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Philosophy and Culture
Reference:

Paradox of practical atheism in Raimund Lullus spiritual quests


Akimov Oleg Yur'evich

ORCID: 0000-0003-0941-7382

PhD in Philosophy

Leading Researcher of the Western Branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)

236016, Russia, Kaliningrad region, Kaliningrad, Artillery str., 62

aktula1@gmail.com
Other publications by this author
 

 

DOI:

10.7256/2454-0757.2023.12.69200

EDN:

RMJUVK

Received:

02-12-2023


Published:

17-12-2023


Abstract: The intuitions of Raimundus Lullus religious metaphysics are in this article explicated according to the opportunities of the convergence between the medieval and the new time philosophy. Such approach to the creativity of the thinker is possible, because his conception is one sides associated with the mystical symbolic theologism, that is typical for the medieval tradition, over sides develops Lullus the new understanding of the infinity of the world, inherent in the newtime philosophy. This opposition conditions some of the features of Lullus spiritual quest. This quest connected the respect to the past, that causes the homesickness to the lost ideals, together with the progressivity – the presentation of the future. This presentiment is by Lullus expressed as the desire to change the external world. The aim of this change is the approximation of the rational theological base – the model for the real life. Lullus experiences the combination and the unrealized synthesis of this intentions as the tragedy. The acute and intensive conflict of this intentions triggers the practical atheism, when the stimulation of the external distraction of the evil leads causes the appearance and the activation of the new evil. This disaster of life is determined with some aspects of Lullus metaphysics, in that the infinity of God is realized as the infinity of the world. The infinity of the world is by Lullus given as the rational hierarchical order, leading to the creator of the world. The tragedy of life is for Lullus the marker, that emphasizes the crisis of the medieval philosophy, that was based on the revelation. This crisis discovers the land of new philosophy. This philosophy stresses the autonomy of the human personality.


Keywords:

God, World, Utopia, Life, Tragedy, Personality, Autonomy, Paradox, Tradition, Culture

This article is automatically translated.

 

    The work of Raymond Lullius (c. 1235-1315), an outstanding thinker, poet and god-seeker of the Middle Ages, is an interesting phenomenon. The "basis" of this interest, according to Anthony Bonner, is the complexity and originality of the thinker's work, "built" around the main work of Lulli's "Great Science" and at the same time unsuitable for a specific rational category[1, p. 46]. It is no coincidence that U. Ecco emphasized that Lulli's rationalism was largely "external", since Lulli's logic was the logic of direct perception of things, and not concepts in things[2, p. 73], believing that Lulli's work was an anticipation of the universalist utopia of Renaissance culture[2, p.62]. F. Copleston also noted universalist tendencies the works of Lullius, such as the desire to unite nations under the rule of the Roman throne [3, p.246].       Due to the special nature of Lullius's work, on the one hand, it is a typical form of medieval philosophy, characterized by such features as eclecticism, reliance on tradition, an apology for unity and religiously determined integrity of the world.  At the same time, it implements the personal intention of the philosopher's spiritual search - the inner tension of insights, which brings Lullius closer to thinkers of later eras, giving his reflections a universal character, allowing him to consider his spiritual searches diachronically in dialogue with thinkers belonging to the New Age, in particular with I. Kant and E.N. Trubetskoy. An important "motive" of the thinker's search, bringing together his logical, ontological and ethical intuitions, was the experience of the evil of the world as its substandardness caused by human imperfection. The explication of this motif was carried out in our work as part of the study of the treatises of Lullius: "The Book of the Lover and the Beloved" and "The Book of the Knightly Order", where complex logical definitions are combined  with the pathos of practical world change peculiar to the thinker, a passionate desire to convince listeners of his rightness [1, p. 47].   The content of these treatises is considered in our work in two perspectives - external and internal. The external perspective exhibits Lullia  as a representative of medieval thought. The inner perspective demonstrates the interpretation of the thinker's work, allowing us to show the points of "divergence" of Lulli with the medieval tradition, which explicate the complexity of the philosopher's worldview (intuition of the infinity of the world and the autonomy of the individual). The place of "meeting" of these perspectives is, in our opinion, the aporia of practical godlessness, which forms the point of the highest tension of the thinker's quest, in which the extremes of Lullius's creativity (focus on practical change of the world and detachment from contemplation of the Beloved) converge, forming the tragedy of the thinker's life. Due to the complexity of this problem, it is considered in our work first inductively (the characteristic of Lulli's creativity is carried out as a consideration of its particular moments in the context of the whole), and then deductively (the characteristic of this whole as a synthesis of these particular moments in the treatises of the thinker, explicates the creativity of the thinker as part of the world philosophical paradigm, which is actualized through the internal dialogue of the world of Lulli with the worlds of Kant and Trubetskoy).    

 The image of "practical godlessness" proposed by E.N. Trubetskoy to denote selfishness and rivalry among people[4, p.65], which is of an unconstrained nature and ineradicable in earthly existence due to its isolation from the All-One Consciousness, can be interpreted in the context of Lulli's work as an aporia - a movement towards the eradication of the imperfection of the world, contradictory due to the fact that the thinker, in accordance with the Christian tradition, realizes the world as perfect.  The responsibility for the "spoiling" of the world lies solely with man.  But the "correction" of the world in medieval philosophy, for which the essence and existence do not coincide in earthly things, is only relative, serving to prevent the absolute victory of evil. In relation to the work and life of Lullius, this aporia is emphasized in a special way, since his activities leading to the eradication of evil and associated with sorrows and suffering, stopping evil, causes other evil. It should be noted that the "schematization" of this aporia outlined in this article does not exhaust its content in Lulli, since the thinker literally "feels" the increase of evil, stating that "mercy, devotion, justice and truth have dried up in the world"[5, p.77].It is no coincidence that in the Book about the Lover and the Beloved, the thinker compared the world to a dungeon in which the servants of the Beloved are imprisoned [5, p. 70], since the thinker's knowledge separates the world and God [6, p.533]. In the context of our research, the sequence in which Lullius, "ascending the steps", considers in the final fragment of his treatise the path leading to the Beloved of his servants (through the steps: self-knowledge, love, awe, renunciation and the neighborhood of vile people) is of interest. In this regard, it is necessary to note several points that confirm the presence of an external intention in the thinker, common to medieval philosophy and an internal intention that brings the world of Lullius closer to the worlds of Modern thinkers.

