The Legacy of John Amos Comenius

November 15 will mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of John Amos Comenius, a churchman, educator, and philosopher who was one of the most famous men of his time and is still highly revered in his native Czechoslovakia. But his legacy does not belong to the Czech nation alone; it belongs to all mankind. It is proper that the anniversary be observed not only in his small native land but wherever the saints of the Christian faith are remembered and honored.

Comenius’s life story is, from the human point of view, a tragic one. He was born in 1592 as the fifth child of a prosperous miller in southern Moravia (now a province of Czechoslovakia) and was left an orphan at the age of twelve. After unsuccessfully trying to carry on his father’s trade, he enrolled at the age of sixteen in a Latin grammar school, and later at a Calvinist Academy. From there he went to the University of Heidelberg, where he became well known for his learned discourses and his interest in the problems of education. His studies finished, he returned to Moravia and became a teacher and minister in his church, the Unitas Fratrum (The Unity of Brethren or, as it is known in America, the Moravian Church). He married a rather well-to-do young lady and settled down in Fulnek in northern Moravia.

Comenius began his ministry and his teaching at the parochial school during a time of turbulent political developments. For decades the most pressing “political” issue of the land had been religious freedom; only a few years before the ordination of Comenius, the Brethren and other followers of John Huss celebrated a decisive victory in their long and bitter struggle for liberty. In that memorable year, 1609, King Rudolph II issued the Letter of Majesty, granting them freedom and promising that “no other decree of any kind will be issued by us or by our heirs and succeeding kings against the above religious peace.” Thus the Unitas Fratrum, which had endured much persecution, had every reason to believe that its time of trial had come to an end.

Yet within a few years, dark clouds started to gather not only over the Brethren but also over all non-Roman churches, indeed, over the whole land, and in 1618 that most cruel of all religious conflicts, the Thirty Years’ War, broke out. The Protestant army suffered a crushing defeat almost at the onset of the war. Protestant political leaders were executed, ministers of the non-Roman churches were jailed and killed, “heretical” books were burned by the thousands, and Catholicism was forced upon the whole population. In 1621 the Spanish army, helping to support the Catholic cause in central Europe, invaded the town of Fulnek. Comenius, whose life was in grave danger because of his ministerial status, was forced to flee, leaving behind his pregnant wife and a small son. He never saw them again. Both of them, as well as the newborn baby, died of the plague brought to town by the soldiers.

For seven years Comenius led the wretched life of a fugitive in his native land. At first, his spirit dwelled constantly at home in Fulnek. Unaware of his wife’s death, he wrote for her a little booklet called On Christian Perfection, trying to convince her—and himself—that “the best thing a man can do is to follow God willingly, though it may be with tears, and accept from his hand with gratitude everything—fortune and misfortune, joy and sorrow, laughter and weeping.” The trusted messenger who was to deliver the booklet and the charming, moving letter that accompanied it brought back the news of the three deaths.

Comenius’s grief was without bounds, and never in his long and sorrowful life was he able to forget his two little boys and the gentle young girl who had been his wife. But even in these tortured times he did not forget his mission as a minister, a man whose duty it was to comfort others. And there were a multitude who needed to be comforted, for the rage of the enemy was beyond belief. The forests were swarming with fugitives like himself, some searching for their children, others for their parents, some dying of disease and hunger, others driven crazy by terror. And every new arrival brought terrifying new stories of torture and slaughter.

This was now his congregation. From his hiding places—deserted huts, caves, even hollow trees—he wrote letters of comfort and little homilies as “The Name of the Lord Is a Strong Tower,” “The Sorrowful,” and “The Press of the Lord.” As soon as these writings became known to the Jesuits, who were forever searching the countryside, they were placed on the Index of Heretical Books; but they circulated in handwritten copies among the fugitives, bringing some measure of comfort into their desperate lives. Besides these small writings, Comenius composed during these years of hiding one of his most excellent and famous books, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, a classic of Czech literature. The book pictures a pilgrim who in vain seeks happiness in the world and finds it at last in union with Christ. It, too, was placed on the Index, but even more than the other books was a source of encouragement to the refugees.

