The Beauty of Balance: A Theological Inquiry into Paradox Book

I heard about Ramon Llull, a 13th c. Catalan philosopher, from a passing mention in Vanished Kingdoms. The breadth of his interests are well represented in this anthology of four works. The first is The Book of the Gentile. An atheist meets three wise men: a Jew, a Christian, and a Saracen. Each tries to convince him of his religion's superiority to the other two. Each gives compelling and accurate arguments. The book is surprisingly broadminded and the ambiguous ending feels quite modern. The second is The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, a collection of 366 verses inspired by Sufism, but with a Christian theme. The third is The Book of the Beasts, which is a political fable about a kingdom of animals with a Machiavellian subtext. The final piece is the Ars Brevis in which Llull outlines his combinatoric method of using logic to build a philosophy. It suggests that Llull would have been a brilliant mathematician if he had lived in a later age (I found a website that produced an elaborate program using Llull's Art -- probably a better way of understanding it than this text, which is quite abstract).