Spiritual Medicine in Ramon Llull’s Book of Contemplation

Abstract

In his intellectual and moral program, Ramon Llull used the topic of spiritual medicine, which was usual in penitential and homiletic literature during the 13^th and 14^th centuries. In 1300, he wrote the Medicine for the Sin, a poem built on the metaphor of a moral electuary, but the motif of spiritual medicine can be found throughout Llull’s production. This paper focuses on the formulation of this topic in the Book of Contemplation, the first work in which Llull presents spiritual medicine as an analogy to physical medicine and describes it with all its components, completely connected to the Lullian doctrine of intentions.