Aloma is grieved, and endeavours to marry Blanquerna to a beautiful girl called Cana. Blanquerna’s reply is to persuade Cana to become a nun, while he himself retires to the desert to carry out his resolve. The story then describes circumstantially and with some prolixity the lives of Evast and Aloma after Blanquerna has left them; it passes on to Cana, who eventually becomes abbess of her convent; and finally, after some long digressions upon convent life, to the later history of Blanquerna, which occupies the rest of the romance.
The second book of _Blanquerna_ deals with the hero’s life before he is ordained priest and rises to the rank of abbot in the monastery which he has entered. A digression follows, entitled ‘The Book of Ave Maria,’ purporting to be an account of the devotions to Our Lady which the hero established. The third book presents him as a bishop, and the fourth as pope.
The various religious ideals presented by Lull in succession lead up to the great ideal of his life: the evangelisation of the world. Blanquerna’s supreme aim as pope is to strive ‘that all infidels and schismatics may be brought into the union of the Holy Catholic Faith.’ His cardinals are quaintly named after the clauses of the _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_, and every clause is expounded so as to illustrate the activity which the Church should show in converting the heathen.
To the court of the Pope comes at length a jester,--one Ramón the Fool,--none other, of course, than Lull himself. ‘I would be as a fool,’ he says, ‘to do reverence and honour to Jesus Christ, and by reason of my exceeding love I would know no measure in my speech.’ Thus disguised, the author can write much which he might not otherwise have dared to put into words. And above all he can deliver himself of the shame he feels because the Head of the Church will grant so little aid to those who aim at following Christ’s last recorded command to convert all nations.
The story ends with the decision of Blanquerna, the pope now grown old in the service of the Church and the conversion of the heathen, to renounce his high office, retire to a hermitage, and devote his last days to contemplation and prayer. His new life is described in detail, and it is interwoven with this description that we come upon the _Book of the Lover and the Beloved_ and the _Art of Contemplation_.