John Amos Comenius

Works

• 1631The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart

  An allegorical journey through the vanity of all estates and sciences, ending in the inner peace of the heart with God; written in 1623.

• 1657The Great Didactic

  A complete art of teaching all things to all people: graded schools for all children, teaching through the senses and in the mother tongue (Czech version 1630s, Latin 1657).

Position

Comenius combined Protestant theology, the natural philosophy of Francis Bacon and a programme of universal education. His “Great Didactic” proposed a graded school system for all children, girls included, teaching in the mother tongue and through the senses, with textbooks matched to age; the “Orbis pictus” (1658), which joined pictures and words, remained in use as a schoolbook in many languages for some two centuries. Behind the pedagogy stood pansophia, a plan for an ordered system of all knowledge, and the “General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs”, which called for universal schools, a universal language and international institutions to secure peace; its manuscript was found in Halle by Dmytro Chyzhevsky in the 1930s and published in 1966. His reception was uneven. The textbooks spread across Europe, while many contemporaries dismissed pansophia, and his publication of the prophecies of Christoph Kotter, Christina Poniatowska and Mikuláš Drabík in “Lux in tenebris” (1657) damaged his reputation; Pierre Bayle treated him with irony in his “Dictionary” for this credulity. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he was rediscovered as a founder of modern pedagogy and as a Czech national figure. Jan Patočka, who edited and interpreted his work, read him as a thinker of the “open soul”.

Life & context

Jan Amos Komenský was born on 28 March 1592 in south-eastern Moravia – Nivnice, Uherský Brod and Komňa all claim to be his birthplace – into a family of the Unity of the Brethren. Orphaned early, he attended the Brethren’s school in Přerov and studied in Herborn, with Johann Heinrich Alsted, and in Heidelberg (1611–14). He became teacher and pastor in Fulnek. After the defeat of the Bohemian estates at the White Mountain (1620) he went into hiding; his first wife and two children died of plague, and in 1623 he completed the “Labyrinth of the World”. In 1628 the Brethren went into exile, and Comenius settled in Leszno in Poland, where he wrote his language textbook “Janua linguarum reserata” (1631) and the Didactic; in 1648 he became the senior bishop of the Unity. He worked in England (1641–42) at the invitation of Samuel Hartlib’s circle, met René Descartes in the Netherlands in 1642, wrote textbooks for Sweden in Elbing (1642–48) and reformed the school at Sárospatak in Hungary (1650–54), where the “Orbis pictus” was written. When Leszno burned in 1656 he lost his library and manuscripts. He spent his last years in Amsterdam, where he died on 15 November 1670; he is buried in Naarden.

Further main works

• The Gate of Languages Unlocked (Janua linguarum reserata, 1631)
• Light in Darkness (Lux in tenebris, 1657)
• The Visible World in Pictures (Orbis sensualium pictus, 1658)
• General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs (De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica, published 1966)