When the situation did not improve, Comenius decided to leave the country and await happier times in Poland, where many Brethren had fled during previous persecutions and had established several congregations. With a small band of other Brethren, he crossed the border in January, 1628, and settled down with his second wife in the city of Leszno. There he tried to pick up the pieces of his ministerial and educational work and also continued to write.

From the moment he crossed the border, Comenius cherished the hope that some day he would return. He realized fully that his fatherland would then be in a state of desolation and chaos, and that much work would be needed to bring it back to the material and—above all—spiritual wealth it had enjoyed before the war. He was convinced that education would play an all-important role in this rebuilding, and with this aim in mind he began work on his Didactic, a book “on the art of teaching all things to all men,” dedicating it to the Czech nation. As the aim of all education he set “to become learned in the sciences, pure in morals, trained in piety.” He advocated public education for all children, noble and common, rich and poor, boys and girls, bright and retarded, arguing again and again that to fulfill the destiny of being “in the image of God” one has to develop to the fullest the potential given to him by the Creator.

Later he translated the book into Latin and sent it to several prominent authorities on education. It did not arouse much interest; many of his ideas were too novel and too daring. Disappointed, he turned to other tasks. He prepared his Labyrinth for print, wrote some prayer books and a book on physics, revised a Latin grammar.

Amidst this activity, quite unexpectedly success came to him from another book. Long dissatisfied with the ways in which Latin was taught, he selected several thousand common words, used them in sentences that described some everyday situation or activity, and translated the sentences into Latin. Thus the book taught not only words or rules but also a “subject matter”: it described the universe, explained natural phenomena, spoke of customs and laws, pointed to virtues and sins. It could be used as a textbook of Latin or a textbook of his mother tongue. He called the book Janua Linguarum Reserata (The Gate of Languages Unlocked) and had it published in 1633. It was a phenomenal success. Within a few years it was translated into sixteen languages, among them such exotic tongues as Persian and Mongolian, and it appeared in eighty editions during his lifetime and twenty-six others after his death.

Comenius became one of the most celebrated men of his time and was welcomed with highest honors wherever he appeared. He received invitations from Germany, Holland, Sweden, Hungary, and England to come and establish schools or give guidance to people concerned with educational or cultural matters. On a trip to Holland he met John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, and was offered the presidency of the recently founded Harvard College. The invitation, recorded in Cotton Mather’s Marginalia, reads:

That brave old man, Johannes Amos Commenius, the fame of whose worth has been trumpetted as far as more than three languages (whereof everyone is indebted to his Janua) could carry it, was agreed with-all, by our Mr. Winthrop in his travels through the Low Countries, to come over into New England, and illuminate this Colledge and country in the quality of a President. But [because of] the solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador, diverting him another way, that incomparable Moravian became not an American.

More than two decades later, Comenius repeated his success with another language textbook, Orbis Pictus (The World in Pictures). Based on the same principle that made the Janua so successful, this second book has the distinction of being the first illustrated textbook in the world. There are more than one hundred known editions of it in a score of languages.

But despite his fame and success, Comenius’s life was not a bed of roses. He constantly fought poverty. Even after he was elected bishop, he received no pay from the church, and from the proceeds of his books he supported not only his family but also the impoverished flocks of exiles in Germany, Poland, and Hungary. When he arrived in London to address the British Parliament and was to attend a dinner given in his honor by the archbishop of York, a tailor had to be summoned hurriedly to make him a robe “in the fashion customary among English divines,” so poorly was he dressed.

Poverty, however, was not his worst enemy. Of far greater concern was the fact that one by one, every dream about returning home proved to have been only a dream. The war was dragging on, and luck was mostly on the enemy side. The Protestant Saxons, for a while successful, were beaten. Frederick of the Palatinate, in whom the exiles placed high hopes, died. The Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, a great ally, was killed in the battle. Finally, in 1648, after thirty years of fighting, the two enemy camps signed the peace treaty of Westphalia, giving each other various concessions. Comenius’s fatherland was given to the Catholics.