In the "path" indicated by Lulli, the features of the philosopher's thinking are traced, which are close to the intuitions of E.N. Trubetskoy, revealed in his work "Metaphysical prerequisites of knowledge. The experience of overcoming Kant and Kantianism", where the thinker, describing different planes of interaction of being and consciousness in the All-One, asserts that "in the Absolute, different planes of being and consciousness differ by self-absorption without transcensusa, what was transcendent to cognition at a higher stage becomes immanent to consciousness"[7, p.115].  What, according to E.N. Trubetskoy, happens inside the sphere of absolute all-one consciousness, Lulli describes in the above fragment, referring it to the human consciousness of the Lover mystically connected with the Beloved. The correctness of the assumption we have made is confirmed by S. S. Neretina and A.P. Ogurtsov, according to whom in Lullius "reason, when elevated to universal things, as a part becomes universal, and when descending from the universal, reason becomes private"[6, p. 534]. Thus, self–knowledge in Lulli can be interpreted as immanence - withdrawal into oneself, preceding transcendence - ascent to the Beloved (a reasonable knowledge of one's own depths presupposes love for the Beloved and renunciation of oneself).   Along with the mystical intention typical of medieval philosophy (fragments of St. Augustine's "Confession" concerning transcendence)  In the texts of Lullius, one can also find prerequisites for an alternative interpretation, explaining why the thinker "set" as the last step of ascent the "neighborhood of vile people", which does not "harmonize" with the mystical context of the utterance.In an alternative interpretation, self-knowledge according to Lulli is actualized not only as immersion into oneself, anticipating transcendence, but also as immersion into a world intelligently and correctly created by God (it is no coincidence that E. Gilson claimed that the world according to Lulli is "an imitation of God"[8, pp.351-352]), causing love to oneself, then the thrill of reason before his Creator, and subsequently renunciation of Reason, and immersion in the world of vile people.  Love, based on the context of this statement, is ambivalent, it presupposes both an attitude towards the world created by God, and at the same time an attitude towards his Creator.  In Lullius, the concept appears in the vestment of the concept with which it is considered (Kulmatov V.A. The logical doctrine of Raymond Lullius Author's abstract. dis. ... candidate of Philos.sciences.–St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 19), thus love in this context means both awe, and renunciation of reason, and the neighborhood of vile people. This conclusion is confirmed by the end of the final statement of the Book of the Lover and the Beloved, according to which the servants of the Beloved are not rewarded, but eternal punishment [5, p.70]; ascension to the Creator thereby turns out to be a return to the world (immanence).The inversion of God and the world suggests that the Christian God is transcendent and infinite, he is beyond the cosmos[9, p.471]. The infinity of God according to Lulli indirectly actualizes the infinity of the world as a path of ascent to God, as evidenced by Lulli's "logicism" - faith in the possibility of rational knowledge of the world, more precisely, in the need for infinite approach to the Creator through this knowledge; thus, the infinity of the path of ascent to God turns out to be the infinity of the world, intelligently created by the creator, which causes the need not only for the divine transformation of the world, but also for its human remaking. The "remaking" of the world in New European philosophy will become a belief in the endless progress of mankind, which led to the shift of emphasis from ontology and metaphysics to epistemology. In Lullius, a gradual "shift" of emphasis is carried out within the framework of metaphysics, therefore, in the Book on the Knightly Order, the religious component coexists with practical instructions concerning the life of knights. De facto, Lullius tried to bring about the harmonization of the world, which Johan Huizinga will write about in his work "Autumn of the Middle Ages", calling renunciation of the world, an attempt to improve it and a dream the ways of harmonization[10, p.45]. According to the thinker, in the Middle Ages, the tendency to practically change the world was not widespread enough, since it was believed that it was impossible to change its form, given by God. In his work, Lullius combined these paths, changing his location and engaging in missionary activities.  A characteristic feature of Lulli's worldview is noteworthy, linking the intuitions of the thinker's metaphysics and the intuitions of his ethics. It is a question of combining projectivity in the thinker's work (a look into the future, for which Lullius was engaged in converting infidels to Christianity, considering himself as their representative in the Christian world) and retrospection, by virtue of which he believed that ancient knights were more perfect than modern knights[5, p.97]. Lullius' Christian pathos is expressed somewhat in a different way than it was in the early Middle Ages (in St. Augustine, whose intuitions are in many ways similar to those of the Catalan thinker, the division into two cities:some people are among the saved, while others are predisposed to eternal death, which is more symbolic than actual [11, p.51]; blessed Augustine argues that no one becomes good without first being evil[11, p.51]). For Augustine, repentance contributes to the eradication of evil in human nature - an internal change in a person, a person's condition, regardless of his belonging to God's or human city, can change. For Lullius, the knight is the one who is least prone to malice [5, p.85]; thus, what for Augustine was a changeable human condition (corrected through repentance) became for Lullius his natural state. Therefore, Lullius, on the one hand, is trying to carry out an external change in the world, and on the other hand, is skeptical about the possibility of this change. The need for change.the intuition of the world as an endless path of approach to God) correlates with the despair caused by the experience of this impossibility, but despite this, the Catalan thinker, unlike Augustine, who perceived the world as something transitory, is convinced that there are an infinite number of possibilities for potential world change. In the paradoxical synthesis of these contradictions, the aporia of practical godlessness is explicated in the work of Lullius precisely in its form, as described by E.N. Trubetskoy at the beginning of the twentieth century (any human action, regardless of the intentions of the subjects committing it, turns out to be imperfect, causing evil for other participants in the cosmological process).

The possible convergence of the positions of Lulli and Trubetskoy is facilitated by the fact that in the metaphysics of E.N. Trubetskoy, as in the work of Raymond Lulli, there is an intuition of the infinity of the universe "absolute consciousness fills infinite worlds with light"[7, p.68]. The intuition of infinite light is also filled with Lulli's poem "The Song of Ramon", at the end of which the philosopher complains, that, despite his labors and exploits, he is "not loved and not revered"[5, p.186]. In "lamenting" human dislike, there is an important moment for Lulli's work, which consists in the fact that for him, unlike Augustine, for whom his own attitude to the Creator is mainly important, The attitude of other people towards the Creator is also important. The pathos of the sermon, emphasizing the dignity of man as a creation of God, endowed with the opportunity, and in fact, the duty to know Him, is associated with the desire described in the "Book on the Lover and the Beloved" by Lullius "to deserve the merits of the Beloved"[5, pp.6-7], whom people do not love enough. The paradoxical nature of this statement by Lullius lies in the fact that the thinker tries to deserve what cannot be deserved a priori. This can be explained by the fact that the "theology" of merit was developed in medieval Western culture, but at the same time it actualizes the projection of the infinity of the path to God, requiring conscious efforts on the part of ignorant and unprepared people. The combination of tragedy with the hope of endless external improvement of the world and the associated internal improvement of man is the "vital nerve" of the treatise "The Book of the Knightly Order", in which knighthood is considered by Lulli as a form of cosmodicy and at the same time utopia.

