When Pope Urbane II called for the first Crusade in 1095, he spoke to an audience craving a rugged spirituality that does not back down to Saracens or infidels. Christendom had yielded too much prime real estate to the advance of Islam. Urban said the Turks were “Persian people, an accursed race,” and that warriors who would face the barbarians would be led by Christ Himself across mountain and sea. Jerusalem was “the navel of the world.” Whoever reclaimed this paradise would find “The way is short, the toil will be followed by an incorruptible crown.” There was no lack of volunteers to take up what they called “the sign of the cross.” With this aggressive rhetoric, Europe’s Christendom reached a boiling point of religious excitement.
In the first of the seven greater crusades they wore a red cross as a badge. Some men branded their skin with a red hot cross. In the first crusade alone, David Schaff estimated that three hundred thousand volunteers died just trying to get to the “Holy Land” in their attempt to liberate Christ’s sepulcher from the “infidels.”
Coleridge expressed the Crusaders’ uncertain hope in these words:
The knights’ bones are dust,
And their good swords are rust;
Their souls are with the saints, we trust.
The Crusades failed in three respects:
1) The Holy Land was not won.
2) The advance of Islam across the world map was not permanently checked.
3) The schism between the Eastern Church headquartered in Constantinople and the Western Church in Rome was not healed.
David Schaff says the Crusades “were the cause of great evils. As a school of practical religion and morals, they were no doubt disastrous for most of the Crusaders. They were attended by all the usual demoralizing influences of war and the sojourn of armies in an enemy’s country. The vices of the Crusading camps were a source of deep shame in Europe. Popes lamented them. Bernard exposed them. Writers set forth the fatal mistake of those who were eager to make conquest of the earthly Jerusalem and were forgetful of the heavenly city. ‘Many wended their way to the holy city, unmindful that our Jerusalem is not here.’ So wrote the Englishman, Walter Map, after Saladin’s victories in 1187.”
During that misguided era there was another example of burning zeal which took a different route to conquer the Saracens and infidels of the Middle East. Raymond Lull (c. 1235-c.1315), was the first known missionary to the Moslems. He did not lead an army, but he appears in history as a kind of holy protest. He is one solitary man, a spectacle before the eyes of Europe for what the Crusades might have been had they been waged with prayer and the persuasive powers of the preached Word.
Lull was born into a noble family of Palma, capital of Majorca, one of the Baleric Islands of Spain. He would have heard the romance of the Crusades in his cradle. Given a military education, he instead became a poet and philosopher, as well as a reckless youth in the court of King James of Aragon. Already he was publishing books on philosophy and poetry at thirty.
But the bent of his mind was toward sensuality. His marriage and family did not seem to hinder his incessant womanizing. He was a lecherous filanderer until the day he wrote a suggestive poem to give to an attractive woman. He interrupted a church service by riding his horse inside the building to deliver the poem. Reading the poem, the woman took him aside and showed him an ugly cancerous growth. She was dying and Lull was jolted. His mindless hedonism gave way to contemplations on the meaning of the cross and the sacrifice of Christ. It led to the salvation of his soul.
After his conversion, he determined to give himself to reaching the Saracens. Roman Catholics claim that he divided his estate among kinsmen and friends and entered an ascetic life as a Franciscan tertiary. But this is uncertain. We do know that in preparation for missionary work among the Moslems, Lull learned Arabic from a Moorish slave. This young Saracen did not become a Christian, and on one occasion Lull heard him blaspheme the Son of God. Indignant, Lull struck the slave violently across the face. The slave drew a knife and wounded Lull, for which he was imprisoned. Perhaps assuming that he would be executed, the Saracen slave committed suicide in that prison cell. More than ever, Lull felt that he had not learned the lesson of love. He was not ready. Thereafter this tragedy may account for the seriousness with which Lull approached his preparations. Wilbur Smith used to complain that too many Christians are “getting ready to get ready to get ready.”
Some might have thought that of Lull also. For years Lull filled the role of a professional student, then started a school to teach Arabic and Chaldean. Meanwhile he promoted missions, making frustrating appeals to the Pope for support of those missionary efforts.
