Wonders and the Order of Nature.

Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750.

New York: MIT Press/Zone Books, 1998. 111 pls. + 511 pp. $34. ISBN: 0-942299-90-6.

When two sober intellectual historians -- one of medieval and Renaissance medicine, the other of Enlightenment mathematics -- confess to a long-held fascination with monsters and prodigies, the result is likely to be a wonderful book. In an earlier joint article, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park indulged their weird fascination to argue that monsters passed from being considered as prodigies in the Middle Ages -- dire messengers from God -- to wonders in the Renaissance, finally to become natural objects in the early modern period. In the present book, they have abandoned this simple story of the gradual rational understanding of monsters and other wonders in favor of a more subtle one. Their aim is to "historicize" not only wonders -- the objects and events that provoke wonder -- but also wonder itself, the affect or passion. In so doing, they intend to trace, through the ideas of and responses to the exceptional and the irregular, the history of ideas about the order and regularity of nature.

Very briefly, their general conclusions here are that in the high Middle Ages, wonder, a species of fear, was the proper attitude of humble Christians to God's inscrutable creation, and curiosity was a species of concupiscence akin to lust, both views received from Augustine. Wonders themselves, being particular exceptions to the general or familiar operation of nature, were either excluded from natural philosophy, which was about only universals and regularities, or explained away. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, wonders enjoyed a brief career as the proper objects of "preternatural philosophy" (159-72), and they evoked neither fearful ignorance nor humble awe, but pleasurable delight. In the sixteenth century, wonder was briefly conjoined with delight and curiosity (which was no longer associated with lust, but rather with greed) as both the origin and motive for inquiry into natural things and the result of its successful pursuit. By the eighteenth century, curiosity had parted company with wond er and greed alike, and became just serious application. The celebrated dissolution of the distinction between art and nature in the scientific revolution occurred in part because natural and artificial wonders were promiscuously displayed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collections. In the seventeenth century, wonders helped usher in a new scientific entity: the particular fact, divorced from theory and explanation. Facts -- even singularly incredible facts -- were more readily accepted than theories in the new scientific societies of the seventeenth century because they did not give rise to so acrimonious and unsociable debate. Only with uncontested facts could the "sociability" of early modern science be preserved. But by the eighteenth century, incredulity in the face of wonders was the rule and wonders ceased to be a legitimate part of the scientific enterprise. This was not because of the rise of empirical, rational science, however, but rather because wonders were thought to be socially disreputa ble (vulgar) and, when brandished by religious enthusiasts as divine portents, were disruptive of the social and religious order. Thus monsters (for instance) gave rise to revulsion and horror neither because they broke God's natural laws (which only God can do), nor because they were signs of God's judgement (which he gave very sparingly), but because they were unseemly and broke social conventions. For this reason, among the learned and polite at least, monsters ceased to be wonders, and wonder itself passed into a sign of ignorant credulity, a motive perhaps for scientific inquiry, but no longer a part of it.

This is a compelling argument of great scope and verve, supported by copious textual and documentary sources and profuse illustrations, all usually deftly interpreted with great sensitivity to context and to the sensibilities and the intentions of the time. There are, however, a few lapses. For instance, Augustine did list, as Park in one of her chapters says, a farrago of widely believed wonders to counteract the incredulity that the doctrine of eternal bodily punishments for the damned usually met with. But this rhetorical association would hardly have caused all wonders whatever, for the rest of the Middle Ages, to be tinged with the fear of eternal damnation, as she asserts (39-48). Thomas Aquinas, for instance, should hardly be accused of playing down Aristotle's view that wonder is a source of delight and the beginning of philosophy. In the Summa theologiae ([I.sup.a-][II.sup.ae] q. 41, a. 4), he did concede to John Damascene that wonder (admiratio) and amazement (stupor) can be species of fear, adding that they are to the intellect what sloth is to the body, though according to Park "he differentiated between wonder and amazement just enough to save Aristotle's basic point" (113). In fact, he asserted in this passage that admiratio and stupor are kinds of fear only when aroused by evils; in the earlier question 32, article 8, which Park does not cite, far from merely "not denying wonder's affinity with pleasure and Inquiry," he had argued that wonder is a source of delight, insofar as it is the desire for knowledge and inspires the desire and hope of learning. "Whatever is wonderful is pleasing," he unequivocally wrote, anticipating the allegedly less dour philosophers of the Renaissance, such as Cardano (167), just as the distinction between admiratio and stupor seems to anticipate Descartes's between admiration and estonnement (317).

Medieval philosophers and theologians in general, according to Park, claimed a "virtual monopoly on absolute certainty" by asserting a "social ideology" of "privileged knowers" and by banishing wonder as a "taboo passion" (117-118). A purported example of this is the frontispiece representing Nicole Oresme presenting his translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to the King of France (figure 3.1). In the last frame of the illustration, Oresme is shown expelling a woman and a youth from the reading room: "As a whole," the caption reads, "the frontispiece indicates the bookish and doctrinal orientation of medieva1 philosophy." Well, perhaps, although Oresme's translating the Ethics into French might lead one to the opposite conclusion, and the last frame in fact illustrates Aristotle's own suggestion that his book is appropriate neither for those without practical experience nor for those still susceptible to the passions of youth (Nicomachean Ethics 1.3). Again, Park shows us Abbot Suger contemplating the marvellous treasures of St. Denis, and she describes his difficulties in controlling the crowds when these treasures were displayed. "The ownership of rare and unusual objects," she suddenly asserts a little later, "served to reinforce social, political, and religious hierarchies," which she then goes on to expound through a social theory of symbols and power (76-88).

In general, when not doing good, old-fashioned intellectual history, Park seems taken with the social theories of power and "self-fashioning" proposed by Lauro Martines and Stephen Greenblatt (e.g., 91, 107, 147, and 158), just as Daston is with Steven Shapin's Social History of Truth (1994). Facts, Daston asserts in one of her chapters, were preferred over theories and explanations by the scientific societies in the seventeenth century in part because they were less contentious and so more sociable; to prefer theories over facts was a mere "bias" (241-246). But at the same time, "an empirical epistemology prescribed sociability": if you relied on others to gather your facts, it would be well to get along with them (245). So which is it: were the members and correspondents of seventeeth-century societies empirical in order to be sociable, or sociable in order to be empirical? And in any case, if, as Shapin claimed and as Daston concurs (249-50), giving the lie was to be avoided above all, facts would seem mo re likely to be the source of bitter disagreements than theories: one can impune the judgement, the motives, the insight, and the intelligence of someone holding a controversial theory, but hardly his truthfulness. Nevertheless, by the early eighteenth century, Daston asserts, incredulity of strange facts was again the rule (251), though she does not look for evidence that the fighting had broken out again.

Finally, to forestall impatient minds from fleeing tedious observation of particulars for premature theorizing, Robert Hooke recommended that philosophers give the same attention to ordinary things as they give to rarities -- which does not mean, as Daston thinks, that Hooke urged them "to see the banal... as marvellous" (315-316) -- though it is none the less good advice, for historians as well as philosophers. For a premise of this book is that the order and regularity of nature are revealed when "transgressed" by "liminal" phenomena, a Baconian supposition that would be shared by neither Aquinas nor Newton. In the end, monsters, wonders, and prodigies, like all such marginalia so much now in vogue, can tell us much about the boundaries and limits of order and regularity, but little about the territory that lies within.