The Problem of Interreligious Peacemaking in the Works of Ramon Llull

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to examine depictions of interior peace, as well as exterior peacemaking in the world, in representative works by Ramon Llull, written during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. I will show how Llull’s goal of ending conflict involved interreligious dialogue and an attitude of intellectual openness, but at the same time advocated problematic efforts to proselytize religious others that were to be backed up by military force. While the writer’s conceptualization of inner, spiritual combat and peacemaking draws on a number of Christian conventions, we will see how it can also be fruitfully compared to Islamic traditions.

In fifth-century Hispania, the poet Prudentius composed the first full-length allegory featuring a war between armies of righteousness and worldly vice, leading to the triumph of Pax. The cult of the Roman goddess Pax had been adopted in the first century to honor the return of Augustus from his military conquests, and to promote the idea of imperial prosperity. In his Psychomachia, Prudentius (2019) transforms her into a personification of Christian virtue’s complete victory over the soul, as the final goal and ultimate prize gained from the struggle against vice (vv. 769–72). Scholars have shown that, in doing so, the Latin poet recontextualized the biblical metaphor of the miles Christi (Bible 2001, Ephesians 6:11–18), while also drawing on the works of Church Fathers, together with the pagan poetry of Virgil (Smith 1976, pp. 126–31).

Medieval commentaries on Prudentius’s allegory, as O’Sullivan (2004) has recently shown, “reveal that the poem was viewed, above all, by the tenth and eleventh-century glossators as a work of moral instruction” (p. 101). In keeping with this tradition, images of making peace with the will of God rendered as a figurative or allegorical combat became something of a commonplace during the Middle Ages. Believers were called on to shield themselves with Christian virtues, to outwardly and inwardly fight an evil force, identified as their own propensity to succumb to temptation. This can be seen in arguably the most popular confessional, sermonic handbook of the era, the thirteenth-century Summa virtutibus et vitiis (Summary Treatise on Virtues and Vices) by the Perault (1519). One manuscript includes an illumination showing the miles Christi or soldier of Christ with a shield of faith in the Trinity, and wielding the Word of God as his sword (Figure 1). This knight sets off on a campaign in which he deploys virtues in a battle against sin, including sapiencia (wisdom) linked to pax (peace).

Of course, the medieval notion of the miles Christi was not only figurative and interiorized. By the late eleventh century, the writings of Gregory VII demonstrate a “radical transformation of the meaning of militia Christi from that of spiritual conflicts and monkish asceticism to the literal meaning of knightly bellicosity” (Russell 1975, p. 35). Importantly, as Tomaž Mastnak has shown, the crusades that followed were predicated on ideas of Christian peacemaking as a means of unifying the Church against internal and external threats. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, movements known as the Peace and Truce of God sought to protect church property and unarmed Christians from outbreaks of military violence. In his call for the first Crusade, Urban II proclaimed a “general Peace of God” in order to protect “the crusaders’ person, property, and families,” as Christendom in effect exported “war to the East” to “secure peace in the West” (Mastnak 2002, p. 49). Writing in the early twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux (2000) famously promoted a new, ascetic army of Templars, identified as “knights of Christ,” who, unlike their worldly counterparts, would maintain a bond or pact of peace among their coreligionists, reconfiguring and exporting their propensity for violence (p. 39). As Frederick Russell puts it, “Europe’s loss of its violent elements was the Holy Land’s gain of faithful defenders” (p. 37). The crusades have been called a “strange hybrid of holy war and just war”: proponents like Bernard appealed to the example of divinely ordained conflicts in the Old Testament; while also attempting to justify war-making on the basis of proper authority (in this case, ecclesiastical as well as secular), right intentions (to secure a lasting peace, as opposed to greed or cruelty), and just cause (liberating the Holy Land and fellow Christians from occupation and persecution) (Russell 1975, p. 2). His In laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood), Bernard exploits and transforms the miles Christi metaphor, portraying Templars as “men of peace” who “arm themselves interiorly with faith” to fight “spiritual hosts of evil,” with “two swords”—representing material and spiritual arms—and protect themselves with the “armor of faith” and “of steel” (pp. 33–34, 46–47).