At the beginning of the "Book on the Knightly Order", a squire preparing to become a knight receives an instruction from a hermit knight whom he meets in the forest "to tell about those who, having become knights, will not obey the statute"[5, p.76]. This instruction combines the external and internal perspectives of Lullius's work. The external perspective (mystical and symbolic) is given in the gesture of handing over the book, since the book in a metaphorical sense can be interpreted as a world in which the Creator's plan is realized. When a person reads a book (the number of potential possibilities of knowledge in Lulli is infinite), he approaches God. God, revealing Himself to man, reveals to him the secrets of the world and gives him the opportunity to use them. The mystical and symbolic perspective of the "Book of the Knightly Order" is also emphasized by the external circumstances of the book's transfer - the squire's dream and the accidental nature of the meeting with the hermit[5, p.73].  By instructing the squire to tell about the knights who disobeyed the charter, Lullius demonstrates that "full" fulfillment of the charter is impossible, realizing that there will be many who did not fulfill the charter and predestining for them the possibility of punishment. The focus on punishment, caused by the consciousness of the imperfection of the performers and partly by the desire to help them, is a form of practical godlessness, since it is conditioned by the awareness of the imperfection of the world (E.N. Trubetskoy wrote about this, describing hell as a "vicious circle" of meaningless life[4, p.41]). "Hell" can be called Lulli's adherence to a rule that is de facto impossible to fulfill. Its execution requires the pre-election of a knight (it is no coincidence that one out of a thousand becomes a knight according to Lulli [5, p.75]). Hence, despite the difference in time and the initial prerequisites of philosophizing, Lulli's proximity (in one particular aspect) to the world of Kant. But Kant binds following the rule(categorical imperative) with the autonomy of the subject, for Lullius, following the rule of the heteronomous religious life of a knight;  Thus, this feature of the thinker's creativity in an external perspective correlates with the religious and mystical world of the Middle Ages, internally approximating the autonomy of the individual, which was justified in modern times.

The question of how to understand the place and meaning of the personal principle in medieval culture is ambiguously interpreted in the special literature. A.Ya. Gurevich believed that the medieval individual was included in several social groups at once [12, p.299], considering that within the social group in the Middle Ages there was a gradual formation of the personal principle. L.P. Karsavin held a fundamentally different point of view, in our opinion, which more adequately reflected medieval realities.  The thinker argued that the Middle Ages are characterized not by individualism, but by a gradual self-deepening of the personality[13, p.181]; thus, the personality of the Middle Ages, separating himself from the usual group, nevertheless, as a rule, considers himself a part of it. This explains the fact that Lullius pays great attention to the relationship between the knight, his order and other orders;  service to his order is for him devotion to other orders [5, p. 84]. At the same time, the designation of chivalry is gradually becoming widespread among Lullius not as a class, but as an internal quality of a knight, "a knight owes everything that is in him to chivalry"[5, p.75].

The movement towards the autonomy of the knight is also one of the prerequisites for practical godlessness. Despite the fact that the thinker was against antagonism both between orders and between individual knights in the conditions of medieval life filled with struggle and mutual wars, Lulli's position de facto generates rivalry between knights (it is no coincidence that Johan Huizinga considered knightly honor a sublimation of ambition [10, p.75]).   Lullius' position on this or that "problem" of chivalrous life is not unambiguous, since the thinker was forced to take into account the factor of depravity of human nature. Unlike St. Augustine, it is no longer enough for the Catalan philosopher to simply choose a position that separates those who are pre-elected to salvation from those who are pre-elected to perdition. He needs to live and fight in a world where good and evil are combined with each other, and it is necessary, defending the good, to justify or at least admit the option of "lesser" evil (it is necessary to take into account the factor of religious rigor and sensitivity of Lulli, he does not rationally calculate, choosing one of the options, but passionately experiences his own the choice, realizing its imperfection, and possibly fatally erroneous character; when reading the "Book on the Knightly Order", the impression arises that despite the fact that the author formulates "rules", these rules are not the realization of rational choice, but as if a form of mystical vision, subsequently "artificially" rationalized by the author).

In our opinion, the feature of the presentation, which A.F. Losev wrote about, telling about the creative "method" of V.S. Solovyov, is applicable to the work of Lulli, which consisted in the fact that the thinker "tried to convince the reader to present difficult truths in the form of easy and accessible statements"[14, p. 162]; thus, Lulli It is as if he is constantly "on the side" of the reader, the very contemporary to whom the thinker's reproaches of disrespect for his Beloved are addressed. In this way, Lulli's position differs from the already mentioned position of Blessed Augustine, for whom divine revelation remains in the foreground, not listeners (it is interesting to note by V.E. Bagno that in Lulli there was "a combination of idealistic aspirations and practical calculation"[15, p.195]). "Practical calculation" from a Christian point of view is a form of practical godlessness[16, p.10]. In Lullius, we are talking about an attempt to realize the Christian ideal of life, which turned into a tragedy for the thinker who carried it out, therefore, in the "Book on the Knightly Order" Lullius justified the possibility of a knight conquering vile knights up to their murder [5, p. 88],[5, p. 93]. If we consider this statement of Lullius from a formal point of view, it looks like an apology for practical godlessness, since, following this instruction, murder can be justified (in the same treatise, Lullius argues that cruelty is against the nature of chivalry, calling for mercy to a defeated opponent[5, p. 119]). This contradiction can be explained by using the "epistemological" scheme of Lulli's metaphysics, reconstructed by V.A. Kulmatov, according to which the bearer of force acts on the principle that accepts force, from which arises a manifestation of force that combines the bearer of force and the accepting principle (Kulmatov V.A. The logical doctrine of Raymond Lulli Author's abstract. dis. ... candidate of Philos.sciences.–St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 13). The bearer of power is God as the "receptacle" of mercy and justice, the squire who is knighted becomes the host (it is no coincidence that knighthood resembles ordination, and the knight is compared  with a priest[5, p. 82];  he synthesizes the divine and the human principle, power and mercy, since God is infinite and man is finite, then a complete synthesis is not feasible, that is, a "real" knight will be an infinite approximation to the bearer of power - the Creator of the world).   Approaching the infinite "source" of power due to the impossibility of synthesis provokes practical godlessness, which according to Lulli is inevitable. An attempt to "avoid" practical godlessness is to follow the rule, conform to it the future knight and his personal almost autonomous experience.     Lullius tries to synthesize the principles of strength and piety in the personality of the knight; people should respect the knight for piety and at the same time fear him as strong; because of this fear, they will not commit crimes[5, p.77]. The "rational" definition of Lulli is based on the religious idea of a combination of power and wisdom in God, but due to the fact that this combination is imperfect in man, this definition indicates the responsibility of a knight before God, the knightly community and himself.    The responsibility of a knight is not autonomous, but rather heteronomous, its weakening or absence leads to a decrease in the status of a knight in the God-human hierarchy that permeates the world, therefore, an unworthy knight is worse for a thinker than a weaver [5, p.82]. The philosopher believed that following this hierarchy (in this he remained faithful to the medieval tradition) weakens practical godlessness, which, as previously indicated, cannot be eradicated due to the sinfulness of human nature.The peculiarity of understanding this hierarchy lies in the fact that the imperfect world (the evil and cruel world of practical godlessness), to the extent of its endless approximation to the hierarchy established by God, begins to be perceived as perfect, thereby the attempt to "avoid" practical godlessness is de facto transformed into its justification (this explains Lulli's justification of violence against infidels and against the vile people [5, p. 83]).  However, practical godlessness is not "pure" violence for Lullius, apparently the thinker believed that infidels become part of the God-human world, which the philosopher sees as the universe (the following feature of Lullius' worldview is interesting, linking the spiritual quest of the thinker with medieval culture: for him, the world is symbolic, any thing points to others, and together they point to The Creator of the universe; Johan Huizinga defined medieval symbolism as the presence of things of a common property correlated with universal values [10, p.203]). The infidels   just like the vile people, they turn out to be outside the symbolic world for Lulli, which makes violence against them justified. This tendency in the work of the Catalan thinker presupposes a relative rapprochement of the divine and human worlds with each other, that is, the human world, conquering the infidels, does so as if with the sanction of the divine world. At the same time, the thinker is aware of the imperfection of Christians who carry out subjugation, but their belonging to the "genuine" world, although they are on its periphery, actualizes it as perfection.

