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The 17th century, in which Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) spent his adult life, was a time of violent change for the cultural and political life of Europe. The Roman Catholic Church, seriously shaken by the Reformation, hurried to regroup. After a systematic revision of its doctrine at the Council of Trent, the Church launched a deliberate re-catholicization program. Adopting a clever diplomatic strategy, led by the Jesuits, Catholicism tried to regain its monopoly in the courts of Europe and thereby push the Reformation aside. These efforts resulted in confessional wars—Protestant versus Catholic— which severely oppressed the people of Europe for 30 years. The question of faith shifted to the background and into the forefront was pushed the question of power.

The battle front between Roman Catholicism and the Reformation passed through Central Europe, where Comenius lived. The Protestant churches in Bohemia and Moravia were violently liquidated in the aftermath of the Battle of White Mountain (1620). Under the Hapsburg dynasty, Roman Catholicism became the only legal religion in those lands. Protestant nobles were forced into exile and the common people were corralled back into the Roman Church.

As a priest of one Reformation church, the Unity of the Brethren, Comenius experienced this tragic situation in the depths of his faith in Jesus Christ. His 1623 work, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, in which he escapes from the world’s chaos to find peace in Christ, testifies to this. In the midst of these disasters he never succumbed to resignation or an ascetic refusal of the world. His reading of the Old Testament prophets helped him to see in these events God’s judgment and a call to repentance. Out of this repentance grew an inextinguishable hope.

This hope bore him through a series of tragedies—his exile, the eventual extinction of his church, the loss of two wives, the fire in which he lost a major part of his research. It was a hope drawn from Scripture that looked beyond the historical events to see signs of the approaching Kingdom of God, a kingdom in which violence and evil would be overcome.

But let us return to the life-story of Comenius and follow the way in which his hopeful faith asserted itself. After the defeat of the Reformation in Bohemia and Moravia, Comenius went into exile, going first to Poland, where the Unity had several congregations. There, in 1632, he was elected their bishop. (At that time the Unity had several bishops, but in the years 1656–1662 Comenius was the last and only bishop of his beloved church.)

From Leszno in Poland, he was a spectator to the Thirty Years War. When the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus entered the fray, Comenius saw him as a champion who would make the world safe for Protestants— or at least negotiate the safe return of the Unity to their homeland. These hopes were shattered by Gustavus’s tragic and untimely death in 1632.

Meanwhile, Comenius was building a reputation as a scholar and educator, and 1641 found him in England, invited by Parliament to organize scientific investigation. There he dealt with the issues that would concern him throughout his life—school reform, religious reform (particularly the reconciliation of the various Protestant groups, an ecumenical cause in which he grew close to the Scotsman John Dury), and universal peace.

Late in life, he presented his blueprint for the reorganization of mankind along these lines, Via Lucis, (1668), a “way of light” in which panharmony would reign. He dedicated the book to the London Academy of Sciences.

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