In 1291, at the age of fifty-five, he first journeyed out as a missionary to the Moslems of North Africa. He could not persuade others to go. Perhaps what was needed was an example. So he went himself, defenseless and alone, “not by force but by reason, not in hatred but in love.” In Tunis, “where proselytism was a crime, and conversion was apostasy, and both punishable with death,” he proposed a public debate with the Moslem mullahs. Instead of debate, they gave him a jail cell and then banishment.
Back in Europe, he resumed his lecturing and writing, with the aim of recruiting missionaries for North Africa. He planned to set up missionary training schools across Europe. For several years he lectured in Paris, Montpelier, Genoa, and other universities, and wrote a book of diagrams and arguments showing the superiority of Christianity.
Lull was thinking through the principles of foreign missions. Besides studying the Arabic language, he promoted the idea of having schools for Greek and Hebrew for the purpose of expounding Scripture, as well as to enable evangelism in the Middle East. In 1305 or 1306, he made another attempt to convert the Moslems of Tunis. He feigned as if he himself was open to being converted to Islam. The Moslems said he would receive great honors if he would convert. At that point, Lull countered, “And I promise you, if you will turn and believe on Jesus Christ, abundant riches and eternal life.” Again he was banished from the country.
Around this time, Lull described his solemn burden: “I had a wife and children; I was tolerably rich; I led a secular life. All these things I cheerfully resigned for the sake of promoting the common good and diffusing abroad the holy faith. I learned Arabic. I have several times gone abroad to preach the gospel to the Saracens. I have for the sake of the faith been cast into prison and scourged. I have labored forty-five years to win over the shepherds of the church and the princes of Europe to the common good of Christendom. Now I am old and poor, but still I am intent on the same object. I will persevere in it till death, if the Lord permits it.”
In 1308, he came out strongly against the Crusades, declaring, “I see many knights going to the Holy Land beyond the seas and thinking that they can acquire it by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain that which they think to have. Whence it seems to me that the conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in the way in which Thou and Thine apostles acquired it, namely, by love and prayers, and the pouring out of tears and of blood.”
In Europe, he secured a councilar decree to establish professorships of Oriental languages at Avignon, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Salamanca. In 1315, at age 79, he made his third advance on the Moslem lines of North Africa. When he emerged into public notice with fiery attacks on Islam, the Moslem population rose up to drive him from the city with sticks and stones, leaving him half dead on the seashore outside the gate of the city. Sailors found him and took him aboard ship. The next day, on the way back to Majorca, he died.
Dr. George Smith said, “No church, Papal or Reformed, has produced a missionary so original in plan, so ardent and persevering in execution, so varied in gifts, so inspired by the love of Christ, as this saint of seventy-nine, who Mohammedans stoned to death on the 30th of June, 1315. In an age of violence and faithlessness, he was the apostle of heavenly love.”
Lull’s words express his resolve as he moved toward martyrdom for the sake of Christ.
He who loves not, lives not;
He who lives by the Life, cannot die.
His most memorable contribution was to substitute love instead of force in missionary labors. That love made him a hard working and well-prepared missionary. In theology and philosophy we feel that he fared well for someone who lived before the time of the Reformation, amid so much religious obfuscation. The Roman church has always been uncomfortable with Lull, hesitating to call him either a heretic or a saint. The Jesuits have never concealed their hostility, and his books were condemned by the Inquisition.
Eymericus, the Inquisitor, bitterly opposed those called Lullists. He brought charges against Lull’s works before the Roman Catholic court, and claimed that there was a bull by Pope Gregory XI condemning Lull’s teaching. Suffice it to say that Lull has never been canonized; however, Pope Pius IX did recognize him for praise. Most of his theological, philosophical, scientific, and poetic works are no longer extant. Raymond Lull was a prodigious man (he may have written three hundred works). He was that rare genius who consecrated his mental powers and finally his physical powers to his Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Lull wrote, “Men die of old age; die owing to the want of natural warmth and to excess of cold; and, therefore, may Thy servant, if it please Thee, not die such a death. I have often shivered from great cold and fright, but when will that day and hour be, when my body will tremble, owing to the great glow of love, and its great desire to die for its Saviour?”
Information for this article taken from:
A. T. Pierson, The New Acts of the Apostles: The Marvels of Modern Missions, 1893
Samuel Zwemer, Raymund Lull: First Missionary to the Moslems, 1902
David Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 5, Eerdman