This feature of Lulli's worldview can be explained by analogy with how S.S. Neretina and A.P. Ogurtsov interpret the metaphysics of the thinker as a whole on the basis of the interaction of universal and particular principles and their equivalence. In Lullius, the universal defines the private, and the private defines the universal [6, p.530]. According to this symbolic logic, the actions of a "private" unworthy Christian aimed at conquering the infidels, despite the fact that Lullius often emphasizes the unworthiness of modern Christians, relate to God as a particular to the universal, and therefore a priori correspond to the rule. This becomes possible because Existence is identical to reason [6, p.530] (we are talking about establishing the correspondence of the divine and human reason).  V. A. Kulmatov, analyzing the logical constructions of Lullius, noticed that the main thing in them are the figures, not the master (Kulmatov V.A. The logical teaching of Raymond Lullius Abstract. ... candidate of Philos.sciences.–St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 5).    This feature, in our opinion, brings the world of the thinker closer to the world of Kant, for whom the purity of the rule is important. Despite the immanentism of the thinker, proved by E.N. Trubetskoy, Kant's emphasis is on the rule, and not on the subject-performer.    This position is not consistently held by Lulli, being, as it were, the logical conclusion of his intuitions; for the thinker, it turns out to be important the convergence of the otherworldly and the world of this world, reflected by him in various works in parallel with the typical postulation of the mediaeval tradition of the substandardness of the world of this world, its depravity.

The justification of the world around us, which actually explicates the practical godlessness associated with this world, is, in our opinion, an integral part of the utopia of Raymond Lullius as a project for building a new "earthly" world, organized on the principles of theocracy, rational in its essence and infinitely approaching the world beyond; this is the world-method, the world-system. It is no coincidence that the thinker believed that his system of logical proofs of the existence of God was able to convince the infidels of the truth of Christianity due to the evidence of the evidence itself. The "illusion" of evidence, which would later become a typical feature of the systems of philosophy of modern times, is peculiar in the form of intuition to the metaphysics of Lullius, being an important element of his utopia.  The authenticity and evidence of the proof is usually confused with the authenticity and evidence of the position defended by the thinker.  Proving that the knightly order should get rid of vicious knights, Lullius relies on an analogy with pain in the arm: "if your arm hurts, then the pain in your other arm is stronger than the pain in me"[5, p.93]. The thinker showed that although all things in the world point to One Thing - God (God in this context can be understood as a hierarchical order, but things a priori logically or ontologically converged within the order itself, in its infinity are closer to each other than things that are distant from each other).  The proof given by Lulli is obvious only if the world is perceived not only logically and ontologically, but also mystically as a whole. From the fact that it has been proven that the world is a whole, it does not follow that this whole can change. Thus, in the idea of the world as the divine order of things, Lullius incorporates the idea of the world as the human order of things, sanctioned not by God, but by the realized divine order, one of the links of God -the World in the infinite hierarchical ladder of existence.

Lulli's utopia is interesting because the thinker, despite the deep rationalism and eschatological optimism characteristic of his missionary projects, can also be called an eschatological pessimist, as evidenced by fragments of the "Book about the Lover and the Beloved", in which the Lover laments both the imperfection of the world and the Church, and his own imperfection. It is no coincidence that Lulli's projects, as a rule, did not receive approval from the powerful and the princes of the church.   This situation is a paradox: the thinker is rational, but his rationalism is too "theological" by the standards of modern philosophy. Lullius is religious and mystically introspective, but his mysticism is too rational and practical for the Middle Ages, thus Lullius' utopia is also a dystopia that sanctions the impossibility of utopia. Lullius "corrects" this state of affairs with the help of cosmodicy, which provokes practical atheism. The Lullian cosmodicy is the justification of the world as a human order realizing the divine order and at the same time the justification of the human order as a reasonable compromise between the infinite divine and the corrupted, sinful human order of things.  With the realism and practicality of Lulli's projects, the rational ideal of order - a rational scheme - comes first for him. If we follow the definition given by A.F. Losev, then the scheme is a way of combining internal and external, in which the general (internal) "outweighs" the private (external)[17, p.46] (the internal - general in the scheme is in no way connected with the "private" external details, it serves only as a method of combining them). In our opinion, reason plays such a role in the constructions of Lullius, it unites the disparate elements of the world as an internal and common principle, and since Lullius, as already mentioned, is characterized by the intuition of the infinity of the world, the elements "strive" for infinite separation, needing external unification.A "side effect" of separation is the "fantasticism" of the thinker's constructions. The point is the incongruity of the rational internal and the emphatically irrational external. It is no coincidence that modern researchers (M.S. Samarina and others). they emphasize the diversity of Lulli's research interests, avoiding their specific characteristics[18, p.68] or emphasizing the abstract nature of the thinker's work, who tried to reduce all existing knowledge to a combination of basic logical principles[19, p.111] (the position of M.A. Lapshinov, who believes that "the image of Richard the Lion, deserves special mention Lulli's heart does not correspond to the real facts"[20, p.99], in our opinion, without taking into account the specifics of the thinker).    Assessments of the thinker's creativity testify to the complexity of the world of Lulli, in which the inner (mind) influences the outer (historical events and people's lives), correlating with it as an external force. This contrasts with the intimate nature of individual works and statements of the thinker, in particular the "Book about the Lover and the Beloved."  In the context of our work, the comparison of external and internal determines the "extreme" form of practical godlessness in the work of Lullius - the struggle against vile people, which, according to the thinker, the knight carries out by protecting clerics[5, p.83]. The cruelty of vile people is irrational, devoid of a reasonable basis, and therefore the fight against it by rational means presupposes external the elimination of evil (imperfection), which is not correlated with the genuine rational order of the world, sanctioned by the divine order; this struggle has the character of a cosmodicy for Lulli - justification and protection of the world.  Protection is important for Lullius because people's actions are connected with their rational grounds exclusively externally.  The subordination of the vile people to the principles of good is schematic, therefore, the "vile people", like the infidels, are deprived of their own voice in Lulli's work; they must obey the binding force of good as an external law (Lulli's position is close to the interpretation of the relationship of the all-one consciousness to its Other in the material world, according to which the Other perceives the unity as an external law[7, p.63]). However, E.N. Trubetskoy's rationalism is not schematic, and for him the world is a living organism. Lulli's rationalism "provokes" the establishment of an external order in the world, without which the latter inevitably turns into chaos of evil and injustice. The thinker "applies" to the human changeable world the absolutely correct and static rules of his "Great Science", which are a priori applicable to any thing and thus resemble the closed world of Kant. If in Kant the rules are immanent in the world of the cognizing subject and limit the sphere of his experience, then in Lullius they are included in the a priori perfect divine plan of the world, the failure of which lowers the status of a thing in the God-human hierarchy. This schematism, as already noted, is combined with the awareness of the impracticability of the rules, with the insubordination of the imperfect world, whereas the fulfillment of the rules a priori presupposes, according to Lulli, bringing the world into line with the divine order (due to the infinity of this process, the fulfillment itself justifies the world, hence the desire for practical activity and faith in the feasibility of missionary projects).   The nature of Lulli's missionary activity often led to purely negative results, which determined his place in culture as one of the prototypes of Don Quixote[15, p.242].

