Contributions to Science by Institut d'Estudis Catalans

VOLUME 12 | ISSUE 1 | JUNE 2016

Volume 12 | Issue 1 | June 2016

OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL

www.cat-science.cat http://revistes.iec.cat/contributions/

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

The Catalan Atlas of the Mediterranean is one of the most important cartographic works of the Middle Ages. The approximate date of production is 1375, and It is attributed to Mallorcan Jew Abraham Cresques, with the collaboration of his son Jehuda. It is a special work that Prince Joan, son of Pedro the Ceremoniós, sent as a gift to the new king of France Charles V. The Atlas is currently preserved in the National Library of France. It covers the territories of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Iran, Persian Gulf and Arabia. The presence of a compass ("rosa dels vents"), is considered the first performance of this instrument on a nautical chart. It is shaped like an eight-pointed star adorned with three colors: red, blue and brown. A copy facsimile, on parchment and illustrated by hand, is exposed at the Sala Puig i Cadafalch of the Institute for Catalan Studies. It was donated to the IEC by Ms. Montserrat Galera in 2014. // (Upper part) The supposed face of Ramon Llull, as it is represented in a painting on wood from the 14th-15th centuries belonging to the Library of Catalonia (Biblioteca de Catalunya).

Ramon Llull (1232-1315/16), a man who gave literary dignity to the Catalan language in the century in which the Romance Languages were being formed. Llull was a proto-European figure of the late Middle Ages, stitching together the edges of the Mediterranean with his tireless travels that contrasted Christian, Jewish and Islamic religions. In the two-year period of 2015 and 2016, under the auspices of the Autonomous Governement of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya) we are commemorating the 700th anniversary of the death of Ramon Llull. The core of the Lullian contribution resided in what he called the Ars, a general system for the interpretation of visible and invisible reality, which made use of semi-mechanical techniques, symbolic notation and combinational diagrams. // (Left) The logotype of the research project "Ramon Llull. Vida i obres" (Ramon Llull. Life and Works), designed by Dr. Mercè Berlanga. The project was developed by Prof. Pere Villalba at the IEC, with the collaboration of the Elsa Peretti Foundation in Girona.

Volume 12 | Issue 1 | June 2016

Editorial Board

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Ricard Guerrero

Biological Sciences Section, IEC

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Salvador Alegret

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Ramon Gomis

Science and Technology Section, IEC

Biological Sciences Section, IEC

EDITORIAL BOARD The Science and Technology and Biological Sciences Sections:

Joaquim Agulló, Technical University of Catalonia • Josep Amat, Technical University of Catalonia • Francesc Asensi, University of Valencia • Damià Barceló, Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona) • Carles Bas, Institute of Marine Sciences-CSIC (Barcelona) • Pilar Bayer, University of Barcelona • Xavier Bellés, Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona) • Jaume Bertranpetit, Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) • Eduard Bonet, ESADE (Barcelona) • Joaquim Casal, Technical University of Catalonia • Alícia Casals, Technical University of Catalonia • Josep Castells, University of Barcelona • Jacint Corbella, University of Barcelona • Jordi Corominas, Technical University of Catalonia • Michel Delseny, University of Perpinyà • Josep M. Domènech, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Mercè Durfort, University of Barcelona • Marta Estrada, Institute of Marine Sciences-CSIC (Barcelona) • Gabriel Ferraté, Technical University of Catalonia • Ramon Folch, Institute for Catalan Studies • Màrius Foz, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Jesús A. Garcia-Sevilla, University of the Balearic Islands • Lluís Garcia-Sevilla, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Joan Genescà, National Autonomous University of Mexico • Evarist Giné, University of Connecticut (USA) • Joan Girbau, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Pilar González-Duarte, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Francesc González-Sastre, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Joaquim Gosálbez, University of Barcelona • Albert Gras, University of Alacant • Gonzalo Halffter, National Polytechnic Institute (Mexico) • Lluís Jofre, Technical University of Catalonia • Joan Jofre, University of Barcelona • David Jou, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Ramon Lapiedra, University of Valencia • Àngel Llàcer, Hospital Clinic of Valencia • Josep Enric Llebot, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Jordi Lleonart, Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona) • Xavier Llimona, University of Barcelona • Antoni Lloret, Institute for Catalan Studies • Abel Mariné, University of Barcelona • Joan Massagué, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York (USA) • Federico Mayor-Zaragoza, Foundation for a Culture of Peace (Madrid) • Adélio Machado, University of Porto (Portugal) • Gabriel Navarro, University of Valencia • Jaume Pagès, Technical University of Catalonia • Ramon Parés, University of Barcelona • Àngel Pellicer, New York University (USA) • Juli Peretó, University of Valencia • F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, Harvard University (USA) • Norberto Piccinini, Politecnico di Torino (Italy) • Jaume Porta, University of Lleida • Pere Puigdomènech, Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona) • Jorge-Óscar Rabassa, National University of La Plata (Argentina) • Pere Roca, University of Barcelona • Joan Rodés, University of Barcelona • Joandomènec Ros, University of Barcelona • Claude Roux, University of Aix-Marseille III (France) • Pere Santanach, University of Barcelona • Francesc Serra, Autonomous University of Barcelona • David Serrat, University of Barcelona • Boris P. Sobolev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia • Carles Solà, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Joan Antoni Solans, Technical University of Catalonia • Rolf Tarrach, University of Luxembourg • Jaume Terradas, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Antoni Torre, Obra Cultural de l’Alguer • Josep Vaquer, University of Barcelona • Josep Vigo, University of Barcelona • Miquel Vilardell, Autonomous University of Barcelona • Jordi Vives, Hospital Clinic of Barcelona

Volume 12 | Issue 1 | June 2016

Contents

FEATURE ARTICLES/RESEARCH CENTRES IN CATALONIA Rovira Ll

CERCA Centres: The awakening of Catalan Research

Martorell JM

Barcelona Supercomputing Center: Science accelerator and producer of innovation

Martínez AB, Biscari C, García G

The ALBA Synchrotron Light Source

DISTINGUISHED LECTURES/RAMON MARGALEF PRIZE 2015 Pretus JL

The 2015 Ramon Margalef Prize to Robert E. Ricklefs: A passion for evolutionary ecology

Ricklefs RE

Intrinsic and extrinsic influences on ecological communities

de Puig i Oliver J

Ramon Llull and Lullism at the Institute for Catalan Studies, 1907–2015

Eco U

The Ars Magna by Ramon Llull

Tessari A

Ramon Llull: The first proto-European

Domínguez Reboiras F

Ramon Lull, a bridge between Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures

REVIEWS /2016: YEAR RAMON LLULL

PERSPECTIVES Agulló-Galilea D

Gaudí and some observations on the Modernist Garden at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital

FEATURE ARTICLE Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

CONTRIB SCI 12(1):1-3 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.237

www.cat-science.cat

RESEARCH CENTRES IN CATALONIA

CERCA Centres: The awakening of Catalan Research Lluís Rovira Director of the CERCA Institution (I-CERCA), Barcelona, Catalonia

Correspondence: Lluís Rovira llrovirap@gencat.cat

Summary. The 42 CERCA centres existing today come from a historical origin plus a new wave of creation of new R&D centres starting approximately in 2000. They all have their own legal status under the umbrella of the CERCA Institution (I-CERCA). I-CERCA plays a control and coordinating role including evaluation, selection of directors, merging CERCA centres, national and international promotion, technology transfer benchmarking, etc. CERCA centres are built on a basis of institutional collaboration with universities and hospitals (who fund them in kind), and promoted by the Government of Catalonia (who funds them in cash with 100 million euros annually that represent 25% of their global income). The outputs measured by ERCs granted, coordination of H2020 projects, HRS4R awards, etc. are impressive. The comparison of their scientific production (and impact) in 2012–2014 with CNRS, Max Planck Institutes and CSIC is surprising! CERCA’s contribution to the expanding Catalan Science is crystal-clear. [Contrib Sci 12(1):1-3 (2016)]

Since 30 years ago several research centres were created in Catalonia, mainly around the area of Barcelona, with a legal status of consortium (in the first two decades approx.) and foundation (in the last dozen of years). Among the initial centres there were the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA), the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED), the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE), the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE), the Centre for Mathematical Research (CRM) and others. A common characteristic of these centres is that they all were promoted by the Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) although involving other stsakeholders such as universi-

ties or the Institute for Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans). The second period of creation of R&D centres started approx. in the year 2000 in a new conception of what R&D centres should be. The idea of CERCA is attributed to Prof. Andreu Mas-Colell who foresaw how to overcome the restrictions for research performance in the Catalan universities at that time through the creation of a ring of R&D centres (CERCA) with outstanding capacities for excellent research, built on critical mass and successful researchers as leaders for these “new institutions”. At this time appeared new centres such as Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Institute for

Keywords: scientific policy · research centres · CERCA ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):1-3 (2016)

Cerca

IR-Sant Pau. Sant Pau Institute of Biomedical Research IRB Barcelona. Institute for Research in Biomedicine IRB Lleida. Biomedical Research Institute of Lleida IREC. Catalonia Institute for Energy Research IrsiCaixa. Institute for AIDS Research IRTA. Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology IS GLOBAL. Barcelona Centre for International Health Research VHIO. Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology VHIR. Vall d'Hebron Research Institute

Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), and others. In 2016, the 42 CERCA centres are: Agrotecnio. Centre for Research in Agrotechnology CED. Centre for Demographic Studies CIMNE. International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering CMR[B]. Centre of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona CRAG. Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics CREAF. Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications CREI. Centre for Research in International Economics CRG. Centre for Genomic Regulation CRM. Centre for Mathematical Research CTFC. Forest Sciences Centre of Catalonia CTTC. Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia CVC. Computer Vision Centre i2CAT. Internet and Digital Innovation in Catalonia IBEC. Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia IC3. Catalan Climate Sciences Institute ICAC. Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology ICCC. Catalan Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences ICFO. Institute of Photonic Sciences ICIQ. Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia ICN2. Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology ICP. Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miquel Crusafont ICRA. Catalan Institute for Water Research ICRPC. Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage Research IDIBAPS. August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute IDIBELL. Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute IDIBGI. Girona Biomedical Research Institute IEEC. Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia IFAE. Institute for High Energy Physics IGTP. Health Sciences Research Institute of the Germans Trias i Pujol Foundation IISPV. Pere Virgili Health Research Institute IJC. Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute IMIM. Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute IPHES. Catalan Institute for Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution www.cat-science.cat

CERCA initially was a programme of the Catalan Government mainly to fund R&D centres. However when the CERCA Institution (I-CERCA) started its endeavour in 2010 as the Agency devoted to support CERCA centres, some other strategic issues arose. I-CERCA monitored and externally evaluated the activity of the CERCA centres from a holistic point of view, analysing the scientific performance, the knowledge and technology transfer, the recruitment of researchers, the administrative management and the scientific dissemination and impact. The first international evaluation exercise was held in 2012–2013. Now, in 2016–2018 CERCA centres are being re-evaluated again. Now the assessment is expected to classify CERCA centres in four categories of performance. Low performance will be associated to executive consequences like thinking over the continuity of the centre. In addition I-CERCA has worked to achieve a certain level of recognition for CERCA at national and international level, and has promoted technology transfer activities through the CERCA KTT Commission (Knowledge and Technology Transfer Commission). This Agency has also managed the SUMA programme, supported by the Catalan Government, oriented to reduce the number of centres through merging them in a bottom-up exercise complemented by economic incentives. CERCA started in 2010 with 47 centres and now only 42 are still active. It’s important to note that almost no scientific capacity has been lost. Merges include all research groups in the resulting centre. Like this, some emblematic institutes have disappeared (IG, CREAL, CRESA, IMPPC, CRESIB, …) being merged with other ones, and creating ambitious scientific platforms to fight for relevant EU projects. Finally, I-CERCA has been responsible, in connection with the Scientific Advisory Board of each CERCA centre, for the selection of Directors at the CERCA centres. Fresh air, avoiding in-breeding in open, international calls has been the result. (More info at www.cerca.cat). Nowadays, the aggregated annual budget of all CERCA 2

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):1-3 (2016)

Contrib Sci

Rovira

Fig. 1. Comparative scientific production and impact, 2012–2014. Data Source: Web of Science-Thomson Reuters, calculated by BAC [http://bac.fundaciorecerca.cat/].

centres is about 400 million euros. The contribution of the Catalan Government to the budget is 25%. The rest of income accounts from competitive projects (mainly EU), private contracts, philanthropy, etc. The CERCA centres have expanded their activity from 2011 to 2014, when an increase in 30 million euros has been reported in competitive projects. Another very important income in kind at the CERCA centres comes from universities, hospitals and other institutions. This part includes the pay-role of many researchers who are at the same time lecturers at university or doctors in hospitals. These salaries are mainly paid by the origin institution although they undertake research at CERCA centres, usually located in university campuses or near a hospital. The scientific performance is heterogeneous but outstanding. In the period 2012–2014 all CERCA centres have published over 20,000 papers in WoS journals, and 1116 papers have evolved as highly cited. The ratio of foreign authors in this scientific production is 53%. And only 9.2% of the articles have not been cited yet. The Relative Citation Impact (RCI) related to citation obtained comparing to other papers at the same journal and year is 2.5, therefore two and half times over the average citation. Comparing CERCA to CNRS, Max Planck and CSIC for the same time-window results are

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surprising for such a young system of R&D centres (Fig. 1). As a measure of excellence in European top-research, the CERCA centres have been awarded with 120 ERC grants in the different calls (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, Prove of Concept and Synergy). 65% centres are coordinating H2020 projects. In addition 26 CERCA centres have obtained the recognition HRS4R form EU-Euraxess. The scientific policy regarding CERCA centres in Catalonia has been developed under a framework of political consensus and institutional collaboration especially with universities and hospitals, searching win-win synergies for the country. The generosity of stakeholders and the rigorous task of the managers at different levels have perfectly complemented the key role of researchers. One step forward has been done. Still some challenges in the way to success, but in the meanwhile…Catalonia as a whole has doubled in the last 15 years its scientific production share to the world. And in terms of Highly Cited Papers (HCPs) the increase in the world share has been 5-fold approx. This geographic scientific miracle has been catalysed by the CERCA centres. Now Catalan Research is in the map of EU. Competing interests. None declared.

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):1-3 (2016)

FEATURE ARTICLE Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

CONTRIB SCI 12(1):5-11 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.238

www.cat-science.cat

RESEARCH CENTRES IN CATALONIA

Barcelona Supercomputing Center: Science accelerator and producer of innovation Josep M. Martorell Associate director, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, UPC-Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Catalonia

Correspondence: Josep Maria Martorell martorell@bsc.es

Summary. Supercomputing has become an accelerator; its use is now essential in almost all scientific disciplines. Established a little more than ten years ago, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) provides computing services for the European scientific community, carries out in-depth research in different fields, collaborates with multiple research centers and develops technologies for different sectors of society. Based on its capabilities and the skills of the responsible team, the BSC is planning to enlarge both its facilities and its penetration into the scientific and industrial communities as one of the most powerful tools to develop complex research. [Contrib Sci 12(1):5-11 (2016)]

Computation transforming the scien tific process The fact that scientific production is increasing exponentially because of many different causes is one which no one doubts. Bibliographic data suggest that the publication of journal articles verified by a peer review system grows at a rate of approximately 6–9% annually, which means that the rate almost doubles every nine years. The growing number of researchers and research centers, the pressure to publish and the ease of access to prior knowledge because of new technologies, partly explain this phenomenon. But it is also true that it is changing how we do science.

In October 2013, the influential Financial Times published an interesting article about how computing is transforming every aspect of the scientific process, also emphasized by the recent nominations of Peter W. Higgs and François Englert― Nobel laureates in Physics―and Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel―Nobel laureates in Chemistry. Curiously, it is worth noting that the article was illustrated with a photograph of the MareNostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Indeed, the 2013 Nobel Prize meant, probably unintentionally, an important recognition of the role of supercomputing and High Performance Computing as an accelerator of scientific progress. For decades, computers have increasingly

Keywords: supercomputing · Big Data · modellization ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):5-11 (2016)

Supercomputer MareNostrum

Interdisciplinarity

and subtly become a fundamental part of universities and research centers, changing the way knowledge is obtained and today their role is essential in almost all of our scientific disciplines. Higgs’ Nobel prize came half a century after he theorized the existence of the particle that bears his name. On one occasion, he explained how his theory took shape while walking in the Cairngorms, in Scotland, but as is well-known, it would not be proven until 2013, after several research sessions at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN. Specifically, experiments were done using the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, which, when operating at full capacity, produce tens of millions of collisions per second; it was estimated that only one million of these collisions would contain useful information to be studied. Interactions in the ATLAS and CMS detectors, such as those occurring in the other facilities at CERN, create a huge stream of data that is filtered as it flows, in an enormous massive computing task, to tell the detector which to register and which to ignore. Despite this filter, the volume of data saved is still huge―CERN produces about 30 petabytes of data each year— and, to analyze it all, the CERN computer center is used in addition to a network of distributed repositories and supercomputers over 42 countries. There were also detectors, in this case LIGO’s interferometers, which allowed gravitational waves to be located on September 14th, 2015, a century after Einstein’s prediction and, according to some experts, the first day of a new era in astronomy. Theory, a research team comprised of over a thousand researchers, access to the latest technology and computer resources from various centers and universities―also the MareNostrum―made this new discovery possible. As regards the Nobel to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, there are lots of people who, without failing to recognize the worthiness of these first-class researchers, regarded it as the Nobel to computational chemistry. This is not surprising and has been driven by the Swedish Academy itself, whose statement argued that the prize was awarded “for the development of multi-scale models of complex chemical systems" and stressed that it “laid the foundation for the powerful programs they used to understand and predict chemical processes.” Today, Computational Chemistry is standard use for tasks such as nanotechnology and drugs design, where, thanks to in silico experiments, the behavior of target proteins when interacting with different molecules can be predicted very accurately, thereby saving time, money and materials. www.cat-science.cat

Computational chemistry and computer science are different things―like computer science and physics or computer science and other scientific disciplines. A software engineer or computer scientist develops algorithms, software, hardware and visualization systems consistent with the purpose for which they are to be used. Computational chemists and physicists, however, work in conjunction with laboratories and theoretical specialties to apply computer tools to research and validate hypotheses in their respective fields of study. The same occurs in many other areas of scientific research. Genomics, for example, is a clear point of convergence between biologists and computer scientists. A single strand of DNA, once sequenced and clean from any noise that may have occurred during sequencing, consists of 120 billion letters (C, T, A and G) spread over parts of a hundred letters. A jigsaw puzzle that has to be assembled, analyzed and compared, with tens and hundreds of similar chains that need to be unraveled in order to know what variables may be linked to a certain genetic trait or disease being studied. And DNA is just one part of this puzzle because to fully understand what happens in living organisms, epigenetic information is becoming increasingly important, as it modulates the expression of genes without changing the sequence of DNA. Bioinformatics for genomic analysis, with the avalanche of data that entails, is considered one of the most disruptive areas in the life sciences because of its implications, among many other reasons, in what will soon be personalized or precision medicine. At present, in Barcelona―physically located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center―we have a copy of the European Genome-Phenome Archive, containing the Genome and Phenome data of more than 100,000 people who have authorized their use for research. Analyzing and connecting these data with each other, and all those that will be produced exponentially over the next few years, is a daunting task for physicians and biologists, and will consist of the production, storage, data analysis and creation of software and hardware tools that are able to carry out these tasks accurately, efficiently and safely. Supercomputers, tools that were essential to the sequencing of the human genome, are now also key instruments in biomedical research; for example, they are used in research to better understand the complexity and the development of cancer, identify new treatments and find patterns in large and complex data sets. In a very different field of research, but also of great social interest, we find research on climate change. Studies on 6

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):5-11 (2016)

Martorell

the weather and climate are a good example of the large amount of data needed to make accurate predictions. It is estimated that, in 2030, the mathematical models used to study climate change will require 350 petabytes of storage. These models have become more and more complex since the 1960s, adding more variables to the factors that must be considered if predictions are to be refined. The World Meteorological Organization is promoting a project, in which the Barcelona Supercomputing Center will participate, where thousands of years of simulations produced by 30 leading centers worldwide will be analyzed, comparing the data the different models produce and contrasting them with historical data and observations from satellites, ocean buoys and weather stations, among other devices, comparisons which will produce much more data. Whenever a model simulates the changes that will occur globally in a single decade, it generates between 135 terabytes and 5 petabytes of data. Running a ten-year simulation at an average resolution needs more than 150,000 hours of processing power. The project promoted by the World Meteorological Organization anticipates simulating approximately 300,000 years using different models and at different resolutions. These investigations could not be done without a network of High Performance Computing systems with distributed repositories throughout the entire globe that store the data generated by different centers; supercomputers, also distributed among different

countries―including, again, the MareNostrum―which run the simulations; and extensive teams of experts in computer science and earth sciences.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center as a service to universities and research No one expects the disappearance of the old methods of short-term research, but researchers from different areas of science are expected to require increasingly more access to High Performance Computing to expand and accelerate their studies. One of the key missions of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is providing that computing service to the scientific community.

Rubén Duro

The “MareNostrum”. A supercomputer is a machine that is capable of performing many operations per second, thousands or millions of times superior to the operations a personal computer can make. Supercomputers are built with the same components as personal computers, but in larger quantities. All these components are connected together with high-speed networks and these networks, in addition to smart programming, result in them all functioning together as a single machine. The MareNostrum stands out amongst our High Perfor-

Fig. 1. Upper view of the Mare Nostrum supercomputer located inside the deconsacrated Torre Girona's chapel (buildt in 1940).

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CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):5-11 (2016)

Supercomputer MareNostrum

mance Computing infrastructures, it is our most powerful machine and also the symbol of the center. The MareNostrum is currently in its third version and we are preparing for the arrival of the fourth; it is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain and one of the most powerful in Europe. With the latest update (made between 2012 and 2013), it has a capacity of 1.1 petaflop/s, or in other words it can carry out 1100 trillion operations per second. MareNostrum is a supercomputer manufactured by IBM with iDataPlex architecture, which facilitates grouping all the components needed to reach the required capacity into very little space (120 m2). It has 48,896 processors distributed among 6112 Intel SandyBridge 2.6 GHz chips and eight cores each, and 3056 nodes and 84 MIC chips. These components, chosen to configure a general purpose, not specialized machine, allow it to be useful for a variety of scientific disciplines. Mare Nostrum’s main memory is 100.8 terabytes and its elements communicate with each other via the high-speed network Mellanox Infiniband FDR10 and Gigabit Ethernet. It has a high-performance, 3 Petabyte file system and is connected to the Big Data BSC-CNS infrastructures. The supercomputer runs on a Linux operating system―SuSe Distribution―and the entire system is connected to universities and major European research centers through optical fiber, facilitating the transmission of data to researchers who need to use our infrastructure.

The MinoTauro. The MinoTauro is the second most powerful supercomputer in the BSC-CNS, with a peak performance of 343.74 teraflop/s (343 trillion operations per second). In 2011, a previous version was considered the most energy efficient supercomputer in Europe, according to the Green 500 ranking. The MinoTauro is manufactured by Bull and one of its features is the addition of NVIDIA GPU (graphics processing unit) cards to its architecture. Big Data Infrastructures. Recently, due to a growing need for large servers and data centers, the BSC-CNS has adopted Big Data infrastructure with a total capacity of 24.6 petabytes. It is scalable architecture equipment, distributed on disks and tapes to store scientific data in the short, medium and long terms. The BSC-CNS has three types of storage systems: high-performance, an active file system and a tape robot. The high-performance system has a 14 petabyte capacity, consisting of more than 2400 hard drives and about 18 servers and is used by all supercomputing machines directly for high-speed reading and writing of scientific data. The file system, which has a capacity of 4.6 petabytes, is made up of about 3200 hard drives and about 20 servers, and is used to store scientific data generated from supercomputers until their subsequent study. The tape robot consists of 7700, 800GB, uncompressed LTO4 magnetic tapes and is used for making backup copies of all the data generated in the center. The tapes also archive the data for which no short-term access is needed.

More than 3000 projects

Rubén Duro

Throughout the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s first 11 years, over 3000 scientific projects from a variety of disciplines have used the BSC’s infrastructure to accelerate the results of their research. The center itself has coordinated and facilitated access for Spanish centers and universities’ research teams to the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). Currently, access to 24% of the MareNostrum is done through this network, while 70% is accessed through the European network PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), a center in which the BSC plays a primary role. The remaining 6% is for use by the BSC researchers. Both in the case of RES as well as PRACE, the use of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center services is coordinated through external access committees, consisting of researchers from different disciplines, which evaluate, prioritize and authorize

Fig. 2. Inner view of the Mare Nostrum supercomputer.

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CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):5-11 (2016)

Martorell

the use of machinery, according to the importance and the needs of the projects presented by the research teams that require High Performance Computing services.

This uniqueness translates into participation as leaders or as partners in research projects from the most diverse disciplines. We currently have one hundred ongoing projects and a presence in major international flagship projects such as the Human Brain Project, providing programming models and methods that help simulate the human brain at different levels, and the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes, an international collaboration to identify common patterns of mutation in more than 2800 cancer whole genomes from the International Center Genome Consortium. Included among the most significant projects that we develop are the following: The European Research Council Grants projects of the center’s director, Mateo Valero, on micro-architectures, systems runtimes, compilers and programming languages (RoMoL); of David Carrera, on holistic integration of emerging supercomputing technologies (HiEST); and of Xevi Roca, to create new simulation methods intended for the aeronautical sector. They aim to expand the potential and field of applying High Performance Computing. It is also worth noting that we lead projects that support the European Commission in the alignment of the different sectors involved in Big Data research and High Performance Computing. An example is RETHINK big, a roadmap of opportunities to improve the EU’s position in Big Data research.

Fourth version of MareNostrum on the way Because it is a publicly owned center, one of the BSC’s maxims has always been to get the best possible performance of its available infrastructures and it is satisfying to note that our machines work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and that more than 90 percent of their capacity is always occupied. The continuous improvement of facilities is another of the center’s maxims. The center currently works on the purchase and implementation of a new version of the MareNostrum planned to be operational at the end the first half of 2017. This new version is expected to have nearly 13.7 petaflop/s of computing power, tripling the current main memory and exceeding the 14 petabytes disk space.

Research of excellence The BSC’s ambition does not stop at being a service center of reference. Despite its short existence, it has already positioned itself as a research center of excellence, awarded the first Severo Ochoa Seal of Excellence and has become the center that receives the highest amount of international public funds for research per researcher. Starting as a center that employed sixty employees, today it brings together more than 450. The 50% of its researchers have trained in computer science and/or telecommunications and the other 50% in disciplines as varied as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geophysics, etc., in full accordance with the need to form interdisciplinary teams able to take full advantage of information technology as an accelerator of knowledge. Because of this confluence of services and research, computer scientists and researchers from other disciplines, BSC has been able to position itself as a center of great uniqueness and interest. Our research is divided into four major areas: Computer Science―the department that has the highest number of researchers―Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computer Applications for Science and Engineering, resulting in a privileged position as researchers and creators of software and hardware and at the same time as users of this software and hardware in the field of advanced research. www.cat-science.cat

Hub to boost research Because of our characteristics—and without a doubt, our researchers’ drive—, we have become collaborators in the research conducted in most centers and research units within our area of influence as a supercomputing center, in just over 10 years. From the beginning, we have participated in more than 1700 joint projects in collaboration with more than 800 universities, research centers and companies from 50 different countries. Needless to say, among these centers and universities are those closest to us, including most of those within the CERCA system and the majority of the Excelencia Severo Ochoa centers. We also participate in numerous international initiatives and consortia that aim to support High Performance Computing, such as the Joint Laboratory initiative on Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC), an international association of six supercomputing centers to make the bridge between Petascale and Extreme computing, or the OpenMP, OpenPower or OpenFog consortia where trends in the fields of parallel programming, processor architecture and distributed computing, among others, are discussed. 9

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Technology transfer

meters beneath seawater and under kilometers of layers of solidified salt. With this technology, the company has significantly increased its competitiveness when searching for new reserves which producing countries can exploit. Another relevant research study in the field of energy, wind in this case, is our collaboration with Iberdrola. With this company we have developed tools to determine how to extract maximum resources from land designated to become a wind farm. With software developed jointly between Iberdrola and BSC we can determine the best way to distribute generators in a particular area in order to make the most of the available wind, and soon we will be able to include weather forecasting software that will predict how much energy a particular farm will produce over the following 24 or 48 hours. The industry believes that being able to predict how much wind energy will be generated in the short term will be a qualitative leap for companies’ power distribution and performance. And still in the energy field, we collaborate with the ITER project by conducting simulations of the behavior of fusion reactors, and also work on relatively new energies, such as that produced by biofuels, studying how to turn the energy generated from biomass combustion into an energy that has a homogeneous composition and can be distributable through networks. As a supercomputer center, we want to extend our collaboration with companies to include the widest possible range of sectors. The jump from industry to services is increasingly plausible, especially with new tools and possibilities of cognitive computing applied to Big Data, an area in which, by our very nature, we have much experience. Along this line, in 2016 we have established a collaboration project with CaixaBank to explore cognitive computing in the world of finance, and we also work on smaller projects with small and medium-sized companies and governments that are increasingly aware of the value that cognitive computing, neural networks and machine learning can add to the administration of large volumes of data, and the value that High Performance Computing machines can add to the management of cities, the environment and public spaces.

