A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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Defining “nature” was no less fraught during the Middle Ages. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources lists twenty-five distinct meanings for natura (“nature”) and twenty-nine for naturalis (“natural”)—and this in British sources alone.127 Arthur Lovejoy, for his part, famously identified sixty-six distinct definitions of nature.128 There is no question that in the high Middle Ages, European theologians and philosophers, artists and poets, were increasingly preoccupied by the meaning and functioning of the phenomenal world—a process M. D. Chenu famously termed “the discovery of nature.”129 But the precise category of “nature” underlying these pursuits was (like the phenomenal world itself) shifting and mutable: “The term nature could stand for the general order of all creation as a single, harmonious whole, whose study might lead to an understanding of the model on which this created world is formed. It could stand for the Platonic intermediary between the intelligible and material worlds; or for the divinely ordained power that presides over the continuity and preservation of whatever lives in the sublunary world; or for the creative principle directly subordinated to the mind and will of God.”130 Such multifaceted approaches to nature were often personified in the goddess Natura, a character who took on increased centrality in an array of medieval literary texts. Natura was varyingly employed to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts, to represent theological hierarchies through her mediation between the divine and the physical, or to firm up (sometimes in the breach) social, sexual, and gender norms.131 When it came to the realm of morality, nature was sometimes taken to represent the intrinsically good (i.e., “natural law”), at other times characterized by amoral and even immoral carnality.132 It was against these still unstable meanings of “nature” that the very category of the “supernatural” was being oppositionally defined over the course of the high Middle Ages.133
This fluid state of affairs can help us to make sense of the Pietists’ tendency to explore both the marvelous and the mundane in their theological writings. Like their Christian contemporaries, Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were struggling to impose order upon a wide array of theologically resonant physical phenomena, both those they observed empirically and those they read about in authoritative texts. When the Pietists’ engagement with wondrous “remembrances” is compared with that of their Christian contemporaries, it becomes apparent that the Pietistic approach toward the natural world paralleled broader currents in Christian theological discourse. A brief survey of some influential Christian approaches to the theological meaning of the natural world—and to the mirabilia that seemed to disrupt it—will illustrate how the interrogation of “nature” among twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern European Christians had much in common with that of their Pietistic neighbors.
Let us begin, as medieval Christian theologians often did, with Augustine of Hippo. One of the earliest and most influential treatments of the theological meaning of natural wonders can be found in book twenty-one of Augustine’s City of God, where he responds to skeptical critics who dispute “unreasonable” Christian teachings such as the resurrection of the dead or the miracles described in the Bible. Augustine’s strategy in responding to these critics is not to rationally justify these Christian doctrines, but rather to delegitimize reason itself as an infallible guide to what is and is not true. Augustine details some of the “marvelous” phenomena and objects that can be observed in the natural world—the magnet, for example—and claims that the majority of them are not subject to naturalistic explanations. These wondrous phenomena surely exist, even though, like the resurrection of the dead or the biblical miracles, they cannot be rationally accounted for. Augustine concludes that whether or not something is rationally comprehensible bears no relationship to whether it does or does not exist—God’s omnipotence alone is a sufficient justification for both marvelous phenomena and supernatural miracles. Far from subsuming “marvelous” natural phenomena within the natural order, Augustine uses marvels to undermine the very notion that there is a natural order in the first place. Committed Christians should not invest time and energy in investigating the natural causes of wondrous phenomena, but instead channel the emotional wonder that comes from observing something unexplained into their apprehension of and relationship with God.134
Augustine’s perspective exercised a great deal of influence in the Latin West during the early medieval period.135 Beginning in the twelfth century, however, a number of interrelated developments took place that served to undermine his approach. The first was an epistemological shift: for the increasingly naturalistically and scientifically minded theologians of the high Middle Ages, the Augustinian approach to wonders was no longer tenable.136 “To appeal to the omnipotence of God is nothing but vain rhetoric; naked truth requires a little more sweat.”137 The existence of marvelous and hence inexplicable objects and phenomena presented an implicit threat to the scholastics’ valorization of philosophical-theological synthesis. For these thinkers, the emotion of wonder that one feels when confronted with something unexplained could no longer be depicted in the Augustinian manner as a religiously positive value; rather, wonder was simply an expression of ignorance, a tacit admission that one had not managed to discern the rational workings of whatever one was observing. This reevaluation of the wondrous reflected, and furthered, a lowering of the boundaries between the everyday, mundane phenomena whose inner workings were understandable and the exotic, seemingly marvelous phenomena whose inner workings appeared to be hidden from view. Both were, at least in theory, subsumed within a unified natural order.138
But ironically, at the same time that theologians and natural philosophers were revising the Augustinian conception of wonders, knowledge of and interest in the wondrous was dramatically on the rise. To begin with, the twelfth century saw the increased circulation of works of paradoxography, as the “renaissance of the twelfth century” spurred interest in classical texts (such as the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder) that catalogued hundreds of “natural wonders.”139 Late antique animal lore also became increasingly available, as the Greek Physiologus was edited into numerous recensions of Bestiaries, which quickly achieved widespread popularity.140 And ancient knowledge concerning the magical and medical properties of gemstones and certain herbs was spread in flourishing genres of lapidaries and herbals.141 At the same time that classical descriptions of natural wonders were becoming widespread, moreover, interest in contemporary marvels was being fed as well. The high Middle Ages saw a flourishing of travel writings, including the popular works of authors like Marco Polo and Gerald of Wales (and, eventually, the hugely popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville). In their descriptions of their journeys, these authors called attention to the wondrous natural phenomena that they observed or heard about in the course of their travels. Elements of these paradoxographic texts and travel narratives made their way into epic romances as well142—the so-called “Alexander Romance” was particularly influential, and different versions incorporated elements of the flourishing paradoxographic discourse.143 All of these developments ensured a wide audience for and interest in these exotic marvels.144
Thus, just as the European interest in natural wonders was reaching its zenith, a number of influential European intellectuals were engaged in a battle to “‘de-wonder’ anomalies”145—as the Pseudo-Albertine text De mirabilibus mundi put it, “The philosopher’s work is to make marvels cease.”146 One common strategy seized upon by thinkers committed to the notion of a stable natural order was to insist that “wonders” are not contrary to the workings of nature, but merely to what we know of nature. The English canon lawyer Gervase of Tilbury, for instance, insisted that wonders are “perspectival,”147 that is, only “wondrous” to those who are ignorant of their (wholly natural) workings. “We call things marvels that are beyond our understanding,” he explains, “even when they are natural.”148 The recognition that the experience of wonder derived solely from one’s knowledge, or lack thereof, rather than from the ontological status of the wondrous object itself, similarly led the twelfth-century natural philosopher Adelard of Bath (whose Quaestiones naturales first imported much Arabic scientific knowledge to northwestern Europe) to deride his imagined interlocutor for his frequent expressions of amazement: “I do not wonder at your wonder, for the blind person