A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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amenable to analysis and theologically meaningful. And like their Christian contemporaries, they invoked a wide array of initially inexplicable phenomena—ranging from spells and amulets to artisanal “trade secrets”—which they utilized to think through the limits and meaning of the natural order. Closer attention to several of the categories of “remembrances” discussed above allow us to trace not only the conceptual parallels between Jewish and Christian conceptions of nature, and the role of wonders therein, but also the specific, shared textual genres they utilized in order to explore them.
OCCULT PROPERTIES AND “SUBTLE SUBSTANCES”
We have noted that “wondrous” stones such as the magnet and even tekumah featured prominently among the remembrances invoked by the Pietists, who claim that they lend credence to God’s invisible powers. But the Pietists do not simply assert that these stones function through supernatural channels. Rather, they attempt to the best of their abilities to account for the specific means by which the magnet functions: “We cannot see who attracts [the iron], or by what means it is attracted to it. Rather, there is some subtle substance that attracts [the iron] to it which we cannot see.” The underlying strategy is not to validate God’s supernatural powers by equating God’s attributes with those of other supernatural phenomena. On the contrary, by positing the existence of an intermediary substance that attracts the iron to the magnet, and that is too “subtle” to be seen by human eyes, the Pietists are seeking to explain that magnetism works via innate and consistent, albeit hidden, means.167 Just as the only way to account for the empirically observed phenomenon of magnetic attraction is to accept that invisible forces can function as part of nature, so, too, there is nothing unreasonable about accepting that God’s power is real, despite its invisibility.
A comparison between the Pietists’ approach to magnetism and that of some of their contemporaries lends credence to the notion that the Pietists understood magnetism to be a wholly “natural” remembrance. For in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, magnetism was frequently invoked in debates over the stability of the natural order—often by opponents of the increasingly naturalistic theological discourse. The thirteenth-century Spanish halakhist Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba), for instance, argued, “I find it surprising that [advocates of science and philosophy] agree that their investigations do not even grasp the truth of natural phenomena, for every object has properties that they cannot account for [rationally], such as the fact that a stone can attract iron…. Is there anything that is more supernatural than for one inanimate object to cause another one to move? … If Aristotle himself had described this, and it were not already well known, [these scientists and philosophers] would doubtlessly have repudiated him.”168 The Pietists’ efforts, however limited, to explain the workings of magnetism are noteworthy when compared with this alternative approach. For Ibn Adret, the magnet proves that investigation of the natural world can never ultimately lead to truths about God, because He is fundamentally hidden from rational inquiry—notably, the same argument advanced by Augustine centuries earlier. Ibn Adret’s pupil R. Joshua Ibn Shueb echoes this approach:
How can one rely exclusively upon his intellect? For we see that the intellect is exhausted even by natural, physical things … among stones…. For we see that certain stones, which are inanimate and motionless, can attract iron … and induce motion in motionless objects…. [Thus,] the intellect is insufficient for grasping even sensible objects, much less hidden matters…. Rather, [the philosophers] claim that these stones have an attraction that causes them to become attached to these objects, while other [stones] have an antipathy [that causes them to be repulsed]…. And there are many other matters also which the scientists are unable to explain, and which, in light of their inabilities to offer explanations, they attribute to “occult properties” (segulot).169
For Ibn Shueb, occult properties are not a means of situating natural but inexplicable phenomena within a stable, rational natural order. Rather, they are an intellectually dishonest attempt to mask the fact that the intellect is not a valid guide to understanding the natural world—much less “hidden matters” such as theology. For the Pietists, in contrast, it is precisely investigating the phenomenon of magnetism, and concluding that there must be some natural process through which it functions, that allows one to draw a link between the natural world and the theological truths it encodes.
Indeed, conceptual parallels to the Pietistic approach to magnetism can be found not among “anti-rationalists” like Ibn Adret, but precisely among the philosophical authors, both Jewish and Christian, whose insistence upon natural causation rendered the occult properties of the magnet potentially troubling. For instance, the Pietists’ contemporary William of Auvergne, a French philosopher and theologian steeped in Aristotelian science, invoked the mysterious workings of the lodestone—a magnet that can “magnetize” other metal objects—as a means of justifying various other philosophical propositions. William describes how one can link a series of metal pins to one another in a chain, so long as the first pin is attached to adamantine (a lodestone), which magnetizes each subsequent pin in contact with it:
For you will see that the first pin of those ordered in this way hangs from this stone which it touches; then that the second pin adheres to it by similar contact, and the third, the fourth, and so on with the others. Since, therefore, the power of the adamantine by which it makes the first pin to adhere to it is transferred to all the pins, why is it surprising if the vivifying or animal power of the first heaven is transferred to the second, and from the second to the third, and so on until it comes to the last of the mobile heavens, which is the heaven of the moon, even if there is not another bond or bonding between them than contiguity or contact, as is seen in the proposed example.170
The argumentation here is nearly identical to that found in the Pietistic sifrut ha-yihud. The ability of the spheres to transfer their “vivifying force” sequentially, from the outermost reaches of the cosmos inward, cannot be apprehended visually, but the example of the lodestone grants credence to this abstract scientific notion.
Jewish rationalists, too, were content to explain magnetism in occult terms—without rejecting the broader construct of natural causality. Abraham Ibn Ezra,171 Maimonides,172 the fourteenth-century southern French philosopher Levi b. Gershon (Gersonides),173 and many others discussed the workings of the magnet in their writings, and concluded that its occult workings can be subsumed within the routine natural order.174 Magnetism should have been problematic for Maimonides and Gersonides in particular, since the Aristotelian natural philosophy to which they were committed held action at a distance to be impossible. Maimonides thus insisted that “even the magnet exerts an attraction upon iron at a distance through a force, spreading out from it in the air, which encounters the iron.”175 Gersonides, who discussed magnetism several times in his philosophical opus Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord) and in his super-commentaries on Averroes, likewise concluded that “the intervening medium is affected,” and that some sort of physical contact between the mover and the moved object is taking place.176 For Gersonides, who also uses the language of segulot, occult properties are not a strike against a rationally comprehensible natural order, as Ibn Adret or Ibn Shueb would have it. Rather, they are a means of privileging Aristotelian physics even in the face of potentially conflicting evidence. His account of the occult workings of magnetism, like Ibn Ezra’s and even Maimonides’, is thus functionally equivalent to the Pietists’ discussion of the “subtle substance that attracts [the iron to the magnet] which we cannot see.”
It must be noted that many of these parallels are of heuristic value only—while they were familiar with the writings of Ibn Ezra, the Pietists never had access to the Guide, and predated William by several decades and Gersonides by a century. But the similarities are suggestive nonetheless. For the Pietists and these philosophical thinkers alike, magnetism is a “wondrous” phenomenon, whose occult workings do not undermine natural causality but rather can be subsumed within it—and can even be invoked to shed light on comparable philosophical and theological doctrines. When we turn to the Pietists’ treatment of the uses of magnetism, however, we find parallels in Christian scientific sources that are far closer in time, and which suggest the possibility of direct exchanges and encounters.
As we have seen above, the