The BSC continues to go further than research by also acting as an accelerator for science. Our defining statement makes it clear that “the mission of BSC-CNS is to research, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress”, emphasizing our third fundamental goal: to be drivers of innovation, at the service of science, business and social progress; in other words, to transfer technology to society. We can now, after our first ten years of life, fully assess the work done on technology transfer and promote a real leap in this field which is, for us, essential. Our collaboration with the business community and the government is structured through three main forms of cooperation: the development of joint long-term projects, timely collaboration through our service platform and the creation of spin-offs from our own technological capabilities.

Joint projects: IT, energy, banking We have extensive experience in this first area, where the creation of joint centers with large IT (information technology) companies stands out. At present, we have centers with IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Lenovo, with whom we conduct research into areas such as cognitive computing, computer systems behavior and prediction analysis, cloud computing, CPUs and energy efficient programming, among others. Some of these collaborations are almost as old as the BSC itself―as is the case of IBM―and have adapted to the strategic needs of the company and the major trends in the field of High Performance Computing. Samsung and Lenovo are more recent collaborations, as is the influence and the increasingly important role played by large Asian companies in the world of supercomputing and IT in general. Note that the today's most powerful supercomputer is one built in China with mainly Chinese technology. Our joint projects with companies are not limited only to the world of IT. We also have stable collaborations with other large companies. The energy sector was the first with which we formed a lasting and diverse activity. The best known success story is our collaboration with Repsol, with which we have developed and are constantly improving software that explores the presence of hydrocarbons in geographically complex areas. Using this software has greatly increased the company’s success rate in finding hydrocarbon reserves in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico, where oil is located kilowww.cat-science.cat

Services platforms The second way in whixh we transfer the technologies developed at the BSC to society is through our services platform: mainly using the Internet, we make our high-value applications developed at BSC available to users. 10

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Martorell

The Department of Life Sciences offers different tools for genomic analysis and medication explorations. We have one of the fastest and most complete and reliable software programs that exist to detect genetic mutations (Smufin) and the simulation method to predict interactions between proteins and ligands, PELE. This latter tool was created to be used in drug design and was considered the best of its kind in the last docking models comparative assessment funded by the National Institute of Medical Sciences of the United States and organized by the Community Structure-Activity Resource (CSAR) from the University of Michigan. We also publish our daily predictions on air pollution across Europe and the transport of desert sand through the atmosphere. This last prediction system convinced the World Meteorological Organization to create the first regional center to address this matter in our facilities in Barcelona in collaboration with the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET). In addition, our Computer Sciences experts offer different programming models and free software to be used in parallel computing, under the concept of "software as a service".

and can reduce costs by between 15 and 20% in this first phase, with an average estimated saving of 40 million euros. These technologies have also proven useful for the discovery of medications in the context of precision medicine as they facilitate research conducted into the most appropriate medication for each therapeutic target, according to their genetic characteristics.

The great challenge of personalized medicine It is precisely in the field of precision medicine where we are currently challenging ourselves to collaborate in the promotion and development of public and cutting-edge precision medicine in our country. Some countries have already launched very advanced pilot tests to regularly incorporate the possibilities that personalized medicine offers into the public network. Hospitals, biomedical research, sequencing, and data centers are the four key pieces of a cycle where the patients who enter the health system with certain complex diseases, are treated with a personalized investigation into their case, research that can develop more effective treatments for the patient and provide more accumulated knowledge about the disease itself. The presence of precision medicine as a regular practice in the health system is almost a reality and Barcelona is in an excellent position to be a pioneer city in this field. The quality of health centers, the numerous and excellent research carried out in biomedicine and the presence in the city of two public centers able to sequence on a large scale (CNAG-CRG) and to process and analyze genomic data (BSC) offer a mix of knowledge, talent, infrastructure and technology that is capable of addressing this challenge.

The creation of new businesses In our first ten years of life we have had approved, or are currently under consideration for, about thirty patents. And after a hard journey through the bureaucratic mazes we have created our first spin-off, which will not be the last, called Nostrum BioDiscovery (BD). It is a company created to accelerate the development of drugs and molecules with different biotechnological applications based on supercomputing which emerged from a collaboration between IRB Barcelona, UB, ICREA and the FundaciĂłn BotĂn. The two purposes of Nostrum BD are to collaborate with companies dedicated to the development of medication and molecules of biotechnological interest and to facilitate the launch of new products. It has state-of-the-art bioinformatics technologies related to protein modeling, the study of protein interactions with molecules of a therapeutic nature and enzyme engineering to develop biotechnology products, all through supercomputing. These technologies, when combined, increase the accuracy of pre-studies and facilitate a more rapid release of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology products. In favorable cases, it is estimated that these advantages may advance the early stages of drug development (the discovery phase, prior to laboratory testing) by up to two years, www.cat-science.cat

Competing interests. None declared.

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FEATURE ARTICLE Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

CONTRIB SCI 12(1):13-21(2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.239

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RESEARCH CENTRES IN CATALONIA

The ALBA Synchrotron Light Source Ana Belén Martínez, Caterina Biscari, Gastón García ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona), Spain

*Correspondence: Ana Belén Martínez amartinez@cells.es

Summary. ALBA is the Spanish third-generation synchrotron light source. It is located in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona) and constitutes the largest scientific infrastructure in Spain. The facility consists of an accelerator complex providing 3 GeV electron beam and several experimental beamlines, with photon energies currently ranging from IR up to hard X-rays of tens of KeV. Different synchrotron radiation techniques are available including diffraction, spectroscopies and imaging. [Contrib Sci 12(1):13-21 (2016)]

Synchrotron light Synchrotron light is electromagnetic radiation that is produced when, within an accelerator, the circulating bunches of charged particles (typically electrons) are accelerated by the magnetic fields that are used to curve their trajectory in order to keep them inside a circular orbit. What we call “synchrotron light” is not something new. It has always existed in our universe. In a star, electrons travelling at almost the speed of light emit synchrotron radiation when they are under electromagnetic forces. However, in the last 75 years, humankind has been able to produce synchrotron light by building synchrotron facilities. In the last 50 years, synchrotron light facilities have become a major research tool to observe the properties of matter thanks to their powerful properties. As the brilliance of synchrotron light is so much greater than that of more conventional sources, such as rotating anode X-ray tubes, the

precision of the measurement is also many orders of magnitude better, being the essential reason why synchrotron light sources are today absolutely necessary for competitive fundamental or applied research. And why is synchrotron light so bright? In a synchrotron facility, as the particles are travelling at speeds close to that of light, the light they produce is confined within a cone in the direction of propagation of the particles that can be contained within fractions of a milliradian. Also, synchrotron light can provide a very broad range of wavelengths: from infrared to hard X-rays, containing also soft X-rays and UV. In addition, the size of the light source is related to the size of the electron bunch. In a modern accelerator the latter can have a cross-section of only a few tens of micrometers. The combination of a small source and a small angle of emission implies an extremely high brilliance (it should be noted that brilliance is a measure of the flux of photons emitted per unit area and unit solid angle within a certain wave-

Keywords: synchrotron · beamlines · biosciences · materials science · condensed matter ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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ALBA Synchrotron

length bandpass) and the very broad range of wavelengths available means that this very high brilliance extends over a large range of the electromagnetic spectrum. In practice, the brilliance of synchrotron light is trillions of times greater than that of other conventional sources of light over most of the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Moreover, not only the brilliance is very high but synchrotron light is also polarized in the plane of the orbit, something exceptionally useful for the study of magnetic properties of materials, and, as consequence of the electrons travelling in short regular bunches, the light is emitted in very short pulses lasting around a few tens of picoseconds (a millionth of a millionth of a second, or 10–12 seconds). This latter property makes synchrotron light sources highly suited for the study of shortlived phenomena.

rent of 250 mA. There is a large number of straight sections (24) available, whose essential role will be explained below, despite the relatively short circumference, thanks to the very compact lattice design, which incorporates a quadrupolar field component in the dipoles. The vacuum chamber has more than 20 windows for the light extraction. Twelve of them are presently used (2 for accelerator diagnostics and 10 for beamlines, both operational and under construction), and the others witness the large potentiality of ALBA for the future. ALBA is a 3rd generation synchrotron facility. That means that its design incorporates long straight sections in between the cells containing the electron optics. In these straight sections the electrons fly freely (i.e., no synchrotron light is emitted as a baseline). However, these straight sections are used to house ad-hoc multipolar magnetic structures, named insertion devices (ID), which force the electrons to undergo more or less exotic trajectories, the simplest being a sinusoidal one. Depending on the dimensions of the excursions imposed on the electron beams, insertion devices are conceptually sub-divided between wigglers―so named when the excursions imposed on the electrons are large relative to the beam angular divergence―and undulators―when the excursions are comparable to the beam angular divergence. The light emitted by the ID is even brighter than that generated at the bending magnets. This can amount to an enhancement of several orders of magnitude and, furthermore,

The ALBA accelerators The ALBA accelerator system consists of a linear accelerator (Linac) (where electrons reach 100 MeV), a low-emittance, full-energy Booster (where electrons are accelerated to 3GeV), and the Storage Ring (where electrons are injected and stored for the synchrotron light emission) (Fig. 1). The Booster (250 m of circumference) and the Storage Ring (269 m) are both hosted in the same tunnel (Fig. 2). The lattice is optimized for high photon flux density, with a nominal cur-

Fig. 1. Scheme of the Accelerators complex and the structure of a beamline.

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Fig. 2. View of the tunnel of accelerators. Storage Ring (left). Booster (right).

insertion devices can be tailored to the specific requirements of a given experiment and may be substituted easily without changing all the magnetic lattice of the Storage Ring. This significantly increases the useful life of the facility. The ALBA Accelerators run on a 24 h a day, 7 days a week basis, for periods that usually are 4 to 5 weeks long. In 2015, more than 4300 h were devoted for users with a beam availability of 97.3%. About 1400 h were dedicated to the optimization of the accelerators for the users as well as to testing new developments. In 2015, the injection in top-up mode has been consolidated. In the top-up mode injection, the current in the Storage Ring is kept constant, injecting almost continuously a very small fraction of current to cope with the beam losses due to the finite lifetime of the beam. In this situation, the front ends (the tube connecting the sources of light to the beamlines), interfaces between the accelerator and the beamlines wherein experiments with synchrotron light are performed, remain open during injection. This injection mode ensures a constant thermal load on the accelerators and on the optical components of the beamlines, which increases greatly the position stability of the photon beam at the sample. This, together with the fact that a constant photon flux at the sample means a constant signal level at the detectors, sensibly improves the data quality of the experiments performed at ALBA. In May 2015, a fast orbit feedback system (FOFB) came www.cat-science.cat

into operation, stabilising the photon beam at the source location at frequencies up to 100 Hz. The immediate conclusion of this development is that now the orbit in the Storage Ring is much more stable, better than 600 nm (rms) in the horizontal plane and 100 nm (rms) in the vertical plane; in other words, the electron beam is stable to less than 1% of its beam size (at the medium straight, typical reference point where light is generated to be fed to the experimental beamlines), placing ALBA at the frontier of the beam stability among the synchrotron facilities worldwide. An additional development, a bunch-by-bunch transverse feedback system, has also started operating in 2015. This system fights electron beam instabilities on a bunch-by-bunch basis, acting directly on the individual bunches by damping high frequency oscillations (up to 250 MHz) that may affect the brilliance of the photon beam.

The beamlines Once synchrotron light is emitted by the magnet systems, it is redirected through the front ends to the beamlines, where experiments are performed by the users. ALBA started operation in May 2012 with seven beamlines dedicated to different scientific fields, mainly physics, chemistry, life sciences, materials science, cultural heritage, biology and nanotechnology. Two new beamlines were initiated in 2014, one of them in 15

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ALBA Synchrotron

operation already in 2016 and the second one to become operational in 2018 and one additional beamline has been started in 2016. So, the current portfolio of ALBA is of 10 beamlines: 8 operational, and 2 under construction. As mentioned in the previous section, the ALBA Synchrotron is designed to host more than 20 beamlines (Table 1).

vestigating surface chemical reactions and surfaces of liquid samples. BOREAS. X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) and X-ray magnetic linear dichroism (XMLD) techniques for the study of advanced magnetic materials. With a second experimental end-station devoted to soft-X-ray magnetic scattering. LOREA. Low-energy ultrahigh resolution angular photoemission beamline for the understanding of the electronic structure of graphene-based material, topological insulators and other advanced materials. This beamline is currently in construction and will be operational in 2018.

According to their scientific applications, ALBA beamlines can be divided into three groups: a) Biosciences MISTRAL. X-ray full-field transmission microscope for cryotomography of biological material of very high spatial resolution, producing 3D images of complete cells without the need of sample slicing. NCD. It studies samples with large (SAXS ) and small (WAXS) periodicities. Very useful to analyze biological applications (fibers, tissues and solutions) as well as polymers. XALOC. It is devoted to protein structure determination through X-ray crystallography. It is available for working in control remote system, sending the samples to the beamline staff and controlling the experiment from outside the facility. MIRAS. Infrared microspectroscopy for the study of molecules. This beamline was operational for users in the last months of 2016. XAIRA. A new microfocus beamline for macromolecular crystallography. This beamline will offer further insight of how biological systems function at the atomic level, determining the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules and complexes. The microfocus beamline will deliver a small X-ray beam of the order of 1 micron (1μm) at the sample position. The small beam size will allow tackling an increasing number of important projects that are limited by the size of the crystals or by the radiation damage effects. These projects include membrane proteins, protein complexes, DNA-protein complexes and radiationsensitive proteins. The beamline is planned to be ready for first experiments in 2020.

c) Materials science With applications in chemistry, environment and cultural heritage, among others. MSPD. Powder diffraction beamline with two end-stations: diffraction under high pressure for analyzing the crystalline structure of matter under extreme pressure (up to –50 GPa) and high resolution and high speed diffraction for the study of chemical kinetics, phase transitions, etc. CLÆSS. Absorption and emission spectroscopy for XANES/ EXAFS during chemical reactions under conditions close to those relevant to industrial catalysis. MIRAS. This beamline, already mentioned above, also has applications in this field thanks to its capability for studying compound plastics, blends, fillers, paints, rubbers, coatings, resins, and adhesives, polymer interfaces, etc. Table 1 shows the list of operating and under construction beamlines, including the number of end-stations, the experimental techniques and their scientific applications.

The users The ALBA Synchrotron is a public consortium, funded in equal parts by the Spanish and Catalan governments, and is intended to be a useful tool mainly for public research. Most of the experiments performed are from public institutions although private access is also available. The ALBA Synchrotron opens two calls per year for granting access to the beamlines for public research projects. The received proposals are initially checked for their technical feasibility and are evaluated by external international panels. The main criterion for the evaluation is scientific excellence. The output of the call is based on a ranking that distributes the available beam time. Since

b) Condensed matter Especially magnetic and electronic properties and nanoscience. CIRCE. Photoemission microscopy for chemical imaging of the surface and photoemission spectroscopy with samples at pressures up to 20 mbar (particularly challenging, since usually photoemission experiments need to be performed under strict ultra-high vacuum conditions) for inwww.cat-science.cat

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Martínez et al.

Table 1. Beamlines, techniques and applications Port

Beamline

End-stations

Experimental techniques

MSPD

High resolution powder diffraction. High pressure diffraction

Structure of materials. Time resolved diffraction

MISTRAL

Soft X-ray full field transmission X-ray microscope. Optimized on the “water window"

Cryogenic tomography of biological objects. Spatially resolved spectroscopy

NCD

High resolution small and high angle X-ray scattering/diffraction

Structure and phase transformations of biological fibres, polymers, solutions. Time resolved X-ray studies

XALOC

X-ray diffraction from crystals of biological macromolecules

Macromolecular crystallography, with particular emphasis on large unit cell crystals

CLÆSS

EXAFS, XANES, Quick-EXAFS

Material science, chemistry, studies

CIRCE

Photo-emission microscopy (PEEM). Near atmospheric pressure photo-emission (NAPP)

Nano-science and magnetic domain imaging (PEEM). Surface chemistry (NAPP)

BOREAS

Circular Magnetic Magnetic Diffraction

Magnetism, surface magnetism and magnetic structures

MIRAS

Infrared microspectroscopy

Life sciences, food sciences, materials science

LOREA

Angle-resolved photo-emission spectroscopy

Polarized electron spectroscopies, structure determination

XAIRA

X-ray diffraction

Microfocus Macromolecular crystallography

2012, when the operation with external users started at ALBA, the number of proposals has been continuously increasing in parallel with the maturing process of the facility. The average oversubscription, counting all of the beamlines, was 2.3 in 2014 and 2015. However, the distribution of the oversubscription is not uniform: in CIRCE oversubscription has been above 4 in the last two years, followed by CLÆSS, in which oversubscription has been between 3 and 4. In 2015, a total of 335 proposals were submitted (34% more than in 2014) and 4980 shifts (of 8 hours) were requested (58% more than in 2014). Most of the granted proposals correspond to Spanish institutions (65%). European institutions represent 31% and non-European countries 4% (Fig. 3).

Resonant

time resolved

band

ments during 2015. Sixteen different international and local companies came to perform studies at ALBA during 2015. Those companies belong to very different industrial sectors such as pharmaceutical, chemistry, automotive, catalysis, nanotechnology, etc. In addition to beam time access, ALBA also offers the external usage of its specialized laboratories such as the magnetic measurements, the radiofrequency laboratories and the optical and metrology laboratory. As an example, the magnetic measurement lab has been testing in 2015 different types of high precision magnets such as dipoles and quadrupoles to be implemented in other accelerator facilities. ALBA is continuously developing new solutions to guarantee an optimal performance of the facility that may be of interest for the industrial community. In that direction, the Industrial Liaison Office works together with ALBA scientists and engineers to establish the best approach to intellectually protect their own developments and, finally, to transfer them to the private sector for their commercial exploitation. As a couple of examples, during 2015, one new patent was registered for an X-ray mirror nanobender and one utility model for a new X-ray detector. Those developments were licensed to the private companies SENER and Alibava, respectively, for their commercialization.

Industrial users The Industrial Liaison Office is in charge of the relationships between ALBA and the industrial community. The main activity led by the Industrial Liaison Office is the relation of ALBA with the industrial sector and the proprietary access to the beamlines, which during 2015 has increased by more than twice with respect to the 2014 period. Almost all the beamlines carried out industrial measure-

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Dichroism.

Scientific applications

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ALBA Synchrotron

Fig. 3. (A) Research areas of the granted shifts in 2015. (B) 2015 Spanish granted shifts distributed by region.

The technological transfer is not only related to patenting and licensing ALBA developments but also to strengthening the relationships with private companies to find common solutions. In 2015, the AGAUR provided ALBA with funding for an industrial PhD. Part of this project is promoted by a private company that wants to increase the knowledge of optical surface cleaning by radiofrequency plasma sources and to implement that technology in its business. It is a threeyear project that benefits both the private company and the interests of ALBA, and a significant success story for the public-private synergies and partnerships.

synchrotron light facility was signed in 1995 between the Spanish and the Catalan Governments. To carry out this study a small group of people was assembled under the direction of Prof. Joan Bordas. This group was first incorporated as a new division in the High Energy Physics Institute (IFAE). Later on, the Synchrotron Light Division became a Consortium in its own right between the Catalan Administration and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). The detailed study commissioned by the Spanish and the Catalan administrations was carried out by the Synchrotron Light Laboratory (Laboratori de Llum de Sincrotró) and published at the beginning of 1998. This was followed by several years of positive evaluations of the project by independent experts and on the 14th of March 2002 a formal protocol between the Spanish and Catalan Governments was signed. The protocol envisaged the funding with equal shares of a synchrotron light source in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès, at some 20 km from the center of the city of Barcelona, and next to the campus of the UAB (Fig. 4). On the 14th March of 2003, both administrations created the Consortium for the Construction, Equipment and Exploitation of a Synchrotron Light Laboratory, CELLS, and established the structure of its governance consisting of a Governing Council and an Executive Commission. In June 2003 the first meeting of the Governing Council took place and in October 2003 the activity of CELLS commenced with the start of the build-up of personnel recruitment and, also, with the appointment of two very important Advisory Bodies: the Machine Advisory Committee (MAC; a high level group of international experts in the field of accelerator science and technology) and the Scientific Advisory

The ALBA project The idea of building a Spanish synchrotron light source goes back to the early 1990’s. The Catalan Government at the time, around June 1992, appointed a Committee with the task of studying the viability and convenience of constructing a synchrotron light facility in the region of Barcelona. By the end of the year this Committee reported to the Catalan Administration with the result that its First Research Plan, approved and presented at the beginning of 1993, included the construction of a synchrotron light source. Also, a Steering Committee constituted by political authorities and chaired by Prof. Ramon Pascual and an Advisory Committee, chaired by Prof. Manuel Cardona and constituted by experts and directors of some European synchrotron light sources, were created. Simultaneously, a program of training fellowships in accelerator technologies was started. An agreement to finance a detailed study for a Spanish www.cat-science.cat

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Fig. 4. Aerial view of the ALBA Synchrotron Light Source.

Committee (SAC; a high level group of international experts in the field of synchrotron light science and beamline technologies). MAC and SAC have been meeting about twice a year with CELLS management and staff and, throughout the construction of ALBA, they have advised on the scientific and technical objectives of the facility and have monitored progress in the complex of accelerators and in the beamlines. Still today, SAC meets twice per year to participate in the strategic scientific direction of the ALBA Synchrotron with the aim of ensuring the quality and relevance of the research performed and developed in ALBA. During the early years of the project the activities of ALBA’s staff were carried out in provisional barracks buildings and at a workshop in the neighboring campus of the UAB. This was necessary because the groundbreaking on ALBA site was only initiated in May 2006 after two years of detailed design work of the building and its associated services. In April 2009, the buildings were ready for occupation and ALBA staff migrated to their new quarters. However, during the summer of 2008, the linear accelerator was installed in its bunker and its commissioning completed. From 2010 to 2012, the commissioning of the accelerators and beamlines

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was done, opening the first one to official users in May 2012. Today ALBA staff is composed by 200 members organized in the following divisions: Experiments (25%), Computing & Control (25%), Engineering (19%), Accelerators (14%), Administration (8%) plus a Director’s Office (9%).

Some examples of experiments carried out at ALBA More than 1000 researchers per year use the ALBA facility for performing cutting-edge experiments and obtaining results very difficult or impossible to get with their home instruments. Here, we will highlight a few of the most recent and remarkable experiments. MISTRAL scientists, together with the National Center of Biotechnology of the CSIC (CNB-CSIC) researchers, were able to obtain the first 3D map of the interior of cells affected by the hepatitis C virus, observing the alterations caused by the virus at the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria of infected cells. It was also confirmed that these malformations were reversed by treatment with the most common antiviral drugs for 19

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ALBA Synchrotron

Fig. 5. (A) Interior of healthy cell (left), interior of a cell affected by the hepatitis C virus (center) and interior of a cell after treatment with antiviral drugs (right): cell nucleus (violet); healthy mitochondria (green); healthy endoplasmic reticulum (beige); and altered endoplasmic reticulum (yellow). (B) Central image of the beamline and results from the microscope.

hepatitis C. To generate this 3D map, the scientists used the MISTRAL beamline at ALBA, with a new technique called soft X-ray cryo-tomography (cryo-SXT). This method can obtain 3D images of the entire cell in its natural state, that is, without chemical pretreatment, cutting or drying the cell (Fig. 5). In the PEEM end-station at CIRCE, researchers were able to observe magnetic skyrmions at room temperature in materials compatible with industrial conditions. This breaks an important barrier for their use as nanoscale information carriers in our computers. Magnetic skyrmions are chiral spin structures with a whirling configuration, considered as units (bits) in new magnetic data storage devices. Despite they were predicted in the 80's, they were not evidenced till 2006. However, they could only be seen under very special conditions (at very low temperatures, applying magnetic fields, in www.cat-science.cat

bulk samples or films grown by molecular epitaxy). These constraints made impossible their application in industrial devices. Using the X-ray magnetic circular dichroism techniques (XMCD), scientists could solve the skyrmion spin structure. In addition, they were also able to study skyrmion

Fig. 6. Sketch of the spin structure of a magnetic skyrmion.

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Fig. 7. (A) Magnetic microscopy image of a skyrmion in a Pt/Co/MgO nanostructure. Within the white dot (magnetization pointing down), a circular black/white contrast is visible which corresponds to the in-plane magnetization components. In the skyrmion center, dark grey, the magnetization points up. The grazing X-ray beam incidence is indicated by the arrow. The skyrmion contracts (B) under an applied magnetic field of 4mT and relaxes again (C) when removing it. (D) The chiral skyrmion spin structure is confirmed by rotating the contrast direction (beam incidence) by 90°.

behaviour under small applied magnetic field, demonstrating their stability against perturbations (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). At the XALOC beamline, researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC), the Institute

of Medical Chemistry (IQM-CSIC) and the University of Glasgow proved the effectiveness of a new drug against malaria. They came to this conclusion after studying the interaction of the 3D crystalline structure of the complex of DNA with the drug. The CD27 drug is a complex synthesized by researchers led by Christophe Dardonville at the Institute of Medical Chemistry of the Spanish National Research Council (IQMCSIC), in Madrid. CD27 is chemically related to diamidines― molecules with two amidines―and has previously been used with success in other Trypanosoma species that produce the "sleeping sickness" in Africa and Chagas disease in South America. Results showed how the CD27 drug completely covered the minor groove of the DNA, preventing the typical development of the parasite and causing its death. This research helps to understand this family of compounds and may significantly contribute to the development of new more effective drugs against malaria (Fig. 8).

Conclusions ALBA is a synchrotron light facility which incorporates the latest technologies available, in operation since 2012. It provides the Spanish scientific and industrial community an invaluable tool for science and innovation and has a huge potential for further developments, which is being gradually exploited with the construction of new beamlines. Located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, just 20 km from the city of Barcelona, it has already become one of the flagship elements of Spanish science and technology landscape. Fig. 8. The drug CD27 completely covers the minor groove of the DNA complex.

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Competing interests. None declared.

