a talmudic story in which Alexander revived some salted fish by dipping them in water flowing from the Garden of Eden: “It says in Tractate Tamid [that] Alexander the Macedonian washed the [dead] fish [in the waters of the Garden of Eden] and they lived.”118 For Eleazar, this story proves the reasonableness of God’s ability to resurrect the dead. Another marvel described in the same talmudic sugya is mined for theological meaning as well, namely an eyeball that alternates between being extremely heavy and extremely light. Judah proves the theological notion that the entirety of Creation praises God119 by referring to a midrashic tale in which Alexander descends under the sea in a kind of proto-submarine, and hears the water singing God’s praises.120 Alexander is also invoked in reference to other wondrous theological tenets, such as the location of the Garden of Eden and Gehenna.121
As I noted at the outset, scholars have focused on inexplicable “remembrances” of this sort in claiming that in medieval Ashkenaz “the universe [was] … empty of harmony and beauty, and above all of meaning.” I have argued that such a claim is belied by the consistent tendency to invest natural causation, empirical observation, and prosaic objects and phenomena with spiritual profundity. But even the incantations and wondrous objects just surveyed should not be read as pointing to an exclusive concern for “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural.” In order to understand their manifest interest in the wondrous powers of incantations, herbs, and stones, it is necessary to briefly survey the intellectual landscape in which the Pietists, along with their high medieval neighbors, were operating.
NATURE BEFORE “NATURE”: NIFLA’OT AND MIRABILIA
The once common notion that mechanistic, comprehensible “nature” can be sharply distinguished from the arbitrary and inexplicable “supernatural” has not fared well in recent decades.122 Just as historians and philosophers of science have problematized the traditional opposition between “science” and “pseudoscience,”123 an array of philosophers and critical theorists have demolished the edifice of an unchanging, essentialistic “nature,” instead emphasizing that conceptions of nature are historically contingent and culturally constructed. Thus post-structuralists, feminist and queer theorists, political ecologists, and others have noted that what gets defined as “natural” often has less to do with any intrinsic properties than it does with the specific power relations that are enacted through the very process of crafting definitions. Rather than conceptualize nature vaguely as a “jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks,”124 these scholars are far more likely to interrogate the manner by which “nature” (and, concomitantly, “science”) are produced, and the agendas they further, than they are to unquestionably accept their transhistorical existence.125 “Nature,” in this view, “is a meaningless term apart from our will to define it.”126
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
