Comenius, John Amos

Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), a Czech philosopher and theologian, was one of the founders of modern educational theory. As a Protestant minister he had to leave Bohemia during the Counter-Reformation, spending most of his life in various European countries. His greatest work (not published during his lifetime) is De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica (A General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs), whose leading idea is the demand for a harmonious arrangement of human relations on the basis of rational enlightenment, the development of education, and the instruction of all humankind. Comenius builds his philosophy on an idea of human nature understood as grounded in an active creative force perpetually leading to improvement: instruction and education are the tools to fulfil this humanitarian ideal. To lend force to this, Comenius constructs a whole ontological system, in which a harmonious development of the whole of existence leads to human reality as its highest tier. Comenius was born in southern Moravia; his family belonged to the Czech reformist church known as the Unity of Brethren. After studies at the Union's schools in his own country and at the Universities of Herborn and Heidelberg, Comenius became a preacher of the reformed church, and later its bishop. His activities in his homeland - where he had started working on a great encyclopedia of universal knowledge in the Czech language and on his first educational works - were interrupted by the anti-Habsburg uprising of the Bohemian Estates (1618-20) which ended in the loss of the kingdom's independence. Enforced re-Catholicization and persecution of other religions followed. For a few years Comenius went into hiding while writing his best-known Czech book, the symbolic prose Labyrint sv?ta a ráj srdce (The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart), but in 1628 he left his country for good and settled in Leszno (Lissa) in Poland. Here he created his important educational works, Didactica and Janua linguarum reserata, where he demands equal rights to education for all people, and also his first pansophic works, Pansophiae prodromus and Conatuum pansophicarum dilucidatio, where he makes proposals for reforming political relations in the world ravaged by the Thirty Years' War. Comenius' educational and pansophic work found much support in Europe, and the English Parliament invited him to come to London to reform the education system and pursue his general efforts at universal improvement there. He recruited influential patrons such as James Ussher, John Selden, John Pym, Samuel Hartlib and others. Impulses from Comenius' stay in England contributed to the appearance of his Via lucis which contains - in addition to a proposal for an international organization of scientific work - Comenius' historical philosophy: Darkness (feudalism, the rule of the papacy and the Habsburgs, and general backwardness) will be driven away by Light because history is a tiered process where the amount of Light grows continuously out of the struggle with Darkness, in the form of rays of general education and rational enlightenment. Comenius expected that the period of the voyages of discovery, expansion of trade, book printing, science and technology will soon usher in an era of enlightenment, peace, international co-operation and prosperity. This should be helped by the spread of education into all layers of society, and to each individual. The outbreak of the Civil War curtailed Comenius' activities in England. He left for Sweden to reform its educational system, hoping at the same time that Sweden's policy and participation in the Thirty Years' War might result in the liberation of the Kingdom of Bohemia from the rule of the Habsburgs and facilitate the repatriation of its political emigrants, a hope soon to be proved forlorn. During his stay he continued to expand his pansophic plans but found the Swedes uninterested. The years 1651-4 were spent in Hungary reforming its educational system, and Comenius then returned to Leszno where a fire in the town destroyed his library and all his manuscripts. Due to the change of political climate in Poland he could not stay there much longer, and in 1656 he left for Amsterdam where he spent the remainder of his life. In the Netherlands Comenius published (with the help of the City of Amsterdam) his educational work Opera didactica omnia (1657-8). At the same time he pressed on with De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica (A General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs), a six-volume work which represents a synthesis of his life efforts. He almost succeeded in finishing it: some parts were published, but he found no support for a complete edition. Nor could his heirs arrange publication, for the same reason. For a long time the manuscript was believed lost. Only in 1935 was it discovered in the library of the Pietistic Orphanage in Halle, and the first complete version was published in Prague in 1966. The Consultation, in addition to its prologue ‘To the Lights of Europe' which addresses Europe's educated elite, consists of seven parts: ‘Panegersia' (Universal Awakening) defines human matters, analyses their disconsolate state and calls for a quest for improvement; ‘Panaugia' (Universal Enlightenment) explores possible ways to reform, and selects the most effective of them, ‘the bright light of Minds spreading everywhere and to everything'; ‘Pantaxia' (Universal Order) or ‘Pansophia' (Universal Science), the fundamental section of this work, outlines Comenius' ontology by describing different tiers of world affairs right to the top one - an ideal human society; ‘Pampaedia' (Universal Education) proclaims education for all, including adults, throughout their lives, including even ‘entirely barbaric nations' which should be freed from ‘the darkness of their ignorance'; ‘Panglottia' (Universal Eloquence), a general study of languages as a means for spreading the light, including an artificial philosophical language; ‘Panorthosia' (Universal Improvement) shows how - thanks to all so far discussed - the state of education, religion and public administration can be improved ‘so that by God's command an Enlightened Pious and Peaceful Age can be brought to Earth'; ‘Pannuthesia' (Universal Call), a challenge to all educated people, lords spiritual and temporal, ‘as well as all Christians without difference, consciously to press for the bringing about of these desired and desirable things'. Comenius' thought is characterized by his effort to achieve synthesis. He accepts all sorts of intellectual ideas from the present and past, transforms them and incorporates them into his conceptual structures. First and foremost he brings to fruition the Czech Reformation tradition, the roots of which go back to Jan Hus. From this tradition stems his emphasis on the activity of humans - free beings who, in striving for perfection, come close to God, and transform the world through their action. In this he does not consider humans to be just a ‘res cogitans' (a thinking substance), and does not reduce them to mere intellectual subjectivity. He sees humans in their complexity, with a developed emotional component and above all with a will which dominates other forces and attributes of human existence. Such a being has all the prerequisites for working upwards again to human perfection, once lost by succumbing to evil and vice. Comenius built his early philosophy on the empiricism of Bacon. But this did not entirely satisfy him, and he searched for a universal knowledge which would be not just an agglomeration of empirical data but a logically structured whole where empirical findings would exactly fit into a solid framework of fundamental principles, to be found with the help of metaphysics. Comenius' image of the world was initiated by Neoplatonism and by Nicholas of Cusa but these impulses are again re-shaped. He combines the dynamic descendancy of Neoplatonic Nature with the non-dynamic ascendancy of Aristotelian-Scholastic Nature, creating the picture of a dynamic ascendant world where practical human activity plays an active part. It is not a purely linear process as it has its regresses, but as a basic direction it points to the highest step - an ideal, harmonious human society. Comenius' lifelong efforts for a universal reform aim at this ideal, as illustrated by his final project outlined in Consultation.