In medieval Iberia, the idea of the peacemaking knight of Christ was later explored in a different, yet related way by Ramon Llull. This prolific writer has been described as an example of “interreligious sensitivity” (Mayer 2010, “Ramon Llull” p. 54), as well as “a St. Bernard redivivus” because he sought to found “a new order … for the recovery of the Holy Land” (Mastnak 2002, p. 227). My purpose in what remains of this essay is to examine ideas of interior and exterior peacemaking in a number of representative texts by Llull, composed in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. First we will see how his writings sometimes appear to foster dialogue with religious others, displaying what can only be described as an attitude of intellectual openness that would eschew conflict. In other works, however, Llull promotes what seems to be a contradictory plan to move closer to a world without war by first calling for a crusade designed to convert Muslims through armed coercion. Finally, I will briefly consider how Llull’s conceptualization of spiritual combat, putting a temporary end to hostilities, and finding an inner, lasting peace, compare to similar ideas found in the Islamic tradition.

Fostering Dialogue

Llull was born in Majorca soon after its Christian conquest, completed in 1231 by Jaume I of Aragón. The king, in keeping with earlier Iberian rulers, first proclaimed the peace and truce of God to unite Christian forces and avoid internal conflict and division before embarking on this campaign. Jaume I viewed the conquest Islamic Mallorca as equivalent to a crusade. He declared, “we have assumed the cross to attack barbarous nations,” and secured a bull from Pope Honorius III that “offered full remission of sins” to those who came to the aid of Aragón (O’Callaghan 2003, p. 89). Donald Kagay has found that Aragonese kings were aware of basic just war doctrine, and in particular the “simple category” provided by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies: “to recover property and repel enemies” (p. 595). However, they also viewed military campaigns “against the infidel population” as a kind of holy war, in which God was “the true lord and governor of battles” (Kagay 2005, p. 595). Jaume I, like the rulers of other Christian Iberian kingdoms, would have been well versed in the histories of the Visigoths who had ruled the Peninsula prior to the Muslim conquest that began in 711. Consistently, Latin chronicles written from the ninth to the twelfth century glorified efforts to “recover” and “liberate” the lands of Visigothic “ancestors” that had been “invaded and captured” by the Moors (O’Callaghan 2003, pp. 8, 18). They claimed that such wars were waged to reestablish the peaceful unity of the Church and fragmented Christian kingdoms, and some chroniclers even referred to reconquest kings as soldiers or warriors of Christ (Bonch-Bruevich 2008, p. 38). Their ideology frequently diverged from the reality on the ground, where Christian rulers were known to ally themselves with Muslim counterparts for political and economic reasons, and often fought bitterly among themselves. Nevertheless, as Xenia Bonch-Bruevich has shown, a “uniquely Iberian symbiosis of bellum iustum” and “bellum sanctum” was built on a “framework” established by Isidore in his Historia de regibus Gothorum (History of the Visigothic Kings): just as, in the sixth century, Leovigild “expanded the rule of his nation by the skills of war” and Reccared “elevated the same nation by the victory of faith,” latter-day Iberian kings were tasked with interconnected objectives of reconquest designated as “dilatore (to expand politically by means of a treaty or military action) and sublimare (to elevate spiritually)” (pp. 33–34).

Coming of age in post-reconquest Mallorca, Llull pursued a strikingly different enterprise than the Aragonese warriors who first occupied the Mediterranean island. As Joseph O’Callaghan makes clear in his study of the reconquest in relation to crusading, the purpose of these military efforts was never “based on any evangelical precept … to convert the Muslims,” but rather to repossess and re-Christianize lands that had been long inhabited by the Moors (pp. 10, 14). After living the life of a courtier, Llull underwent a spiritual awakening and pledged to dedicate himself to converting as opposed to fighting Muslims. After years of study, Llull became a missionary and travelled throughout the Mediterranean, seeking to proselytize in North Africa.1 These frustrated efforts are idealized in his fictional works.