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):13-21 (2016)

DISTINGUISHED LECTURES Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

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CONTRIB SCI 12(1):23-25 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.240

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RAMON MARGALEF PRIZE LECTURE OF 2015

The 2015 Ramon Margalef Prize to Robert E. Ricklefs: A passion for evolutionary ecology Joan Lluís Pretus Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia

Correspondence: Joan Lluís Pretus jpretus@ub.edu

Summary. Two passions were the starting points of Robert Ricklefs’ career: the reproduction of birds and the biodiversity of the tropics. It is important to underlie his key contribution to the unification of the biological sciences that he achieved to demonstrate by the unifying nature of his work and by suggesting the scale of the scientific background on which it rests. Among his multiple contributions to the science of ecology is the notion of evolutionary trade-off that included functional, metabolic, demographic and population considerations. He has made a crucial contribution to the consolidation of the theory of life histories. We might even say that the impact of his critiques of the theories of biological diversity of communities has a relevant part in the research agenda in the coming years. In contrast to the prevailing dualism to explain biodiversity (niche theory and neutral theory), Professor Ricklefs provides solid empirical data and realistic arguments calling for an urgent update of the current paradigm. [Contrib Sci 12(1):23-25 (2016)]

When talking about a naturalist, as Robert Ricklefs defines himself, it is a good idea to refer albeit briefly to his childhood because it was on the privileged peninsula of Monterrey in California, where he grew up and which triggered his early curiosity about nature. Attracted right from the very beginning by botany and ornithology, the young Ricklefs went to Stanford University at the age of 16 and when he was 24 earned his doctorate at Pennsylvania University, where he would become a professor one year later in 1968. Coming forward in time, from 1995 to the present he has

been based at Missouri University State at St. Louis. It is now 50 years since at the age of 22 he published his first article in the journal Condor. Throughout his career, which remains fully active and creative today, he has carried out vast quantities of research in various fields of ecology on over 300 scientific articles, some written entirely by himself, not to mention the many chapters he has contributed to specialist publications. Plus at the age of 30 he published his book Ecology, and three years later The Economy of Nature, general treatises which have been updated in successive editions, the last

Keywords: Ramon Margalef Prize 2015 ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Margalef Prize

in 2014. We can say without hesitation that Ricklefs is in the first rank in the scientific community where he is also one of the best known and most appreciated people in teaching and popularizing ecology around the world. Ricklefs’ work has been recognized by numerous academic awards. By way of example there is the Sewall Wright Award in 2005, which is presented for scientific careers that have made a key contribution to the unification of the biological sciences. It demonstrates the unifying nature of his work and suggests the scale of the scientific background on which it rests, something which I am keen to corroborate in that tribute. Ricklefs acknowledges the direct academic and personal influence of his mentors, including Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, who was also awarded the Ramon Margalef Prize in 2009, and Robert MacArthur at Pennsylvania during his doctoral studies. The intellectual ferment of those years, with the birth of evolutionary ecology focused on life histories on the one hand and the resurgence of community ecology focusing on biodiversity on the other, stimulated Ricklefs and made it fertile ground for the cultivation of his two passions, the reproduction of birds and the biodiversity of the tropics. Regarding the first point, Ricklefs successfully produced one of the first quantitative predictive models about a vital feature, the optimization of the growth rate, published in the journal Ecology in 1984. He developed the notion of “evolutionary trade-off” and included functional, metabolic, demographic and population considerations in his objectives. His ability in analytic resolution is coupled with his capacity for synthesis, which leads him to explore the interaction of vital traits, revealing the “unity in diversity” of patterns in the life histories of the various taxa. This skill enables him, for example, to extrapolate and predict the ageing style of specific and now extinct groups from fossil records, such as the Tyrannosaurus. If Ricklefs has made a crucial contribution to the consolidation of the theory of life histories, his impact on the critique and deconstruction of the theories that explain the biological diversity of communities is equally significant. Indeed, we might even say it is more relevant due to the drastic change in direction entailed by his theories which are set to revitalize the research agenda in the coming years. In contrast to the prevailing dualism to explain biodiversity (niche theory and neutral theory), Ricklefs provides solid empirical data and realistic arguments calling for an urgent update of the current paradigm. As he says “neither niche theory nor neutral theory provide a satisfying narrative for understanding biodiversity.” Here Ricklefs is a combative and activist advocate of a deterministic assembly of communities www.cat-science.cat

About the author Joan L. Pretus (1961) is staff professor at the University of Barcelona, where he has developed research projects to characterize community and ecosystem level processes in Mediterranean-type aquatic food webs. His current interests focusses on life-history trait evolutionary responses to shifts in selection pressures for selected species both aquatic and terrestrial, and its relevance in conservation biology. He is lecturer in evolutionary ecology, emphasizing the relevance of an ecoevolutionary synthesis as a basic fundamental instruction addressing forthcoming issues in field, theoretical and experimental biology.

Joan Lluís Pretus, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona

and minimizes the role of stochastic processes because in his view “regional deterministic processes responsible for diversity patterns dominate the weak influence of chance,” so that “nature may appear neutral, but that is primarily because nature is complex.” However, within this determinism Ricklefs redirects formulating hypotheses towards other still poorly explored mechanisms that he envisions, once he has argued with em24

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Pretus

pirical clarity the inability of conventional niche theory to explain changes in local biodiversity patterns in different and ecologically equivalent biogeographic areas. He proposes reconnecting ecology and biogeography, the regional and local scale. It is in any case the alleged niches that would adapt to the richness of the species under robust and predictable regional influences, rather than the niches determining this richness. Ricklefs has challenged the very concept of community. See, for example, the article he published in 2008 in thew journal American Naturalist, where the title “Disintegration of the Ecological Community” speaks for itself. Yet, he also does not subscribe to current conventional trends to explain biodiversity which, inspired by the concept of metacommunity, make dispersion and connectivity into the key players. In them, Ricklefs still sees the influence of the powerful carrying capacity prejudice―the Verhulst equation―but now in a contrived way, what is called limiting similarity or packaging of species and consequent saturation of the local richness of the community. In its place he advocates an open, unrestricted community depending on the regional biogeographical context. Yet, he goes further and proposes an intrinsically biological mechanism for diversity, little connected to limitation by resources or the forcing imposed by environmental gradients. This is a mechanism of coevolutionary interaction of species with their specific pathogens and parasites. This is where Ricklefs unifies and reconnects seemingly unconnected phenomena such as the diversity of the rainforest and the―until now misunderstood―taxonomic cycle of Edward O. Wilson, and bases it on the dynamics of coevolutionary interaction that is little recognized in ecology. Ricklefs produces flowing arguments and, as in the case of Ramon Margalef, bases them on an enormous capacity to combine observational data. “Observation―Ricklefs says― has inspired my career much more than theory.” He reorganizes, crops if necessary, renews or replaces theories for use based on his observations and generates new predictions. His procedure is both surgical in criticism and inclusive in the presentation of the solution, and provides a research agenda. That is because Ricklefs’ way of doing science is unusual today: it is inductive science, capable of generating hypotheses from the accumulation and detailed consideration of numerous observations, of which Darwin, Edward O. Wilson and Ramon Margalef are also masters. At any event, it is a way of building knowledge that is the reverse of the hypothetical-deductive model which excessively tightens and strangles ecology as heir to natural history. In a nutshell, Ricklefs turns ecology into an observational science, or as he puts www.cat-science.cat

it: “the process of inductive reasoning involves arriving at a conclusion from observed facts placed in a framework of generally accepted principles, or premises.” Ricklefs is thus a naturalist due to his rich and contrasting argumentative connections who also has a powerful methodological arsenal as an ecologist. Finally, which is Professor Ricklefs’ basic message? I would say it is to relearn how to observe. Ricklefs wrote in 2012: “There is a growing tendency for observation to serve theory rather than provide new insight or to test the predictions of theory.” This tendency, he says, “is reinforced by the general decline of teaching focused on organisms and habitats in favor of an emphasis on ecological concepts.” Based on this, it might be useful to critically ask ourselves how far ecology is a victim of Goethe’s premonition when he wrote that “every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts.” Thank you, Robert, because while enjoying your encouraging example, we also realize how useful it is to learn to break away from compartmentalization, the partly inevitable sub-product of science. And how the ecologists take control for this purpose when they think like naturalists. I would like to finish with some of your own words: “the pressure to publish leaves little room for observation and reflection, much to the detriment of our science and of the pure joy of being a scientist.” Competing interests. None declared.

CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE 12(1):23-25 (2016)

DISTINGUISHED LECTURES Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

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CONTRIB SCI 12(1):27-34 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.241

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RAMON MARGALEF PRIZE LECTURE OF 2015

Intrinsic and extrinsic influences on ecological communities Robert E. Ricklefs Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Correspondence: Robert E. Ricklefs ricklefs@umsl.edu

Summary. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists have sought to understand geographic variation in the diversity of species ever since the great natural history explorations of the 19th Century and the subsequent development of ecology and evolution as scientific disciplines. Early insights, beginning with Darwin and Wallace, focused on the role of competition in limiting species coexistence within communities, but ecologists have gradually shifted to a more regional perspective that includes the processes of species production and extinction within regions. Recent observations, including the evolutionary lability of distribution and abundance, and the absence of a clear signal of competition impacts on populations of close relatives, suggest that coevolutionary relationships between pathogens and their hosts might be responsible for observed variation in distribution and abundance, and also drive the diversification of species within regions. Margalef’s emphasis on observing nature closely, and paying attention to the implications of patterns for underlying processes, had a strong influence on me as a graduate student 50 years ago, and continues to be valid. [Contrib Sci 12(1):27-34 (2016)]

Even before the great explorations of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), and others during the 19th century, biologists were aware of the tremendous diversity of species in tropical environments compared to environments within temperate and boreal latitudes. Modern species inventories show that life tends to be most varied where the climate is warm and wet, and in mountainous areas in any climate

zone [13,55]. Yet ecologists and evolutionary biologists continue to debate the underlying causes of these consistent patterns in species richness. The origin of diversity lies in the production of new species through various mechanisms of speciation, which for the most part require the initial spatial separation of diverging populations, that is, the allopatric model of species formation. In this sense, speciation is a regional process and no doubt depends on the history and

Based on the lectures given by the author at the Palau de Pedralbes of Barcelona, and in the School of Biology, University of Barcelona, on 27 and 28 October 2015, on the occasion of receiving the Ramon Margalef Prize of 2015

Keywords: species diversity · competition · population distribution and abundance · pathogen-host coevolution · Ramon Margalef Prize 2015 ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Ecological communities

geography of a region, whether a continent or a large body of water. While speciation builds diversity, extinction diminishes the species richness of a region, often leaving little evidence of the past for biologists and paleontologists. Both speciation and extinction influence species richness, but controls on the rates of these processes are poorly understood. In particular, biologists have argued over whether present-day diversity represents a steady-state balance between speciation and extinction, as in the regulation of population size when births exactly replace births; alternatively, species richness tends to increase with time, barring catastrophic extinction, and diversity reflects the age of a taxon or region [7]. Also at issue is whether any steady-state in diversity would represent a regional limit to species reflecting the interaction of populations with the geographic heterogeneity of a region, or local limits to species coexistence set by competition for resources and other interactions between populations at a particular location. Contemporary biologists have puzzled over the “problem” of species richness for decades, and although both the data on species distributions and evolutionary relationships, and our ability to analyze those data, have increased dramatically in recent years, general consensus about the meaning of patterns in species richness continues to elude us. In his seminal paper in the journal American Naturalist in 1963, entitled “On certain unifying principles in ecology,” Ramon Margalef (1963) pointed out that “Ecologists have been reluctant to place their observations and their findings in the frame of a general theory. … A certain effort should be made in constructing a general frame of reference, even though some of the speculation may be dangerous or misleading.” [27]. This paper appeared during my first year as a graduate student with Robert MacArthur at the University of Pennsylvania, and I remember it having a dramatic effect, as did Margalef’s insights placing ecological systems in the context of cybernetics [28]. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists are not lacking in hypotheses concerning diversity patterns, particularly the dominant latitudinal gradient in species richness [11,32,34], however distinguishing among explanations has been problematic. In particular, we have in recent years lost track of many of the natural history insights that motivated earlier generations of biologists and molded their thinking. In his writings, Margalef frequently emphasized the intrinsic value of natural history and of observing nature with an open mind. As I hope to show here, simply paying attention to patterns in nature can still provide valuable insights into the processes that have shaped the contemporary natural world. www.cat-science.cat

Competition and ecological communities Contemporary ecological thinking, particularly concerning the dominant influence of competition among populations on the species richness of natural communities, has its roots in the early development of the theory of evolution. The economist Thomas Malthus (1798), in his Essay on the Principle of Population [25] famously emphasized that competition for food resources would limit the human population. Charles Darwin (1859) was greatly impressed by Malthus’s theory and incorporated competition as the primary driver of diversification in the formation of new species, for example: “And we have seen … that it is the most closely-allied forms … [which] generally come into the severest competition with each other; consequently, each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them.” [3]. This strongly ecological principal was quickly assimilated into thinking about the relationships among species. For example, the American ornithologist Joseph Grinnell (1904), who later gave the word ‘niche’ its ecological meaning, pointed out that “Two species of approximately the same food habits are not likely to remain long evenly balanced in numbers in the same region. One will crowd out the other; the one longest exposed to local conditions, and hence best fitted, though ever so slightly, will survive, to the exclusion of any less favored would-be invader” [10, p. 377]. This idea of competitive ‘exclusion’ was soon given an experimental foundation by the pioneering studies of Tansley (1917) [61] on closely related species of bedstraw (Galium) and of Gause (1934) [8] on competition in Paramecium in the context of the developing mathematical theory of population interactions by Lotka, Volterra, and others [18]. By the mid20th century, community ecologists had concluded that membership in local ecological communities, as well as geographic distribution within regions, is constrained by interactions between species [15,16, 20]. Robert MacArthur, in his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Hutchinson, asked how five superficially similar species of warblers (Aves: Parulidae) could coexist in the spruce forests of his native New England. His field observations showed that each species foraged in a different part of the spruce trees—one in the open branches at the top of the tree, another among the foliage at the base of the tree, and so on. Observations of this kind led to the idea that species could coexist only by partitioning resources in such a way as to reduce competition between them. Formal mathematical theory based on com 28

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Ricklefs

Fig. 1. A diagrammatic representation of the origin and distribution of species within a region, emphasizing the connection between regional processes and local assemblages of species and the dynamic nature of diversity and distributions on both evolutionary and ecological time scales.

Local and regional contributions to diversity

petition equations supported the view that species richness is limited by competitive interactions among species for limited resources [24,29,62,63], reflecting the earlier insights of Darwin and Wallace, the latter of whom wrote “If a continent is fully stocked with animals, …, then, so long as no change takes place, no new species will arise” [64]. If species richness were limited by competition and other local interactions between populations, then variation in species richness might be explained by the influence of physical characteristics of the environment—climate and soils—on the outcome of these interactions. This insight led to many analyses of the relationship between species diversity and climate and other variables [9,14]. A more recent example of such an analysis was that of Holger Kreft and Walter Jetz [19], who related plant species richness in hundreds of local floras to climate, while also investigating whether these relationships differed among regions. Seventy percent of the variation in species richness could be related statistically to local characteristics, particularly potential evapotranspiration (PET, a measure of the thermal energy of the environment) and number of wet days during the year. Except for the well-known elevated species richness of the Cape Region of South Africa, no region effects were identified—evidently species richness patterns were shaped by variation in local conditions. www.cat-science.cat

One of the apparent contradictions in the development of ecological theory during the middle of the 20th century was the emphasis on local conditions to explain patterns species richness in continental regions, and the emphasis on regional characteristics (area and distance to sources of colonists) to explain variation in species richness on islands [22,23]. Recently, many ecologists have been finding that regional characteristics do appear to influence, sometimes to a considerable extent, both regional and local diversity [52]. For example, mangrove forests have developed in essentially identical shallow marine environments throughout tropical regions of the world, but differ greatly in both regional and local numbers of species, being far more diverse in Australasia and the Indo West Pacific region than in the Atlantic and Caribbean regions [50,53]. The species richness of temperate forests, existing under similar climates and sharing many of the same genera of trees, increases from Europe to eastern North America and to eastern Asia [21]. This variation is quite generally related to the extinction of European species caused by climate cooling during the late Tertiary [57,58] and to regional influences on species formation contrasted between eastern Asia and eastern North America [35]. 29

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Ecological communities

Fig. 2. The distribution of variance in population traits of forest birds of eastern North America. The yellow portion of the bar represents the proportion of the variance that represents differences between closely related species (i.e., in the same genus). The lowest three bars represent morphological variation, which exhibits the expected evolutionary conservatism represented by differences in measurements among higher taxa (green [genus], red and black [family and above]). The upper nine bars describe variation in population abundance, extent, and distribution. After [43].

Broad considerations of regional variation in species diversity, independent of differences in climate and other local conditions, have led me to adopt a regional concept of the ecological community that embraces interactions between populations over their entire distributions [37,38,42]. This idea is illustrated in Fig. 1, where regional and historical processes of species formation and extinction establish the overall diversity of a region, within which distributions are sorted out through interactions of populations over the entire area. A certain number of species will occur at any given point within the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the local diversityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but their presence or absence at a particular place will depend on processes influencing population growth and the dispersal of individuals throughout the region. At any given time, a population might be expanding or contracting, which occasionally creates the isolated populations that can lead to independent evolution and formation of new species, and connects population processes to regional diversity. At any given time, some species are widespread and abundant within a region, while others are rare and locally distributed. This variation is undoubtedly related to the particular adaptations of a species that determine its www.cat-science.cat

relationship to the physical environment, and also to other species that might be food resources, competitors, predators, or pathogens. These adaptations are difficult to characterize because the relationships of any particular species are complex. However, we can learn something about the nature of traits that influence a speciesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; distribution and abundance by asking whether close relatives have similar population characteristics, which would therefore reflect shared adaptations inherited from a recent common ancestor. We can answer this question simply by conducting a hierarchically nested analysis of variance in distribution and abundance, as shown in Fig. 2 for forest birds of eastern North America. The result is that, in contrast to conservative morphological adaptations, distribution and abundance are evolutionarily very labile traits, with most of the variation reflecting differences between close relatives. That is, population characteristics appear to be unrelated to adaptations shared by close relatives. One implication of this signal of extreme lability is that variation in distribution and abundance of populations must be influenced by highly species-specific factors. As I will emphasize below, I believe that the primary candidates 30

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Ricklefs

Fig. 3. The average abundance of a species of tree is not negatively influenced by the number of species belonging to the same family in 50-hectare forest plots in central Panama, Malaysia, and Cameroon. Data are from the Smithsonian ForestGEO project [www.forestgeo.si.edu]. After [43].

are specialized pathogens. This simple insight is very much in line with Margalef’s admonition to learn from nature, that is, to let the patterns in nature suggest their underlying causes.

the presence in the forest of other closely-related taxa. I have observed such an absence of population impact from potentially close competitors in many tests of this type with a variety of organisms—trees, birds, butterflies. These results have led me to question, not that competition is a potent force in ecological systems, but rather that competition is primarily responsible for variation in the distribution and abundance in species. These observations could be reconciled if ecological systems were more closely aligned with Steve Hubbell’s [12] view of species being on a competitively level playing field, in which no one species has an advantage over another, but rather births and deaths in populations are completely random and occur at similar rates across all species. This is not the place to argue the merits of neutral theory in ecology. However, aligning ecological systems more closely with Hubbell’s concept, and further removed from the competitiondominated concepts developed during the middle of the last century, allows small differences in population productivity to cause large variations in population abundance and distribution, which are then largely independent of particular functional traits.

Testing the population effects of com petition Darwin’s insight that “…it is the most closely-allied forms … [which] generally come into the severest competition with each other…” suggests a test for the influence of competition on local abundance. If this were true, we would expect the local abundance of a particular species to be depressed by the presence of close relatives in the same location. This hypothesis can be tested simply by relating the average abundance or density of species within a taxonomic group (say, a genus or a family) to the number of co-occurring species in that same taxon [39,41,44]. An example, based on the abundances of forest tree species in 50-ha plots in Panama, Cameroon, and Malaysia (Fig. 3), shows no impact on the local abundance of individual species from www.cat-science.cat

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Ecological communities

Institute [45,46] confirmed that the so-called “taxon cycle” stages identified from geographic distributions and taxonomic differentiation of island populations indeed represented a temporal sequence, and that related species could be in different stages of this cycle at any given time. It is a small step to recognize that similar expansion and contraction cycles in continental biotas could ultimately drive species production within large regions. The potential impacts of pathogens on host distribution and abundance are well established by the detrimental effects of many introduced parasites and diseases on native host populations [1,2,17,26,33,40,56]. These effects are often species-specific. Pathogens and their hosts exert selective pressure on each other, either to increase virulence and contagion on the part of the pathogen, or to increase resistance to, and tolerance of, infection on the part of the host. This creates what has been referred to as a coevolutionary arms race between host and pathogen which, depending on the appearance of mutations that might shift the balance in the host-pathogen interaction, would lead to phases of expansion and contraction [4,5,36]. From the standpoint of the regional community, host-pathogen evolutionary dynamics seem capable of driving variation in distribution and abundance, which, interacting with the regional landscape, also might drive the large-scale processes that determine rates of species production and extinction. Regardless of how causes(s) of variation in species richness over the surface of the earth and its waters are ultimately resolved, it is clear that discovery continues to depend on direct observation of nature—the natural history that Ramon Margalef found so important to the development of his own insights. Host-pathogen coevolution might not be the key to understanding patterns in species richness, but contemplating this perspective has led me to pursue new research on the haemosporidian (malaria) parasites of birds [6,30,31,48,49,51,54,59,60] that may yet contribute new insights into global patterns of diversity.

Pathogens and the generation of diver sity My view that variation in distribution and abundance is related to the effects of specialized pathogens comes from work begun as a graduate student, and which has continued to the present, on the biogeography of birds in the West Indies [41]. Based on the varied distributions of species across the islands, it was clear to me and my long-time collaborator George W. Cox, that the range of one species might be expanding while that of a related, ecologically similar species might be contracting at the same time [47]. Such individualistic patterns argued against common causes, such as climate variation, and instead suggest specialized agents such as predators or, more likely, pathogens. Later phylogeographic work with Eldredge Bermingham at the Smithsonian Tropical Research

About the author Robert E. Ricklefs received his Ph.D. in Biology by the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He developed his career as Assistant Professor and Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania until 1995, when he gained the position of Curator’s Professor of the Department of Biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His research has been focused mainly in the evolutionary ecology and on diversity in ecological systems, with a special interest on birds as elements to explain the pathways of diversification. He has been awarded with several prizes, among them the William Brewster Memorial Award (1982), the Pacific Seabird Group's Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), the Margaret Morse Nice Medal (2003) and the Cooper Ornithological Society’s Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. Since 2009 he is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

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Acknowledgments. My research and insights into community ecology owe much to collaborators, students, and funding sources over the years. George W. Cox, Roger Latham, and Eldredge Bermingham have been wonderful colleagues; many students and postdoctoral fellows have contributed to the work in the West Indies and on avian malaria, including Irby Lovette, Steve Latta, Sylvia Fallon, Diana Outlaw, Maria Svensson-Coelho, Matt Medeiros, Vincenzo Ellis, and Leticia Soares; several organizations and agencies have generously funded parts of the research, including the National Geographic Society, Waitt Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Curators of the University of Missouri. I am deeply honored by the Margalef Prize and humbled to be in the company of previous recipients. I am also grateful for the wonderful hospitality shown me by the Margalef prize committee, colleagues at the University of Barcelona, and members of the Margalef family.

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Ricklefs

the future improvement of society. Johnson, London 26. Mangan SA, Schnitzer SA, Herre EA, Mack KM, Valencia MC, SĂĄnchez EI, Bever JD (2010) Negative plant-soil feedback predicts tree-species relative abundance in a tropical forest. Nature 466:752-755 27. Margalef R (1963) On certain unifying principles in ecology. Am Nat 97:357-374 28. Margalef R (1968) Perspectives in Ecology Theory. Chicago, University of Chicago Press 29. May RM (1975) Stability and complexity in model ecosystems. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 30. Medeiros MCI, Ellis VA, Ricklefs RE (2014) Specialized avian Haemosporida trade reduced host breadth for increased prevalence. J Evolution Biol 27:2520-2528 31. Medeiros MCI, Hamer GL, Ricklefs RE (2013) Host compatibility rather than vector-host-encounter rate determines the host range of avian Plasmodium parasites. P Roy Soc B Biol 280:2947-2954 32. Mittelbach GG, Schemske DW, Cornell HV, Allen AP, Brown JM, Bush MB, Harrison SP, et al. (2007) Evolution and the latitudinal diversity gradient: speciation, extinction and biogeography. Ecol Lett 10:315-331 33. Oidtmann B, Heitz E, Rogers D, Hoffmann RW (2002) Transmission of crayfish plague. Dis Aquat Organ 52:159-167 34. Pianka ER (1966) Latitudinal gradients in species diversity: a review of concepts. Am Nat 100:33-46 35. Qian H, Ricklefs RE (2000) Large-scale processes and the Asian bias in species diversity of temperate plants. Nature 407:180-182 36. Quental TB, Marshall CR (2013) How the Red Queen drives terrestrial mammals to extinction. Science 341:290-292 37. Ricklefs RE (2006) Evolutionary diversification and the origin of the diversity-environment relationship. Ecology 87:S3-S13 38. Ricklefs RE (2008) Disintegration of the ecological community. Am Nat 172:741-750 39. Ricklefs RE (2009) Speciation, extinction, and diversity, 257-277. In R Butlin, J Bridle, D Schluter (eds) Speciation and patterns of diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 40. Ricklefs RE (2010) Host-pathogen coevolution, secondary sympatry, and species diversification. Philos T Roy Soc B 365:1139-1147 41. Ricklefs RE (2011) A biogeographic perspective on ecological systems: some personal reflections. J Biogeogr 38:2045â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2056 42. Ricklefs RE (2011) Applying a regional community concept to forest birds of eastern North America. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 108:2300-2305 43. Ricklefs RE (2012) Naturalists, natural history, and the nature of biological diversity. Am Nat 179:423-435 44. Ricklefs RE (2015) How tree species fill geographic and ecological space in eastern North America. Ann Bot 116:949-959 45. Ricklefs RE, Bermingham E (2002) The concept of the taxon cycle in biogeography. Global Ecol Biogeogr 11:353-361 46. Ricklefs RE, Bermingham E (2008) The West Indies as a laboratory of biogeography and evolution. Phil Trans Roy Soc London B 363:23932413 47. Ricklefs RE, Cox GW (1972) Taxon cycles in the West Indian avifauna. Am Nat 106:195-219 48. Ricklefs RE, Fallon SM, Bermingham E (2004) Evolutionary relationships, cospeciation, and host switching in avian malaria parasites. Syst Biol 52:111-119 49. Ricklefs RE, Fallon SM, Latta SC, Swanson BL, Bermingham E (2005a). Migrants and their parasites: A bridge between two worlds, 210-221. In R Greenberg, P Marra (eds) Birds of Two Worlds. The ecology and evolution of migratory birds. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 50. Ricklefs RE, Latham RE (1993) Global patterns of diversity in mangrove floras, 215-229. Ricklefs RE,Schluter D (eds) Species diversity in ecological communities. Historical and Geographical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Competing interest. None declared.

