A General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs. Intended for All Mankind. An Excerpt.

by John Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský)

Joh. Amos Commenii Orbis sensualium pictus: : hoc est, Omnium principalium in mundo rerum, & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura.

Luminaries of Europe, men of learning, churchman and statesman, salutations!

We are to consult together on the reform of human affairs, that is to say, in ways more general and broadminded than any since the world began. This is, to be sure, nothing new in terms of subject matter, but it is completely new in terms of the method for finding a solution. Never, from the fall to these day, have human minds been governed by a dullness so great that they could not recognize their shortcomings and did not regret them, that they did not long for some change for the better and even find in every nation and in all circumstances educated, courageous men who strive as best they can for the reform of human affairs. Never before, however, has an attempt at the reform of all the flaws been undertaken by everyone.

For turmoil persists in the world, and has not been eliminated as far as all Humane Society is concerned.

Left: Comenius. “The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart” Right: Joh. Amos Commenii Orbis sensualium pictus: : hoc est, Omnium principalium in mundo rerum, & in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura. https://archive.org/details/johamoscommeniio00come/page/54

What is there to prevent us from exploring whether it is possible to remedy such diverse, foolish, and destructive vicissitudes more effectively with regard to the whole community of men as well, and ultimately somehow completely eliminate them? And what is there to prevent us from trying to achieve the same from other people, and others from trying to achieve it from us? It is surely a matter so important that it is better to miss the target a thousand times than not to have tried a thousand times to hit it.

Since this consultation is intended to be participated in by all nations of the world, which are divided and estranged from each other by various views of things, particularly things divine, I take upon myself the task of proceeding circumspectly; I wish to reproach no one with his faults, to reproach no one with his mistakes, nor do I wish to insult anyone directly or indirectly; for I know that no one errs because he would like to. [And why would anyone want to?)

It will be better to collect examples of truth and then deal with errors either by inconspicuously leading them to the center of truth, or, for the time being, to pretend that they do not exist, until a way is found to lead them into the womb of shared truth.

“The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart” by Comenius, Johann Amos, 1592–1670

PANEGERSIA or universal awakening,

In which after an account of what human affairs are and how they are corrupted, and, moreover, how in heaven and on earth in each era counsel was sought for their reform, and, eventually, how it is necessary to consult in a new manner, all people are called upon to contribute resolutely by general consultation in the matter of importance to them all.

What are you doing, poor little thing? What’s your hurry? Is it your task to appoint yourself for the task of the salvation of the world? Why are you rushing to your death, daring to do things beyond your powers? Why are you vexed with grief, which benefits no one, or why be called a fool or elicit laughter and mockery?

To what end are we given a will, and what does it seek? The good. Every man desires his own welfare. He fears indisposition, pain, vexation, and avoids them as best he can.

By contrast, he wishes to have everything that is good and pleasant and finds it hard to bear it if such things are taken away from him.

He also desires things that are truly good and feels wrong and deceived by things that are only apparently good.

There are three routes of human grandeur, peculiar to the human spirit:

reason, which apprehends things,

the will, which pursues the good in things,

and, lastly, the urge to action, which is in all respects armed with abilities to act and regulated by them.

Nothing, as a rule, gets reformed, except that which is corrupted. By recommending a conference on the reform of human affairs, we are therefore assuming they are corrupted. Evidence of that is surely not difficult to find, because complaints that nothing is as it should be and that everything is going astray (now this way, now that way) are universal.

It is also well known that many people who are dull of mind, spirit, and senses, prefer the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. Nor is there a shortage of people who are the opposite, too curious, eager to know everything, and day and night torment, exhaust, vex, and bring themselves to the verge of death.

Roberto Rossellini, a prominent Italian director, was inspired by Comenius’ ideas on the system of education and the importance of the image. “It was from Comenius that Rossellini came up with the concepts of ‘direct vision’ (or autopsy, which originally means ‘seeing with one’s own eyes’) and ‘essential image’. “A big part of the learning disability,” Comenius wrote in his Pansophiae Prodromus(1637), “comes from the fact that things are not taught to the pupils through direct vision, but through tedious descriptions, as a result of which it is very difficult for images of things to be pressed into understanding; they, therefore, are so weak in memory that they easily fall apart or become confused with other things.” Roberto Acioli de Oliveira. From Cinema Italiano. “In the final phase of his career, Italian master Roberto Rossellini embarked on a dramatic, daunting project: a series of television films about knowledge and history, made in an effort to teach, where contemporary media were failing. Looking at the Western world’s major figures and moments, yet focusing on the small details of daily life, Rossellini was determined not to recount history but to relive it, as it might have been, unadorned but full of the drama of the everyday. This selection of Rossellini’s history films presents The Age of the Medici, Cartesius, and Blaise Pascal — works that don’t just enliven the past but illuminate the ideas that brought us to where we are today.” From The Criterion Collection.

