III. De les branques d'amor
The Three Branches of Love
Llull introduces the three branches of love—conditions, questions, and prayers—explains their purpose, and outlines the method of exposition through the roots and rubrics.
The branches of love are many, but we want to bring them to three. Only three: conditions, questions, and prayers of love.1 The reason we place conditions, questions, and prayers of love in this Tree is that through the conditions, the lover will know how to condition his love to desire and love his beloved, and will know how to solve the questions of love; and through the questions of love, there will be consolation between the lover and Love, who will ask each other questions for love; and through the prayers, the lover will know how to pray to his beloved.2 The conditions, questions, and prayers will proceed through the roots of love, so that they can be ordered and understood according to their definitions. We divide the conditions into rubrics, mixing love with each root of love, and we'll do the same with the questions of love and the prayers. We'll send the questions to the conditions, by which they can be solved in such a way that the conditions and the questions correspond in number and rubrics, and we'll do likewise with the prayers.3 First they mixed love with goodness and greatness; afterward with goodness and duration, and so successively from rubric to rubric until the rubric of love.
Read the original Catalan
Branques damor son moltes; mas nos les volem adur a . iij. tan solament, les quals son; condicions, qüestions, prcgueres damor. La raó per que posam en aquest Arbre condicions, qüestions, pregueres damor, es car per les condicions sabrà lamic condicionar sa amor a desirar e amar son amat, e sabrà soure les qüestions damor; e per les qüestions damor serà solàs enfre lamic e lamor, quis faran qüestions per amor; e per les pregueres sabrà lamic pregar son amat.
Les condicions qüestions e pregueres iran per les rails damor, per ço que segons lurs diffinicions sien ordenades e conegudes; e departim les condicions en rúbriques, mesclant amor ab cascuna rail damor,' e asò metex farem de les qüestions damor e pregueres; e les qüestions trametrem a les condicions, ab qui poran ésser soltes en tal manera, que les condicions e les qüestions se concordaran per nombre e rúbriques; e asò metex de les pregueres.
Primerament mesclaren amor ab bonea granea: en après ab bonea duració, e enaxí successivament de rúbrica en rúbrica tro a la rúbrica damor.
Notes
- 1 ↩Reading 'prcgueres' as 'pregueres' (prayers), matching s4 and ordinary Old Catalan spelling; the supplied normalized text retains the OCR form. The semicolon after 'son' is treated as introducing the list (colon sense).
- 2 ↩Old Catalan 'soure' read as 'solre' (to solve/resolve). 'Solàs' is consolation/solace. 'Quis faran qüestions' taken as reciprocal 'qui·s faran qüestions' (who will put questions to each other). 'Condicionar' keeps the intentional echo with 'condicions'.
- 3 ↩Source has a stray apostrophe after damor; treated as punctuation noise, not a lexical variant.
Arbre de filosofia d'amor (Tree of the Philosophy of Love) companion
A daily portion of stillness
Chosen Portion delivers one short contemplative reading and a guided moment of silence each day — the ascent, one step at a time.
Chosen Portion is the paced doorway into this collection: it portions the dense mystical treatises into one daily reading plus guided silence, exactly as the 14-day plan teaches.
- Daily bite-sized excerpts from the contemplative classics, never a wall of text
- A built-in timed stillness practice that grows from 2 minutes to 10
- Gentle progression through the tradition — the app remembers where you are on the ascent