References 1. Bever JD (2003) Soil community feedback and the coexistence of competitors: conceptual frameworks and empirical tests. New Phytologist 157:465-473 2. Comita LS, Muller-Landau HC, Aguilar S, Hubbell SP (2010) Asymmetric density dependence shapes species abundances in a tropical tree community. Science 329:330-332 3. Darwin C (1859) On the Origin of Species. Murray, London 4. Dybdahl MF, Jenkins CE, Nuismer SL (2014) Identifying the molecular basis of host-parasite coevolution: merging models and mechanisms. Am Nat 184:1-13 5. Ebert D (2008) Host-parasite coevolution: insights from the Daphniaparasite model system. Curr Opin Microbiol 11:290-301 6. Ellis V, Kunkel M, Ricklefs RE (2014) The ecology of host immune responses to chronic avian haemosporidian infection. Oecologia 176:729-737 7. Fine PVA, Ree RH (2006) Evidence for a time-integrated species-area effect on the latitudinal gradient in tree diversity. Am Nat 168:796-804 8. Gause GF (1934) The struggle for existence. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore 9. Gentry AH (1988) Patterns of plant community diversity and floristic composition on environmental and geographical gradients. Ann Mo Bot Gard 75:1-34 10. Grinnell J (1904) The origin and distribution of the chest-nut-backed chickadee. Auk 21:364-382 11. Hillebrand H (2004) On the generality of the latitudinal diversity gradient. Am Nat 163:192-211 12. Hubbell SP (2001) The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography: Monographs in Population Biology 32. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 13. Huston MA (1980) Soil nutrients and tree species richness in Costa Rican forests. J Biogeogr 7:147-157 14. Huston MA (1994) Biological Diversity. The coexistence of species on changing landscapes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 15. Hutchinson GE (1957) Concluding remarks. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 22:415-427 16. Hutchinson GE (1959) Homage to Santa Rosalia, or why are there so many kinds of animals? Am Nat 93:145-159 17. Josefsson M, Andersson B (2001) The environmental consequences of alien species in the Swedish lakes Malaren, Hjalmaren, Vanern and Vattern. Ambio 30:514-521 18. Kingsland SE (1985) Modeling Nature. Episodes in the history of population ecology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 19. Kreft H, Jetz W (2007) Global patterns and determinants of vascular plant diversity. P Natl Acad Sci USA 104:5925-5930 20. Lack D (1944) Ecological aspects of species formation in passerine birds. Ibis 86:260-286 21. Latham RE, Ricklefs RE (1993) Continental comparisons of temperatezone tree species diversity, 294-314. In RE Ricklefs, D Schluter (eds) Species Diversity: Historical and Geographical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 22. MacArthur RH (1972) Geographical Ecology. Patterns in the distribution of species. Harper and Row, New York 23. MacArthur RH, Wilson EO (1967) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 24. MacArthur RH, Levins R (1967) The limiting similarity, convergence, and divergence of coexisting species. Am Nat 101:377-385 25. Malthus RT (1798) An essay on the principle of population as it affects

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Ecological communities

51. Ricklefs RE, Outlaw DC, Svensson-Coelho M, Medeiros MCI, Ellis VA, Latta SC (2014) Species formation by host shifting in avian malaria parasites. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA111:14816-14821 52. Ricklefs RE, Schluter D (1993) Species diversity in ecological communities. Historical and Geographical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 53. Ricklefs RE, Schwarzbach AE, Renner SS (2006) Rate of lineage origin explains the diversity anomaly in the world’s mangrove vegetation. Am Nat 168:805-810 54. Ricklefs RE, Swanson BL, Fallon SM, Martínez-Abrain A, Scheuerlein A, Gray J, Latta SC (2005b) Community relationships of avian malaria parasites in southern Missouri. Ecol Monogr 75:543-559 55. Rosenzweig ML (1995) Species diversity in space and time. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 56. Sainsbury AW, Nettleton P, Gilray J, Gurnell J (2000) Grey squirrels have high seroprevalence to a parapoxvirus associated with deaths in red squirrels. Animal Conservation 3:229-233 57. Sauer JD (1988) Plant Migration. The dynamics of geographic patterning in seed plant species. University of California Press, Berkeley

58. Svenning JC (2003) Deterministic Plio-Pleistocene extinctions in the European cool-temperate tree flora. Ecol Lett 6:646-653 59. Svensson-Coelho M, Blake JG, Loiselle BA, Penrose AS, Parker PG, Ricklefs RE (2013) Diversity, prevalence, and host specificity of avian Plasmodium and Haemoproteus in a western Amazon assemblage. Ornithological Monographs 76:1-47 60. Svensson-Coelho M, Ricklefs RE (2011) Host phylogeography and beta diversity in avian haemosporidian (Plasmodiidae) assemblages of the Lesser Antilles. J Anim Ecol 80:938-946 61. Tansley AG (1917) On competition between Galium saxatile L. (G. hercynicum Weig.) and G. sylvestre Poll. (G. asperum Schreb.) on different types of soil. J Ecol 5:173-179 62. Vandermeer JH (1969) The competitive structure of communities: an experimental approach with protozoa. Ecology 50:362-371 63. Vandermeer JH (1972) Niche theory. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 3:107-132 64. Wallace AR (1880) Island Life. Macmillan, London

Scientists awarded the Ramon Margalef Prize for Ecology (2005–2015) The Autonomous Government of Catalonia created the Ramon Margalef Award for Ecology to honor the memory of the Catalan scientist Ramon Margalef (1919–2004), one of the main thinkers and scholars of ecology as a holistic science. His contributions were decisive to the creation of modern ecology. This international award recognizes those people around the world who have also made outstanding contributions to the development of the science of ecology. More information can be obtained at [www.gencat.cat/premiramonmargalef]. Since the 2010 Prize, all lectures given by the awardees are published in Contributions to Science [www.cat-science.cat]. Year

Winner

Main topic of research

Country

2005

Paul Dayton

Population and community ecology, mostly in benthic environments.

USA

2006

John Lawton

Dynamics of populations and communities, impact of global changes in organism populations and communities.

2007

Harold A. Mooney

Plant physiological ecology and phenomena affecting global changes, such as ecological invasions, the loss of diversity and the degradation of ecosystems.

USA

2008

Daniel Pauly

Study of the decline of fish stocks and the ecosystems’ response to human pressure.

France

2009

Paul R. Ehrlich

Population and human over-population.

USA

2010

Simon A. Levin

Mathematical modeling and empirical studies on the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.

USA

2011

Juan Carlos Castilla

Marine ecology, mostly rocky ecosystems and their sustainability.

Chile

2012

Daniel Simberloff

Invasive species and their impact in the loss of diversity.

USA

2013

Sallie W. Chisholm

Biological oceanography and marine ecology, mostly for the studies in the understanding of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the ocean and the microbiology of the oceans from a revolutionary new perspective.

USA

2014

David Tilman

Ecosystem functioning, biodiversity and protection of endangered species.

USA

2015

Robert E. Ricklefs

Intrinsic and extrinsic influences on ecological communities.

USA

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REVIEWS Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

CONTRIB SCI 12(1):35-46 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.242

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2016: YEAR RAMON LLULL

Ramon Llull and Lullism at the Institute for Catalan Studies, 1907–2015 Jaume de Puig i Oliver Vice-president, Institute for Catalan Studies, Barcelona, Catalonia

Correspondence: Jaume de Puig i Oliver jpuig@iec.cat

Summary. The study of the life and work of Ramon Llull is an important aspect of the study of the Medieval European philosophy because the religious, moral and even scientific faces of this relevant figure. Since its early years, the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) has engaged in the study of some particular aspects of Lull and Lullism, with a different dedication due to the historical facts affecting its own existence, has been one of the main institutions devoted to this intellectual work. Works on Llull’s bibliography from different libraries, on the understanding of his thought, on his relationship with other Medieval philosophers, and on his importance in the European Medieval philosophy―written by members and no members of the IEC―have been published in the IEC journals almost since the beginnings of the institution. The final (or at least, the last) result of its effort has been the publication, in 2015, of Ramon Llull: Vida i obres. Vol. 1: Anys 1232-1287/1288. Obres 1-37, an enormous and astonishing work made by Pere Villalba that is only the first of the three scheduled volumes on the Catalan writer and philosopher. [Contrib Sci 12(1):35-46 (2016)]

Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) is one of the greatest figures of the Catalan literature, but also one of the main authors in medieval philosophy. Consequently, Llull has been extensively studied and commented by many other authors since the Middle Ages, but specially in modern times. We present in this article the studies made by Members of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) and/or published by the IEC on Llull’s life and work. We divided the studied period into three stages: the first covers the period from the foundation of the Institute for Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC) to the Spanish Civil War (1907–1936); the second covers the

years 1947–1973 during which the existence of the IEC was tolerated; the third begins with the renewal and reorganization of the IEC to date (1975–2015).

The origin of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) and the Lullism The modern interest for Llull—born in Mallorca just three years after the conquest of the island by the King of Aragon, Jaume I (in 1229)—started in Mallorca, where the lullists

Keywords: Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) · Lullism · Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) · Medieval philosophy ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Ramon Llull and the IEC

na Library in Milan to study Lull’s manuscripts in Catalan, especially the Llibre de contemplació de Déu that was copied in 12801. The first two generations of the IEC created the Estudis Universitaris Catalans (EUC), which was not only an erudite journal, but the project of an active Catalan university facing an outdated Spanish university. From the EUC cathedra of history of Catalan literature, between 1906 and 1910 Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856–1937) updated the Lullian studies in Catalonia. The work had been inspired, and facilitated, by the appearance, in the volume XXIX of the Histoire littéraire de la France, of the study started by Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré (1801– 1881) and finished by Barthélemy Hauréau (1812–1896) on the life and works of Llull (1885; 386 pages). The merit of the article was the control of the bibliography and the knowledge of the collection of Llull’s manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris (BNP) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Some manuscripts from Venice, and another library in Paris, were cited, but it was obvious that, apart from the edition of the ancient inventories of Llull’s works in the BNP Latin manuscript 15450 (pages 80 and 90, written around 1311 and 1314 respectively), the authors did not intend to provide any definitive catalog. They based their analysis of the Llull’s thinking on the available printed works (313), even knowing that many of them were not authentic, but simply attributes of the publishers, the manuscripts or the bibliographers. In 1910, Rubió i Lluch offered a summary, or educational program of lessons, given on Llull in 19062. His summary was the first clear and ordered list of all the problems related to Lullian bio-bibliography, which added a “summary exhibition of his scientific opus” and a “summary exhibition of Llull’s vulgar opus", i.e., a first inventory of Lullian manuscripts written in Catalan. However, the cataloging of Llull’s manuscripts remained open, although limited to the Catalan manuscripts since Littré and Hauréau had demonstrated: a) that it was impossible to explain Llull without the Latin manuscripts, and b) that Lullian manuscripts were something like a bottomless pit. In his critical studies on Llull, Jordi Rubió i Balaguer (1887– 1982), son and disciple of Rubió i Lluch, never abandoned his interest in the problems with the Lullian manuscripts. In addition to cataloging, join with Jaume Massó i Torrents (1863– 1943), the first manuscripts arrived at the recently created Library of Catalonia, in 1910 he was already interested in

Fig. 1. Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16).

launched an initiative that attempted to overcome years of isolation and hesitant initiatives: the critical edition of the works written in Catalan by Ramon Llull (1232–1315/1316n). Twenty-one volumes of this edition appeared from 1905 to 1950, the importance of which has been, and is, enormous. The first generation of the IEC, therefore, found that one of its possible objectives had been covered already by others. From the beginning, the IEC directed its interests towards the most insufficiently treated critical aspects of Lullian works: to establish a reliable bibliography of the editions of Llull’s texts, the study of European Lullism and the catalogue of Llull’s manuscripts dispersed outside the Iberian Peninsula. When the IEC was born, the Mallorcan publisher’s committee for the Llull’s Catalan texts requested assistance for the copy of the Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek manuscript of Blanquerna, and the IEC subsidized the trip of Mateu Obrador (1852–1909), asking him for the translation of the others Llull’s manuscripts in that library. As he travelled through Munich, Obrador had time to peruse the Ambrosia-

The favorable report for the grant was signed by A. Rubió i Lluch and Miquel dels S. Oliver: Cf. Anuari, II (1908): 16-17, 30-32; III (1909–1910): 15-16. Notes taken by Obrador in Munich and Milan were extracted by Estanislau Aguiló and published in Anuari, II (1908):598-613. 2 A. Rubió i Lluch (1910) Ramon Llull en els Estudis Universitaris Catalans. EUC, IV:282-298.

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de Puig

Fig. 2. Antoni Rubió i Lluch (left) and Ramon d'AlòsMoner (1885–1939) (right)

Llull: amb un apèndix bibliogràfic dels manuscrits i impresos lulians de Maguncia. In this work, apart from the Lullian texts of Mainz, the researcher of the German Lullism during the 17th and 18th centuries also presented the correspondence between the bollandists and the Llull’s editor in Mainz. This was one of the few documentary pieces of evidence of that adventure, undoubtedly treated with great reserve by everyone because of doctrinal, economic and political implications involved. The second volume of the series was Bibliografia de les impressions lul·lianes, written by Elies Rogent i Massó (1893–1924) and Estanislau Duran i Reynals (1894– 1950), published in 1927 with a foreword, indexes and some additions by Ramon d’Alòs-Moner. Promoted from the EUC by Rubió i Lluch, this work was the most notable fruit of the IEC on Lullian bibliography during its early years. The work had been preceded by three articles from the same authors on the Lullian editions from the Library of the University of Barcelona (BUB), published in the EUC in 1912, and then continued in the Mallorcan libraries, in December 19138, and in the BNP9. None of the three following expected volumes—the catalog of the Lullian manuscripts from Mallorca, commissioned to Estanislau Aguiló (1959–1917)10; the catalog of the Lullian manuscripts from Rome, made by Alòs-Moner, and the cata-

some fragments contained in the ACA (Archive of the Crown of Aragon) or Ripoll n. 129 manuscript3. In 1912 Balaguer proposed to the IEC the systematic cataloging of the Lullian manuscripts, including the Latin ones, and offered to undertake the project of cataloging the Latin ones in Munich4. The Rubió i Balaguer proposal, entitled Sobre bibliografia lul·liana, summarized the previous work of Obrador on the Catalan Lullian manuscripts and advocated for the completion of a systematic catalog of all the Lullian manuscripts and prints from the European libraries. He, incidentally, affirmed that the Lullian manuscripts in Rome had been catalogued by Ramon d'Alòs-Moner (1885–1939), who was actually in Rome serving an internship between 1910 and 19135. Unfortunately the results of the work of Alòs remained unpublished. Later, other scholars undertook the same task, ignoring the work of the IEC6. The same has to be said about the cataloging of Lullian manuscripts from Munich, carried out by Rubió i Balaguer. Indeed, Alòs and Rubió were heard, at least in part. They asked for the creation of a commission on Llull’s historical studies and the necessary means for the publication of five volumes of Estudis bio-bibliografics lul·lians7. The first number of the proposed work came out in 1915, and covered Adam Gottron’s (1889–1971) L’edició maguntina de Ramon

EUC, IV (1910):124-129. EUC, VI (1912):378-383. It is on record that he spent two months: Anuari, VI (1913–1914):XXXIII-XXXIV. 5 Anuari, III (1909–1910):20-21; IV (1911–1912):XIII; V–I (1913–1914):X, XXXIII. 6 Anuari, V–II (1913–1914):5. 7 Anuari, VI (1915–1920):VIII. 4

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Ramon Llull and the IEC

log of the Lullian manuscripts from Munich, made by Jordi Rubió—were published, surely due to the World War I and the General Primo de Rivera (1870–1930) dictatorship. Which was the reason for the lack of continuity of the initial impulse? It was not decreasing interest because, in 1915, Rubió i Balaguer published La Lògica del Gazzali posada en rims per Ramon Llull11, and the same year, joining with Alòs, wrote the report presented by the IEC to the chairman of the Provincial Council and to the Mayor of Barcelona on the commemoration of the 6th centenary of the death of Ramon Llull12, and made the chronicle13, consisting in reporting on the ongoing works about manuscripts and prints. In 1916, he published, in the Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya (BBC), El Breviculum i les miniatures de la vida d’en Ramon Lull de la Biblioteca de Karlsruhe14, another of the pending studies― the Lullian iconography―indicated by Rubió in the report on the 6th centenary15. Alòs included in the chronicle of the 6th centenary of the death of Llull, written for the 6th volume of the Anuari, news on the publication of the Catàleg de les obres lulianes d’Oxford, by Josep M. Batista Roca (1895– 1978)16, already reviewed by J. Rubió in the BBC17. Jointly with another Lullian scholars, Rubió “flooded” the BBC with works about Lull: El P. Jaume Custurer i els seus catàlegs lul· lians18, by Joseph M. March (1875–1952). In 1925 appeared the last work of Gottron published in Catalonia: El Catàleg de la Biblioteca lul·liana del convent dels Franciscans de Mallorca19, contained in the manuscript II 438 of the Staatsbibliothek of Mainz and written by the Mallorcan Franciscan Rafael Barceló (1648–1717), author of several works of Lullian themes. It is possible that the diversification of the Rubió-Alòs bibliographic interest towards the study of the Capitular Library of Tortosa20, and Rubió’s own interest towards the study of the Crònica of Bernat Desclot (?–1287) prejudiced the publication of the Lullian catalogues and the continuing in the second volume of his father’s Docvments per l’historia

Fig. 3. The Mainz’s edition by A. Gottron (1889–1971)

de la Cvltvra catalana mieg-eval, added to the slowness of the publications of the IEC for political and budgetary reasons. In 1921, Rubió encouraged Pere Bohigas (1901–2003), a disciple of him and Ph.D. student in Madrid, to catalogue the Catalan author manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional (BN) and other libraries in Madrid. Bohigas continued the task of inventorying the Catalan manuscripts in the BNP and those in the Arsenal, Mazarine and Sainte Geneviève libraries. In Easter 1927, he moved to England for two months to visit the library of the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and the libraries of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. Returned to Catalonia, Bohigas undertook the study of manuscripts of the BUB, i.e., those of the Spanish ecclesiastical

It is on the record that he worked on request of the IEC in 1915. Anuari, V–I (1913–1914):XXXIV. Anuari, V–I (1913–1914):311-354. 10 Anuari, V–I (1913–1914):XXX–XXXIV. 11 Anuari, V–II (1913–1914):5-9. 12 BBC, III (1916):73-88 13 Anuari, V–I (1913–1914):XXXIV. 14 Published in the Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, VIII (1916):204-228. 15 BBC, II (1915):181; IV (1917):150-152. 16 BBC, V (1918–1919):32-44. 17 BBC, VI (1920–1922):146-224. 18 Anuari, VI (1915–1920):IX, XV. 19 Cf. EUC, XI (1926):121-130; XII (1927):411-457; XIII (1928):530-535; XV (1930):92-139; XVI (1931):82-111, 213-310. 20 The review published by Alòs in Anuari, VIII (1927–1931):526-527 on the Repertori de Manuscrits Catalans, is explicitly eulogistic and hopeful. 9

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confiscation (Desamortitzación) by Mendizábal, 1836-1837. In this way was formed―sponsored by Patxot―the Repertori de Manuscrits Catalans21. We are convinced that the initiative of the Repertori de Manuscrits Catalans, and its first results, led Rubió to do not precipitate in the publishing of his catalog of Munich nor the Alòs catalog of Rome, hoping that Bohigas works should give a perspective, and particularly some possibilities of analysis that neither he nor Alòs, nor anyone else, had been able to dream while inventorying bibliographic collections from Roma and Munich separately22. We see no reason for which Rubió could not have undertaken the publication of his catalog of Lullian manuscripts and that of Alòs. Rubió had no qualms in publishing, on the BBC of 1920s and 1930s, the catalog of manuscripts of the Biblioteca Episcopal de Vic (BEV)23 and the collections of the ACA in Sant Cugat24. On the other hand, it caused a similar effect to that caused by the study of Littré-Hauréau on Llull , which was published in the second part of the 9th volume of the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (DTC) cols. 1072–1141 (1926), the work of Ephrem Longpré (1890–1965), in which the author showed his knowledge of the current work of the IEC on Llull and of the abundant Lullian bibliography pu-

blished until then in Catalonia and other places. However, the confirmation of this was in the Carmelo Ottaviano’s (1906–1980) article Ricerche Lulliane, published in EUC in 192925, in which the Italian made a formal review of the catalog of Lullian manuscripts of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, published by Mateu Obrador in the second volume of the Anuari of the IEC. Ottaviano said that Obrador had inventoried only twenty-two Lullian manuscripts from a library having fifty-one in total. Moreover, Obrador attributed to manuscript N 259 Sup. the much less numerous and important Lullian of the next manuscript, N 260 Sup., and eliminated the forty-eight Lullian works contained in the manuscript N 259 Sup., which contained an unknown work. In the same article, Ottaviano announced that he will publish, in a collection directed by Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), a chronological inventory of the Llull’s works, indicating date of composition, exact title, classification by subject, incipits, the significant editions, and the manuscript sources. The task of Rubió and Alòs was pioneering. From the Bohigas Repertori de Manuscrits Catalans, it was unthinkable to responsibly edit a catalog which, from a perspective of rigorous research, would have raised more questions than it would have solved. It is symptomatic that from 1929 Rubió

Fig. 4. Joaquim Carreras i Artau (1894–1968) (left) and his brother Tomàs Carreras i Artau (1879– 1954) (right)

Josep Gudiol, Catàleg dels llibres manuscrits anteriors al segle XVIII del Museu Episcopal de Vic. BBC, VI (1920–1922 [1925]):50-97; VII (1923–1927 [1932]):59-154; VIII (1928–1932 [1934]):46-120. 22 Francesc X. Miquel Rosell, Catàleg dels llibres manuscrits de la biblioteca del Monestir de Sant Cugat existents a l’Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó. BBC, VIII (1928–1932 [1934]):143-240. 23 EUC, XIV (1929):1-13. 24 Anuari, VII (1921–1926):373-379; VIII (1928–1931):525-542. 25 EUC, XVII (1932):166-183.

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Ramon Llull and the IEC

did not publish any further Lullian study in the IEC books. This does not mean that neither the IEC nor Rubió disregarded Llull, quite the contrary. Alòs-Moner published, in the volumes of the Anuari, detailed reviews of the Lullian bibliographic26. Often the review was critical, and it noted the shortcomings in the reviewed works or the relationship between independent works. And, perhaps, it is significant that the Lullian studies driven by the IEC were published in the EUC. To get started, the Notes per al catàleg d’alguns còdexs lul·lians de les biblioteques de Palma de Mallorca, by Obrador27, published as a homage and, especially, because “some of these manuscripts no longer appear today in the collections where Obrador saw them.” In the same volume, Salvador Galmés (1876–1951) published Ars infusa, work that Ottaviano presumed lost although it existed in two manuscripts28. In another volume of EUC, Josep Tarré (1884– 1957) published the Avendo Noi decree of Pope Benedict XIV (1675–1758), written in 1751, in which he gave instructions to the promoter of the faith on the question of worship to Ramon Llull and the review of his works29. This first epoch of the Lullian studies by the IEC ended with the volumes of the miscellaneous in honor of Antoni Rubió i Lluch, in which Manuel de Montoliu (1877–1961) studied the persistence of the troubadour element in the Ramon Llull’s Llibre d’amic e amat30; Tomás Carreras i Artau (1879–1954) started the study of the Lullian philosophical terminology31; Anthony Pons (1888–1976) presented friar Mario de Passa, representative figure of the Lullism at the end of the 15th century32;

Fig. 6. Miguel Batllori (1909–2003).

and Josep Sebastià Pons (1886–1962) was studying the Plant de nostra dona santa Maria33 from the literary point of view. At the end of that period, just before the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the priest Miguel Batllori (1909–2003) started a Lullian campaign with the work Records de Llull i Vilanova a Itàlia. Part I: Per la història del lul·lisme als ducats de Ferrara i Mòdena34. The year on Llull was completed with Relíquies manuscrites del lul·lisme italià35, with news on Italian Lullian manuscripts from Bergamo, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Modena, Padua and Pesaro, and Al margen de un incunable luliano36. In an apparently unremarkable review of Les obres autèntiques del beat Ramon Llull. Repertori bibliogràfic, by Joan Avignó (1871–1939)37, Batllori wrote “It is a pity that the author… has not been encouraged to make a bibliographic catalog, if not definitive, at least as comprehensive as the current state of the Lullian research permits, adding to his thorough reviews of the different works of Llull the complete list of all known manuscripts, of all versions and of all the studies of each work, collecting into a consultation corpus the huge amount of bibliographic material, dispersed, here and there, in a number of magazines and publications which can hardly be covered.” In 1936 he published Un lul· lista bolonyès del segle XVII: Luigi Sabatini38, prelude of one of his greatest contributions to the history of Lullism.

Fig. 5. Covers of the Estudios Lulianos (EL) (left) and Obras de Ramón Lull (ORL) (right) journals.

EUC, XVII (1932):291-301. 27 EUC, XX (1935):142-161. 28 EUC, XXI (1936):363-398. 29 EUC, XXI (1936):545-552. 30 EUC, XXII (1936):317-337. EUC, XXII (1936):109-113. 32 AST, 10 (1934):11-25. 33 AST, 11 (1935):129-141 (= Miscel·lània Finke d’història i cultura catalana). 34 Razón y Fe, 108 (1935):443-450. 35 AST, 11 (1935):587-588. 36 AST, 12 (1936):191-216. 37 EUC, XIX (1934):263-269. 31

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We need now to make a reference to the work of Cramer von Bessel (?–1948), Une correspondance du XVIIIème siècle en marge de l’Editio Maguntina39. In this contribution was published a handful of documents—previous to those of Gottron—in which it was clearly demonstrated that the search for Lullian manuscripts in Barcelona, to serve for the Mainz edition, was active at the time of the Spanish Succession War (1701–1713). It would not be fair if we forget, even in retrospect, that Gottron published, in 1913, the study Ein lullistischer Lehrstuhl ih Deutschland um 1600?40, and later, in 1923, another study on the same issue, Die mainzer “Lullistenschule” im 18. Jahrhundert41. In those early years, Gottron was the most notable foreign researcher to establish contact with the IEC. Already in the second volume of the Anuari (1908) it appeared Contributo agli studi Lulliani, by Pier Enea Guarnerio (1854– 1919), from the University of Pavia, edition and study of the Doctrina dels infants, a poorly known Lullian catechetical text different from Doctrina pueril42.

the Llull’s works proposed by Ottaviano44. They also reviewed the lost works (12) and the apocryphal or attributed ones (44). On this basis, the study of the formation of the Lullian Ars, and its evolution in various writings and applications made by Llull, could be undertaken. The results of Tomàs Carreras in the study of the “genetics” of Llull’s thought have been the basis for all subsequent studies on Llull’s philosophy and the irreversible projection of the Lullian work beyond the fence of the strict literature. For his part, Joaquim Carreras wrote a first history of Lullism which, as a synthesis, has not yet been surpassed45. The main merit of their Historia de la filosofía española. Filosofía cristiana de los siglos XIII al XV is that it avoided the corset of the defense of the “Spanish science”, promoted by Menéndez Pelayo (1856–1912) and Bonilla San Martín (1875–1926) in the late 19th century, and rightly placed the Hispanic medieval philosophy in the context of the current concerns in the European philosophy at that time. The Carreras brothers’ work transpires everywhere the

Tolerated existence of the IEC After the Spanish Civil War, many members of the IEC had to take the road to exile, and the most eminent of them all, Pompeu Fabra i Poch (1868–1948), died plunged into misery. Throughout this period, the initiatives and many of the brightest fruits of the Catalan study of Llull and the Lullism were born and raised outside the IEC. In 1944, Joaquim Carreras i Artau (1894–1968), who, with his brother Tomàs (1879–1954), co-authored Historia de la filosofía española. Filosofía cristiana de los siglos XIII al XV― already completed before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War―, joined the IEC. The first volume was published in 1939 and the second towards 1947―although it is dated 1943― as a publication of the Asociación para el progreso de las ciencias. The monograph on Ramon Llull in the first volume of this work was a milestone. Little concerned about the issue of Lullian manuscripts, in the beginning of each work (243) the authors referred back to the catalogs of Littré-Hauréau, Longpré and Joan Avinyó43, and to the chronological table of

Fig. 7. Cover of the Arxiu the Textos Catalans Antics (ATCA) journal.

