Abstract » Hotson
Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism
Howard HOTSON
The Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia
In outlining his own intellectual genealogy, Comenius tended to trace his inspiration to cosmopolitan thinkers whom he encountered in the 1620s: notably the Swabian preacher, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), the Calabrian prophet, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), and especially the English Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
It has suited the purposes of both Czech and English historiography to follow him in emphasizing particularly the Moravian’s debt to the English statesman. For Czech scholars, Comenius’s alleged Baconianism aligns him with the central intellectual development of the seventeenth century. For English scholars - whether sympathetic or hostile to Comenius’s reforms - the association with Bacon is equally useful in explaining the reception of Comenius in England and his impact on the turbulent intellectual developments of the 1640s and 1650s.
In striking contrast to these intellectual giants encountered in maturity, Comenius seldom mentioned the tradition in which he received his own philosophical education: the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition dominant not only in Herborn but also in Přerov in his youth. His explicit references to the main figures in this tradition are infrequent; and although these allusions have been carefully studied by all students of Comenius’s early years they reveal very little, not least because typically they advertise points on which he differs from them and remain silent on underlying points of agreement.
If we filter out Comenius’s explicit testimony and place the evolution of his pansophic project against the background of the tradition in which he was educated, however, a radically different impression of his fundamental intellectual debts emerges. Both the basic objectives pursued by Comenius and many of the most important means with which he pursued them bear a striking family resemblance to those of his predecessors in the steadily unfolding Ramist and post-Ramist traditions of reformed central Europe.
Comenius, to be sure, did not adopt the ends and means of his predecessors uncritically: he pushed their objectives to their logical conclusion, adapted their means in order to pursue these broader aims, in some cases inverted their specific pedagogical preferences, and often he raised their proposals to new heights with his own inspired emendations. Yet in overhauling the principles of his predecessors in this way, Comenius was not radically departing from the post-Ramist tradition: he was continuing a process of evolution which can be traced back even before Ramus to his main predecessor, Rudolph Agricola (1443-1485), well over a century earlier. Moreover, the celebrated authors encountered are thereby revealed to have modified details of his thought, not laid the foundations of it, which are instead firmly grounded in a longer tradition the international significance of which has been largely overlooked.
The web of debts revealed in this way is in fact far too dense to be untangled properly in a brief paper. Instead, this introduction will attempt merely to outline some of the basic lineaments of that debt by tracing the post-Ramist origins of elements of Comenian pansophia summarized in his famous motto, ‘Omnes, Omnia, Omnino’.
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