The world of Lulli's metaphysics is, as it were, composed of interconnected elements modeled on the "mechanism". The peculiarity of its "consideration", in our opinion, depends on whether it is studied statically or dynamically. If we consider Lulli's work statically, that is, to correlate individual statements of the thinker with each other, revealing their common characteristics, then his cosmodicy, associated with the external eradication of evil, looks like an apology for practical godlessness. A knight who protects the clergy from vile people or destroys infidels is faced with the consequences of his own actions, leading to an increase in the total share of evil in the world.    At the same time, if we consider the complex mechanism of Lulli's "machine of the world" dynamically, tracing the mutual connections of its individual parts, it turns out that its peculiarity is that individual parts, due to the "infinite" nature of the tasks set by Lulli that are not solvable for people, sometimes seem to contradict the found whole, opening up new horizons and prospects;(it is no coincidence that one of the tasks of a knight described in the "Book on the Knightly Order" is to help those who are denied dignity[5, p.90]).   The formulation proposed by the thinker is interesting from several points of view.  Those who are denied dignity for Lullius are sick, weak, and all under the protection of a particular knight.  For the thinker, the position of those who are denied is considered simultaneously in the internal (from the point of view of Lulli's own intuitions) and in the external (based on the tradition of interpretation) perspective. From the point of view of tradition, those who are denied dignity are punished by God, so help for them can only be relative, designed to ease their situation. However, if we consider this statement of Lullius in the context of the "Book on the Order of Chivalry", then those who are denied dignity (the infirm and peasants) these are people who had no place in the rational world project "invented" by Lulli, which is an endless assimilation to the divine order of things.  This means the spontaneous irrationalization of the Lullian universal rationality of the world for the benefit of the world as a whole. However, due to the "complexity" of the world of Lullius, irrationalization is compensated by rationalization of a different order, consisting in the fact that a hunchback or a fat man cannot be a knight [5, p.105]. This maxim of Lullius can be explained by the fact that a crippled knight will not be able to fight on an equal basis with others. This corresponds to the practical orientation of the thinker's intentions, however, in the same fragment, Lulli adds that "neither wealth nor spiritual nobility will help a crippled squire to become a knight"[5, p.105]. In other words, wealth and spiritual nobility are assumed by Lulli as qualities of a knight a priori, but according to the general intention of the Middle Ages, wealth and spiritual nobility correspond to physical beauty and strength. This harmonious ideal is an apology for practical godlessness, but at the same time, this definition poses an important problem for the creativity of the thinker of the correlation of the natural and the "supernatural"  worlds.

For Lullius, the natural world is a haven of sin and death, a habitat for vile people, whose existence is justified, as already indicated, only to the extent of its rationally justified approximation to the genuine divine world, which exists for Lullius only as a project.  The intuitions of the thinker actualize the implementation of this project as infinity, and during its implementation, the "natural world" is explicated as a transitional link or step, to which the knight's life is adapted. But at the same time, the knight lives in a "supernatural" world - the world of approaching the divine. For the thinker, he is the world in the true sense of the word. In the Book of the Order of Chivalry, Lullius identifies features of this supernatural world that are close to modern ideas of humanism and civilization. We are talking, first of all, about the common good that the knight serves.  For Lullius, it corresponds to the idea of the unity and integrity of the world[5, p.80]. People who are denied dignity due to human arbitrariness in the "natural" world (for example, peasants) are involved in the common good and are under the protection of a knight[5, p. 92].By the common good, Lullius means the ethical projection of the general philosophical concept of "good", the proof of which is the dependence of Lullius on Plotinus, traced in the special literature and described by V.A. Kulmatov (Kulmatov V.A. The Logical doctrine of Raymond Lullius Author's abstract. dis. ... candidate of Philos.sciences.–St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 9).

In the work of Lullius, there is a gradual "maturation" of intuitions, which will later be characteristic of the philosophy of modern times (mainly for the teachings of Kant). We are talking about forcing and describing in the "Book on the Knightly Order" an important process for the Middle Ages, which L. P. Karsavin called self-deepening of personality. We assume that we can talk about the relative autonomy of the knight's personality, carried out by Lulli against the background of his teaching about the knightly order and implemented within the framework of the Christian paradigm. This autonomization, in turn, bases the gradual immanentization of the idea of the good of the knight and chivalry as correlated with the inner world of the individual, not separated from the external idea of the good of the knightly order, but nevertheless independent and striving for autonomy; according to Lulli, the knight relies only on his spiritual nobility[5, pp.88-89]. As this view develops, Lullius, in our opinion, tries to go beyond the boundaries of the "natural" world, leveling practical godlessness. Therefore, a knight according to Lulli finds pleasure in bringing hardships and worries to his subjects [5, p.80], which obviously cannot be an object of selfishness and rivalry with others, since the knight's duty to himself is higher than honors [5, p.131], and the fewer comrades, the closer help God [5, p.89].

A special place in the "Book on the Knightly Order" is occupied by the emphasis on the concept of "duty". Lulli actualizes the problem of imputation of debt within the framework of a heteronomous religious paradigm. According to his ideas, which anticipate Kant's intuitions, knightly service is preceded and accompanied by the process of a knight realizing the nature of his duty to God and the order, which, according to the thinker, is facilitated by training, which is akin to monastic asceticism. Lulli stated that crimes against honor, morality and dignity are more dangerous than crimes against material goods[5, p.94], emphasizing the state of personality that Kant later tried to show by considering external reverence for the moral law as an internal falsity of personality[21, p.45] and paying attention to the purity of the moral motive.