In keeping with earlier treatments of religious war, hearkening back to the crusading propaganda of St. Bernard, Llull imagines a cleansing of knighthood in a widely known treatise that he composed in the 1270s, called Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (Book of the Order of Chivalry). Apart from employing the topic of virtues combating vices in the “cor” or heart of the knight, he assigns spiritual meanings to various weapons and military accouterments, including the sword, lance, shield, helmet, armor, saddle, spurs and reins. Writing in the later thirteenth century, after the failure of crusading enterprises under Louis IX, Llull creates a fictional frame in which a squire learns the wisdom of an aged knight in a locus amoenus or idealized natural setting. In Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria (Llull 2015), the writer only once mentions the obligation to “conquer and subjugate” infidels, as he envisions a return to what are described as the pristine origins of Christian knighthood, when violence was carried out only for the sake of peace:

“knights who are enemies of the peace and love war … are unjust … the first knights … were accorded with justice and peace and pacified people through justice and by force of arms … knights of today, who are bellicose and unjust, are not in the order of chivalry nor profess properly the office of the knight” (pp. 96–97).

A number of scholars have discussed Llull’s engagement with the other Abrahamic religions, focusing in particular on Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis (Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men), written around the same time as his chivalric treatise. Llull’s writings reflect his own experience with this kind of peacemaking—that is, his efforts to discuss and build on shared beliefs with Jews and Muslims as a means of avoiding conflict, in addition to evangelizing. For example, Annemarie Mayer observes how Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis (Llull 1985) imagines an interreligious encounter between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim wise men, a “trialogue” that eschews “wars and enemies,” instead demonstrating “joint action in the common worship of God … Llull draws a line … from the evident correspondence between the three religions until the real unity (as they speak in the same way of the same attributes of God) and … towards the compatibility of religions” (Mayer 2010, “Ramon Llull” pp. 19, 22). While combative attitudes are rejected in this encounter, Christian orthodoxy is defended against heresy, and the role of the pagan as a potential convert to one of the three monotheistic religions presupposes that only one faith can be completely true in the end.2 As Mayer points out, Llull believed that “without religious peace there is no peace in the world,” and therefore mutual “understanding” would be the necessary precondition for reconciling tensions with Judaism and Islam (Mayer 2010, “Ramon Llull” pp. 19, 23). The purpose of the Catalan author’s openness was to convince religious others of Christian truth, not through the rhetoric of polemics or by strategically quoting authorities, but through methods of discussing or debating spiritual difference and acknowledging shared traditions.3

While it is beyond the scope of this article to consider how Llull’s Ars Magna or Great Art informed these efforts, it should be pointed out that Llull created an intricate, evangelizing system of “principles” designed to make philosophical propositions that would ring true to any monotheist.4 In fact, it was his rationalistic account of faith that led to Pope Gregory XI’s condemnation of Llull’s ideas later in the fourteenth century (Turner 1911). The “Principle of Concordance and Contrariety” in his Art, as Pamela Beattie observes in her study Llull’s crusade treatises, seems to have led him to the conclusion that “peaceful disputation with infidels accords more with the divine dignities than fighting against them” (p. 187). In this way, Llull hoped that Jews and Muslims would come to comprehend fully what he saw as the perfection of Christianity in relation to undeniable truths contained in their related doctrines—the same goal that motivated Llull’s study of Arabic and Islam, and his later, evangelizing in North Africa, the inspiration for his Disputatio Raymundi christiani et Homeri saraceni (The Disputation between Ramon the Christian and Omar the Saracen) (Mayer 2018, “Llull and Inter-Faith” pp. 159–60).