Comenius was shattered by the terms of the treaty. He pleaded with the Swedish chancellor, one of the Protestant negotiators, that “by the wounds of Jesus Christ ye do not abandon us who are afflicted for Christ’s sake.” But all pleading was in vain. The fate of the exiles was sealed.

Nearer to despair than before, Comenius hardly knew what to attempt next. His beloved fatherland lay devastated in enemy hands; his church was in danger of extinction. Then his wife, a faithful companion throughout the bitter years of exile, fell ill and died. He found solace in writing. In a sorrowful, profoundly moving little book that he called The Bequest of the Dying Mother, the Unity of Brethren, he pictured his church as a mother calling her children to her deathbed and dividing among them “the treasures that God entrusted unto her.” Some of these treasures were bequeathed to his native land, others to all mankind, some to specific congregations or church bodies, others to all Christendom. Probably no words other than the Scriptures are more sacred to Czech Protestants than the words of Comenius’s Bequest.

In spring, 1650, Comenius made a long visit to Hungary, having been invited by the powerful family of Rakoczys to establish schools there. He returned to Poland almost on the eve of the Swedish-Polish war. The first victories of the Swedes rekindled in him for the last time a faint hope of returning home, but soon the situation changed. The Swedish regiment that was occupying the town where he lived was forced to leave, and the advancing Polish army burned the flourishing town to the ground. Comenius, now sixty-four, fled the burning town with nothing but the clothes on his back. He lost all his meager possessions, including his books and manuscripts, and once again had no place to lay his head. After great hardships he arrived in Amsterdam, where through the charity of friends he spent the last fourteen years of his life in reasonable comfort, supervising the publication of his collective works and writing more books. He died on November 15, 1670, and was buried in the nearby town of Naarden. His grave is now cared for by the Czechoslovak government.

Comenius’s legacy to mankind is manifold. During his lifetime he was called “The Teacher of Nations,” and he is remembered mainly for his contributions to education. Many of the “daring” and “novel” ideas expressed in his Didactic have long since been adopted. His call for public education of all children has been answered by civilized nations the world over. The organization of public schooling follows pretty much the plan he set forth. His insistence on the importance of pre-school training and guidance has been proved correct. Many of his practical points of language teaching and learning are as valid today as they were three hundred years ago.

What is often omitted in a summary of his contributions to education, however, is a mention of the force that motivated him to improve upon the educational opportunities of children everywhere—his conviction that each person is precious in the eyes of God. He dwelled with great seriousness on the training of a pre-school child because “Christ, the revealer of God’s secrets, clearly stated that such is the kingdom of heaven.” His interest in the education of the poor and untalented stemmed, not from any social or economic plan, but from the knowledge that “out of the poorest, the most abject, and the most obscure, God has produced instruments of his glory.” His insistence on equal educational opportunities for girls was not a call for women’s rights but an expression of his belief about women:

They are also formed in the image of God, and share in his grace and in the kingdom of the world to come. They are endowed with equal sharpness of mind and capacity for knowledge (often with more than the opposite sex), and they are able to attain the highest positions, since they have often been called by God himself to rule over nations, to give sound advice to kings and princes, to study medicine and other things that benefit the human race.…

Yet it has to be admitted that Comenius did not labor over his books on education and did not travel far and wide to establish schools with the sole motivation of helping to make every human being more reflective of the image of God. He also had a more earthly goal in mind; he strove for a world of concord and peace. This one who had suffered all his life from consequences of wars labored hard to reform the war-torn world he knew, calling nations and churches to mutual respect and cooperation. In matters of church and theology, he stressed purity of life and personal piety far more than dogmatic subtleties, firmly believing that no theological issue was worth quarreling—let alone fighting—about. Concerning the Lord’s Supper, one of the hottest points of dispute among the theologians of his time, he wrote,

Whether this sacrament is received by mouth or by faith alone, why do ye quarrel about it? Why do ye wish to discuss all about which the Scriptures are silent?… Remember that we all know only in part, and especially remember that this mystery was ordained not that the hearts of the believers be torn asunder thereby but rather that they be bound together into one.