With such an abundance of things that escape human reason, is it any wonder that these people are never accompanied by peace of mind?

And what are the predominant ambitions in the world? The pursuit of property, rank and pleasure. Is there anyone who had not noticed that these three things comprise the basis of human happiness, and that everything in the world is made to conform to them? But what are these things? Property is a certain worry, rank mere smoke, delight sweet poison.

So long as people do not understand this, they chase shadows without substance, and, devoted to these nothings, themselves dissolve into nothing.

“In Via Lucis, vestigata et vestiganda [“The Way of Light,” written in 1641 but not published until 1668], John Amos Comenius proposed to a group of scholars on its way toward becoming the Royal Society of London a new effort on the part of learned Christendom to establish a College of Light, or a broad community of scholars who share the same foundation of knowledge, the same sacred mission, and even the same language.” From Huenemann’s blog.

Let us look at the state of politics.

Its law is self-control, because the only thing that can govern is that which controls itself, and no one can govern others, except one who can also, indeed primarily, control oneself.

That is why this supreme art is to be able to govern man, the ruler of all things, even though he turns this art to himself alone or, more likely, to several people who share the same pre-eminence.

People are unable to govern and are unable to let themselves be controlled by others. They are unable to govern others; they are unable to govern themselves. They are unable to let themselves be controlled by others and are unable to control themselves.

First of all, most people are not mindful of their own majesty and are therefore of a slavish spirit, degrading themselves with the most worthless things, like gluttony, pleasure-seeking, and other trivial pursuits; they permit themselves to be controlled, led, dragged along, and tossed about every way, unworthy of the name ‘man,’ which, after all, is the creature intended to rule over things.

Left, center: William Blake. From The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake illustrated his all books and created this famed series for children, in part following the tradition started by Comenius. Right: Lewis Carrol’s illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland follows the tradition. “What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures of conversations?”

There are, on the other hand, certain people who are not satisfied with looking after themselves in their own affairs, and without restraint seek to rule over others, and they are delighted to have an opportunity to rule them, to fight against them, to conquer them, to subjugate them, and to crush them.

And when they meet with the resistance [since human nature always resists been entirely stripped off its innate freedom and forced to do something], they look for ways to bring human nature to heal.

What are these ways? They are one and all violent, for example, flogging, cudgeling, shackling, imprisoning, hanging, or executing by the sword. But does that correspond to some order? Is it fitting and proper to treat a creature of reason in this way?

Oscar Kokoschka. Left: Comenius and Brethren Fleeing the Country, from the cycle Comenius. Right: Outside Fulnek Chateau, from the cycle Comenius.

The only thing that we truly need to recall is the vilest of crimes, which brings people such extreme disasters — namely, war. This is clear when we consider the war raging in our time, a conflagration that has afflicted unfortunate Europe for 40 years now. How many towns have been destroyed, how many lands have been laid waste, how many nations have been slaughtered, how many communities in their prime have been destroyed, how many entire states have been turned into dead bodies. What form do these evils assume or how will they end?

The world is one in terms of nature; why, then, should it not become one also in terms of morals?

Europe may be physically separated from Asia, Asia from Africa, Africa from America, just as the individual empires and provinces are separated from each other by mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, so that we cannot all be in contact with each other.

Yet our common Mother Earth supports us all and feeds us; the air and the winds blow on us all and restore us to life; we are all covered by the same sky, the same sun and stars turn around us all and alternately shine upon us. It is therefore clear that we all occupied the same dwelling in the same area keeps us all alive.

If we are all citizens of One World, what is to prevent us from being united?

***

Biography of Comenius

excerpted from Jean Piaget, “Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670)”, [1957] 1993.

