The Ethics of the Miraculous: Magical Technologies and Religious Pedagogies

What is a "technology"? In the three preceding pieces the term is treated as effectively self-evident. The contributors do not pause to define it, but in essence treat it, when understood as a process, as meaning "advanced technology," or as engineering or applied science; when understood as an object, the contributors treat "technology" as equivalent to a piece of machinery. Magic remains largely undefined as well, but the sense is equally clear: magic, understood as a process, is a kind of experience of an alternate reality, more vivid than everyday reality and perhaps escaping normative assumptions about perception.

Insofar as "magic" coupled with "technology" in this colloquial sense raises any vexed issues, as Michael Ostling has pointed out, it may seem to do so only to the degree that these terms are understood in opposition to each other: a "technology" in this colloquial sense is conceived as something that manipulates physical or material forces (even where they may be hidden) while a "magic" is conceived to manipulate evidently non-physical forces (spirits of the dead, demons, orishas and so forth). In some cases, one might be inclined to think of as "magical" any widely used technology that seems to work for some people, but nobody can explain how (dowsing to find current, homeopathic remedies to cure colds). As Ostling puts it, "In such everyday perspectives … technology works via natural or practical means…; in contrast magic … doesn't (really) work at all …" (Forum Introduction, 170).

What happens, then, when you set about creating convincing technological illusions of the purported effects of magic or religious miracles? Technologies of entertainment magic have long been used by pickpockets for stealing wallets, by religious leaders to attract a following, by spiritualists to make money off the grieving relatives of the recently deceased, and so on. Depending on context, then, there could be ethical issues surrounding the use of any technology—understanding this term very broadly—that effectively mimics religious experience, or that deploys magic (real or apparent) in an unfair way, or alternatively that covers up the use of magic where people would feel uncomfortable with it. What is the line between piety and fraud? Between therapy and cold reading? The vexed issues I see as latent in all the pieces in this forum are ethical ones. I want to use my own space here first to delimit and expand the understanding of what constitutes a "technology," in the process reviewing a medieval magico-religious technology for knowledge acquisition and showing how it worked. In the last section I explore the ethical issues that seem to me to hover under the surface of each piece in this forum.

EXPANDING THE SENSES OF THE WORD "TECHNOLOGY": PREMODERN USAGES

For a long time, at least since the seventeenth century, and again more lately, "technology" has been a word capable of indicating a variety of methods for doing many kinds of things—things by no means relegated exclusively to materials science. The Oxford English Dictionary offers seventeenth-century usages showing that "technology" might reference parts of a systematized understanding of a human skill set for treating entirely non-material objects (e.g., the word is used with reference to a "learned and artificial discourse," or a "Cabalistical" technology).¹

The word "technology" was born in an era that still studied classics. It is a portmanteau of two Greek words, "techne" meaning a skill set (an exact equivalent of the word "ars" in Latin), and the suffix "-logy", from "logos" meaning speech or reason, also the root of "logic." In the classical and medieval periods, all the "artes" are "technai," or skill sets: this is true not only for the mechanical arts but the liberal arts too. Our contemporary colloquial idea of technology correlates most closely with the skill sets of the medieval "mechanical arts" (applied arts such as building, metalwork, navigation, and medicine). But the liberal arts, too, are technai—ars grammatica, ars rhetorica, ars logica, and so on; that is, they were skill sets as well. In the later...