Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)
2010 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kaiser, Christopher Barina: "Isten bölcsességének jelei" Comenius Panorthosia c. művében: egy bibliai téma a modern tudomány alapjaiban
Kaiser, Christopher Barina The “Marks of God’s Wisdom’’ IN COMENIUS’S PAN A biblical Commonplace at THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN Science Abstract: Comenius is one of the early founders of modern scientific enterprise. His projects for pansophic science and public education inspired a generation of aspiring scientists to pursue various projects in a time when public support for science was minimal. little known is the fact that Comeni- us’s confidence in the possibility of scientific endeavor was based on a longstanding theological tradition that combined Old Testament wisdom with Platonic philosophy. I shall briefly survey the history of that tradition and show how it inspired a generation of early modern scientists and how it continues to inform the scientific enterprise even today. J ohannes Amos Comenius (née Jan Komensky) has been called an “incomparable Moravian.”1 He was one of the most widely known scholars of his time. Almost everywhere I go in East Central Europe, as far east as Sárospatak in northeastern Hungary, I find monuments, schools, and museums erected in his honor. Comenius was equally well known in Western Europe and even in Colonial America. According to one report, Comenius was recruited—albeit unofficially— to become the president of a small school in colonial America. That school was my own alma mater, Harvard College.2 He had studied in the Netherlands and in Germany, and he spent major parts of his life in Poland, England, and Sweden as well as in Germany and the Netherlands and here in Sárospatak, where he taught in the mid-17th century. The current expansion of the European Community would no doubt have pleased Comenius very much. Optimist that he was, he might well have viewed it as a partial realization of his prophetic, utopian vision of a unified Europe—albeit 1 The epithet goes back to Cotton Mather and was adopted by Matthew Spinka, John Amos Comenius: That Incomparable Moravian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 84-6. 2 Matthew Spinka tentatively locates this contact with John Winthrop, Jr. in 1642; Spinka, John Amos Comenius, 84-6. Sárospataki füzetek 21
