upside down and inside out. He began to see with all clarity that the Gospels recommended a life of poverty, devoted to helping others, possessing ‘neither gold nor silver nor money in your purse, no wallet for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes’. Poverty, he was to say, is to have nothing, to wish for nothing, yet to possess all things truly in the spirit of freedom. He came to see that experience itself, not things experienced, were important. The things we possess have a hold on us and threaten to rule our lives. A voice emanating from a painted crucifix in the Church of San Domenico near Assisi told him, ‘Go, Francis, and repair my House, which as you can see, is falling into ruin.’ Francis felt that this experience was ineffable.
He so transformed his nature in the animal, vegetable and, as we shall see shortly, in the material dimensions, that animals responded to him in an amazing way. A cricket sang when he asked. Birds gathered to hear him preach. When a large, fierce wolf terrorized the mountain town of Gubbio, Francis went out to meet it. The wolf ran towards Francis, but when he ordered it not to hurt anyone, the wolf lay down at his feet. It then began to walk alongside him, completely tamed. A few years ago a wolf ’s skeleton was found buried underneath the floor of the Church of San Francesco della Pace in Gubbio.
If we compare the mysticism of Ramón Lull with that of St Francis we see that a profound change has taken place in a very short time. Francis’s mysticism is the mysticism of simple, natural things, of the open air and the everyday.
In the first biography of St Francis, The Little Flowers of St Francis, it is said of him that he discovered the hidden things of nature with his sensitive heart. To Francis all things were alive. His was an ecstatic vision of the cosmos as idealism conceives it, everything created and charged with life by the celestial hierarchies. All creation sings in unison in the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon:
The spirit of Christianity had once helped the evolution of Buddhism. It had introduced a spirit of enthusiasm that helped the Buddha’s teaching of universal compassion find fulfilment in the material world. Now, although the Buddha did not incarnate again, his spirit here helped reform Christianity by inspiring a simple devotion and compassion for all living things.
Near the end of his life Francis was meditating on Mount La Verna, praying outside his hermit’s cell, when suddenly the whole sky blazed with light, and a six-winged Seraph appeared to him. Francis realized that this great being had the very same face he had seen on the painted crucifix that had set him out on his mission. He understood that Jesus Christ was sending him on a new mission.
Shortly after the death of St Francis trouble broke out in the order he had founded, the Franciscans. The Pope asked the order to take on extra responsibilities involving owning property and handling money. Many of the brothers saw this as a violation of St Francis’s vision, and they formed breakaway groups called the Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli. Both to themselves and to many outsiders they seemed like the new order of spiritual men whom Joachim had prophesied would oversee the end of the Church.
So it was that followers of St Francis came to be hunted down and killed as heretics.
A famous fresco by Giotto shows St Francis propping up the Church. If Francis saved the Church from complete collapse, can he be said to have succeeded in reforming it as the voice from the crucifix had asked? In esoteric Christianity it is believed that the Seraph who gave Francis the stigmata told him that his new mission was to be fulfilled after death. Once a year, on the anniversary of his death — 3 October — he was to lead the spirits of the dead out of the lunar spheres into the higher hierarchies.
Initiation, as we continue to see, is as concerned with life after death as much as this life.
IN THE LIFETIMES OF RAMÓN AND Francis new, different impulses for reform and purification of religious practice were growing up in many parts of Europe, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and above all in the south of France.