Perhaps nowhere else did he express his longing for harmony and love in Christendom more beautifully than in the words of his Bequest of the Dying Mother, the Unity of Brethren:

To all Christian churches together I bequeath a lively desire for unanimity of opinion and for reconciliation among themselves, and for union in faith, and love of the unity of spirit. May the spirit which was given to me from the very beginning by the Father of spirits be shed upon you all, so that you would desire as sincerely as I did the union of all who call upon the name of Christ in truth.

Exactly three hundred years later, in 1948, when churchmen of many nations and denominations met in Amsterdam to form the World Council of Churches and declared, “We intend to stay together,” members of the Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian delegations made a pilgrimage to Comenius’s grave in Naarden, rejoicing at the fact that one of that remarkable man’s fondest dreams was finally becoming a reality.

Comenius was three centuries ahead of his time also in his call for a world government. He spoke of a “senate of the world,” an international body of learned, upright men who would “keep watch as from a high tower” over all nations. It would be their duty to see that no king abused his power, that social evils that lead to wars were eliminated, that people everywhere were taught “not to lower their human dignity by starting hatred and litigation over material things.” They would act as a court of appeal in international disputes, and their findings would be binding on every king and nation. In this unified world, education would play an enormously important role. Comenius envisioned a universal educational program, directed from one headquarters and spreading throughout the world by means of common schools, teaching from common textbooks and in a common language. That way, he felt, the same truth would be presented to all men, misunderstandings would be eliminated, wars would cease, and harmony would be achieved.

Much of Comenius’s work in education, his writing of textbooks, and many of his travels through Europe were in the service of this grandiose plan for unification of the world, often referred to as “Pansophia.” However fantastic the plan sounds to us today, there was a good deal of interest in it, and Comenius came close to attaining a Pansophic College that would be the headquarters of the universal educational program. During his stay in London in 1641–42, the British Parliament accepted the plan “for assigning some College with its revenues as Pansophic College.” But soon afterwards the civil war broke out, and Comenius had to leave England. The only result of his trip there was the founding of the learned Royal Society, which devoted itself to the “mysteries of nature,” not to the problems of world government.

Comenius worked on the pansophic plan for some forty years and presented it in full in his last work, the seven-volume De rerum humanarum emendatione consultation catholica (General Consultation Concerning the Improvement of Human Affairs). Only two of the seven volumes were published during his lifetime; the rest were thought lost. Then in 1935 the manuscripts of the five missing volumes were found in Halle, Germany, and in 1945 they were sent to Prague. The Comenius Institute has since published both the Latin original and the Czech translation. The work, which is almost as voluminous as all the rest of Comenius’s work put together, has been the subject of much research in recent years, and full evaluation will take a long time. It will probably rank as one of the most comprehensive elaborations of a philosophical system, and will establish Comenius’s place in the intellectual history of Europe. Thus a part of his legacy we are yet to receive.

Apart from his contribution to education and to reconciliation among churches and nations, Comenius left to mankind a pearl of great value in the example of his own life. A man of grief, he was also a man of hope. A man of sorrow, he was a man of faith. A man of poverty, he was a man of virtue. All his life, even under the most adverse circumstances, he served the Lord faithfully and in obedience. Protest and rebellion had no place in his heart. Two years before his death he surveyed the long years of his life in a modest booklet, Unum necessarium (The One Thing Needful). Noting sadly, “All my life I have been a pilgrim, never and nowhere did I have a lasting home,” he nevertheless did not complain. The One Thing Needful, as he saw it, was neither wealth nor security; it was the thing Mary chose, willingness to sit at Jesus’ feet. Then in the last chapter he made his personal bequest:

Come, my sons and my daughters, come, my children’s children, and harken unto the voice of your father (before I myself sleep with my fathers): No bequest do I leave unto you besides that One Thing Needful: that ye may fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man (Eccl. 12:13). Then the Lord will be your inheritance (Deut. 18:2) and your shield, and your reward shall be very great (Gen. 15:1).

O that mankind might take up its inheritance!

Eve Chybová Bock is assistant professor of German at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio. She is a native of Czechoslovakia and did undergraduate work at Charles University in Prague, and she has the M.A. from Yale.

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