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The wit and wisdom of Comenius, also his frustration and his deep spirituality, are seen most clearly in the book he wrote in 1623, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. He wrote it while in hiding, in the wake of the Battle of White Mountain. The Brethren weren’t welcome in Bohemia anymore. Comenius was a stranger in his own land.

His anguish took refuge in allegory. He wrote of a young man trying to find his way in the world—but what a strange world it was. The Labyrinth strikes one as a cross between John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Ecclesiastes. Of course, Comenius wrote five years before Bunyan was born. His work is more of a social commentary than Bunyan’s, with a cynical edge to it. Comenius’s pilgrim finds that all in this world is vanity, until…Well, we’re getting ahead of the story.

We quote some excerpts from The Labyrinth on succeeding pages, but we were so struck by the cleverness of this allegory that we wanted to give you a plot summary as well. Perhaps, if you’re interested, we’ll publish a modern version of this classic work, but for now sit back and enjoy this condensed travelogue of Comenius’s adventures in a strange world.

The Labyrinth of the World strikes the reader as a mixture of Pilgrim’s Progress and Ecclesiastes. The narrator is a pilgrim, wandering through an allegorical world, and he sees only futility. Tie-ins to Comenius’s own life are evident—he wrote this in hiding, after the death of his first wife and their children, as the Hapsburg forces were beginning to run the Protestants out of Bohemia and Moravia.

As a young man, the narrator wonders what to do with his life. He decides to test out all occupations before choosing. With two guides, Searchall and Delusion, he comes upon a walled city, surrounded by a great abyss. This is the earth. Its citizens pass each other in the marketplace, wearing masks, which often make it difficult to see where they are going. There is much stumbling, much arguing. Death, with its sharp scythe, stalks the city, felling some with arrows. Some shriek or weep a bit, but soon life continues as before. At one gate of the city, a continuing stream of people crawl in from the abyss—the children who repopulate the city.

There are six major streets to the city. The first is home to domestic folks. Since people can only enter in pairs, there are large scales at the gate to match men with women. The pilgrim wonders how this scrawny man can balance out with that healthy girl, and is told that the man must have a fat pocketbook “or a hat before which other hats are doffed.” Once paired up, the couples are handcuffed together. Much misery follows, as they continually pull in opposite directions and sometimes children are handcuffed to them as well. But when Death strikes one partner, the other is free. This is what happens to the pilgrim, and he proceeds to the second street.

This is where the laborers live and work. The pilgrim sees no job he likes: “Every human occupation is but labor and weariness.” Men toil only to feed their mouths; money is earned to be spent, only “it was spent easier than it had been earned.” Everywhere he sees envy, ill will, dishonesty, and fraud—and no concern for the soul.

The third street houses the learned class. “Candidates” enter through a gate called Discipline. To be accepted, they must have heads of steel, brains of quicksilver, backs of lead, skin of iron, and purses of gold. Once inside the gate they are—sometimes painfully— reformed to conform with the others. The pilgrim goes through this process.

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