EUC, VII (1913):221-223. 39 Anuari de la Societat Catalana de Filosofia, 1 (1923):227-242. 40 Anuari, I (1908):497-519. Cf. Les obres autèntiques del Beat Ramon Llull. Repertori bibliogràfic, Barcelona 1935, previously cited. 42 Cf. L’Ars compendiosa de R. Lulle avec une étude sur la bibliographie et le fond ambrosien de Lulle. París 1930:31-95. 43 Later, he remade it partially, in 1957, in Ramon Llull. Obres essencials, vol. I, cited below. 44 Revista de filosofía, 2 (Madrid 1944):253-313, 479-537. 45 ER, 1 (1947–1948):75-88. 41

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initial spirit of the IEC and the project of Enric Prat de la Riba (1870–1917) (the “Pratian” project) to study the realities with scientific rigor and without prejudice. Regarding Llull, this work clearly demonstrated―not a small thing―that Lull was an unavoidable chapter in the history of philosophy. The stay of Joaquim Carreras in Italy allowed him to quickly publish El lulismo en Italia (ensayo de síntesis)46, in which offered new details about Llull’s stays in Italy. He clearly differentiated the authentic Italian manuscripts―those responding to aroused Italian interest on Llull―from those belatedly imported, and divided the Italian Lullism into five periods: 1316–1480, 1480–1563, 1563–1700, the 18th century, and the 19th and 20th centuries. Another decisive fact produced outside the IEC was the appearance, in 1957, of the journal Estudios lulianos (EL)— then Lullian Studies and finally Studia Lulliana—initially created and directed by Sebastià Garcías Palou (1908–1993) and, later, by Anthony Bonner. The journal appeared sheltered by the “Maioricensis Schola Lullistica”, which was also in charge of the project, from the 1959, of the edition of the Latin works of Ramon Llull. This project came to be the complement of the great work Obras de Ramon Llull (ORL), initiated by Obrador, continued by Salvador Galmés, and culminated in 1950. The real driving force behind the project was Friedrich Stegmüller (1902–1981), who had spent a few years working at Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in the Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi. The project took shape in five volumes of the ORL, published in Mallorca, but was suddenly broken in 1967. However, the IEC did not forget Llull. In the first issue of the Estudis Romanics (ER) journal, published in 1947, and later converted into the prow of the works of the Philological Section, Salvador Galmés published the first post-war critical Lullian study, Ramon Llull no és l’autor del llibre “Benedicta tu in mulieribus”47. Three years later, Joaquim Carreras i Artau published El lul·lisme de Juan de Herrera, l’arquitecte de l’Es-

corial48. The inaugural lecture of the 1951–1952 course, read by Antoni M. Badia i Margarit (1920–2014), was Els orígens de la frase catalana49, in which he showed that Ramon Llull had led the Catalan language to maturity, elegance and logic. Ramon Aramon i Serra (1907–2000) took up the slack from Ramon Alòs in monitoring the Lullian bibliography50, reporting the published studies, editions of texts and translations of Lullian works. Batllori continued the studies on Lullism in Italy and in the rest of Europe, while it was engaged in critical studies on Llull’s biography and edited Vita coetània51, with a great amount of notes52. Joaquim Carreras gave an account of the publications of Philip Anton Brück (1913–1984) on the German Lullism of the 18th century53, the work of Erhard-Wolfram Platzeck (1903–1985)54, and those by Frances A. Yates (1899–1981), Helmut Hatzfeld (1892–1979) and Robert Pring-Mill (1924–2005)55. Three conspicuous members of the IEC, Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Joaquim Carreras i Artau, and Miquel Batllori, and another one that could/should have been, Martí de Riquer (1914–2013), constituted the advisory committee for the publication of the two volumes of Ramon Llull. Obres essencials (the first in 1957 and the second in 1960). In the absence of new editions, they were annotated and republished as a series of Lullian works of the Mallorcan edition of the ORL. For many students, teachers and readers of the dark years of Franco’s regime, these two volumes were the first opportunity to read Llull and the first approach to the solid knowledge of their thinking and their national significance. And, for those generations it also represented the opportunity to make contact with the survivors of the former teams of the IEC. Of the few Lullian studies then published in ER it must be emphasized two works of Friedrich Stegmüller. The first was Raimundiana Americana56, and the second study was Eine neue Handschrift der “Taula general” von Ramon Llull57. New perspectives were also opened by the work of Ramon Sugra-

Miscel·lània Puig i Cadafalch: Recull d’estudis d’arqueologia, d’història de l’art i d’història oferts a Josep Puig i Cadafalch per la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, vol. 1 (1947–1951):41-60. 47 Anuari IEC 1952:43-54; and, in a separate edition, Barcelona IEC 1952, 124 pages 48 Cf. Publicacions lul·lianes. Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, 2 (1953):90-92. It must take into account that Batllori will publish: Miquel Batllori (1954) Introducción bibliogràfica a los estudios lulianos. Palma de Mallorca, 24 pages, linked with the former bibliographical works of the IEC. 49 Ramon Llull en el món del seu temps. Episodis de la història,79. 60 pages. Barcelona 1960; Certeses i dubtes en la biografia de Ramon Llull. EL, 4 (1960):317320; La “Vita coetània” encapçala el volum Ramon Llull. Obres essencials, vol. I, Barcelona, Editorial Selecta 1957:31-54. 50 Batllori also wrote the general preface for the volume: Raimundo Lulio. Obras literarias. Madrid, BAC 1948:XVII-XIX, in which he also included an introduction to the Spanish edition of “Libro de la orden de caballería”, made by Ramon de Luanco and published by the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona (RABLB) in 1901. 51 ER, 2 (1949–1950):296-297. 52 ER, 3 (1951–1952):313-317. 53 ER, 5/2 (1955–1956):260-266. 54 ER, 9 (1961):29-48. 55 ER, 10 (1962–1967):91-97.

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nyes de Franch (1911–2011), Ramon Llull i l’Islam58, in which, regarding Llull, he reviewed the thesis of Américo Castro (1885–1972) on the historical vital approach of Semitic root common to all the Spanish. Towards the end of the period, appeared another work, Raimund Llull and Lullism in fourteenth-century France, by Jocelyn Nigel Hillgarth59, that was a milestone in the study of the history of Lullism.

Reorganization and resumption of the IEC (1975–2015) In 1975 the political and administrative situation of the IEC partially stabilized and the IEC engaged a slow renovation. At the beginning of this period, there were three events which had a decisive influence for the future. The first event was the resumption of ROL. Stegmüller, after the Mallorcan failure, convinced the publishers of the Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis (Brepols) to publish the volumes of the work produced by the Raimundus Lullus Institut of Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). Thus, in 1978 it brought out the first edition which, at the time of this writing, has reached the 37th volume. Finally, were the Germans who crowned the edition of the works of Llull, initiated by Salzinger (1669–1728) in Mainz, a university center that had gathered all known Lullian manuscripts microfilmed, and the essential textual corpus to adequately study Llull was accessible. The second event was the appearance, in 1982, of Els manuscrits lul·lians medievals de la “Bayerische Staatsbibliothek” de Munic. I. Volums amb textos catalans. Apèndix: Inventari d’obres lul·lianes en català, followed by the second part, in 1986, Volums amb textos llatins, written by Josep Perarnau i Espelt. A proof of the quality of Perarnau’s work is the fact that the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has adopted his two volumes as its own catalog of Hispanic manuscripts, in spite of the fact that they are not written in Tedesco. That same year, 1982―and this was the third fact―, appeared the first issue of the annual journal Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics (ATCA), first published by the Jaume Bofill Foundation (vols. I–III), later, by the same Foundation joined with the IEC (vols. 4–5) and, finally, by the IEC and the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia (vol. 6 and on), always under the direction of Josep Perarnau, who, in 1990, entered the Philo-

56 58

Fig. 8. Josep Perarnau.

sophy and Social Sciences Section of the IEC. The annual journal offered a follow-up of the bibliography from anywhere, written in Latin characters, on texts and works of Catalan authors of any subject and of authors who have written about Catalonia until the end of the 18th century. In addition, the annual journal intended to promote the editing of Latin texts of Catalan authors and of authors who have written about some aspects of the Catalan life in any language. Nowadays, the annual journal has published 23,411 abstracts or “bibliographical news”, besides several reviews. Needless to say, therefore, that, until now, the student of Llull and Lullism has had, periodically, a great, if not exhaustive, Lullian bibliographic content. Moreover, the annual journal aimed to study a section of the Catalan literary production―that written in Latin. The work of putting into scholarly hands critical editions of Catalan authors, generically called ancients, fully entered into the perspective of the first IEC and, with the ATCA, this kind of research was normalized. In Consideracions diacròniques entorn dels manuscrits lul· lians medievals de la “Bayerische Staatsbibliothek” de Mu-

ER, 19 (1962–1967):17-31. 57 Immediately reviewed by Batllori in Boletín de Estudios Hispánicos, 51 (1974):311-318. ATCA, 2 (1983):123-169. 59 ATCA, 5 (1986):231-267.

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nic60, Perarnau expanded the data set by Hillgarth on the LuB that, in llism of the 14th and 15th centuries, and suggested addition to Paris, the other places on which Ramon Llull wanted to concentrate complete series of his work also had been fruitful centers for the dissemination of the Lullian ideas. If Paris worked in an effort of synthesis, Genoa showed its concern for the logic and the mechanisms of the Lullian Ars, and Mallorca, connected to Valencia, worked in the catechetical and pastoral orientation. Perarnau also demonstrated that, unlike Paris and Genoa, the Lullism in Catalonia by the mid16th century was linked to spiritual movements, as also was the first Valencian Lullism. Finally, that study revealed that there existed a 15th century Bavarian Lullism more related to the line of Genoa and Padua than that of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). Encouraged by Perarnau, Francesco Santi published Osservazioni sul manoscritto 1001 della biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze, per la storia del Lullismo nelle regioni meridionali dell’Impero nel secolo XIV61, in which he demonstrated that there was a history of the 14th century Lullism in the southern extremes of the Empire and that the Italian monastery of San Girolamo della Cervara (Santa Margueritha Ligure, Liguria) was one of the centers, characterized by Franciscan ideals, to which the Genoan lullists seem to be related, in connection with Milan, Parma and Padua. Among the Mainz manuscripts there are texts on which so crucial an issue in the work of Llull as the rational demonstration of the truths of faith, were treated according to the classical method of scholastic university dispute. In the passage from the 14th to the 15th centuries―and surely gravitating around the Lullian school of Barcelona―there was the concern to relocate the Lullism into certain normality, even accepting some convenient sacrifices. This fact was confirmed by the publication of the Perarnau’s Política, lul·lisme i Cisma d’Occident. La campanya barcelonina a favor de la festa universal de la Puríssima els anys 1415-143262 in which there are ten edited writings formally referring to the controversy of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, with the particularity that the author―a lullist from Barcelona―attempted to homologate that point of Lullian doctrine and to make it acceptable to the theologians of other schools. Another field of study opened by Perarnau was that of

the Castilian medieval Lullism. He showed that the first Valencian Lullism depended on Mallorcan one, and that this last followed the Llull’s works and concerns expressed during his last stay in Mallorca during the years 1312–1313. Llull had already distanced himself from the spiritual ones in Naples in 1294 and, after his death, appeared a normalized lullist current, supporter of the concealing of the aspects that could seem annoying and unconventional. However, from 1317, in Valencia the opposed way is followed, and throughout the 14th century Valencian Lullism was grafted of arnoldism and spiritualism, and this was the current that entered Castile. This was why Perarnau urged scholars to study the extent to what the reformist Lullism spread throughout Castile during the Renaissance. The conclusion of all this was that the works of Perarnau induced a qualitative change to the image that the medieval Lullism had acquired since Joaquim Carreras i Artau, with a final acquisition: the Lullism was active, polycentric and able to connect with other doctrinal currents after the death of Ramon Llull63. The debellation of Eimeric‘s Lullian condemnation was another of Perarnau’s battlefields. The question was addressed ex-professo by Perarnau in De Ramon Llull a Nicolau Eimeric. Els fragments de l’Ars amativa de Llull, en còpia autògrafa de l’inquisidor Eimeric integrats en les cent tesis antilul· lianes del seu Directorium inquisitorum64 work in which the author pointed out several irregularities of Eimeric’s transcripts of the Lullian texts, thus invalidating their inclusion on a list of theologically erroneous propositions as if these were made by Llull. The inquisitor Bernat Ermengol had already studied, jointly with other theologians, some articles of the Art amativa that Eimeric attributed to Llull, articles that did not fit when compared to the original texts of Llull, and Perarnau was who documented the legal force that the king gave to the conclusions of Ermengol’s commission. During the first years of that third period, Michael Batllori published three remarkable studies on the Lull’s biography. The first one was on L’entrevista de Ramon Llull amb Ramon de Penyafort a Barcelona65, the second one treated the issue of Llull’s martyrdom66 and the third one compared the two recent editions of the Vita coetanea, that of Baudouin de Gaiffier (1897–1984), published in 1930, and that of Hermò-

ATCA, 3 (1964):59-191. The works of Perarnau on the manuscripts of Mainz and the studies related with Llull and the Lullism in the first five volumes of ATCA were not unnoticed: Cf. Francesc J. Fortuny (1988) Vers una revisió de la història del lul·lisme. Anuari de la Societat Catalana de Filosofia, 2:200-206. 62 ATCA, 16 (1997):7-129. 63 King Joan I gives legal force to the copy of the dictum of the Ermengol commission on the Ramon Llull book “Arbre de Filosofia d’Amor” (Barcelona, Arxiu Reial [ACA], Canc. r. 1892, f. 217v). ATCA, 28 (2009):629-633. 61

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genes Harada (1928–2009), published in 1980. Batllori was also the curator of the volume Ramon Llull. Antologia Filosòfica, edited by Ed. Laia in 1984, in whose introduction he offered a synthesis of the Lullian philosophy focused on the artistic methodology, on cosmology, on anthropology, on sociology and on Lullian aesthetics. Some years later he studied the educational ideas of Llull67. Besides Batllori, another Catalan Jesuit, Eusebi Colomer (1924–1997), member of the IEC since 1968, continued the way of the Carreras brothers in De la Edad Media al Renacimiento: Ramon Llull – Nicolás de Cusa – Juan Pico de la Mirandola68. With that work, Colomer placed Llull into a specific current of the European philosophy. He shortly published De Ramon Llull a la moderna informàtica69, a suggestive study which made fortune. Colomer followed promptly the foreign Lullian studies and dedicated several works to the interreligious dialogue in Ramon Llull and the comparison between Lullian apologetics and that of Ramon Martí (ca.1220– ca.1284)70. These and other of his works on Llull were rearranged in El pensament als Països catalans durant l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement (Barcelona, IEC-PAM 1997, 14-31, 86216), which can be considered his capital work on the history of Catalan philosophy. From the decade of 1980, the works published by the IEC have reflected quite well the diversification of interests in Lullian studies. The Raimundus Lullus Institute of Freiburg has been the undisputed leader in the study of the Llull’s manuscripts. With this, the project of Rubió should be considered finished in regarding the Latin Lullian manuscripts, but not for the Catalan manuscripts. Jesús Alturo i Perucho gave news of Un nou manuscrit (incomplet) del Libre de l’Ordre de Cavalleria de Ramon Llull71, and Albert Solé initiated a series of studies on the older Lullian manuscripts and their environment: Els manuscrits lul·lians de Pere de Llemotges72, Estudi històric i codicològic dels manuscrits lul·lians copiats per Guillem Pagès (ca.1274-1301)73 and Els manuscrits lul·lians de

primera generació74. It has recently appeared the Massimo Marini’s study “Sanctissimus mandavit responderi, ut tandem quiescat”. Sulle trace di alcuni manoscritti Lulliani conservati a Roma75, in which he tried to explain the presence of some Lullian manuscripts in the “eternal city”. The work of Josep Hernando i Delgado Obres de Ramon Llull en biblioteques privades de la Barcelona del segle XV76, shows that, when compared with the previous century, in the archives of Barcelona there were more readers and more works of Llull, meaning that the Eimeric’s campaign against Llull roundly failed. Some historical lullists have also been studied, such as Ramon Sibiuda, Salvador Bové (1869–1915) and Salvador Galmés. However, most of the studies published by the IEC in that third stage referred to the thought of Ramon Llull, based on the works of the pioneers (the Carreras, the foreign lullists), on the accumulated bibliography and on the number of titles of the ROL. It should be noted, moreover, that the study of Llull was diversified in all directions. It seems appropriate to specially note two contributions about the “scientific” Ramon Llull, an aspect in which the IEC had done virtually no article to date. These contributions are two works of two different authors. The first one is the work of Lola Badia, La ciència a l’obra de Ramon Llull77, in which the results of searches of Yates, Pring-Mill, Bonner, Ruiz Simon and others, are sorted and summarized. In Badia’s work, Llull’s writings on medicine and astronomy received an especial treatment, and were collected with the mathematical and technical data, scattered here and there in the Lullian work, including a particular analysis of De arte electionis, in which Llull proposed a method of voting similar to that proposed by Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) in 1785, with the inherent mathematical implications. The second referred work is that of Michela Pereira Per una història de l’alquímia a la Catalunya medieval78, in which it is clearly disproved that Llull was an alchemist, with the enumeration of the Lullian

Cuadernos/Quaderns d’història econòmica de Catalunya, 21 (1980):9-11. Un problema agiografico intorno a Ramon Llull (Raimundo Lullo): il martirio, Agiografia nell’Occidente cristiano, secoli XIII–XV. Roma 1980:115-128. 66 El Pensamiento pedagógico de Ramon Llull. In: Bernabé Bartolomé Martínez et al, Historia de la Educación en España y América. La educación en la Hispania antigua y medieval. Madrid 1992:345-370. 67 Herder, Barcelona 1975:19-43. 68 EL, 23 (1979):113-135. 69 Ramón Llull y Ramón Martí. EL, 28 (1988):1-37; La controversia islamo-judeo-cristiana en la obra apologética de Ramón Martí, “Diálogo filosófico-religioso entre cristianismo, judaísmo e islamismo durante la Edad Media en la península ibérica”, Brepols 1994:229-257. 70 ATCA, 7/8 (1988–1989):223-240. 71 Llengua i Literatura, 5 (1992–1993):447-470. 72 ATCA, 25 (2006):229-266. 73 ER, 32 (2010):179-214. 74 ATCA, 30 (2011-2013):483-525. 75 ATCA, 25 (2006):267-345. 76 O. c., vol. I, Valencia 2004:403-442. 77 Ib., 455-482. 65

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Rubén Duro

during its first stage and it is undeniable that, since 1975, the IEC has been completely opened to all the Lullian studies. Lately, at the door of the 7th centenary of the death of Ramon Llull, the IEC has published the first volume of a biography that is destined to play a role in the future Lullian study. It is the work of Pere Villalba, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and editor of the threevolumes book Arbor Scientiae in ROL. The biography, entitled Ramon Llull: Vida i obres. Vol. 1: Anys 1232-1287/1288. Obres 1-37, has been sponsored by the Elsa Peretti Foundation, thanks to the effort of Alessandro Tessari, professor at Padua and former Italian deputy, fervently interested in the cultural and political significance of the figure of Ramon Llull for today’s world. The whole work will include three volumes and will analyze each step in Llull’s life and every one of his works, as Llull was writing them, in a diachronic succession. Since the first moment that the IEC was aware of the existence of this work―by its scientific secretary Ricard Guerrero―showed a great interest, culminated by the agreement with the Elsa Peretti Foundation for the publication and dissemination of the work. This work wants to be a book of reference, with the aim of providing all the known information about any aspect regarding Llull’s bio-bibliography; it wants to be a basic introductory work to the advanced understanding of Llull’s work and thought; and it expects to open a new stage in these studies, thanks to the meticulous analysis of each work of Llull. Because that this analysis does not elude the comparison between the Lullian ideas on certain issues and the today’s scientific ideas, the work of Pere Villalba also provides a solid anchor point to the modern reader, allowing him to measure the distance between our time and Llull’s time in certain aspects, and its proximity in others.

Fig. 9. Pere Villalba’s book Ramon Llull. Vida i Obres. Volume I. Published by the Institute for Catalan Studies with the support of the Elsa Peretti Foundation.

arguments against alchemy. Finally, the author studied the reaction of Francesc Eiximenis (ca. 1330–1409) and Nicolau Eimeric against alchemy and the alchemists. These works only give a very pale idea of the multiple directions and interests that characterize the contemporary Lullism. And Lullism, since the time of Littré-Hauréau, remained as a movement unceasingly vivified from outside. In this regard, it must be recognized that the IEC, along its whole existence, has not led to any fundamental Lullian initiative with continuity. The result is that, except the efforts made by ATCA to keep updated the scientific bibliography about Llull since 1982, to date, the IEC cannot present any research project as a solid point of reference for all lullist scholars. It would be very unfair not to take into positive consideration the efforts made by the IEC on the bibliographic issues

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2016: YEAR RAMON LLULL

The Ars Magna by Ramon Llull* Umberto Eco (1932–2016)

Summary. Beyond his general acceptance as a philosopher, theologician and religious man, Ramon Llull was also a scientist. In fact, he was a scientist in the way a scientist could be considered in the Middle Ages, with a society ruled by religion and by the absolute truth derived from the holy books (Bible, Koran and Torah). That truth, the “true Truth,” was different for each religion, and that fact was the origin of many disputes among believers of these three religions. Llull as a scientist emerges from his attempt to explain the religious fact not by the mere faith but by means of the reason. That purpose embebed all his work and converted him into one of the most important figures of science and humanities of the European Middle Ages. [Contrib Sci 12(1):47-50 (2016)]

At the crossroads of three cultures Ramon Llull (latinized in Lullus, italianized as Raimondo Lullo, and often anglicised as Raymond Lully or Raymond Lull), who lived from 1232 to 1315/16, was a Catalan born in Mallorca, and therefore grew up at the crossroads of three cultures: Christian, Jewish and Islamic. Not only did he become an interpreter of these traditions, but he was the first European philosopher to write doctrinal works in the vernacular, and

some of them in rhyme, with very popular cadences, “so that one can demonstrate logic and philosophy to those who cannot understand Latin or Arabic” (Compendium 6–9 ). First of all, however, the works of alchemy, which are all spurious, must be expunged from the Lullian corpus: the reputation of Llull had become such that various practitioners of occult sciences attributed their own works to him. Llull also wrote mystical, poetic, educational works, such as the novel Blanquerna and the Llibre d’Amic e d’Amat (The Book of

*This

article is a translation from Italian of Chapter 4 of the textbook Storia della Filosofia. Vol 1 Dall'Antichità al Medioevo, edited by Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Riccardo Fedriga, Editore Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2014. The original text was selected by Prof. Alexandro Tessari for the project on Ramon Llull's life and works established between the IEC and the Elsa Peretti Foundation. The text was translated by Margaret Evans Lupino. Keywords: Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) · Tabula generalis · Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Ars Magna

the Lover and the Beloved), but the works that had the greatest influence on later thought are those devoted to the Ars Magna.

sequences, with each letter different from the other; if we allow some letters to be repeated (as in the word “letter” with two “t” and two “e”), then the number of sequences is 5 x 1027 (i.e., a “5” followed by 27 “0”).

Converting infidels

Importance of the arrangement of the elements

Llull, having become tertiary Franciscan after leading a dissipated life, wanted to unify Christianity, Judaism and Islam around a core of shared truths; but in fact he was interested in converting the infidels to Christianity. The idea of converting the infidels is present in the Franciscan world: think of the mission, during the Fifth Crusade, of St. Francis (1182–1226) in front of the Soldan of Babylon (i.e., the sultan al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt [1177–1238]) in an attempt to convert him to Christianity, or of Bacon’s appeal for the study of languages, so that it would be possible to talk to infidels and be able to learn from them treasures of wisdom that they had no right to possess. Llull, however, wanted to invent a kind of universal language that could convince anyone of the truth of the Christian religion on the basis of rigorous mathematical calculation. To this end he devoted most of his life, while travelling throughout Europe and in the East. According to tradition, he would have been martyred by the infidels. In fact, he was attacked in Tunis, but he died later in Mallorca; however, he would be beatified as a martyr by Pope Pius IX (1792–1878) in 1850.

There is not only the permutation but also the “arrangement” of the elements. For example, given four people, A, B, C, D, how can I arrange them in pairs, as done on an airplane that has seats two by two, but in a way that takes into account also the order (in the specific case, to define who sits next to the window, and who sits next to the aisle)? Our people could be arranged in twelve ways: AB AC AD BA BC BD CD CB CA DA DB DC. Finally, there is “combination” if, of the four elements A, B, C, D, one wants to know in how many ways they can be paired, for instance, if they were soldiers to be sent on patrol. In this case, the order of selection does not matter (the pair consisting of A and B is the same as that composed of B and A), and the couples would be six: AB AC AD BC BD CD.

Permutation, computation, arrangement To understand the Lullian project we must bear in mind the concept of “permutation”: given n different elements, the number of possible combinations, in any order, is given by their factorial, which is represented as n! and is calculated as 1 x 2 x 3 x ... x n. An example of a permutation is the anagram present in the Jewish Kabbalistic texts, which Lull probably knew. Except that in the case of anagrams, of the 24 possible permutations of the sequence ROME, for example, we use only the one that has a sense in our language, i.e., MORE, and discard those that we do not recognize as existing terms in the lexicon such as EOMR, OEMR, MREO and EROM. In theory, however, all possible permutations could be considered as new words. As the number of elements increases, the number of permutations reaches amazing values. In addition, consider that the twenty-one letters of the Italian alphabet can give rise to more than 51 x 1018 21-letter www.cat-science.cat

Fig. 1. Ars brevis. The First Figure. From Escorial Ms f-IV-12, fol.3.

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First Figure. The so-called First Figure of the Lullian Ars shows how, having assigned to the letters the nine absolute Principles, they can combine to form 72 propositions of the kind “Goodness is great,” or reading it in the opposite direction, “greatness is glorious” (Fig. 1). Third Figure. We skip the Second Figure, which does not refer to combinatorics. More interesting is the Third Figure, in which Llull considers all possible pairings between the letters. It seems as if he excluded the reversal of order, because the result is 36 pairs, but the virtually possible pairs number 72, because each letter can be either subject or predicate. Thus, the system allows questions such as “if goodness were great” or “what is great goodness?” The Third Figure allows, at least in theory, 432 propositions and 864 questions (Fig. 2). Fourht Figure. The Fourth Figure is the one that will be the most successful in setting tradition. Here, the mechanism is mobile, in the sense that we have three concentric circles of decreasing sizes, applied one on top of the other and usually held at the centre by a knotted rope. Nine elements in groups of three allow 84 possible combinations (of the kind BCD, BCE, CDE). If in Ars brevis and elsewhere Llull speaks of 252 combinations, it is because to each triplet, the three questions designated by the letters that appear in the triplet can be assigned. Each triplet generates a column of 20 combinations (84 columns!) because Llull transforms

Fig. 2. Ars brevis. The Third Figure. From Escorial Ms f-IV-12, fol.6.

The Tabula generalis and the Figures Llull was therefore implementing a combinatorial tool that nowadays is of great interest, mostly for researchers in computer science. For combinatorics to work to its full capacity, it must be assumed that there are no restrictions in thinking about all the possible combinations. Otherwise external criteria appear that not only discriminate between the results of the combinatorics, but also insert restrictions within the same combinatorics. For example, consider four people, A, B, C, D; there are six ways to combine them two by two, as we have seen, but if it is a combination intended to allow procreation, and if A and B are males, while C and D are females, then the possible combinations are reduced to four. In addition, if A and C are brother and sister and they would consider incest taboo, the possibility would be reduced to three. Now Llull had the truly revolutionary idea of combinatorics but at the same time he limited its possibilities. The Lullian Ars considers an alphabet of nine letters, from B to K, representing nine absolute Principles (or Divine dignities), to which Llull attributes nine relative Principles that are predicates of his absolute Principles: nine types of Questions, nine Subjects and nine Vices and Virtues. www.cat-science.cat

Fig. 3. Ars brevis. The Fourth Figure. From Escorial Ms f-IV-12, fol.7.

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Ars Magna

arguments previously tested. The Ars is not a mathematicallogical tool, but only a dialectical tool, a means to identify and remember all good ways to argue in favour of a preconceived thesis.

The charm of combinatory art The Lullian Ars would seduce posterity as if it were a mechanism to explore an infinity of worlds and of possible truths (and so will happen with Niccolò Cusano [1401–1464]); adopted by the Renaissance Christian Cabalism, it preceded the combinatorial dizziness with which mathematicians and philosophers of the 17th century played until the Dissertatio de arte combinatoria by Leibniz (1646–1716), who will think of a calculation based on empty symbolic forms, not anchored to any content. For Llull, however, both the principles of faith and a well-ordered cosmology must moderate the discontinuities of combinatorics. As Llull says in the Catalan version of his Logica Algazelis: “De la logica parlam tot breu tot / car a parler avem de Deu” (“About logic let’s speak briefly / because we must speak about God”) (Fig. 4). Rereading Llull today as if he would have invented computer science would be betraying his intentions. But certainly he was the forerunner of the subsequent boldness that he inspired.

