Contemplatio in Deum: or the Pleasure of Knowing God via his Attributes

• Autores: Annemarie C. Mayer
• Localización: Knowledge, contemplation and Lullism: contributions to the Lullian session at the SIEPM congress - Freising, August 20-25, 2012 / coord. por José Higuera Rubio, 2015, ISBN 978-2-503-54853-1, págs. 135-152
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ramon Llull firmly believes that God is characterised by a multitude of attributes, and those attributes are not an absolute secret. They are not hidden or unknowable, although God is transcendent. If human beings believe that God created the world, they can look thoroughly at God’s creation, see how it is modelled and structured, and they can draw conclusions about its Creator. By contemplating the world and the way it is, by employing the reason God has gifted them with, human beings can also contemplate God. The insights that such contemplation affords result in pleasure, because they constitute knowledge related to salvation. In his Liber Contemplationis in Deum Ramon Llull lists 20 different divine attributes. He distinguishes between the attributes with reference to God (quoad Deum) and the attributes with reference to us (quoad nos). How does Llull deduce these attributes ? How does he distinguish them ? What do they tell us about Lull’s notion of God ? In later works Llull reduces the number of divine attributes to seven. Does the concept become more elaborate as the list of attributes becomes shorter ? This paper argues that the entire conceptual framework that Llull will use later for his endeavours in inter-faith dialogue with Jews and Muslims is already in nuce in the Liber Contemplationis. This paper analyses also the relation between the different attributes, and asks why bonitas and perfectio are given such a prominent role. It introduces also the notion of “attributes of reference”, i.e., of the divine attributes that Llull uses to qualify other divine attributes. On the basis of the concept developed in the Liber Contemplationis, this paper shows how Llull could employ his notion of divine attributes in inter-church and, above all, in inter-faith dialogue.