Calling for Crusade

In another recent study, Gabriel Ensenyat compares the younger, “pacifistic” Llull seeking an enlightened dialogue among monotheistic wise men, to the writer’s seeming militarism in later, Latin works. Drafted in the 1290s, these writings promote a renewed invasion of the Holy Land, and were initially entitled Tractatus de modo convertendi infidelis (Treatise on the Way to Convert Infidels) and Quomodo Terra Sancta recuperari potest (How the Holy Land can be Recovered)—seeming to evince what Gregory Stone has called “Llull’s split personality” (p. 123). Ensenyat argues against any contradiction in Llull’s overarching approach to encounters between Christianity and Islam, on the one hand motivated by reasoned persuasion, and on the other supportive of armed campaigns in the Holy Land. This scholar points out that the primary aim of the medieval author’s proposed campaigns was not the destruction of Muslim enemies, or even the reconquest of lost territory in the Middle East: “this Llullian crusade endeavored to ensure captive audiences. Llull never suggested the physical elimination of the infidels but rather their conversion … the use of force was to oblige Muslims to attend preaching as otherwise they simply would not go” (Ensenyat 2008, p. 141).5 Llull’s strategy of deploying an army to force prisoners to listen to arguments in favor of the Christian faith (and if need be, discipline them), according to Ensenyat, might have emerged as a result of the writer’s personal disappointment, after having failed to persuade Muslims to convert through the kind of voluntary discussion he had advocated in earlier works. Whether or not this experience provoked his seemingly incompatible aims, scholars agree that “no other theorist combines crusade and evangelization in the same deliberate and insistent way that he does … if they refused to submit to the spiritual sword (gladium spirituale), it would be necessary to subdue them with the corporeal sword (gladium corporale)” (Beattie 2018, pp. 180, 186). Whether or not we view the internal logic of Llull’s overall thinking as contradictory, his approach to conversion by mixing appeals to reason with the threat of force represents a problematic deviation from and apparent contradiction with theological understandings of the centrality of free will in conversion. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa theologica, stipulated that wars against infidels should not be waged in order that they “be compelled to the faith, in order that they may believe … for even if they were to conquer them and take them prisoners, they should still leave them free to believe, if they will” (2.2, Question 10, Article 8; qtd. in Mastnak 2002, p. 213). In fact, the use of force that Llull at times advocates in his quest to convert Muslims, over whom according to Aquinas the “Church had no jurisdiction,” seems partly influenced by ideas concerning persecutio—that is, a qualified, restrained kind of persecution carried out with the intention of correcting and bringing heretics back into the faith through “material,” and, if necessary, armed “coercion” (Mastnak 2002, pp. 30–33, 214).

In spite of his support of coercive tactics and evangelistic plans conceived of in military terms, another text by Llull that was written not long before his death suggests that he never totally gave up on pursuing an explicitly peaceful encounter with Islam. In the Liber de participatione christianorum et saracenorum (Llull 1988, Book of Participation between Christians and Saracens), the aged missionary advises Frederick III of Sicily to establish an exchange in which learned, bilingual Muslims and Christians would be sent to Tunis and Sicily. Positioned on either side of the Mediterranean, and on equal terms, they could more amiably discuss the shared truths of their faiths, with the ultimate aim of not only of avoiding further religious wars, but establishing unity and world peace—albeit contingent on conversion to Christianity, in keeping with the apocalyptic expectations of spiritual Franciscans of the period.6 As Annemarie Mayer puts it, Llull’s ecumenical impulses can be described as an “inclusivist” insofar as he “perceives Christianity as maximally valid within a range of valuable alternatives. He does not believe that Christians exclusively may know, love, and serve God; but neither does he think that all religions are equally true” (164). Ultimately, the relatively open exchange that Llull had in mind was designed to bring about the triumph of Christianity over other religions. It seems clear that Llull preferred to engage in an “intellectual war” rather than a “war of iron” so long as the former appeared to be demonstrably more “effective” than the latter (Mastnak 2002, p. 224). In later years, he seems to have expected that some combination of words and arms might be necessary.

