not via mathematical formulae or logical deduction, but through experimentation and careful observation. While discussions of casting spells, or of wondrous animals, might seem at first glance to have little to do with horticultural guidance or recipes for tanning solution, all of these contents were often grouped together in medieval writings on account of their shared epistemological foundations. Indeed, the curricular divisions of knowledge that can be found in works like William of Conches’s Philosophia mundi tend to subsume “magic” within the “mechanical arts” rather than in the Trivium or Quadrivium—attesting to the perceived linkages between empiricism, mechanical knowledge, and the occult.160
In fact, this period saw the growth of an entire genre of literature devoted to precisely these subjects, namely the “books of secrets.”161 Along with discussions of “marvelous” natural objects and their uses, these collections also contained a mix of recipes for medicines, spells, and instructions on how to master a wide array of crafts. Despite (or perhaps because of) their purportedly esoteric nature, these books were extremely popular in the medieval period—even among the scholastics, many of whom devoted considerable attention to these texts and their contents.162 Certain especially popular books of secrets even achieved quasi-canonical status among the university students and scholars. The extremely influential Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), for instance, has survived in so many manuscripts that Thorndike declared it “the most popular book in the Middle Ages.”163 This text, a “mirror for princes” supposedly composed by Aristotle for the use of his pupil Alexander the Great, combines basic political and moralistic guidance with medical, alchemical, and physiognomic contents and sundry magical spells. The very fact that it was attributed to Aristotle, and flourished among clerics and university scholars alike, attests to the fluid boundaries during this period between magic, science, and the occult.164
Scholars of medieval and early modern Jewish culture have increasingly explored the fluidity between medieval Jewish “science” and “magic.” Today it is a commonplace, for example, that the rationalist philosopher Moses Maimonides’ famous condemnation of astrology as a pseudoscience was well beyond the mainstream of medieval Jewish scientific discourse, and that influential thinkers from Abraham Ibn Ezra to Abraham Bar Hiyya to Gersonides all considered astrology to be a—even the—valid approach to understanding the natural world, useful for scientific, medical, and theological purposes alike.165 Occult properties—known as segulot—were seized upon by Jewish thinkers just as they were by their Christian contemporaries, and amulets and talismans were endorsed as medically effective and well within the contemporary definition of “rationality.”166 For philosophically minded Sephardic thinkers, then, as for high medieval scholastics, the ostensibly “magical” and occult could be readily subsumed within a stable and comprehensible natural order.
Awareness of this cultural and intellectual backdrop casts the Pietists’ preoccupation with both routine and marvelous “remembrances” in new light. Like their Christian contemporaries, the Pietists assumed that the natural order was both 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