For Lullius, the motive of searching for the true world is characteristic, and the world affected by sin is for the thinker as if it were an apparent world (the beloved easily endures hardships for the sake of the lover, despite the severity of his sufferings).  This can be explained not only by the religious mood of the thinker, but also by his rationalism, since for Lullius, a reasonable conscious due, as already indicated, is what exists[5, p.96]. This formulation of the problem characterizes the tragic position of the thinker in the medieval tradition, since for the philosopher, on the one hand, the gap between what is due and what is, is obvious, and on the other hand, Lullius is characterized by a belief in the priority of what is due. From our point of view, this explains the peculiarities of the philosopher's understanding of human behavior, combining logical and ethical points.  The thinker, considering the chivalrous virtues, adheres to the Aristotelian doctrine of the middle, for example, interpreting abstinence  as a middle ground between excess and deficiency [5, p.126]. In this case, Lullius follows the medieval tradition, however, if you look closely at the image of a knight created by the philosopher, it becomes obvious that to describe him, the thinker often uses evidence from the opposite, for example, describing the behavior of an unfair knight, he thereby draws the image of a just knight, emphasizing their difference[5, p.97]. This shows the logicism and ontologism of Lullius, it is no coincidence that V.A. Kulmatov emphasizes that for Lullius "non-existence is a reduction of being to an infinitesimal, correlated with being."    (Kulmatov V.A. The logical teaching of Raymond Lullius, Abstract of the dissertation. ... candidate of Philos.sciences.–St. Petersburg, 1996, p. 16); in this sense, an unworthy knight turns out to be infinitely correlated with a worthy knight.

In Lulli's formulation of this problem, the following point is significant. The unworthy knight, as well as the worthy knight, is included in the general order of the world, which actualizes the Lullian cosmodicy, however, due to the intuition of the infinity of the world, which inspired the constructions of Lulli, there is no middle ground between these knights, outwardly defended by the thinker in the doctrine of virtue.  Lulli, like Kant later, solving ethical problems, connects the nature of their solution with the peculiarities of judgments[21, p.23] trying to solve them with the help of logic, thereby rationalizing them and leaving room for practical godlessness. Formally, the definitions of Lullius concerning the differences between a worthy and unworthy knight correspond to the logical law of the excluded third, according to which a knight can be worthy or unworthy, but no third is given.  Lullius does not express the transition from an unworthy to a worthy knight, but only shows a holistic picture, the "eidos" of the knight, the violation of which (the collapse of the ideal) according to Lullius causes the "destruction" of the entire "system". We are talking about an ideal structure, the violation of the "proportions" of which makes the goals of the knightly order unworthy, thus, Lulli does not create a real charter of the knightly order, but rather gives a possible idea of such charters. In our opinion, Kant's position is close to this intuition of Lullius, who does not describe the specific possibilities of applying the categorical imperative, but considering its very definition in detail and in detail, outlines the possibilities of its implementation, which, in fact, appear to him as if in the "background", if compared with the nature of accuracy and detail his wording.  Despite the obvious differences, which consist in the fact that Lulli's position is metaphysical, that is, it is based on the internal tension of interaction between the human and divine worlds (Kant denies the possibility of reason to go beyond its limits). Lulli's intuitions, in our opinion, correspond to Kant's statement that "the difference between virtue and vice should not be sought in the degree of observance of certain maxims, but only in their specific quality (in relation to the law) [21, p.339], while "each of the vices has its own maxim, it is necessary to contradict the maxim of the other"[21, p.340]. What Kant postulates as an immanent relationship to the moral law of a person, for Lullius turns out to be an attitude to the God-human order of things, which corresponds to the rational new world being arranged by the thinker, more precisely, it is like the eternal formation of an imperfect old sinful world in relation to the new world.  Just as Kant has no boundary between imputation and fulfillment of a moral maxim, so in Lullius a knight cannot fail to fulfill his duty if he is actually a knight, that is, the fact of non-fulfillment destroys the ideal world of chivalry, leveling chivalry in the knight himself[5, p.88]. Emphasis or addressing to the personality, as already mentioned, it brings Lullius and Kant closer together, making their worlds similar due to Lullius' emerging tendency to autonomy of personality. However, Lullius is unable to "make a choice" between the autonomy of the knight, which he is just beginning to have, and heteronomy, due to the knight's belonging to the estate or his involvement in the divine order.  Lullius's heteronomy is denounced as a form of autonomy, since each knight's action is not self-sufficient, but is mutually determined by the actions of other knights and orders.  At the same time, it is paradoxically self-sufficient, since the personal manifestations of a knight in relation to other knights and orders are relatively autonomous, which is manifested in Lullius in the personal nature of imputation - the impossibility of transferring responsibility from an individual knight to the order.  A paradoxical situation arises in the work of the Catalan thinker - the general Christian intuition of the integrity of the world is actualized in the "Book on the Knightly Order" due to the autonomy of a specific unique personality, while Kant's autonomy of personality should serve as a "guarantee" of the rule's fulfillment.  In our opinion, Lulli anticipated the intuitions characteristic of the philosophy of the new age, when the integrity of the world will be maintained at the expense of the human personality, which entails a different qualitatively new emphasis on practical godlessness, due to the fact that according to Kant "the subjective basis or reason for recognizing the maxim cannot be known"[21, p.27]

Kant de facto "levels" practical godlessness, reducing its metaphysical origins to the interaction of human inclinations[21, p.28]; thus, the insolubility of the problem (metaphysical ineradicability of evil) is explicated within the framework of another problem - the independence of the moral law and the associated human arbitrariness, which cannot be invented or imposed on the subject from the outside[21, p.28].  According to Kant, the idea of a moral law is not just the makings of a personality, but is a personality [21, p. 29]; thus, on the one hand, Kant strengthens the character of personality autonomy (a gradual movement towards autonomy was outlined by Lulli when considering chivalry as an immanent quality of a knight's personality), and on the other hand, demonstrates that the source evil is, as it were, transferred from metaphysical grounds, as in Lulli's case, to the procedure of subjective choice of personality, since according to Kant "the moral law acts irresistibly on an evil person, but other motives oppose it"[21, p.38]. Kant believed that it is only necessary to "reveal" the mechanism of interaction of motives, and then the "technique" of their combination will become obvious, thereby, when finding the "right" balance of these motives, the "metaphysical" problem of practical godlessness will be removed a priori.  In our opinion, the "Kantian" way of solving this problem resembles the attempts of Lullius to rationalize the behavior and actions of the knight, in which the thinker "translates"  purely moral questions on the "logical rails", since de facto according to Lulli, chivalry is conditioned by a correct understanding of what chivalry is (it is no coincidence that A.I. Uemov linked the predictive possibilities of Kant's logic and their early intuitions, realized, in his opinion, in the logical machine of Raymond Lulli [22, p.5]).

The commonality of the metaphysical premises of Lullius and Kant is due to the hypostasis of the immediate given, which E.N. Trubetskoy objected to in Kant's metaphysics [7, p.24]. In accordance with the intuition of E.N. Trubetskoy, Kant in his teaching, distracting from the forms of experience, hypostatized this distraction, thus, the measure of the fundamental concept of "moral law" for Kant, despite the external distraction, still turns out to be the internal experience of the subject, opposed to the "layer" of experience from which he was distracted as the experience is purely external. This feature of the formulation of the problem of experience and the closely related problem of radical evil in Kant's work has been interpreted in modern specialized literature. A common point of a number of works devoted to this topic in the works of Kant (M.E. Soboleva, A.V. Yarkeev, P. Muchnik) is the accentuation and reflection of the structure of the subject's choice of a good or evil maxim.  This problem affects the essential definitions of the Kantian system concerning the position of a human subject in the world. M.E. Soboleva believes that Kant's human subjectivity has turned into a source of objectivity[23, p.16]. If we proceed from the interpretation of M.E. Soboleva, according to Kant, the makings for good are necessary for being as a person, while evil tendencies are not essential from the point of view of the existential structure [23, p.19]. The author emphasizes the normative nature of good in Kant, perceiving good and evil as motives for action [23, p.22]. According to this interpretation, a person becomes a "machine of good", whose actions can be calculated based on which of the motives is predominant.  The Kantian concept, in accordance with this interpretation, turns out to be close to the intuitions of Raymond Lullius on the basis that both thinkers emphasize following the ideal, the implementation of which is described in the rule, and the formulation of the rule looks like it is "fused" with the ideal, inseparable from it.