Internal and External Peacekeeping

While Llull’s limited commitment to avoiding religious conflict by sharing ideas has attracted increased attention, the way in which this might relate to notions of internal pacification of the soul versus external peacemaking in his works has received less notice. It is an issue worth addressing in some detail, before returning to the problematic nature of implicating coercion in the evangelization of Muslims, and the limits of Llullian openness with and peaceful acceptance of religious others. Such a connection can be seen most strikingly in the author’s seminal work, the Blanquerna (Llull 1986), with its interpolated, mystical Libre d’amic e d’amat (Book of the Lover and the Beloved). Written during the early 1280s, in the years leading up to his activities in the Maghreb, the didactic novel follows the trajectory of an autobiographic character who progresses from the reclusion of a hermit, to the socially active life of a bishop and pope, before returning to Christian asceticism. The text presents interrelated methods both for restoring peace among Christians, and for pacifying the soul as well as the religious other through a conversional, allegorical combat that takes place on an internal battlefield. For instance, in one encounter, a Christian knight assures Blanquerna that he has vanquished enemies in his mind through the practice of virtue triumphing over vice, reminiscent of the earlier-discussed pyschomachia tradition. In a later chapter on “fortitude,” the eponymous character instructs another knight by relating the example of a learned Christian preacher in an Islamic kingdom who dedicated himself to overcoming “the law of Mahomet in so far as he was able” (p. 189). Threatened with death by the Muslim king, the unarmed missionary proclaims that the “strength of the mind … greater than strength of body, therefore charity, which is in my mind, has such love … ready to do battle with the powers of thy soul and with the souls of all them that are beneath thy sway … there is no charity or fortitude which can by any arguments do battle with mine” (p. 190). The king responds by summoning his “wisest men,” who, “had the most charity” to “vanquish in the Christian the virtue and charity of his mind,” but the missionary “vanquished and overcame them all with spiritual strength and with charity” (p. 190). After hearing the tale, the knight agrees with Blanquerna concerning the superiority of mental versus corporal battles. The knight’s interest, however, returns to successfully waging internal conflict against the temptations of immorality and criminality. Like the preacher’s efforts against the religious other, this inner combat is likened to victory in armed combat.

Thus, Llull imagines personal, spiritual struggles, missionary activity and religious disputation as metaphorical, inner battles taking place in the mind and soul.7 While Llull is not opposed to military conflict in the name of Christianity, as we have seen, here he privileges internal conflict against vice and unarmed campaigns—which implicates an openness to martyrdom in the tradition of the early Church—to conquer the mind and soul of the religious other through peaceful dialogue.8 This can be seen in a later section of Blanquerna, concerning the blessed Virgin, when the only reason a knight refuses to engage in a peaceful dispute with a Muslim king over Koranic versus Gospel portrayals of the mother of Jesus, is because of his lack of education: “he was unlettered and knew not the Scriptures, and therefore he desired not to answer the king by argument” (p. 254). In keeping with Llull’s earlier-mentioned letter to Frederick III, and Latin treatises on crusading and conversion, when Blanquerna becomes Pope he sends friars to study with Jews and Muslims, in order to Christianize a remote land. At the same time, he also initiates a holy war “against the enemies of the cross” in order to make peace between warring Christian kings. Accompanying the kings are “many friars who had learned Arabic, as messengers to the Saracens” (p. 334). Along with the friars, the Pope calls on a peacemaking Cardinal whose title is derived from the Angelic Hymn sung at mass, itself inspired by a verse from the Gospel of Luke (Bible 2001, 2:14), “Et terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis” (Peace on earth to men of good will) (p. 331). The purpose of these messengers is to maintain the pact between the two kings and their subjects, and to dedicate themselves to a peaceful conversion of Muslims, as opposed to resorting first to violence. This can be compared to Llull’s later writing on a proposed evangelizing crusade, in which he suggested first unifying military orders (and relations with Constantinople) in order to avoid internal conflict and promote Christian “harmony and love” (Beattie 2018, pp. 185–86).

In Blanquerna, converting Muslims as means of pacifying enemies within the faith is motivated by the threat of death and damnation, “ere the two kings slew them [the Saracens] and their souls went to everlasting fire” (p. 331). The Cardinal at one point expresses his thoughts on the meaning of Christian peace in a brief letter addressed to Pope Blanquerna, describing how war can be understood as a consequence of Original Sin insofar as Adam put himself in conflict with God, and was exiled from a state of Edenic tranquility. The Savior then came to reestablish a state of peace between God and humankind through his incarnation and sacrifice. After this letter is read, the autobiographical character Ramón the Fool tells the story of a combative married couple, who only managed to restore peace in their household through the mutual love they felt for their newborn son. Similarly, both Blanquerna and his Cardinal are described at length as pacifying coreligionists through the creation of ties and alliances between enemy factions that are mutually beneficial. They also negotiate and restore peace through strategies of distributive justice, gift giving, counteracting sin with moral education, and emphasizing the forgiving, pacifist nature of Christ in their preaching. War between Christians is to be avoided at all costs. Prior to becoming Pope, in the sermons of Bishop Blanquerna, he is said to have constantly advocated “peace, and said that war and strife are the occasion of all evil, but peace is the occasion of all good; wherefore Jesus Christ preached peace daily for so long as he was among us” (p. 299).

