Ars Magna

Ramon Llull (c. 1232-1316) was a courtier and love poet on Majorca until, at about thirty, a series of visions of Christ on the cross turned his whole life to religion. In 1274, on Mount Randa, he received what he called an illumination: a method by which reason alone could demonstrate the truths of faith to anyone, Christian, Muslim or Jew, by argument rather than force.

He called it the Art and refined it for more than thirty years, culminating in the Ars generalis ultima (1305-1308), also known as the Ars magna. Its heart was an alphabet. In its mature form the letters B to K stand for nine divine attributes: goodness, greatness, duration, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth and glory. Set on concentric paper wheels that turn against one another, they generate every combination of principles, so that any question can be broken into its parts and answered systematically.

Leibniz, barely twenty, took up Llull's idea in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), and later dreamed of a calculus of reasoning so exact that two philosophers in dispute could simply sit down and say “Calculemus”: let us calculate. Jonathan Swift, less impressed, sent Gulliver to an academy in Lagado where students crank a great frame of words until it spits out scraps of sentences, so that anyone might write books of philosophy without genius or study. Between them, they described the machines we now talk to.