In order to follow the ideal, Lulli translates moral problems into the language of logic (it is no coincidence that his maxims can be interpreted from the point of view of the laws of classical logic), but his concept is ontological at its source. The thinker proceeds, as indicated earlier, from the irresistibility of practical godlessness in the world, the relative compensation of which is external resistance to evil through violence (in the Lullian apology of violence, the following point must be highlighted: the extreme tension of the thinker's mystical experiences stimulates the intention of external correction of evil, associated, as already mentioned, with the remaking of the world;  at the same time, the thinker is convinced of the impossibility of correcting the world and man, which determines the share of tragedy inherent in the work of Lulli).  Lullius is inclined, as it was indicated earlier, to "logicize" the manifestations of practical godlessness, as if introducing them into a certain framework, within which his rationalization takes place, carried out, for example, in the "Book on the Knightly Order".  Rationalization in relation to the conditions of medieval life can be considered as a form of play in which the solution of a certain task can be perceived, if not as a complete victory over evil, then as a significant weakening of its action in the world.

For Kant, practical godlessness is transformed from a metaphysical problem into a problem of complex but inevitable anthropological choice.   The predetermined nature of this choice in the sense of necessity for a person contains, in our opinion, something inherently mechanical, which brings together the worlds of Lullius and Kant as spaces of "unconstrained" play according to pre-established rules.

For Lullius, the source of the game is man's interpretation of the divine order, initially taken seriously, for Kant, the choice of a maxim becomes a game with an unforeseen result. Due to the inherently human nature of this choice, practical godlessness is "embedded" in the selection procedure, and the only way to reduce it is to remove the problem, radically change the point of view on it. It lies in the fact that Kant "takes the problem of radical evil beyond the limits of religious conceptualization"[24, p. 6], therefore, according to Kant (interpretation by A.V. Yarkeev), the moral law does not depend on the good[24, p.10], thereby "breaking the thread" that allows to explain evil metaphysically, and "The objectification of the law leads to the identification of the subject's position with the sphere of the noumenal thing in itself"[24, p.16], and the actions of the subject turn out to be an expression of a universal substance-God[24, p.16]. According to A.V. Yarkeev, in Kant, the autonomous subject re-constructs the rules [24, p.16], that is, in fact, he takes the place of God. Analyzing Kant's argumentation, A.V. Yarkeev comes to the conclusion that, due to its abstract nature, it actualizes unlimited human guilt, being an indirect justification of totalitarianism[24, p.10]. The abstract nature of the moral law can thus serve as a justification for any human act, if this act formally corresponds to a moral maxim; thus, formalism based on the self-legality of the subject leads to the justification of practical godlessness. In fact, the situation with Kant's moral law is the same as with the chivalrous "charter" of Lullius, for whom practical godlessness, whether violence against infidels or vile people, is a priori possible and even necessary.  For Lullius, due to the religiously determined imperfection of the world ontologically established by him, practical godlessness manifests itself as a problem of inconsistency between what exists and what is due, despite the fact that the thinker's system is based on their identification. In Kant, however, due to the a priori ametaphysicity of his system, the problem of practical godlessness, as already indicated, is speculatively removed, remaining empirically unresolved.

From the "position" "created" by the metaphysical premises developed by Kant, two principal ways out can be outlined, more precisely, two possibilities for fixing the insolubility of the "problem" of practical godlessness. One of these exits, outlined, as it seems to us, in the work of A.V. Yarkeev, is a "symbolic" exit from the noumenal world of moral law into the phenomenal world, marked by the incomprehensibility of the subject's choice of a good or evil maxim and, as it were, projected by the responsibility of the subject for this choice. Another way proposed by Pablo Muchnik in the work "Moral incomprehensibility and self-construction in Kant" actually involves the speculation of Kant's intuitions, the "deepening" of the reasoning of the moral law given by the thinker. P. Muchnik distinguishes evil maxims of the first order - (actions) and evil maxims of the second order - (their foundations)[25, p.18], at the same time, the act of freedom through which the agent formulates evil maxims of the second order according to P. Muchnik lies outside experience [25, p.19]. The agent (subject) wants the maxim he has adopted to become a universal law and for him to become a member of the world created by his actions [25, p.26]. This position of Kant is anticipated in the spiritual quest of Lullius, since his knight also lives in a world created by his own actions, which is partly explicated by the impracticability of the charter in the Book on the Knightly Order.   

Kant's position as interpreted by P. Muchnik (if Kant's autonomy of the subject is not taken into account)  it corresponds to the ideal relations within the chivalric order, since the de facto knight explicates into the order, taken as an ideal structure, relations immanent to his own personality, and then implicates them, accepting them for execution already in the form of rules formulated by the order, which, however, does not protect, as already indicated, from practical godlessness. The knight of Lullius (as described in relation to the interaction of unconditional consciousness and its other by E.N. Trubetskoy) introspects, transcends, as if passing into another plane of being, from which his maxims are sanctioned. To indicate   of this plane of being, determined by the spontaneity of the subject, in fact by his freedom in Kant's system, P. Muchnik uses S. Morgan's term "leap of volition"[25, p.25]. This term can be translated into the language of metaphysics formally denied by Kant as transcense, since this "leap" is not determined by the previous experience of the subject, but defines this experience itself due to its unpredictability and spontaneity, and to describe it, Muchnik introduces the term "transcendental unity of recognition", which the author, along with the "transcendental unity of apperception", considers fundamental in Kant's worldview [25, p.36].   

