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
Christopher Kaiser This idea of a double imprinting does occur in other Christian texts like Gregory of Nazianzus’s Second Theological Oration (delivered 379-80 CE): Is it not the Artificer of [all moving things] who implanted reason [logori\ in them all, in accordance with which the universe is moved and controlled? .... Thus reason that proceeds from God, that is implanted in all from the beginning, and is the first law in us, and is bound up in all leads us up to God through visible things.15 Gregory’s pairing of the logos in all things with that implanted in the human mind is very similar to Comenius, but lacks the citation of Wisdom 11. There may well be other early texts (of which I am as yet unaware) that did interpret Wisdom 11:20 in terms of a dual imprinting the way Comenius later did. But the idea came into its own with the Christian humanist renewal of interest in Platonism in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, just prior to Comenius’ time. We come closest to the thinking of Comenius in Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices mundi (“Harmonics of the Universe”), which had been published in 1619. Like Gregory long before him and Comenius afterwards, Kepler thought of the divine ideas like those of mathematical geometry as being imprinted on the natural world and also impressed on the human mind as part of the image of God: Geometry, being part of the divine mind from time immemorial, from before the origin of things, being God himself.. .has supplied God with the models for the creation of the world and has been transferred to [or ‘implanted in’] human nature along with the image of God.16 As a result of this dual imprinting, humans could indeed have confidence in their ability—provided they undergo suitable training—to discern the geometries and laws that God had implanted in the natural world. This leads us to the second difference between Comenius’s statement in the Panorthosia XI. 16 and Augustine’s use of Wisdom 11. Comenius clearly infers the human mind’s capability of “finding the numbers, weights and measurements,” something that Augustine would have written off as idle curiosity. In order to find precedent for Comenius on this point, we must again refer to Johannes Kepler who cited the basic idea in Wisdom 11:20 in much the same way. 15 Oration 28.16; ET in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, 7:294b; also in Library of Christian Classics, 3:147 16 Kepler, Harmonices mundi IV. 1; Gesammelte Werke, 20 vols., ed. Max Caspar, W. von Dyck, et al. (Munich, 1938-88), 6:233; ET by Richard S. Westfall, “The Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The Construction of a New World View,” in The Concept of Nature, ed. John Torrance (New York, 1992), 65. 28 SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK
