Abstract » Heřmánek
Prague 2009
Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy: Eschatological Expectations between East-Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670
Pavel HEŘMÁNEK
J. A. Comenius and Christina Poniatowska: Prophetic Revelations and Theology
First, basic features of religious imagination in the 16th and 17th centuries will be summarized briefly, according to the confessional situation in Central Europe. The prophetic revelations of many individuals from different social groups, of various professions and ages were widespread phenomena of Central European Protestantism throughout the 17th century and particularly in the long period of the Thirty Years‘ War and progressing Recatholicisation and persecution of the Protestants within the Habsburg monarchy. Jan Amos Comenius enumerated 16 prophets between 1616-1665 in his famous edition of prophecies Lux e tenebris. According to some sources, more than thirty men and women are known having so called revelations.
The major theologians of the period were sceptical about this phenomena, they saw it distrustfully or refused it. On the other hand, some of those who experienced prophetic revelations personally edited, commented and defended them - usually in controversies with the adherents of orthodoxy. Among these theologians sympathetic with the prophecies, Jakob Fabricius, superintendent of Pommerania and confessor of Gustavus Adolphus, and especially a famous Czech emigré, intellectual, humanist and reformer, Jan Amos Comenius, belonged to the most well known.
Comenius met a visionary Christina Poniatowska by coincidence in North Bohemia and he adopted her to his family very quickly. In 1628, they emigrated from Bohemia to Leszno in Poland - the centre of the Unity of Brethren in exile. Comenius recorded all details of many of Poniatowska’s extatical visions and therefore dramatical destiny of this young girl can be analysed and also the structure of themes of her 85 prophetic revelations can be described. They also can be compared with revelations of two other girls from the lands of Bohemian Crown, edited by Jakob Fabricius in Stettin.
The main focus of this paper will be on theological reflections of Poniatowska’s revelations presented in a small Latin tract written by Ponitowska’s father Julian Poniatowski. Intially, he was an oposer of all new prophecies but having heard his daughter’s arguments, he had believed them and wrote a comment of her prohecies. In the last part, the most important and the most systematical reflection of the phenomenon of prophecies will be discussed - Comenius’s tract De veris et falsis prophetis written in 1629. Here, Comenius summarized his theological view in 63 points and for the first time, he formulated his eschatology influenced by prophetic revelations of Poniatowska.
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