Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/598

 582 INTELLECT AND FAITH. and religious poetry. The great collective edition of his works printed in Mainz from 1721 to 1742 forms ten folios. Like all other great scholars of his day, his name was a convenient one to affix to books on alchemy and magic, but all such are supposititious. His reputation as an alchemist is seen in the tradition that in Eng- land he made six million gold florins, and gave them to the king to stimulate him to a crusade, but his own opinion of alchemy is expressed in a passage of his Ars Magna : " Each element has its own peculiarities so that one species cannot be transmuted to an- other, wherefore the alchemists grieve and have occasion to weep," and in other equally outspoken expressions.* For our purpose we need consider but one phase of his marvel- lous productiveness. In the solitude of Monte de Ran da he con- ceived the Art which passes by his name — a method in which, by diagrams and symbols, the sublimest truths of theology and phi- losophy can be deduced and memorized. Of this the Ars Brevis is a compend, while the Ars Magna describes it in greater detail and proceeds to build upon it a system of the universe. As the product of a man untinctured with culture till after the age of thirty it is a wonderful performance, revealing a familiar acquaint- ance with all the secrets of the material and spiritual worlds, the powers, attributes, motives, and purposes of God and his creatures logically deduced, which the Lullists might well hold to be in- spired. This Art he himself taught at Montpellier and Paris, and in 1309 forty members of the latter University joined in a cordial recommendation of it as useful and necessary for the defence of the faith. At home it had great and enduring vogue. Favored by successive monarchs, it was taught in the Universities of Ara- gon and Valencia. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Estudio Lulliano was founded at Palma, subsquently enlarged into the Universidad Lulliana, where the tradition of his teaching was preserved almost to our own days. Cardinal Ximenes was its great admirer ; Angelo Folitiano says that to it he owed his abil- ity to dispute on any subject ; Jean Lefevre d'Etaples prized it Lullii Art. Mag. P. ix. c. 52 (Opp. Ed. Argentorati, 1651, p. 438). For an account of Lully's poetical works, see Chabaneau (Vaissette, £d. Privat, x. 379).
 * Nic. Anton. I. c. No. 87-154.— Hist. Gen. de Mall. III. 68, 70, 96-8.— R.