Fig. 4. Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria. Gottfried Leibniz, 1666.

the triplets into quadruples by inserting the letter T. When a sequence such as BCTC is obtained, the letters preceding T should be read as absolute Principles, and those that follow it as relative Principles. Hence BCTC will be read as: “If B, the goodness, being C great, as it contains C in itself, then things are consistent.” With this system, it is possible to obtain 1680 combinations (Fig. 3). But here the first limit of Ars arises: many of the possible combinations must be rejected, based more on experience that on the truths of faith. For example, combinatorics would allow the question “if the world were eternal” and the answer that, if the world were eternal—we have already seen that goodness is so great that it is eternal—there should be eternal goodness and therefore no evil in the world. Llull objects, however, because evil exists in the world, as shown by experience. Therefore, it must be concluded that the world is not eternal. The answer is thus in the negative, but not based on what combinatorics would say, but according to what good Christians know, namely, that the eternity of the world is an Averroes heresy. Thus, the 1680 sequences do not serve to generate new questions and answers, but provide only the proof of

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2016: YEAR RAMON LLULL

Ramon Llull: The first proto-European Alessandro Tessari1,2 Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Padova, Padova. Elsa Peretti Foundation, Girona, Catalonia

1 2

Correspondence: Alessandro Tessari tessarialessandro2012@gmail.com

Summary. Since the seven centuries from his death in 1215, Ramon Llull has been an unavoidable figure in the history of philosophy and science. His apparently ceaseless work to connect the Islamic, Jew and Christian cultures―and, of course religions―spread the knowledge across the Mediterranean region and beyond, reaching almost every country in Europe. His attempt to connect faith and logic is in the base of his wonderful Ars combinatoria and, as a result, in the base of the modern computational science. Philosophers such as Cusanus, Pico della Mirandola, Bruno, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, were influenced by the Lullian works. And the same can be said for architects like Juan de Herrera (architect of The Escorial) and even for kings and emperors such as Felipe II. The appearance of the first volume of Ramon Llull. Vida i Obres, by Pere Villalba, in 2015, published by the Elsa Peretti Foundation and the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), commemorated the 700th centenary of this emblematic figure of the culture both Mediterranean and universal, and allowed the access to an enormous quantity of information that had been scattered in different works, collections and libraries. [Contrib Sci 12(1):51-61 (2016)]

Introduction In the two-year period of 2015 and 2016, we are celebrating the 700th anniversary of the death of Ramon Llull (1235–1315/16), a man who gave literary dignity to the Catalan language in the century in which the Romance Languages were being formed. Llull was a proto-European figure of the late Middle Ages, stitching together the edges of the Mediterranean with his tireless travels that contrasted Christians, Muslims and Jews. In the

century of the last crusades he strongly proposed interreligious dialogue of the three Abrahamic monotheisms. And with the extraordinary imagination of his combinatorial wheels that must have drawn from the complete knowledge that was not separated from salvation, he is a man of our time. In his autobiography he says that he was inspired by God to build this system of concentric wheels to write the “llibre que fos el millor del món”1 (the best book in the world). And, in the Ars brevis, he specifies in

Keywords: Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) · Lullism · Cartesian criticism ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Ramon Llull

his son, Jaume II (1242–1311), who would become King of Mallorca and Montpellier. But Llull would expand the cultural and political borders of the Aragonese monarchy which, with the Catholic Reconquista of almost all of Spain in 1229―after 500 years of Arabic rule―, would leave the immense problem of the coexistence of the two cultures, Christian and Arabic. If we remember that the enclave of Granada would remain under Arabic rule until 1492, we can imagine the weight of the problem of the relationship between the two cultures would have in the centuries that followed the Reconquista. To this was added, as an element of complicated enrichment, that of the extremely cultured Jewish culture that contributed so much, in the libraries of Cordoba, in an extraordinary synergy of work with Islamic glossators and translators, to the spread of the Greek roots of the culture of the entire West. Perhaps it is worth recalling that the diverse Jewish world that developed the Kabbalah in the year 10003, with its techniques of permutation and combination. these techniques saviors of the labyrinthine risks that Babelic knowledge, tempted by omniscience, contained―, probably offered Llull elements to build his Ars combinatoria, which responded to needs that were encyclopedic and panoptic. The magnificent tradition of the Porphyrian trees (Fig. 2), taken from the Joachimites, and through this means conveyed to the Franciscans, might easily have offered Llull ideas for endless variations on the theme. Llull’s concentric wheels also allowed for another interpretation: that of heuristic knowledge and discovery. With minimal alphabets, letters, numbers or God dignitates, one can build a virtually infinite meaningful universe. Along this interpretive line, which Llull certainly was proud of, I believe that we can relate to the concentric wheels that Jewish Kabbalism has produced in some documents, next to the eccentric wheels of the Sephiroth.4

Fig. 1. Life of Ramon Llull from Breviculum.

what that Ars consists of, i.e., to write the book that is “totale” (complete), the book that should allay any anxieties, uncertainties, and desire for knowledge or salvation. He says in the prologue that “Subiectum huius Artis est respondere de omnibus quaestionibus”2 (The subject of this Art is to answer to all the questions). Llull was a “secular intellectual who deployed his philosophical, scientific and diplomatic actions in many European countries of the Mediterranean“ (Fig. 1). This is how Pere Villalba presents him in his impressive work entitled Ramon Llull, vida i obres. A secular thinker with close to 280 works, which touch on all areas of knowledge from literature to theology, medicine, and law, written in Catalan and Latin (those manuscripts written in Arabic have not been found). He was trained at the court of the Aragonese King Jaume I, the Conqueror, (1208–1276) and would then remain connected to 1

In the Vita Coetanea by Llull, different versions exist, a Catalan and a Latin one. But even of the Catalan one there are several versions. The one shown is Villalba’s version. The Latin version, in its complete sentence, reads: "quod ipse facturus esset postea unum librum, meliorem de mundo, contra errores infidelium". Cf. Llull Database, on line. 2 Raimondo Lullo, Arte breve, edited by A.Musco and M.Romano, Milano, Bompiani 2002, p.84 3 Of equal interest―it seems so to the author―is the iconographic material reported by Giulio Busi in his Kabbalah visica, Torino, Einaudi 2005. On page 45 some of the concentric wheels are reproduced (Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, ms hébr.825, cc.213v-214r), defined as “wheels of the three and four alphabets”. The wheel of the three alphabets is identical to the fourth figure of the Ars Lulliana, which served as an unlimited multiplication of combinations. The other figure, which of the four alphabets, instead recalls the reading that Bruno will give to the Lullian wheels. Bruno even hypothesizes about the mechanical translatability of languages among themselves. See G.Bruno, Corpus iconographicum, edited by Mino Gabriele, Milano, Adelphi 2001. Contributions of great wealth to the understanding of this complex phenomenon also include G.Busi, Simboli del pensiero ebraico, Torino, Einaudi 1999; Moshe Idel, Mistici messianici, Milano, Adelphi 2004. 4 Cf. G.Busi, Kabbalah cit.. The argument of a possible connection Llull-Kabbalah for the system of concentric wheels, was also presented by H.J. Hames in The Art of Conversion, Leiden 2000. Regarding Hames’ interpretation, Busi would still show reservations: Cf. Busi, Pico della Mirandola, Torino, Einaudi 2004, p.XXIV, note n.45. Much more in tune with what is being said here is the research of Moshe Idel on Golem, the most fantastic figure of Jewish imagination, which from magic passes to artificial anthropoid, recovering the side of computationalism. Cf. M.Idel, Il Golem. L’antropoide artificiale nelle tradizioni magiche e mistiche dell’ebraismo, Torino, Einaudi 2006. Idel strengthens Hames’ hypothesis that the concentric circles appear in Jewish Kabbalism not long before Llull’s works on the ars combinatoria. Cf. M.Idel, Ramon Lull and Ecstatic Kabbalah. Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institutes, LI (1988):170-174.

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Fig. 3. logotype of the research project "Ramon Llull. Vida i obres" (RL. Life and Works), designed by Dr. Mercè Bertlanga. The project was developed by Prof. Pere Villalba at the IEC, with the collaboration of the Elsa Peretti Foundation.

vastness of the horizons that are opened due to the irrepressible imagination of the Mallorcan, and, on the other hand, it aims to put the reader in a position to follow, step by step, Llull’s life, from the rich and frivolous Aragonese court to the dramatic break with his family, the recurring mystical crises, and his panic about his inadequacy when faced with the task he felt so necessary as if it were a mission: that of the redemption of the “infidels”, the conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity. His studies in theology during the time he spent in Dominican and Franciscan environments are mixed with literary works and genres in fashion at the time: from sensual trobadorismo (troubadour-ism) that was popular in the courts―from chivalry to falconry―, to the rigor of self-imposed study in order to preach. He studied Arabic not only because the level of Arabic culture at that time was equal only to the level found in universities and convents of the Dominicans and the Franciscans―far superior to that of the curtensi environments―but, above all, because being fluent in this language allowed a direct comparison with the Arabic-Islamic world. And it was with the Arabic language and culture that Llull began his amazing production as a prolific writer. It is believed that Llull’s first major work is also a way he measured himself against Al-Ghazali (latinized Algazel)

Fig. 2. Llull’s tree from Arbor scientiae.

Publication of Volume I of Pere Villalba’s Ramon Llull: Vida i Obres Thanks to the patronage of the Elsa Peretti Foundation in Girona, the Institute for Catalan Studies has initiated a project (Fig. 3) for the publication of an important work by Professor Pere Villalba i Varneda, Ramon Llull, vida i obres, in Catalan. The first of three monumental volumes has been published in 2015. (See de Puig, pp. 35-46, this issue.) Villalba, one of the greatest scholars of Llull, has edited for the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis the three volumes of Arbor scientiae the fundamental work of the Mallorcan. It is a work that is difficult to read and interpret, in which one sees Llull's ability to gather the contribution of the two extraordinary cultures, the Arabic and the Jewish, grafting them into the root of Greek thought.5 The work of Villalba is like an Ariadne’s thread in midst of the immense Lullian production. The presentation of the works, in strict chronological order, on one hand leaves intact the fascinating sense of loss that always accompanies the 5

Cf. U.Eco, l’Aristotele latino in U.E., Dall’albero al labirinto, Milano, Bompiani 2007, p.97 sgg.. Eco’s thesis is that William of Moerbeke and Herman the German would have offered Latin translations of the Aristotelian texts that were more reliable than the Arab ones. There is always a degree of uncertainty: if the primacy of the Arab version was made difficult by the fact that often Latin was a third or a fourth reading of the Greek texts, because they passed through the Syrian language, both for the translations Arabic-Syriac-Latin and those that were from Greek-Syriac-Latin. It is also interesting to note Francesca Forte, Ermanno il Tedesco e il viaggio della Poetica, Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia (Nuova Serie XIV (2008), Firenze University Press 2008:17-52.

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Ramon Llull

(1058–1111), disciple of Ibn-Sīnā (latinized Avicenna) (980– 1037), with a work written in Arabic, Logica del Gatzell (1271), which sounds like an imitation. Perhaps Llull saw in the prolific and cultured Arab writer what he was beginning to think could be for the Christian world: an arbor porphyriana of complete knowledge. Nonetheless, to measure the significance of this extraordinary Mallorcan thinker we must go beyond his death. During his lifetime he enjoyed a good reputation not only for his ties to the Aragonese royal family, but also for his indomitable aim to pursue the task of preacher, of evangelist. But it would be simplistic to think that he only focused on those who were redeemable. He even positioned himself, with the same strength of his deep convictions, and without fear, before the most powerful on earth, popes and kings, repeatedly presenting them with his plans for a training school for missionaries―where they would learn the languages. The redeemer who is unable to make himself understood is not credible. The redeemable must be able to understand the language of those who seek him, of his redeemer. Llull dedicated a significant part of his works to language and universal communication. The Ars combinatoria, which is part of the foundation of many of his works, is not just a contraption. The game of the concentric wheels that move to produce a virtually infinite combination of symbols, signs and numbers is a technique that Llull most likely learned from the cultured Jewish environment of Catalonia and Provence. To Llull, the combinatorial wheels could be used for a complete reading of the world. The symbols that Llull would use in his wheels were the dignitates Dei (God’s dignities). From their combi-

nation, we proceed to the construction (an ontological and metaphysical one, to some degree) of the world and therefore of knowledge. Nothing must remain unknowable. It is precisely for this bizarre encyclopaedism that Llull did enthrall following centuries and even at the beginning of 1600 his epistemology was placed, next to that of Aristotle and Pierre de la Ramée, at the foundation that would enable the understanding of the modern Copernican revolution.6 Llull was careful to record at the bottom of many of his manuscripts the list of works already written, knowing how easily and nonchalantly the great masters often appropriated the writings of monks who through the constant work of translators and glossators were able to form a culture and write books of great length and originality. Despite this caution, after his death many manuscripts appeared with his signature, but by authors who exploited the dominant cultural climate in Europe: a rich and complex Neoplatonism, with strong veins of magical-alchemy. Some of these manuscripts had enormous popularity and spread widely, thus giving the figure of Llull―already rich for his many interests―the additional characteristics of an alchemist magician, someone sensitive to esoteric grandeur.7 This contamination of actual works and pseudo works of Llull would go on over the centuries before the philological scientific criteria began to present a more plausible attribution to Lull of his writings. What certainly contributed to formalizing this contamination was the release in Argentoratum (Strasburg), in 1598, of the book by Lazarus Zetzner (1551–1616), Raymundi Lullii Opera. This enormous volume of about a thousand pages contains 10 works by Llull (later on it would be discovered that 4 of these

J.H.Alsted, Clavis artis lullianae, Argentoratum 1609. The edition of 1633 bears the name Sumptibus heredum Lazari Zetzneri. But probably the edition of 1609 still bore the signature of the founder of the publishing house Lazarus Zetzner who in fact died in 1616. It is interesting to note that this book had notable success and it was re-released in a few years: in 1633 and 1651. This brings some perspective to the argument of those who believe that in the Cartesian era the “Llull” thesis was a thing of charlatans and still very marginal. Argentoratum was one of the most important and well-known publishing centers in cultured Europe and the figure of Zetzner had such intellectual prestige that he was compared to the greatest philosophers of his time. One of the schools that encouraged the marginalization of the figure and thought of Llull was certainly that of Eugenio Garin, the great historian of Renaissance philosophy, a master of the best Italian and European historians and, above all, a writer of rare elegance. It must still be recognized in Garin the rigidness of a thesis: when he embraces materialistic historicism, in which it would be foolish to blame the poor achievements of “real socialism”, he will feel compelled to confine all the ideas that, in the history of Western thought, move in opposite directions. Garin began his extraordinary career as an academic with a very interesting work on Pico della Mirandola (Firenze, Le Monnier 1937). But for his next work, this prior work of his youth then seems to him to be a concession of the irrational idealism that in some ways he was not proud of. When he chose the Cartesian rationality as the dividing line between what is useful to progress and what is an obstacle, he ended up giving a highly reductive reading of Lullism. And he projected on Descartes his discomfort about the curiosities of youth. He would write repeatedly (Cf. E.Garin, Vita e opere di Cartesio, Bari, Laterza 1999) that Descartes let himself be seduced by Llull, as he, Garin, was by Pico, only at the stage of his early youth. For more on the thesis of a Descartes interested in Llull even at a mature age, and substantially in all of his works, see A. Tessari, Considerazioni sull’Ars di Ramon Llull e la Mathesis Universalis di René Descartes, in Janus, Quaderni del Circolo Glossematico, edited by R.Galassi, Il Poligrafo, Padova 2004, pp.199-220. 7 One can see the continued interest Michela Pereira dedicates to this topic. Cf. in particular The alchemical corpus attributed to Raimond Lull, in “Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts”, vol.18. London 1989. In this field we should cite Francis Yates, The Art of memory, London 1966; The Rosicrucian enlightenment, London 1972; The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London 1979; Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays, vol. I, London 1982. It is clear that the teacher who more than any other has dedicated an on-going interest to Llull and Lullism, both in nonfiction and in his great novels that are known around the world, is Umberto Eco. Here we recall the essays on Llull, Pico and Lullism in U.Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto, Milano, Bompiani 2007.

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were apocryphal), 3 works by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) to comment Llull’s work, a work by Cornelius Agrippa (1486– 1535), In artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria and, finally, the Opus aureum by Valerio de Valeriis. The numerous reprints in later years of this particular book attest to the success of this work and a reflection of the interests that a cultured Europe had for Llull’s work. To emphasize, even in a negative sense, the criticism of Llull’s entire body of work, only two years after the publication of Zetzner’s work, Giordano Bruno, who was one of the most passionate interpreters of Llull, was burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, following the sentence of heresy pronounced by the Inquisition.

Giordano Bruno and Ramon Llull Bruno (Fig. 4) spoke of Llull, of his ars combinatoria and his mnemonics, in all the European courts he visited once he had left Italy, chased by accusations of heresy. In the court of Henry III of France (1551–1589), among the Calvinists of Geneva, in the court of Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603), in different German principalities and, finally, at the court of Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) in Prague, Bruno brought the verb, the suggestive message of Llull’s work, which was something more significant and profound than mere mnemonics. The techniques of memory had already enjoyed a long tradition since Simonides of Ceos (6th century BC) and through Cicero (107–43 BC) and Quintilian (35–100 AD) connected to Llull’s century: they were techniques based on the role of images and loci, mechanical and regulatory cognitive strategies. The need for the enhancement of memory, and the dream of mnemonics that were easy to learn, were related to political or legal activities. A series of substantially circumscribed topics had to be remembered in logical sequence, with ease. To this end, the dislocation in space of strong images, the statues of a temple, for example, could be enough support, or so it was believed, for nearly two millennia. Substantially exhaustive, these techniques were not, however, aimed at exhaustiveness or at heuristics. They were aimed at the discovery of new things. This is why, to a writer, the reading of Lullian Ars combinatoria as a variation of the different classical mnemonics appeared restrictive. Paolo Rossi (1923–2012) also offered his support to this reading in his own work. In 1960 he published the unforgettable and beautiful Clavis universalis. Tecniche della memoria da Lullo a 8 9

Fig. 4. Sculpture of Giordano Bruno at Campo de’ Fiori (Roma), made by Ettore Ferrari in 1889.

Leibniz.8 It came out almost simultaneously with another fascinating book, by the Warburg scholar Francis Yates (1899– 1981), The Art of Memory.9 In those years the computer had just appeared on the world stage. It is no accident that in some languages it is called an ordinateur or an ordenador. It ordered, or organized, the finite quantity of data and cards that each student had accumulated in paper form. It was a modern version of the Porphyrian tree. Yates and Rossi addressed the Lullian issue based on the knowledge that was available at the time of that machine, which was certainly already quite surprising. But it was considered a powerful machine for mechanical operations: finding a piece of data in a considerable mass of data; cataloguing stored information in different orders―one could draw up from the files or ac-

P.Rossi, Clavis universalis.Arti della memoria da Lullo a Leibniz, Firenze, Ricciardi 1960. F.Yates, The Art of Memory, London 1966.

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of bad students) had created. Even the Church lent a hand, in this sense, to building the evil monster of the Inquisition, with the endless succession of crimes against free men or those too weak or ill to defend themselves. What contributed to the fame of Llull as a magician and alchemist was also the great interest of Agrippa, an extremely cultured yet bizarre person, who had dedicated writings to the occult philosophy that had a wide readership. What was curious about that Neoplatonic time is that the works of Agrippa, which came out slightly before the De revolutionibus of Copernicus, were almost more popular than the difficult Copernican texts, which required almost a century more of time to pass before they were accepted. The concern that led Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) to not publish his De revolutionibus while he was alive–it was published the same year of his death–shows how much the birth of modern scientific thought had been hampered by a Church known for extravagance, excessive power and ignorance, but also a secular culture that had decided to get lost in equally extravagant fantasies of the worst/deteriorating Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, esotericism. Consider that the birth, near the mid-15th century, of socalled Italian humanism, proclaimed the rebirth of man, at last the master of his destiny. Man the measure of the world, man the craftsman, capable of governing the world and nature. In this megalomania, even magic and alchemy were seen as positive elements that strengthened the faculties of man. And the disorder the centuries fell into, centuries that the world still sees with innocent eyes, such as the centuries of the rebirth of beauty, of man as master of the universe who will leave in the arts examples of rare beauty, shows curious contradictory situations: men of the Church who understood this innovation, still looked upon by the official Church with great distrust; think of Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a Franciscan from Paris, that advised Descartes to not burn his letters about the motion of the Earth, but to keep them for better times. Mersenne had, just as Descartes did, lengthy correspondence with all the leading exponents of the sciences of Europe at the time. And while he advised caution to Descartes, he had no doubts about organizing the publication in Paris of the works for the newly condemned Galileo. It is even worthwhile to defend the intelligence of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who should not be deprived of the moral responsibility of having signed the death sentence of Bruno with his heresy judgment. Bellarmine, a man of rare culture even in his contemporary ecclesiastical environment, perhaps sensed that history would side with Bruno, although in his works there is no hint of this. By his

cording to the author, the title or a cited name. What happened then, in the history of the computer, is fairly obvious: the emergence of networks so immeasurably large to accommodate all the files that the individual researchers had at their disposal. Each network put in their finite quantities of information. But the result was that the deposit became a virtually infinite warehouse of data where it was even easier to get lost in the labyrinth. The reading that is sometimes heard of the Lullian Ars combinatoria today tends to be precisely this one. Until Llull focused on bringing order to the finite data, he remained in the logic of Porphyrian tree: this was a tree that took into account all the incoming and outgoing ramifications, a warehouse that is always possible to inventory. When Llull went from the tree to the concentric wheels, and this must have happened based on the suggestions that came to him from the Kabbalistic world, he found himself (possibly without even realizing it) on a completely different epistemological horizon. The wheels, like all the alphabets of the world, were not made to create a finite number of propositions, but to produce an infinite number of them. Llull, with a purely mystical and metaphysical temperament, as well as a poet, felt that these wheels, which in Kabbalism help the Jews to try to discover the secret will of Yahweh, combining and mixing the consonants of the Hebrew alphabet, could serve, in his visionary capacity to converse with the Almighty, as a metaphor: man can become a true creator if, in the basic alphabet, has those letters, those signs that are the dignitates Dei. The “dignities of God” are the key to bringing man to the same plane as the Pantocrator. Man will recreate the world with the help of the names of God: he becomes a participant in a heuristic adventure. And this is the way to salvation. The interest for this bizarre figure, this “phantasticus” that he called himself, grew due to many factors: certainly the wealth of the horizons of his immense production. What also helped was the climate of widespread Neoplatonism that became controversial with an Aristotelianism that was poorly interpreted by the Mannerist school. The paradox of this result is evident: Neoplatonism, with its poetic detachment from material reality, is placed at the baptism of the birth of modern scientific thought, while Aristotelianism, which certainly in the original Greek reading was much more attentive, in the reading of the world as perceived by our senses, was seen as an obstacle to the development of modern scientific thought. In Humanism, there was a growing push to free man from his oppressive cage that evil Aristotelians and scholars (even Thomas had to serve the misfortune www.cat-science.cat

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behavior on the inquisitorial commission one can easily deduce, or assume, this afterthought. Indeed, he took action until the very end to offer Bruno a way to salvation, suggesting to him that he would abjure the theories that he had published after the papal condemnation of the Copernican theories. Thus he would have absolved his writing prior to the Papal prohibition.

and commitment of the Dominican order to rehabilitate, years later, the figure of Thomas. And they even resorted to the threat of a schism of the order. We should remember that even after their political and military defeat in 1229, the Arabic culture continued to exercise a powerful charm over not only the Hispanic world but also throughout Europe. It was in the 15th century that a talented young scholar, Nicholas von Kues (1401–1464), made a tour of university studies that has offered a model that European universities would still be inspired by. He studied in Heidelberg, Padua, Cologne and Paris, and continued to perfect his studies in Constance and Leuven. He graduated with a degree in Law in Padua. He came into contact with teachers who allowed him to get to know the work and thinking of Llull. The young Cusanus, destined for a brilliant career in the Church that would lead up to the cardinal’s purple, inspired his vast philosophical, theological and scientific production on Llull, on this never-mentioned teacher. It is known that during his time in Paris and Padua he enjoyed transcribing manuscripts by Llull. And when, in 1448, he became Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone), he collected manuscripts that today still can be found in the town of Innichen (San Candido) that was a part of the Bressanonese diocese.

Connecting faith and logic After Llull’s death a controversy broke out to condemn him for heresy. But at the same time academic chairs of Lullism were created at several universities. The figure of Llull was found fascinating often for opposite reasons: he wanted to establish a connection between faith and logic, gathering the best of the Arabic tradition based on that that Aristotle interpreted with extraordinary wealth of inspiration. This freedom of thinking found in Arabic thought fascinated even Thomas of Aquinas (1225–1274), who explored the averroistic theses to such a point that after his death he was condemned of Averroism, in the company of Averroes himself, by the Parisian bishop Étienne Tempier (?–1279).10 It took all the strength

Fig. 5. Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Juan de Herrera, architect. 10

Tempier on March 7th of 1277 condemned close to 219 Heterodox, Averoistic and Aristotelian propositions.

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In the second half of the 15th century, Llull, who had reworked the Jewish Kabbalah, fascinated another young man. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) helped to expand the legend of encyclopedic knowledge. Jewish Kabbalism sought out in the sacred text a secret knowledge that God hid behind the easy and superficial appearances, to entrust the journey of salvation to the will of man who seeks and wants and conquers his salvation. This hypothesis could find reasons for convergence with Calvinism and Lutheranism. Even the “grace” does not exclude the participation of man in winning the attention of a merciful God. We have already said that, in the 16th century, between Agrippa and Bruno the fame of Llull had gotten complicated and loaded with sulfurous evocations. But what always dominated was the idea that man could reach faith and salvation through reason: the cognitive strategies were facing an unmanageable explosion of knowledge. Heinrich Alsted (1588– 1638) had seen11 in three major subjects, Aristotle (384–322 BC), Pierre de la Ramée (1515–1572) and Llull (1232–1315/16), the three fathers of epistemological strategies to order knowledge and save it from Babelism, from the labyrinths of pluralism that were less and less governable. In which of the three did Alsted see the legitimizer of the Copernican revolution? Which one was still not fully understood, but in the midcentury fixed with the characteristics of the De revolutionibus? It is proposed here only as a hypothesis not supported by evidence for now, but only by small clues, that Llull is the bearer of the epistemological paradigm. Bruno is presented as a man of rare cultural and philosophical sensitivity to sense that Copernicus was the new world, even if he did not have the mathematical instruments to fully grasp the Copernican revolution. And Bruno was also the man that reinterpreted and updated the computational tools of Llull to adapt them to a universe of limitlessness. Bruno thought that enriching (in his own way) the Lullian wheels, calibrated with different alphabets, would even allow for the mechanical translation from one language to another. The concept of infinity entered the great debate of modernity with Bruno’s visionary nature, which in turn used the visionary nature of Llull. What is certain is that the 17th century opened with the strong presence of the magic figure of Llull on the European stage.

Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo (1409–1485), who wanted to learn the memory techniques that Bruno—it was said so—was an expert of. Due to a misunderstanding between the two of them, which was never made clear, Bruno was subsequently referred by Mocenigo to the Venetian Inquisition tribunal. But, immediately, there was an intervention made by the King Felipe II so that Bruno could be transferred to Rome and then to Naples. The explanation was simple: Bruno, as a Neapolitan citizen, was in effect a subject of His Majesty Felipe II. But the most interesting thing is that it was not bureaucratic interests that moved the Hispanic Kingdom to steal Bruno from the Venetian court. Felipe II had very special reasons for not wanting Bruno, disciple and student of the great master Llull, to end up in the meshes of the Inquisition. When Felipe II decided to build the Escorial (Fig. 5) he hired the most famous architect of his time, Juan Bautista de Toledo (1515–1567). At his death Juan de Herrera (1530– 1597) completed the construction of the Escorial. Both architects had been trained by Felipe II in the Lullian school, as were all the ambassadors of his immense empire. What did Felipe II see in Llull? The imaginative ability to reduce the world by the coordinates of the Porphyrian trees must have seemed to Felipe II to be a key to being able to reduce the complexity of his empire to something understandable and that could be governed. The Escorial was the panopticon from which to rule the world. But to govern it, it was important that the ambassadors, in turn, gave their synthesis of the status of such vast territories that one can imagine were so complex and full of contradictions. And this is why the king fell in love with the Mallorcan: the man who in the century of the Crusades compared and interacted with the three monotheisms that were always fighting each other. The reductio ad unum of knowledge used by Llull must have appeared to Felipe II to be the keystone to not get lost in the maze of plurality. A few centuries later two great monarchs who had the same problems as Felipe II, Louis XIV (1638–1715) and Peter the Great of Russia (1672–1725), called in as a consultant the great philosopher at that time, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The same request was made to him: how can a governor govern territories with people who are so varied and speaking hundreds of different languages? The elderly Leibniz saw that it was precisely Llull who suggested the idea of an ars characteristica that could be used as a universal language. When he was nineteen, Leibniz had begun to write the de Arte combinatoria of his own, inspired by Llull. And this was the need of

The panopticon Bruno, after the European tour, accepted the invitation of the 11

Cf. note 5.