Left: Jean Piaget. “Piaget is represented, with his much loved pipe, in the context of children’s drawings of fluid in a container and of objects on a hill, made between about four and eight years of age.” From Portraits of European Neuroscientists by Nicholas Wade, Marco Piccolino & Adrian Simmons. Right: Comenius. Janua Linguarum Reserata (1632; The Gate of Tongues Unlocked)

Born on 28 March 1592 in Moravia, he was left an orphan at an early age, and his guardians gave so little thought to his education that he was 16 before he could begin his Latin studies at the school in Přerov. His position as an orphan deprived of primary education no doubt did more to make him think about the relationship between school and personal work than a normal school upbringing would have done. With other young men belonging to the community of the Moravian Brethren (the famous Protestant sect), he was later sent to the University of Herborn where he studied Protestant theology, attended John Henry Alsted’s courses, and became familiar with Wolfgang Ratke’s famous memorial on language teaching. He soon began to write a book of the same kind for the Czech public, and also embarked on a Latin-Czech glossary which he continued to perfect over a period of forty years. On his return to Moravia, he became a schoolmaster and later the church pastor at Fulnek; but the insurrection in Bohemia, which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War, was the start of his misfortunes. He fled from his home, lost his wife and young children, and began to wander from one lordly domain to another, writing works of consolation for his co-religionists and preaching a resigned withdrawal into the inner life of the mind. Expelled from Bohemia, he took refuge at Leszno in Poland, where the Moravian Brethren had a centre and there, at the town’s secondary school, resumed teaching. It was then that he developed his ideas on education, basing himself in particular on Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella, those ‘happy restorers of philosophy’. And it was then, too, that he started to grapple with the great problem of his time, that of method. He wrote his Janua linguarum reserata, which was extremely successful, and his The Great Didactic (originally written in Czech). But in his eyes these works were only stepping-stones to far more important objectives: he aimed at nothing less than a radical reform of human knowledge as well as of education. The Great Didactic itself was full of general ideas, but Comenius wished to unite and systematize them in a universal science or ‘pansophy’ (a term in fairly current use at that time).

This was the beginning of his international vocation, for such a systematization of knowledge, to his mind, was bound up with the co-ordination of universal currents of ideas. Starting from that moment, all his undertakings were accompanied by efforts at co-operation on a larger or smaller scale.

His first objective was the reconciliation of the Churches. Certain English friends, who were also interested in the movement for conciliation, sought to get him away from Leszno and brought his work to the attention of Louis de Geer, a Swedish philanthropist of Dutch origin; they then published Comenius’ pansophic programme, without his knowledge, under the title of Pansophiae prodromus (a book that attracted the attention of Mersenne and of Descartes himself) and in 1641 invited him to London to help bring about an understanding between King and Parliament and to found a circle for pansophic collaboration.

These attempts failed; yet from them Comenius derived fresh ardour with which to pursue his schemes for reforming human society and learning in general. A choice was open to him between an invitation from Richelieu to found a pansophic college in France, and one from Louis de Geer to reform Swedish schools. He chose the second offer, hoping, no doubt, to obtain Swedish political support for the Bohemian refugees. On the way, he met Descartes at Endegeest, and Jungius and Tassius in Hamburg, and found difficulty in realizing that they hardly shared his views on the forming of an international circle for pansophic research. In Sweden he was well received by court society, but his particular Protestant views were viewed with some dubiety by Lutheran public opinion. He settled at Elbing in East Prussia (which was then Swedish territory) and wrote his Methodus linguarum novissima. But this work he regarded as of merely secondary importance, his great problem being, more and more, the reform of human affairs.

After taking part in the Colloquium Charitativum held at Thorn in 1645 with a view to reconciling the Churches, he fell into disgrace with the Swedes (he had foreseen that this would happen but had persisted in his course, which does credit to his character). He also escaped the lures of the Catholic party, which had thought to make use of him, and without having achieved any practical gains, but having acquitted himself with dignity in difficult circumstances, he resumed a scheme for a work on the universal reform of human society by the following means: (a) unification of learning and its spread by an improved school system under the supervision of a kind of international academy; (b) political co-ordination through international institutions aimed at maintaining peace; © reconciliation of the Churches in a tolerant form of Christianity. The title of the work, General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs, shows that his idea was to submit a programme to those taking part in the great negotiations which had aroused and disappointed so many hopes during the seventeenth century.

Promoted to the rank of Bishop of the Moravians, Comenius returned to Leszno. In 1650, however, he went to Saros Patak in Transylvania in the — again ill-starred — hope of founding a pansophic college. There he wrote the Orbus sensualium pictus, the first illustrated textbook, which met with great success. In 1654 he returned to Leszno, which was razed on 25 April 1656 during the Swedish invasion of Poland. In the disaster, Comenius lost his library and many of his manuscripts, including the Latin-Czech glossary on which he had been working since his youth.

After this new misfortune, he went with his family to stay with Laurenz de Geer (the son of his former patron) in Amsterdam. He refused a teaching post but consented to the publication of his complete didactic works. He still sought to complete his General Consultation, but had not yet been able to do so when he died at Amsterdam in November 1670.