Apart from overcoming sinfulness, worldly and political considerations are crucial to peacemaking among fellow Christians in the Blanquerna, and pacification is a question of how to go about renewing a preexisting state of unity. In the case of infidels, the Catalan author not only advocates dialogue, debate and open-minded discourse—albeit with an implicit or at times stated aim of evangelizing—but specifies in detail the amiable attitude that participants must maintain in order to make progress in their conversations. At one point, Llull’s peacemaking Cardinal intervenes in a quarrel between a Christian and Jew who meet every day and engage in what is described as a mean-spirited religious dispute. The Cardinal admonishes them with a speech in which he observes that “anger” clouds the “understanding” of truth, whereas the emotions of gladness and “joy” lead to fuller comprehension (p. 332). He then explains how this requires the establishment a kind of dispassionate and amicable emotional space for abstract, theoretical discourse where reason can operate apart from the will’s tendency to immediately affirm or deny propositions and ideas before they have been fully understood. The peaceable space, similar to that created in the Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis, would allow participants in the interreligious discussion to comprehend and entertain the possibility of truth-seeking through a more open consideration of the faith of others. It seems likely that Llull himself sought to practice this method, evidently with great difficulty, during his missionary activities among non-Christians in Aragón and the Maghreb. The Cardinal compares rising above unexamined, dogmatic strictures to the humbling experience of listening to and making music. Through this process, the wise Christian and Jew move from enmity to “friendship,” “agreeing with each other in love and conceding to each other the truth” (p. 332).

Scholars have found evidence of Llull’s openness to Islamic ideas, in addition to his interest in Judaism, in his life and writings. He apparently studied Arabic for several years with a Muslim slave purchased in his native Majorca, and even acknowledges the influence of Sufi spirituality—without referencing any specific sources, typical of his avoidance of citing authorities—in his introduction to the Libre d’amic e d’amat that forms part of his famous novel:

“the Saracens have … certain men called Sufis, who are the most prized among them, and these men have words of love and brief examples which give to men great devotion; and these are words which demand exposition, and by the exposition thereof the understanding soars aloft, and the will likewise soars and is increased in devotion”.

(Llull 1986, p. 410)

It is generally agreed that Llull was impacted by a number of Arabic, Islamic traditions: from Eastern animal fables, to the beautiful names of God, and Al-Ghazali’s popular compendium of the teachings of Arabic philosophers, in addition to Sufi “writing about mystical love” (Simon 1988, p. 27). Llull claims to have composed texts in Arabic, and, although none of these survive, a majority of scholars agree that he achieved a degree of oral and written proficiency in this language. What seems clear is that Llull exhibits what scholars have called a “global influence of Islamic thought” that can frustrate those “seeking influences from specific Islamic authors” (Bellver 2014, p. 295). The most notable exception is al-Ghazali, whom scholars agree influenced Llull’s approach to logic, as evidenced by his early work, Compendium logicae Algazelis. They have also compared Llull’s Art to the Islamic thinker’s emphasis on proving religious truth through reason, as opposed to relying primarily on faith or appeals to authority, as well as al-Ghazali’s spiritual work on the divine names and attributes (Stone 2018, pp. 133–38).9