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the great monarchs of the world: to speak and to dominate the whole world through a universal language. The demand for a foundational language, a single language, reappeared at the end of the 19th century when scientists focused on the problem of the roots of all knowledge. And it was Leibniz, the father of infinitesimal calculus,12 who took the figure and name of Llull out of the shadows where Descartes had previously confined him to. To be able to build a disambiguated language that everyone could understand was part of the dream of Porphyrian trees, of Camillian theatres, of maps of knowledge, anxieties and problems that Llull tried to give answers to with his Ars combinatoria. Herrera, who was fascinated by the Italian renaissance, left in the library of the Escorial his manuscript Discurso de la figura cúbica, según los principios y opiniones del arte de Ramón Llull, from 1575. It is certainly interesting to try to understand why the visionary capacity of Felipe II and his architects brought him to build a panopticon―a variant of the tower of Babel, of course―but that should not collapse due to the impossibility of understanding among the architects of the work. Babel collapsed due to linguistic Babel. Llull offered Felipe II the possibility of building a panopticon that would not collapse due to a linguistic Babel. 120 works by Llull in Herrera’s library makes it clear that Herrera saw in Llull not just another author, but that clavis universalis that had to do with salvation through knowledge. Not long before Bruno was incarcerated in Venice or perhaps in the same period in which he was about to be transferred to Rome in 1593, Felipe II sent to Rome (to underscore just how important the figure of Llull was to him) a delegation headed by Pedro Jerónimo Sánchez de Lizarazu (?–1614),13 with the request that the Mallorcan should be canonized. There is no documentary evidence to prove that delegation met with those who were organizing Bruno’s trial.

Fig. 6. Portrait of Renè Descartes. Frans Hals (1582–1666). Musée du Louvre. Paris.

Zetzner was published with a juxtaposition of the works of Llull and Bruno. This book was widely read among educated men in Europe for at least two hundred years. A copy was later found in Newton’s private library. This book bound the two names of Llull and Bruno together in a fatal bond. It is certain that as long as Felipe II had been alive, the request for the canonization of Llull had a great more weight. Once he died, however, the request died with him. His successor Felipe III (1578–1621) did not have the same interest as his father in the figure of the Mallorcan. Yet we know that a few years later, in 1609, Sánchez de Lizarazu published a very significant work entitled Generalis ed admirabilis methodus artis lullianae.14 In it, Llull was presented as someone who proposed, to the scientific culture of the newly started 17th century, a scientific method that served all disciplines, a method that certainly recalled the old dream of the mathesis universalis, of the clavis universalis, of an epistemological strategy that offered a unifying key to reading and all knowledge. Less than thirty years later Descartes published Le discours de la

The Cartesian criticism In 1598, two very significant events occurred: the book by 12

It is very interesting that Llull dedicated so much attention to the classic topic of the squaring of the circle, a road that will bring Leibniz and Newton to calculus. The Brepols versions were about to come out, in the collection of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, the Geometria Nova by Llull edited by Carla Compagno, a scholar who worked for years at the Raimundus Lullus Institut di Freiburg. And it is precisely in this work that the fascinating topic of squaring the circle appears. Together with Ulli Roth, Compagno has always edited for the CCCM the Arbor Philosophiae, the De leviate et ponderosi tate elemento rum and the Desolatio Raimundi, Turnhout, Brepols 2011. Compagno, in his research, developed the line that Eco and Pereira have opened for an evaluation or a re-evaluation of some elements of the magical-alchemy culture that for a long time were only read in a reductively negative way. 13 Alberto Pavanato, Generalis et Admirabilis Methodus: Pedro Jerónimo Sánchez de Lizarazo and Lullism in Spain at the beginning of the XVII century, Master’s degree thesis, 2009, Padova. In this soon to be published work there is a lot of information about the complex figure of Lizarazu. 14 Sánchez de Lizarazu, Generalis et admirabilis methodus ad omnes scientias facilius et citius addiscendas: in qua Eximi et piissimi Doctoris Raimundi Lulij Ars brevis explicatur, Tarassona, 1613.

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méthode, in which he proposed that exact project. The CarteB consian book came out in 1637, four years after the second demnation of Galileo. Descartes was terrified that the Inquisition might reach him. “If they have burned Galileo’s letters and put him in prison, with the abjuration obligation, he― Descartes added in a letter to Mersenne―who was a personal friend of the Pope, what will they do to me, not even a friend of the Pope?” In this Discours, in which the need to align oneself with the Church and against the Copernican theories is a dominant theme, Descartes proposed, in a sort of autobiography, dialoguing with God. In this apocalyptic scenario in which “I” and “God” face each other, God appears 50 times and the “I” of Descartes appears 500 times, such was his opinion of his hypertrophic ego. But the most curious thing of all was the only one who succeeded in piercing this ostracism, out of any other co-protagonist of the Cartesian adventure, was Llull. Descartes, in order to present his method, said that it did not resemble Llull’s method, which “teaches to speak without judgment of the things that are not understood instead of learning them”.15 Now if this was Llull’s method, and since Llull had been dead for some 300 years, why did Descartes need to grant him the honor of being mentioned, an honor that he did not even allow Galileo? There is only one answer: Llull came from the European culture of the 1600s presented as one of the paradigms of cognitive strategies of great scope. And Descartes feared that the ghost of Llull could undermine his dream of giving his name to the century. He showed the same bitterness against Galileo as well. After the second condemnation of Galileo in 1633, Descartes (Fig. 6) had written to Mersenne that, if Galileo’s worldview collapsed, due to the attacks of the Inquisition, all of his philosophical system would collapse as well.16 Forgetting that he had written this letter, five years later, again writing to Mersenne who had asked how his philosophy related to Galileo, Descartes―who suspected that Mersenne imagined an inferiority to Galileo―, wrote an obscene letter against Galileo, stating that he had had found nothing in Galileo’s books “that give me envy, nor almost anything that I would like to make my own”. It should not be a surprise that throughout all his life, and not only in his younger years―as Eugenio Garin (1909– 2004) wrote―, Descartes had been haunted by the philo-

sophical presence of Llull. The same word, “method”, which Descartes used for his important work in 1637, a word of great interest that comes from the Greek “methodus”, was presented as a new word that would open a new period for philosophy and science. During all of Latin times the word “methodus” never appeared except for a few times in Marco Vitruvio (ca.75–ca.15 BC) and in Claudio Claudiano (ca.370–ca.405). The Romans did not know the value of the Greek term “methodos”. Their equivalent, measurement, ratio, via, did not achieve the strength of the Greek term μέθοδος (metà-odòs). Not even the word τεχνος (techna), which leans toward artifice, cunning, trick. For many centuries it was thought that Descartes, with the rediscovery of this word, had inserted his words into the most meaningful Greek philosophical tradition. Which is why for some it is very significant that in Sánchez’s book, which had the Habsburg court behind it, the word “methodus” was used to define the ars lulliana. There are no reports that Descartes had heard of this book, and he may never even have held a text by Llull in his hands. We do know, from his correspondence, that he requested information from Issaac Beeckman (1588–1637) about Llull and his system, always suspecting that he was a charlatan or that it was a method for charlatans. Actually, even in his works of maturity, in the very concept of mathesis universalis, in the articulation of his method contained in the Discourse, in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Descartes always had to deal with this embarrassing “stone guest” that filled the stage with his absence. Through pilgrimages in the European courts, Bruno, a few years before the Cartesian adventure, had even reached the court of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague, who, upon hearing about Lullian techniques, showed great interest in Bruno and gave him a pension. But the reason for so much interest may have been that when he was ten-years old, Rudolf II had gone to study with his uncle Felipe II at the Escorial and there it would have been impossible for him to have not breathed in the Lullism that filled the imagination of his uncle and his uncle’s architects. He remained at the Escorial for some ten years. To debunk the claim that Descartes knew nothing, directly or indirectly, about the presence of Llull in the culture of his time, are not only the repeated editions of Zetzner that have been mentioned previously,

R.Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam-Tannery, vol.VI, p.17 : “a parler sans iugement, de celles (choses) qu’on ignore, qu’a les apprendre”. Ivi, vol.I, pp.270-271. Speaking of the condemnation of Galileo’s system, specifying that if this system “est faux, tous les fondemens de ma Philosophie le sont aussi, car il se demonstre par eux evidemmen”. Letter from Descartes to Mersenne, end of November 1633.

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attempts to organize knowledge often led to paralysis of the labyrinth or a Babelic collapse. In his latest work, a book on the history of philosophy in which he tells the story of Ramon Llull, the phantasticus creator of the ars combinatorial, has courageously brought Llull to young Italian high school students. But the Mallorcan, who perhaps dreamed of converting Muslims and Jews to Christianity with the power of reasoning that had to mechanically lead to a solution, was, at the end of his life, ironically the opposite. He studied Arabic to speak to Muslims, he studied the texts of learned Muslims, he tasted the magic of Sufi mysticism, and in the end, he was called the “christianus arabicus”. The Llull “fantasista”, the dreamer, who for centuries was not understood and derided as the inventor of a computationalism that was to reduce man to a machine, perhaps echoes the imagination of Federico Faggin, the inventor of the first microprocessor. But―says Faggin―every machine that can help man in the course of his life has to “stay in its place.”19 It should not invade our lives. It will never become our awareness. Within the increasingly uncontrollable memories we could put more and more things: our memories, our fantasies, everything we have done and thought in our lives. That which perhaps we in the flesh have forgotten today is more and more opaque and it is there, within that memory, in a memory stick, in a USB. But we are the ones who carry the memory stick in our pocket. Maybe the book that is “the best in the world”, that Llull dreamed about, has not yet been written. Maybe there is still another question that has not yet been answered.

but also the fact that in Paris, in the years in which Descartes wrote the Discourse, the two most significant works by Llull on the ars combinatoria were published.

Conclusion The weight of authority of Descartes has left a negative mark on the figure of Llull. A few years before the Discourse even Francis Bacon (1561–1626) spoke negatively against Llull17 but with the same arguments that his Novum Organum rejected mathematics. His prejudice against “mathematical calculation”, wrongly considered evocative of Aristotelian metaphysics, makes for a strange father of the modern scientific method. And even in the defense of inductive empiricism Francis was behind his namesake Roger Bacon (1214–1294) who, almost three centuries before him, together with the calculators from Oxford, had anticipated the scientific and formal approach in the construction of knowledge. An important trace of Llull’s computationalism can be found in one of the greatest philosophers of the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Even for him―as for Leibniz―the dispute, the verbal controversy, should be able to be reduced to the famous calculemus. Even language should have a correspondence of name/noun-thing for which even reasoning becomes an adding or subtracting of terms that are somewhat homogenous.18 Umberto Eco and Federico Faggin, who appear in Villalba’s tabula gratulatoria at the beginning of the book, measure the vastness of the Lullian visionary horizon. Eco has a passionate eye on a resourceful Middle Ages, in which the first

Competing interest. None declared.

F. Bacon, De dignitate et aumenti scientiarum, 1623. Latin translation of an earlier draft in English: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human, 1605. Speaking of Llull he says that his method is a method of deception because it gives man the illusion of knowing even that which he does not know. It was the same concern that Bacon had about mathematics: it gives you security even in the biggest calculations that had never been known before. In this view even Galileo was strongly suspected: to mathematically see the stars before one can see them physically. 18 Cf. Joseph M.Bochenski, La logica formale. La logica matematica, Torino, Einaudi 1982, Of Llull he says that he is the first who can claim the idea of a mechanical process that is quite general. And those who follow up on this dream of a universal science of all the sciences are Pascal, Hobbes, Leibniz up to Boole, Peirce and the logicians. 19 Federico Faggin, interview by G.A.Stella, Corriere della sera, October 9th 2014, p.39.

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REVIEWS Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

CONTRIB SCI 12(1):63-70 (2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.245

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2016: YEAR RAMON LLULL

Ramon Llull, a bridge among Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures Fernando Domínguez Reboiras Raimundus-Lullus-Institut Freiburg, Germany

Correspondence: Fernando Domínguez Reboiras reboiras@gmx.net fernando.dominguez@theol.uni-freiburg.de

Summary. Disputes among Muslims, Jews and Christians were very frequent during the Middle Ages. Each religion wanted to predominate in the world and was self-proclaimed as the owner of the truth. Is in this difficult environment that the figure of Ramon Llull emerges as the first one trying to solve those conflicts without the use of the force, but by means of the reason. Of course, the mission was very difficult due to the historical radicalization of the three main religions, those religions called “the religions of the book” because their faith is based on the truth revealed by God and written in the holy book (Bible, Koran or Torah). Llull was convinced clearly explaining and demonstrating the reason below faith, people of the three religions could reach a mutual understanding and acceptance. [Contrib Sci 12(1):63-70 (2016)]

Introduction To understand the thought of Ramon Llull and the current set of his ideas regarding a possible inter-religious dialogue we have to consider some simple data of phenomenology of religion as valid today as in the times of Llull. The three “religions of the book” as Muhammad called Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have in common the unprecedented claim of its origin. The faith of these three religions is based on divine revelation, in a common initial fact of their religious ideology: God communicated with man. In the religious consciousness of hundreds of millions of believers God spoke, once and

forever, for various reasons and procedures. The result of this process is the zeal of the community of believers to save the sacred texts. The security of owning “the truth” is based not only on “truths” contained in these texts, but above all, on the authority of the speaker. God spoke, God gave his word, God himself said which and how “the truth” was. It is “the truth” because he said so (fides qua creditur, say the Scholastics) and in what he left “divinely” writing can be read “truths” of that faith (fides quae creditur). The practical consequences of that faith, the subsequent behavior of those dogmas or truths constitutes the only “true” law (lex vera). The greatness and the cause of the great power of conviction of these religions is this first and original be-

Keywords: Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) · Christianity · Islamism · Judaism · religious books ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Ramon Llull and the three religions

Fig. 1. Tohra, Bible and Koran, the "three books".

lief: God and not man is the source of all truth. The truth is a gift of God, not an intellectual conquest of the human beings (Fig. 1). To a secular observer in religious matters the weak point of the secure possession of truth is not the initial revelation, but the absolute security of owning the original text revealed by God himself. What criteria are given to assume that the text we read today reproduces exactly the divine words? We know that critics of the text can be both from a safe lawyer as from a hard and unappealable judge. The certainty provided by faith does not require evidence or rational demonstration of what God has said and, therefore, carries itself a great danger. We know from experience that consciousness of the distant divine origin can be solidified in a strange and literally inhuman body. Revelation tends to appear as a stone block fallen from the sky on the roof of mankind. The believer must accept it as it is written because God said so. The truth becomes immutable writing fixed forever without regard to the interests and needs of human beings in their particular circumstances, immune to the vicissitudes of history. The original divine manifestation, call it Bible or Koran, by the grace of their faithful guardians, becomes a faithful depositum (in this way it was the Bible defined in scholastic terminology) a “tank”, a pool of standing water that is transmitted intact from generation to generation. Inevitable consequence of this is fundamentalism or religious positivism, that is, the words of the holy book read like a divine dictation is taken literally, it does not matter if talks of biology, astronomy, and although in the name of God wars and murders are committed. Closely linked to this precarious vision is dogmatism, i.e.,

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the truths of the book become dogmas in unappealable truth endowed with absolute literal immutability, although their language, their symbols and concepts are incomprehensible because they have been far away from the time and space where they were made. To break these fixations has always been the task of enlightened religious consciousness that, according to the requirements of each generation interprets the text. The fundamental function of theology is to interpret how strange and contradictory is the original message translated the archaic concepts, myths and symbols to the current language in its poetic, sublime and profound religious dimension. The relationship between truth or truths revealed and enunciation in the varying circumstances of time and space is the foundation of all “reasonable” religious discourse and is, without doubt, the origin of all the grandeur and all the misery of religion in the history of thought. This theological task has always been subtle and complex as it affects the deepest and most delicate of faith. All that can be said of religion is reduced, for better or worse, to that intricate dilemma: the oral update dogmatic and ethical content of a belief transmitted by an ancient scripture with claims of sustainability. It is not that revealed religion loses its immutability and is subject to the variables of time and space. The reading of the holy book is done individually or collectively in a particular circumstance reflects inevitably the reality of a text written in the limited ways of subjectivity, of a society, and of a time and a certain culture where every book and every sentence have the specific date. “Say (religiously) the true” involves adapting

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Christian Ramon Llull (1232−1316) had lived since his childhood between Jews and Muslims and knew the priority of the written content for understanding the language of the divine writ. For orthodoxy in Islam divine revelation in the Arabic language exists from eternity, i.e., the Koran. Despite being the last of the three books, was not a temporary creation or the result of a particular act of literary inspiration. In Islam, the role of the prophet is secondary, it is the word communicated by God the center and reason of life of the believer. One can speak of boundless adoration of the Koran and all its letters, the book itself is the only divine manifestation and has a primary and fundamental role. The most significant difference with Christian revelation is, however, that the Koran is just God's word in Arabic. In Islam, its translation into another language is not prohibited, but is no longer the Koran, but an interpretation of it. In Judaism there is a similarity in the treatment of the sacred text. In the Hebrew tradition the foundation and starting point of rabbinical science was always the reading and interpretation of the Torah. It is noteworthy that contact with Islam led to a significant rise of Hebrew science and it was in Cordoba where Judaism developed a grammatical and philological science which left decisively to the further understanding of the Torah. Llull understood well the greater complexity (and inherent difficulty) of the relationship among word of God and his writing in Christianity. The fundamental and decisive character in relation to the word of God in Christianity is its extratextuality, i.e., the overcoming of the book through the “incarnation” (humanization in the flesh) of that word. Christianity confesses, “the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. That Word (the word) is not only true, but “truth and life” (John 14:6). The word of God is alive, is not only written, affordable and understandable philologically, but personal

that word of God, set in illo tempore in a book, to reasonable and variables laws of language. Religion is inevitably exposed to all the risks of interpretation and cheerful “connivance” with philology. This simple postulate of the “religions of the book” is not a matter that we have discovered in our hermeneutics age and it cannot be considered as the result of enlightened reason. This perspective accompanies and dominates the history of religions.

The search for a universal language beyond the particular discourse of every religion: The "Illuminated Doctor" Ramon Llull writes, with God's help, a new book From the point of view of the phenomenology of religion it is enormously significant that the three religions born in the Middle East have chosen writing as a key element of its origin, constitution and means of communication across generations. To preserve the truth in a book carries, as well as Plato said (in his dialogue Phaedrus), the multiplicity of readings and possible interpretations. It is natural that faced with such a dilemma, religions have wanted to determine who must be the qualified and competent interpreters among the endless reading of a text. The relationship between the content of scripture and written manifestation is in Judaism and in the Islam clear and crisp: the word and writing is a unique language considered that in which God spoke and the writing he set until his last sign. In the Koran and the Torah, the Hebrew and Arabic languages are manifested in a harmonious fusion: the study of this language and that writing is a divine office and those exercising that office are the true interpreters and authorized transmitters of that message (Fig 2).

Fig. 2. The symbols of the three "religions of the book".

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communication. No wonder, then, that the final formation of a canon of sacred scriptures in Christianity has had a long history accompanied by the difficult acceptance of the Hebrew Torah. In Christianity the word of God written in Hebrew is his “Old Testament” that was translated into Greek. The new canon, the “New Testament” although was drafted partly in Aramaic, was also fixed in Greek. Very soon, however, for Western Christendom was necessary to translate their divine writtings to the language of the Roman Empire. For fifteen centuries and for almost twenty in Catholic confession, the word of God was communicated in Latin, the sacral-liturgical language that was not the original and that the people neither spoke nor understood. From the 16th century, the Reformed churches were translating the Christian Bible into all languages, while the Catholic Church prevented direct access to the original divine message. But all these translations are made without the limitations of Islam who judges all translation as betrayal to the word of God and as such insufficient. In Christianity the unique and important element of the communication of the texts is the translation. While in Judaism and Islam "to tell the truth" is taken literally repeating in the liturgy the same words with which God revealed His truth, the Christians first translate them into another language giving more importance to its meaning than to the oral reproduction. This process of translation (and interpretation) was accompanied by decisive controversies for configuring the Christian religion as a whole. It is known that the reading of God's revelation through translations has enormous implications for understanding the message. Christianity tends to formulate truths in propositions or in dogmas, that is, it tends to "tell the truth" with other words and concepts although these have their foundation in the original word. In the other two religions it is clear that God is the author of the book and that the hagiographer is a mere instrument. Christianity, however, sees the Bible, especially as a locus theologicus, a place where to find their dogmas, the principles of theological argument and the fundamental truths of faith. Religious controversies in our time, as in the time of Llull, focus on the recognition or not of “the truth” contained in religious texts. Llull clearly knew the religious phenomenon and when intends to write a better book than all other religious books is opening a gap in the rigid intellectual structure around him. He wanted to break a dialogue of the deaf avoiding the religious language of each religion. He thinks that can break the rules and try to that believers discuss the contents deduced from the revealed texts and not www.cat-science.cat

just its literal formulas. His book, a new one, must be the norm of contact and dialogue between different religions. Above all has to insist on the importance of the two distinctive dogmas of Christianity from other religions, the “incarnation” of the word of God, the second person of a “trinity”. Ramon Llull will make all efforts to demonstrate the rational necessity of these specific dogmas of the Christian religion. All his work had no other purpose. Llull reflected deeply on the Christian communicative way and clearly saw a profound difference to the two religions that spread religious influence in the Mediterranean. Muslim message was communicated in one language without translation into any other. This was precisely the crucial point for the new Lullian rhetoric. In an effort to build consensus among all religions Llull would envy the unifying role of the Koran in the Arabic world. The Bible praying by Christians was not written in the same language and the same characters as had come out of the mouth of God. Christians could not compete with Arabics and Jews in regard to the unity of revelation and oral expression. The deep knowledge of the revealed message to their innermost linguistic problems was much higher among Arabs than among Jews and Christians. They converted philology in a divine service. Llull rejected the sacred books as the only source of truth and was aware of the superiority of the sacred writings of Arabs and Jews, at least in its literary quality compared to those of Christianity, whose content had been translated with no linguistic expression fixed and immutable. The higher consideration of these writings did not imply for Llull a judgment about the value of their religious content. The superiority of Christianity over other religions is founded on the content and not the in the way formulated, in the sense of their dogmas and not on the beauty and consistency of the revealed message. Lullian idea of unity among religions was no competition between the sacred books, but the substitution of the particular religious language by one common, and to overcome the language barrier with translatable and understandable basic concepts in all languages and for all three forms in which the only God reveals. The program of Llull for the conversion of infidels serves both for Christians and non Christians, because all that reject the dictates of reason, which is above every religion, are infidels. It is not strange that Llull finished rejecting a literature espoused with beauty. He put the open book of nature above the books written. The liber naturae and his interpreter, the reason, are the norm and not the beautiful and philologically impeccable holy books. The growing 66

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development of literary Lullian expression towards almost algebraic language forms, express his conviction of ephemeral nature of literary forms against the pure and rational message that anyone can verify reading eighty percent of his writings.

Advocate of the “infidels” Llull, unlike his coreligionists, was aware of a very contemporary fact, that most Christians do not know the Christian truth and can not order life according to that truth. They have some beliefs, but not the whole truth. If the Christian God is the true God almighty, He can not consent that most of humanity live in error. God revealed His truth through Christ, and Christians are obliged to keep that truth worldwide. Llull is convinced that, if the majority of people live in error is because Christians do not put the means and strive to fulfill the gospel commandment of Jesus “Go into all the world and preach the gospel ... “ (Matt. 28:19). This is the starting point of all Lullian work, that is, to do that commandment (Fig 3.). The Christian Church (like other religions) judged misunderstanding and rejection as recalcitrant stupidity or wickedness of the “infidels”. It was not easy to the theologian to explain why the infidel would condemn himself without having heard of Christ. Llull became “lawyer of the infidels” defending the rationality of their rejection. The Christian hierarchy wanted that the infidel would change his faith by another without providing any rational basis. Although the Church obstinately demanded that the infidels had to accept the proposed principles, becaused that is how it is written in the book, the infidel had the full right to reject them. Llull demands of the Church and of himself an effort of aproximation through rational postulates. He thinks that all communication strategy of Christianity has to adapt the language of the recipient, that is, convert the message revealed to the linguistic repertoire of the “infidels” and not, as was done, to preserve power structures. It has to meet the material needs of fellow believers. Llull does not want to act with the cultural or ethic superiority of the missionary. Christian religious content must be considered an information vehicle translatable to the knowledge of the recipient. For the Church, the preaching of the Gospel is a mandate received from its founder and is understood as a duty and a right. To the medieval mind this second aspect could justify recourse to arms. Promotion and training of missionaries compete church officials. Llull proposes a new model of mission, based on dialogue and discussion, following his method www.cat-science.cat

Fig. 3. Ramon Llull "preaching the Gospel".

the Art. The proposed model takes into account the personal life of the missionary and his understanding of faith. Presupposes not only the intellectual preparation but contemplation (reflection and not only liturgical repetition of formulas) and when possible considers the dialogue as dispute, when necessary, and with the help of the force of arms if inevitable. The Christian theologians demanded to the “infidels” submission to the truths and not understanding them. For centuries the Christian homiletics devoted themselves to remind the Christian, in weekly sessions liturgical, the theological terms in a submissive acceptance. The Christians that did not meet their obligations stated by the clerical establishment are excluded from the Christian religious process and thus also from the civil society. Llull autodidact and sure of his theological philosophical knowledge is not willing to accept the comfortable attitude of the clerical and political establishment that consider natural enslaving the “infidels” and that they abandon all their cultural background. Llull did not agree to reduce the transmission of the Christian message to rhetorical figures and concepts to sustain a poor argument in favor of traditional institutions. He, like the new secular bourgeoisie, requires a deeper understanding and a higher level of rhetoric and theological competence of the Christian message to avoid appearing ridiculous to non Christian intellectuals. Ramon Llull preserved until the end of his life the utopian belief that, by following his method, all believers, regardless of individual religious languages, could achieve harmony among world religions. Llull had direct knowledge of Christian missionary activity 67

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Ramon Llull and the three religions

because since childhood he could see the way in which Arabic substrate established until the conquest of the island of Mallorca when it was Christianized. And he understood the need to preserve fundamental aspects of that culture that, being enslaved and subdued, was disappearing. The Christian invading army and the subsequent colonization imposed its culture while it destroyed the the Muslim one. Llull does not consider the infidel, the non-Christian, an abstract figure within their philosophical and theological arguments, but something concrete active and equal in the act of believing. “The infidels are men, like us.” That is, they are not non-believers, they believe―like the Christians―but in a different object of faith. The act of believing is the same but faith as an act of believing is common to both believers and unbelievers. This is a critical starting point in the Lullian vision of the infidel. Llull respect the Muslim faith to realize that the so-called non-believer (infidel) believe more deeply and intensely than the Christian. The Muslim follows and fulfills the obligations of their religion with more rigidity and therefore than Christian. This will be an important reality in the implementation of the Lullian dispute to the conversion of infidel. A Muslim must be taught not to believe, but to direct his faith to, what is for Llull the true faith, the Christian. Llull would continually put himself questions that any Christian thinker had been raised earlier: how is it possible that the infidel, no Christian, believes more intensely than the Christian believer?; how is it possible that true faith does not move so wills effectiveness as beliefs considered false?; how is it possible that those who are not in truth believe deeper than those that have the truth? These issues, which have not lost its topicality, are considered by Llull under a radical perspective. Since the Muslim overcomes the Christian in the strength of his faith, his conversion must not be to make him a weakly believing Christian. The conversion of the infidels should not change their character or their will, but the content of their faith. Muslim culture, besides deeper convictions, also follows a better physically and morally healthy life. Muslim believers, which for religious reasons do not drink alcohol or eat salted meat, preserved until their old age―according to Llull―a clearer understanding than Christians (Felix, chap. 50). Llull ends up sympathizing with the oppressed Muslim population and openly declared himself “advocate of the infidels” (procurator infidelium), not in an anachronistic-revolutionary social sense but as a defender of the Christian obligations trying they did not forget them. This compassion with the infidel decisively determined his vision of the temporal power and of the function of the spiritual strength. www.cat-science.cat

The criterion of religious truth The observation of the surrounding reality makes him to establish a clear principle, i.e., that Christians, Jews and Muslims have something in common: they all believe. If most people believe something false, then faith is not a criterion of truth. Only believiving, no one comes to the truth. For Llull the sole criterion of truth is the reason. Besides to believe it must reasonably demonstrate that what is believed is true. Llull demands to the Christians to understand and demonstrate the truths of their faith, especially the differential dogmas that separate them from Jews and Muslims: the Trinity and the Incarnation. But Llull also requires this rational demonstration of the faith from Jews and Muslims. All they must be willing to talk. This is extremely important for Llull, who believes possible to achieve all believers that love true are willing to discuss and submit their beliefs to the judgement of reason. Llull is convinced that through a healthy and rational religious dialogue, truth will be necessarily imposed. The nine years of study after his conversion is the Lullian effort to reach an understanding of their faith. In the Book on the Contemplation in God (Llibre de contemplació en Déu) he shows the way forward to reach a rational understanding of their beliefs, it constitutes his spiritual exercises, his litmus test. This contemplative experience of rational understanding of their faith is what Llull wants to make available to Christians and non-Christians. He talks about his method in terms of “enlightenment”. That is why he is known since the Middle Ages as “Doctor Illuminatus”. This reference to a divine gift allows him to avoid, during his long life and his immense work, any reference or reverence to the sacred books (auctoritates). Thus all that is deduced or induced by means of reason can be attributed to intellectual rigor. Llull is convinced that authorities are not necessary to legitimize his knowledge or to demonstrate the viability of his project. And where everyone mentions the words of Isaiah (7:1), “Unless you believe, you will not understand”, Llull says “if you do not understand, you can not believe”. His Ars generalis tried to be a new universal science, a new easy method to learn and communicate. This claim against specialization too narrow and elitist explains the background of his ideas. Llull wanted theological science (in the Middle Ages science par excellence) come out of the traditional intellectual circles and came to wider social sectors, including non-Christians. This would be the way to allow the natural union of religions avoiding what was a remora and brake, i.e., clerical technicality and specialization (priests, rabbis or muftis), linked to the letter of the holy book. There 68

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were necessary new literary techniques instead the rigid theological and philosophical literature. Llull wanted a method to make understandable and plausible Christian faith to all fairly skilled people (Fig. 4). All speculation requires putting into literary practice what has been learned. It is not possible to separated absolutely faith and reason, intellectuality and religiousity, the ontological and the ethical. Llull strongly believed to have found a method for communicating the truths of their religion in an understandable language directed at the mind, regardless of the sacred books that, in principle, are an obstacle to rational argument. He did not reject those books but is clear for him that God is not manifested through the Holy Scriptures to hinder our knowledge, but to facilitate it. Starting from the secure possession of revealed truth, Llull believed to possess the method to prove it. The truth as revealed, and not its scientific demonstration, is a hindrance for other believers, the reason is no obstacle to faith but its natural complement. The Lullian Art is conceived by Llull as a substitute of the whole medieval system of university education in theological and philosophical matter or, at least, a new orientation of it. This would sound as a presumption and unacceptable arrogance in a man that would no be Ramon Llullâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Enlightened Doctorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;who considered his Art as revealed by God as the Scripture itself. His failure in contemporary intellectual circles and the subsequent formal education is the best explanation of his claim that would necessarily be opposed by

established science. On the other hand, it also explains the attraction and fascination of this phantasticus man, especially in certain reformer sectors influenced by the spiritual Franciscans who disparaged the pride of university science and, later, in the Renaissance, when criticism to scholastic science became more acute. No wonder either that Llull in Paris saw the key obstacle to the spread of his new conversion program and that was there where developed a more constant and intense theoretical activity . The fundamental characteristic of the Lullian work is its radical break with institutionalized forms of communication. Llull requires congruence between the religious message and the rational system of knowledge. Merely religious acceptance is inadmissible to him. He did not accept a dissonance between the religious message and the recipient rational criteria. A connoisseur (even that not expert) of the Middle Ages and of the scientific principles of a society founded on the three religions of the book knew the effect it would have a science which postulated dispense the sacred books and study the structure of nature to reach the knowledge of the truth hidden and only open (disclosed) in the holy book. Neither Jew nor Christian, nor Muslim could accept any knowledge and any understanding that formally avoid the divine revelation. We will not insist on this crucial tenet of Lull's thought, however we need to take into account as it determines the marginal nature of Llull philosophy and is, basically, the rai-

Fig. 4. Ars lulliana.