The substantiation and description of the transcendental unity of volition in relation to Kant's system outlines ways to return to the world of metaphysics associated with the rejection of that absolute centrality to human thinking in Kant, which E.N. Trubetskoy wrote about[7, p.28]. Thus, Kant's world returns us to that inner tension, the insurmountable abyss between the ideal and its actual embodiment, which the Catalan thinker Raymond Lulli spoke about with passion and despair, and the impossibility of justifying the mortal life of a person by the abstract precision of the moral law "provokes" the philosophical justification of a religious worldview[26, p.124] as spontaneously and at the same time indestructibly given the basis of life in a world of practical godlessness, which does not hold a person above the abyss, but illuminating his inevitable fall into it with the light of eternal meanings in the past, present and future.In conclusion, it should be noted that the protection of "religious" metaphysics determines the special place of Raymond Lulli's spiritual quest in the history of culture due to their belonging to the medieval tradition, which, however, outlines the possibility of correlating Lulli's work with Renaissance philosophy and Modern philosophy due to the thinker's characteristic intuition of the infinity of the world, defining Lulli's cosmodice as the protection of the world in the as an endless path of ascent to the Creator. The cosmodicy determines the utopia of Lulli - the focus on practical change of the world in order to weaken the action of evil (practical godlessness). Due to the impossibility of this change realized by the thinker, Lulli's utopia is at the same time a dystopia, causing a gradual "shift" of the thinker's interest from the macrocosm to the microcosm, which determines the projective nature of the philosopher's work (focus on the future, characteristic of Renaissance philosophy and modern philosophy), while simultaneously actualizing its retrospective character (immersion in the past, characteristic of medieval philosophy).  The "complexity" of the thinker's intuitions makes it possible to correlate them with the worlds of modern philosophers (in particular with the world of Kant) due to the general orientation of their efforts to minimize the manifestations of evil in the world. The paradoxical result of these de facto efforts is the accentuation of the aporia of practical godlessness, which for Kant is concentrated in the formal nature of the rule, the implementation of which cannot be rationally justified, and for Lullius in futile attempts to actually destroy evil, which do not fit into the traditional Christian picture of the world and bring the thinker's creativity closer to the intuitions of European rationalism of Modern times.

        

     

            

               

 

 

                                                                                               

                                                   

                                          

                

      

                 

                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

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It is well known that the study of Western European medieval philosophy has been one of the weak points of Russian historical and philosophical science for a long time. It cannot be said that in recent decades the situation in this area has not begun to change for the better, however, even today the general level of knowledge of the material, understanding of the specifics of the medieval way of philosophizing, the ability to see the essential in the extant monuments of medieval philosophy and literature among authors who decide to speak on this topic is lower than the corresponding components in the activity domestic "antiquaries" or specialists in the field of New European philosophy. Therefore, there is a natural desire to support each new attempt, to help overcome the difficulties that inevitably arise for a researcher immersed in the "spirit" of another era and another culture. Unfortunately, the reviewed article about R. Lullia only partially deserves such a benevolent presentation. Familiarity with the article reveals many disadvantages that do not allow it to be considered as a completed, ready-to-publish work. The text is not structured, there is neither an introduction nor a conclusion. And it's not only that the parts of the narrative are not separated by subheadings, the author does not give a clear formulation of the research objectives, and from the final fragments it is impossible to understand what results he came to. If you look at the presented text as a whole, you cannot see the plot of the narrative, it is a collection of heterogeneous remarks and it seems that nothing will change if some of them are reversed. It is difficult to recognize the bibliographic list as adequate to the chosen subject of consideration. Thus, there is no foreign research literature in it. We repeat, it is not a matter of observing a certain "formal canon", just that the reader should know that other researchers have already said about this subject, and the author is obliged to provide such information at least in general terms, only in this case the reader will be able to understand why it makes sense for him to get acquainted with the proposed work. There are a lot of comments on the design of the presented article. Already in the first sentences of the article, the author admits a very sloppy syntax, there are many punctuation and stylistic errors, for example: "an attempt to consider the spiritual quest of Lullius, with the help of ..." (why the comma?); "... explicate the complexity of the philosopher's worldview by the place of "crossing" ..." (where is the dot?); "... people wearing the unconstrained nature and ineradicable in earthly existence due to its isolation from the All-One consciousness can be interpreted..." (why is the participial turnover "not closed"?); "on this occasion, Lulli S. S. Neretina and A.P. Ogurtsov noticed..." (?); "According to Lulli, reasonable knowledge ..." (where is the comma?); "According to Huising in the Middle Ages there was ..." (again, the introductory construction is not highlighted, and the name of this author, as you know, is inclined in Russian), etc. And why are the links incorrectly designed? Here and there, in the text itself, there are indications of cited sources with the year of publication, pages, etc. The author simply forgot to put things in order in his work? It is impossible to recommend such a text for publication without thorough revision, this would mean imposing an obligation on the Editorial Board to make corrections or amendments to almost every sentence. With that said, it seems right to send the article for revision.

Second Peer Review

Peer reviewers' evaluations remain confidential and are not disclosed to the public. Only external reviews, authorized for publication by the article's author(s), are made public. Typically, these final reviews are conducted after the manuscript's revision. Adhering to our double-blind review policy, the reviewer's identity is kept confidential.
The list of publisher reviewers can be found here.

The subject of the study of the article "Aporia of practical godlessness in the spiritual quest of Raymond Lullius" is the interpretation of the human personality, its autonomy and self-knowledge in the treatises of the medieval thinker. The author turns to the analysis of two works by Lullius: "Books about the Lover and the Beloved" and "Books about the Knightly Order", placing their consideration in a wide temporal and semantic context. The author of the article draws parallels between self-knowledge and human self-determination, demonstrated by Lulli, with the understanding of man by such philosophers as Augustine the Blessed, Imanuel Kant, Evgeny Trubetskoy. The research methodology used in the article includes a comparative and historical analysis of the formation and development of the ideas of Lulli, a hermeneutic analysis of these texts, a comparative analysis that brings together different approaches to understanding the human personality, its dignity, freedom and duty. The author analyzes the "Book about the Lover and the Beloved" and the "Book about the Knightly Order" in two perspectives - external and internal. The external perspective allows us to see in the reflections of Lullius the characteristic features of medieval thought, while the internal one reveals the divergences of the thinker with the medieval tradition caused by the complexity and independence of his worldview. The author uses inductive and deductive approaches to study the positions of Lullius. The first allows us to characterize the work of Lulli through the consideration of his particular moments in the context of the whole. The second is to characterize the whole as a synthesis of particular moments in the thinker's treatises. The relevance of the work is connected with the enduring interest of philosophy in the human personality, its self-knowledge and self-determination. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the analysis of Lulli's work in a broad philosophical context. The style of the article is typical for scientific publications in the field of humanitarian studies, it combines the clarity of the formulations of key theses with their logically consistent argumentation. However, reading the text of the article is hampered by a lot of typos, a lack of uniformity of footnotes and huge paragraphs including many abstracts. The structure and content fully correspond to the stated problem. The bibliography of the article includes 26 titles of works by both domestic and foreign authors devoted to the problem under consideration. Appealing to opponents is the main advantage of the article. The author seems to fit his research into a double semantic horizon. Firstly, in the context of research on the work of the medieval philosopher. Secondly, the author establishes parallels between the ideas of Lullius and the philosophical seekers of both his contemporaries and later philosophers, especially emphasizing the roll call of the positions of Lullius, Kant and E. Trubetskoy. The article contains an appeal to both classical studies of the history of medieval thought. Ekko, F. Copleston, A.Ya. Gurevich, A.F. Losev, S. S. Neretina and to the authors who studied the work of Lulli – A.P. Ogurtsov, E. Gilson, V.A. Kulmatov, etc. The article will be of interest to researchers of medieval thought and creativity of Lulli, authors working in the field of philosophical anthropology, historians and cultural scientists.