With regard to the Catalan writer’s approach to interior peacemaking, it is possible that, in addition to Christian ideas of the soul’s battle, Islamic notions of the inner struggle of believers to overcome vice could have contributed in what has been described as Llull’s search for syncretic truth or openness to “cross-pollination” (Bellver 2014, p. 300).10 The Libre d’amic e d’amat (Llull 1995) is full of bellicose imagery used to express the lovers’ victory in conquering and destroying “desamor” (lovelessness) to arrive at a state of inner peace (p. 163). The evocation of armor recalls the figurative meaning of the miles Christi, and the “troops and brigades” hearken back to the psychomachia allegory, while the portrayal of lovers clearly reflects the Song of Songs, Trinitarian doctrine, and the poetry of the troubadours (p. 61). At the same time, considering Llull’s earlier-mentioned acknowledgement of the Sufis in his preamble, his peaceful campaign can be compared to the concept of a greater “jihad.” While this nonviolent meaning of the word hearkens back to the origins and early history of the Islamic faith—together with the more literal, combative notion of the term—it developed most fully in Sufi spirituality. In particular, as Cook (2005) observes in his study of the history of jihad in Islam, al-Ghazali represented “the lusts and passions of the soul as an invading army” blocking the way to mystical revelation—“when he deals with the subject of exercising the soul … he uses military, and especially jihad, imagery to describe this battle” (p. 37). The thirteenth-century mystical poet, Ibn al-Farid, also described the contemplative aim of this interiorized conflict: “so battle yourself that you may contemplate in yourself from yourself a repose beyond description, arising from peacefulness. And after I struggled with myself I contemplated the one who made me contemplate and who led me to myself” (Renard 1988, p. 232). As Cook points out, “Al-Ghazali’s Sufi successors went a good deal further” in their exploration of the inner jihad, “chief among these was … Ibn al-Arabi … a Spanish Muslim mystic” (p. 38). Although this Andalusian writer favored and continued to develop notions of spiritualized, unarmed warfare, he did not exclude from the full significance of jihad armed conflict and efforts at conversion backed up by force. Similarly, Llullian “pau” (peace) is first-and-foremost to be attained through an internalized battle to conquer the enemy within and thereby encounter God. It requires a joyful openness to recognizing and relating to truth wherever it is found, but without fully excluding the kind of pacification that could require military force. O’Callaghan has observed that, in contrast to the goals of the crusades and Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, a military jihad could only be initiated after an invitation “to embrace Islam, and only after they had refused to do so would the holy war be declared against them” (p. 12). Comparably, the Llullian crusade was primarily rooted in the objective of converting religious others, leading them by force if necessary into a pax Christiana. As Mastnak has noted, its ultimate goal was eliminating “difference” and “contrariety,” and pacifying the world by bringing about complete “concordance”—in other words, for Llull, complete and lasting “peace is only imaginable among Christians, and universal peace presupposes universal Christian rule” (pp. 225–26). Peace with the religious other qua other was necessarily a temporary arrangement, in keeping with the tradition in Islam that “there could never be permanent peace with them until they had finally submitted” (O’Callaghan 2003, pp. 11–12).

Mastnak, in his illuminating study of Llull’s approach to external peacemaking, notes that the Iberian author’s crusading advocacy has been compared to that of St. Bernard (p. 227). As we have seen, a close reading of interiorized images of peace in the Llull’s works complicates this comparison. His final, early fourteenth-century crusade treatise, Liber de adquisitione Terrae Sanctae (Book on the Pursuit of the Holy Land), is structured on what he views as “the three gifts of the Holy Spirit required for acquisition of the Holy Land: wisdom, power, and love” (Beattie 2018, p. 205). Written in his old age, this last treatise, in the words of Beattie, “perhaps more than his previous works … shows that Llull’s proposals for mission and crusade were both subordinate to his greater goal of bringing peace and unity” (p. 205). It has been shown how Llull, seeing himself as a peacemaker, was prepared to come to a deeper understanding of his own faith by engaging with non-Christian beliefsliefs and practices, and adapting transconfessional elements—such as the Islamic, and more specifically Sufi model of Jihad—into his own thought, spirituality, and evangelizing efforts. Llull’s concept of inner and external peace can be understood as an open forum and a discursive space that is interreligious and, to a certain extent, syncretic. Yet his peacemaking mission is also open to armed coercion, and for this reason remains problematic, especially in the context of Christian theology surrounding evangelization. It involves a particularly free form of dialogue with the other, and the struggle for a mystical, soulful disarmament with the ultimate goal of eliminating war and strife—while at the same time relying on an inherent threat of physical violence.