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Ramon Llull and the three religions

different origin would fight to join in a common future program without sacrificing their reason and give up their freedom. With his method, Llull also not intended to provide a definitive solution to all the problems affecting the social and religious plurality of his time, but the dynamics of his thinking tends clearly to unite, to iron out all the differences that separated the persons of his time. Llull was convinced that it was possible and necessary to prove by natural reason that God is the highest expression of love in which everything happens and through whom everything happens. He only admitted the difference between the divine reality that acts and the union that naturally follows between that action and passion. The God of Lullian theological philosophy was, it had to be a “trinitarian”. But the exposure of this Christian dogma in the context of his philosophy could not express all that the Christian New Testament and ancient interpreters said about the mystery of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Llull understood, however, that philosophy and theology could agree in love, so he also meant that the need for the incarnation of the Son of God by which the union with the world was made created by him could be understood in some way by natural reason. Anyone can not align Llull among the thinkers who aim to separate. Life was not limited to the world of plants, animals or human compound; in the matter he finds and highlights the active force of the elements and their combinations to show that nothing, not even the stones are inactive. And above cosmic reality he distinguished various forms of spiritual activity: one united to the impressions of the senses and the imagination and another liberated from those bonds; one that accepted believing the manifestation of God through His word and another identified with the word understanding it. But, for Llull, those double realities were not mutually exclusive. He thought that being and thinking, matter and spirit, sensual and intellectual reality, the finite and eternal reality ware in opposition but united in the same understandable reality by faith and reason.

Fig. 5. Portrait of Jakob Brucker (1696−1770).

son d'être of all refusals and enthusiasm generated by his thinking the last seven hundred years. That's why Jakob Brucker (1696−1770), the first historian of philosophy could write “primus philosophiae reformator Raymundus Lullius”. Finally, if the main problem Llull wants to solve with his philosophy was the irreducible plurality of religious beliefs, his Art seeks diaphan, understable and universal reasons so that everyone can reach the truth over religious beliefs, confessions and schools. His science was a practical and affordable science to all willing to learn, without authorities or interpretive determinants. In his time, as in ours, ideologies, worldviews, philosophies and theologies faced and acted with the sole purpose of submitting, enslave or annihilate the enemy. While these opposing views did seek only the defeat of the other and not struggling to find their common roots and solve their common problems, peace between peoples and religions could not reach. But the more we penetrate in his work, the better we understand that what he wanted was to get men of www.cat-science.cat

Acknowledgements. The author wants to acknowledge the support of Carmen Chica and Rubén Duro in the translation and edition of the original manuscript. Competing interest. None declared.

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PERSPECTIVES Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Catalonia

OPENAACCESS

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CONTRIB SCI 12(1):71-78(2016) doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.246

Gaudí and some observations on the Modernist Garden at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital David Agulló-Galilea Vallès Superior Technical School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Catalonia

Correspondence: David Agulló-Galilea david.agullo.galilea@gmail.com

Summary. Nineteenth-century Europe was characterised by a clear drive towards secularism, which provoked a religious reaction that reached its apex in the final decades of the century and was represented by artists such as Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) or institutions such as the Güell Colony or the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital. To understand this process of religious affirmation, it is also crucial to remember some significant movements, such as the new cult of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital Modernist garden contains architectural elements with some formal characteristics and symbolic content analogous or equivalent to different parts of the most important works Gaudí was constructing during the same period or immediately after completing the work of the Mental Hospital. [Contrib Sci 12(1):71-78 (2016)]

A construction beyond time and history As we head west out of Barcelona towards the basin of the Llobregat River, amidst the immense agricultural landscape and the turbulent urban and industrial agglomeration we can find a Marian-inspired Modernist garden tucked away in the walled grounds of the former Mental Hospital in the town of Sant Boi de Llobregat. Built between 1905 and 1912, it has remained hidden over the passage of time and history. As has been explained in various published articles [1,2,3, 4,6], this Modernist site contains architectural elements with some formal characteristics and symbolic content analogous or

equivalent to different parts of some of the most important works Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) was constructing during the same period or immediately after completing this work. To mention but a few, we find fragmented examples of an antecedent of the ceilings in the naves of the Sagrada Familia Temple (1915– 1921), the compositional structure of the floor plan at the Güell Colony crypt (1908–1915), formal aspects of the Casa Milà (1906–1912), and the cross-section and trencadissos (mosaics of broken tiles and glass) of the serpentine bench in Park Güell (1910–1914). The Modernist constructions at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital were erected in one of the centre’s ex-

Keywords: Modernism · Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital · Our Lady of Lourdes · Book of Revelation · grotto · Gaudí, Antoni (1852–1926) · Güell Colony ISSN (print): 1575-6343 e-ISSN: 2013-410X

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Modernist garden

pansion phases with the aim of landscaping the gardens in the enclosure. The work formed part of a pedagogical series of occupational workshops in which patients learned the bricklaying trade. The Revista Frenopática Española—a scientific magazine produced at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital first published in 1903—and Información y Noticias, Hermanos San Juan de Dios—a publication by the religious brotherhood— contain information on the urban planning and architectural interventions carried out at the psychiatric centre. This documentation tells us that the first work in the institutional gardens took place between 1903 and 1904. The architectural ensemble of the Cascade Cave (Cascada Cova), a rocky construction in the shape of a cave with a slope crowned by a canopy, was built between the spring and winter of 1906 [11] before subsequent interventions in the garden in 1907 saw the addition of benches, waterfalls, bridges, etc. [12]. In 1910 a large reservoir with a central floating replica of Montserrat was built among the existing allotments [13] and between 1910 and 1912 the Flooded Chapel (Capella Inundada) was constructed, a grotto consecrated to

Our Lady of Lourdes in which mass was held twice a year from 1918 onwards [15]. Finally, in 1912 two plazas were landscaped and bordered by benches covered in trencadis. The archives of the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital (which is now the Sant Joan de Déu Healthcare Park) include dated glass-plated photographs which have been fundamental in accurately determining the years during which the different parts of this exceptional Modernist architectural ensemble were constructed (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).

The Güell Colony and the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital: Two closely linked institutions Now we shall turn our attention to the numerous and surprising connections and parallelisms which exist between the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital and the industrial “colony” of the Güells at Santa Coloma de Cervelló. The

Fig. 1. Contemporary postcard showing children next to the Cascade Cave.

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Agulló-Galilea

Fig. 2. Cross-section of the architectural ensemble of the caves in the gardens of the former Sant Boi Mental Hospital. Drawing: Esteve Agulló-Galilea, David Agulló-Galilea and Felipe Buill.

latter is where Gaudí built what is considered to be his masterpiece, a church built between 1908 and 1915 that remained unfinished. Commissioned in 1898, the complex experimental work was undertaken in the colony’s workshops and exhaustive analysis was done using photographs and structural calculations, resulting in the construction of a large funicular model. During those years Gaudí would have established connections in Sant Boi de Llobregat as various artisan workshops in the town participated in the construction of the church at the Güell Colony. We know this due to the conservation of bills from these workshops signed by Gaudí and bills for the architect’s journeys there by pony and trap. These bills are conserved in the Güell Colony rectory archives and include the José Molins mat makers, the Ramon Bruguerolas ironmongers and the José Elías café restaurant, all of which were located in Sant Boi de Llobregat. It is also worth emphasising that the master builder for the first phase of the Park Güell construction was Lluís Parés, who, along with many of his bricklayers, was born and worked in Sant Boi. This fact was provided by the research we carried out under the guidance of historian Guillem Fernàndez Gonzàlez at the Municipal Historical Archives in Sant Boi de Llobregat [8]. It is also highly relevant that there is a large building that still exists today within the grounds of the former asylum in Sant Boi which, although we have found no documents accrediting its authorship, presents several similarities in its formal and structural characteristics to the buildings by Francesc Berenguer i Mestres (1866–1914), Gaudí’s right-hand man and among those who designed most of the constructions in the Güell Colony. This finding was confirmed and extended thanks to Manuel Medarde, archaeologist, industrial engineer and founder of The Gaudí Research Institute. During the years he dedicated to the Güell Colony project, Gaudí made the long www.cat-science.cat

journey from Barcelona to the industrial hub by railway, arriving at the station in the town of Cornellà before taking a pony and trap to the town of Sant Boi de Llobregat. Just before reaching the colony, he would have passed the grounds of the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital where, between 1903 and 1912, an ensemble of grottos and benches were being built, which anticipate subsequent works by Gaudí. As explained above, there is a geographical connection between the two institutions. Both are situated on extensive rural estates on the banks of the Llobregat River and lie within a few minutes walking distance of one another, thereby facilitating the establishment of a neighbourly relationship or interdependence. The first documentary evidence of this appeared during the research carried out by the team of Guillem Fernàndez Gonzàlez at the Municipal Historical Archives in Sant Boi de Llobregat, which shows that, owing to a cholera epidemic, hundreds of patients were transferred from the former Sant Boi de Llobregat sanatorium to the manor house on the Can Soler de la Torre estate, residence of the Güell family and the land on which the Güell Colony would be erected years later [9]. It must be noted that the Güell Colony and the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital were conceived and later developed within the same conflictive cultural, political and social context, thereby making it possible to establish similarities between both entities and facilitating a better understanding of the Modernist constructions at the former sanatorium in Sant Boi. Hence, the Güell Colony was initiated when Joan Güell i Farré (1800–1872)—who had amassed a large fortune in Cuba and promoted several industries upon his return to Barcelona—founded the El Vapor Vell factory in the Sants neighbourhood of Barcelona (1846), the sole producer of corduroy in Spain. As a result of the labour disputes 73

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Fig. 3. Plan of the former Sant Boi Mental Hospital. Architect: Miquelerena, 1911.

based on ideas originating in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century, providing a series of improvements to the surroundings and services with public spaces, a rationalisation of the urban planning and the implementation of systems with a high degree of organisational autonomy. In the case of the psychiatric centre, aside from the medical services we find a series of facilities linked to basic needs: a school, a library, a large agricultural colony and workshops for tailoring, carpentry, gardening, ironmongery, baking and printing. The most productive area was the bricklaying workshop, in which patients learned the trade in order to work on the different expansions carried out in the asylum grounds, resulting in the construction of pavilions, service buildings or annexes in the gardens. It is worth highlighting that there was even a brickyard, where the bricks used to build the various pavilions and additional edifices were made. As mentioned above, there was also structured urban planning at the Güell Colony and, while the presence of architects from Gaudí’s studio is documented from 1893, the earlier urban project for the colony is attributable to Francesc Berenguer i Mestres, co-worker and right-hand man of Gaudí himself. Here too a series of services were included—athenaeum, cooperative, café, schools, chemist’s, theatre, parish church, etc.— which meant the colony became a system with a high degree of autonomy comparable to the asylum in Sant Boi. Moreover, aside from the parish church, the Güell Colony had a series of religious orders and associations which ran the social activities in the community. These included the Carmelite Sisters of Saint Joseph, who lived in the colony itself and worked to heal the sick and teach both children and young female workers, the Venerable Third Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, and the Saint Louis Workers’ Board, where the cate-

in this textile factory, protests by the working classes spread to other large cities and represented a loss of control for the ruling classes. This, along with the difficulties of urban planning in Barcelona, drove industries to build outside the city, and in 1860 the business owner bought the Can Soler de la Torre estate in Santa Coloma de Cervelló and moved his corduroy industry there. Three decades after the initial industrial activity on this estate, on 20th May 1892, Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi (1846–1918), son of Joan Güell i Farré (1800–1872), officially began textile production in the Güell Colony. The origins of what was known as the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital can also be found in Barcelona, where Antoni Pujadas i Mayans (1812–1881), a doctor of medicine and surgery, managed the Healing House (Casa de Curació) on Canuda Street, a treatment centre for mental diseases. Owing to different conflicts between the patients and the local inhabitants as well as the possibilities for urban expansion which existed outside Barcelona, in 1854 the psychiatric centre moved to the town of Sant Boi de Llobregat, initially carrying out its work in the nucleus of a former Capuchin convent. It is therefore evident that both the Güell Colony and the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital mainly originated from a desire to establish and recreate an isolated social model which allowed them to avoid a series of social conflicts, principally labour disputes and those arising from social coexistence, which were present in society at the time. Definitively, they were structured around a model organisational system in which collective work and religious life became the basic tools around which the operation of both institutions revolved. In terms of the urban planning for both the industrial colony and the former asylum, hygienic criteria were applied www.cat-science.cat

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chism and Bible studies were taught. From the outset the former Sant Boi Mental Hospital, which was created around a framework based on hygienist theories, had its own parish church in which patients could participate in religious services (Fig. 3 and Fig.4). In 1895 the San Juan de Dios Hospital Order took over the Sant Boi Mental Hospital, leading not only to the implementation of new regulations in which Catholic thinking became more prevalent but also to the incorporation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Congregation of Hospital Sisters to take care of the female patients. This subsequently led to the separation of the sexes and was the starting point for the creation of two different institutions. Within this framework of a significant religious presence in the Güell Colony and the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital, we must mention two important events which allow us to link them both chronologically and ideologically. On 23 February 1905 a child labourer fell into one of the dye vats containing boiling water in the Güell Colony workshops, leaving him with severe burns on his legs. The boy, Josep Campderrós, also known as “el Pepet de la pell” (Pepet of the skin), was immediately transferred to the Sacred Heart Hospital in Barcelona where, thanks to a skin graft donated by fourteen of the colony’s workers and by Eusebi Güell’s own children, Claudio and Santiago, they were able to save his injured legs in an operation without anaesthetic [7].

His recovery was considered to be a genuine miracle and the story was published in almost every Barcelona newspaper; from that moment on the Güell Colony was idealised and viewed as a benchmark social organisation. In 1906, a year after the accident and just as the “miraculous” cure was appearing in the press and being widely talked about, construction work began on the Cascade Cave in the gardens of the former Sant Boi Mental Hospital, just a few metres from the Güell Colony. Full of formal references to the church in the colony and having the same experimental characteristics, the Cascade Cave formed part of a group of grottos designed for use by children and dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, the ultimate symbol for miracle cures. The recovery of the boy from the Güell Colony led to the implementation of a series of propagandistic actions, which culminated in Pope Pius X (1835–1914) granting the Pontifical Diploma and the Benemerenti Gold Medal to the donor labourers. Thus, in 1911, and in the presence of the Bishop of Barcelona, Mgr. Juan José Laguarda (1866–1913), the Diocesan Board of Catholic Action awarded these diplomas and medals in the colony itself. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the same year construction of the Flooded Chapel began at the former sanatorium in Sant Boi. Situated to form the symbolic and geometric centre of a set of grottos in the asylum grounds, the architectural feature consisted of a grotto with the functions of a chapel and was presided over by a sculp-

Fig. 4. Plan of the Güell Colony, drawn by Francesc Berenguer and published in 1910.

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bourgeois idealism, this movement eventually led to the beginning of the avant-garde towards the close of the century. All these momentous shifts brought about a definitive and complete secularisation of society accompanied by a gradual decline in the traditional ways of life. As a consequence of and in response to these changes, the Catholic Church, and particularly Pope Pius X, decided to refute them with an ideological discourse. It was expressed through the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), the promulgation of the encyclical Quanta Cura with its Syllabus errorum appendix (1864) and the convening of the Vatican Council I (1869 to 1870), which, among other aspects, condemned the new doctrines and decreed papal infallibility with the common aim of reasserting the meaning of true Christianity. During the same period there were many apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Europe, the first of which was in 1846 in La Salette, France, where the Virgin announced in an apocalyptic tone the punishments God would wreak on humanity and prophesied the imminent arrival of the antichrist. Once these apparitions were approved by Philibert de Brouillard (1765– 1860), Bishop of Grenoble, devotion to Our Lady of La Salette extended very rapidly across Catholic Europe, particularly in Barcelona. Not only were nearly a thousand sanctuaries soon built throughout the continent, but also Pope Leo XIII (1810– 1903) elevated the status of the temple at La Salette to a minor basilica. The most transcendent Marian apparitions, though, occurred in 1858 in a grotto in Lourdes, France, where, according to Bernadette Soubirous (1844–1879), the Virgin asked her to give penance and pray, to drink from a source which would spout clean water if she dug under a rock, and to erect a temple, predicting that pilgrims from all over the world would arrive. As a result of these apparitions, the image of Our Lady of Lourdes began to be venerated from 1864 onwards, with thousands of chapels throughout Europe building replicas of the grotto where the vision had appeared. Consequently, during the great Catholic resurgence in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, the grotto and the Virgin Mary became an iconic place of pilgrimage to rediscover a sacred place, which had to coexist with what was by then a completely secularised contemporary world [14]. As for Catalonia, the process of change towards modernity and contemporaneity definitively began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Already governed by a liberal political system and a fully capitalist economy, these decades were characterised by rapid economic and industrial growth, which culminated in two large projects: the 1888 Universal Exhibition and the Cerdà Plan, which marked Barcelona’s de-

ture of Our Lady of Lourdes. Meanwhile, in the same year further cases of cures considered to be miraculous appeared in the Güell Colony. Two sick workers, for instance, were healed after the colony’s chapel invoked the intervention of Pius X and the Holy Trinity. It is noteworthy that these “miraculous” events caused many members of the clergy to make a pilgrimage to the industrial colony; this even included a visit from Rome by Mgr. Francesco Ragonesi (1850– 1931), in representation of Pope Pius X. Therefore, in the Güell Colony and the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital we find two institutions which are closely connected both physically and ideologically, a fact which allows links to be made between the events and activities which took place at the two sites, as well as making it evident that the construction of the Modernist edifices at the sanatorium is not a casual or isolated occurrence. This entire set of connections and analogies can be illustrated with an event from 1910. Among the acts which took place in Barcelona to celebrate the “V Social Week in Spain”—congresses at which the Church debated the social question— the speakers made a visit to the Güell Colony. During this visit, Mgr. Laguarda, Bishop of Barcelona, asked Eusebi Güell if, given its exceptional and exemplary nature, he would erect “a very thick, very high wall (around the colony) so that the doctrines of socialism would never penetrate” it. Such a wall already existed around the grounds of the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital, making normal relations with the outside world surrounding it very difficult.

The great Catholic resurgence in late Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-Century Europe The construction of the garden dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital responds to and forms part of a dynamic which was present in the context of a period of significant political, economic and social change in Europe. Western culture underwent a complete transformation in the nineteenth century due to the radical advances in all areas of knowledge and as a result of all manner of revolutions. While the economy experienced two great industrial revolutions, in the political sphere the ideas from the Enlightenment of the previous century gave rise to bourgeois and proletariat uprisings. Philosophy produced the foundations for contemporary thinking: absolute idealism, dialectic materialism, nihilism, rationalism, etc. From the world of the arts came Romanticism: founded on www.cat-science.cat

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finitive transformation and urban expansion. This new reality also implied a progressive secularisation of Catalan society and in response to this phenomenon the Catholic Church, which viewed liberalism as the source and origin of all evils, delivered a discourse to remind Catalans of the Catholic influence in the nation’s history and promoted large numbers of pilgrimages and devotions with the aim of maintaining a collective consciousness in order to remind citizens that Catholicism had to be actively exercised and professed. At the same time many fundamentalist Catholic groups appeared, who responded with a discourse of confrontation against the significant and traumatic changes produced by modernity. It was in this context that the Spiritual Association of Devotees of Saint Joseph, founded in 1866 by Josep Maria Bocabella (1815–1892), began to design and build the Sagrada Familia Temple, conceiving it as an expiatory temple, a place financed by donations through which society could achieve social and spiritual redemption. The last decade of the nineteenth century was a period of tension in all areas of society, principally arising from the severe economic and social inequalities which existed due to various factors, including the collapse of numerous banks, the loss of colonial markets, the agricultural crisis caused by the hemipteran phylloxera (Dactylosphaera vitifoliae), the reassessment of economic protectionism and two significant terrorist attacks by anarchists (at the Liceu Theatre in 1893 and on Canvis Nous Street in 1896). All this social tension was also reflected in the ecclesial sphere, in this case as a conse-

quence of interpreting all the existing social, economic and moral problems as nothing more than a struggle between God and the devil. Pope Leo XIII himself supported this idea and in the 1890 encyclical Humanum genus he promoted the pious practices of reciting exorcisms in private and adding prayers of an exorcistic tone to the end of every mass. Consequently, it was a period in which liberalism, the labour movement, the popular classes and the Church experienced a conflict of interest on economic, social and moral issues. This subsequently triggered major events in the first decade of the twentieth century: the first general strike in Barcelona in 1902, which was met with an excessive repression by the government and employers; numerous attacks by anarchists, such as the one against President Antonio Maura (1853– 1925) in 1904 or the 1905 attack on Cardinal Casañas (1834– 1908); the political rise of the Republican Alejandro Lerroux (1864–1949), who was against Catalan autonomy, was anticlerical and promoted workers’ rights; and finally the incidents that unfolded during the Tragic Week in 1909 [10]. In the face of this series of changes, which inevitably led to a society governed by the parameters of rationalism and science, the French grotto also served as a reference for conservative Catalan Catholics to reconstruct their entire symbolic and religious world. Hence, the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes gradually spread across Catalonia and grottos dedicated to the Virgin were built in many gardens. One of the most representative works built during this period was the Our Lady of Lourdes Chapel in Pedralbes, constructed in Bar-

Fig. 5. Monks and Holy Mass at the Flooded Chapel of the former Sant Boi Mental Hospital.

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celona around 1890 by the architect Joan Martorell i Montells (1833–1906), who had restored the Pedralbes Monastery in 1897 and with whom Gaudí had collaborated. We must also refer to the Nativity façade of the Sagrada Familia Temple, particularly the Biblical scenes and the portrayal of the coronation of the Virgin Mary framed in a grotto. The entire sculptural work faces east, as do the Marian grotto and the Modernist architectural ensemble at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital. Also worth mentioning from this period is the façade of the Casa Milà, which has forms that evoke a set of grottos: these were to be crowned by a large sculpture of the Virgin but in the end it was not erected for fear of attacks by anarchist and anticlerical groups. The Modernist creations at the former Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital, built between 1906 and 1912 and dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, included a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, grottos, fountains, all types of plants, and images. The images were created in trencadis and located on the underside of the existing bridge, and were therefore only visible in the reflections on the water in the lake. All of the features created a sequence of Marian symbolism. The most significant symbolic element, however, is an east-facing chapel which formalises a grotto containing a statue of the Virgin Mary and from which emanates water that forms a lake, seemingly alluding to the spring where the apparition of the Virgin took place. This grotto, which has Our Lady of Lourdes wearing the twelve-starred crown from the Book of Revelation (unlike the original Lourdes statue), also features an abstract dragon with two expressive eyes which, by extending its tentacles and opening its mouth, spouts water from within. This allows us to establish the symbolic reference of this entire architectural ensemble to the passage of the woman and the dragon in Revelation, which tells the story of the Virgin Mary being pursued by a large dragon until it finally vomits water once defeated (Fig. 5). In conclusion, we can say that nineteenth-century Europe was characterised by a clear drive towards secularism, which provoked a religious reaction that reached its apex in the final decades of century and was represented by artists such as Gaudí or institutions such as the Güell Colony or the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital. To understand this process of religious affirmation, it is also crucial to remember some significant movements, such as the new cult of Our Lady of Lourdes. All of this took place within a transcendent and complex historical process. To mark the culmination of the 1854 proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in 1905—a year before work began on the Modernist ensemble at the Sant Boi de Llobregat Mental Hospital— www.cat-science.cat

Pope Pius X performed the symbolic act of inaugurating the Lourdes sanctuary in the Vatican gardens complete with grotto and temple to the Virgin Mary, further clear evidence of the importance of this symbol during this period of history. Acknowledgements. The author would like to thank Sarah Marshall for the translation of the original manuscript, Adriana Velásquez for the coordination of the translation, and Manel Guardia, architect and professor ETSAB (UPC), for their assistance during its elaboration.

Competing interests. None declared.

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The Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), academy of sciences and humanities, founded in 1907, is the top academic corporation of the territories of Catalan language and culture, and has been a full member of the International Academic Union since 1922. The IEC has 186 full or emeritus members from throughout the linguistic territory, and 72 corresponding members that represent our institution’s relations with the international scientific community, and has 28 filial societies of all fields of knowledge, with a total membership of around 10,000 across the whole territory. In addition, 111 local research centres also belong to it, and this shows how well grounded the research community is, throughout our cultural territory. The IEC is the central institution in the Catalan cultural world. It was set up in 1907 at the initiative of the Diputació de Barcelona to “establish here scientific study centres specialising and working not just in education, but in producing science and aiding research.” In the following years, the Institute set up its various science departments. The Philology Department, directed by Pompeu Fabra, played a key role in establishing the rules of the Catalan language.

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