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

Marks of God wisdom”

nature and human reason as God’s books because they were both believed to be created by and illuminated by God.

Accordingly, for Comenius, there were three Books of God:

(1) The external, natural world, which is governed by universal ideas and hence can be examined by the human senses assisted by the light of reason;

(2) The human Mind, which is guided by the internal light of reason and divinely inspired ideas;

(3) Divine revelation primarily through the reading of God’s written word, but also through the inner feelings or intuitions God’s Spirit grants us in response to fervent prayer and the divine judgments that are manifested in the history of the world.11

We find here the same twin beliefs (1 and 2) that were described by Einstein and Davies, but for Comenius they are set within the framework of a third book, based on the spiritual disciplines of Bible-reading and prayer (3). But nothing is said in section 8 about the way in which the human mind and the external, natural world are coordinated. It is simply stated as a fact.

It is important to keep the idea of these three Books of God in mind as we turn to Comenius’s major point in section 16 of chapter XI—an affirmation of the viability of a universal philosophy. I am particularly interested in the biblical reference here because it provides us with a mirror for looking back to the Old Testament and its early Christian interpretations and also to some of Comenius’s contemporaries. Here is the key text from section 16:

We must seek assistance [to demonstrate the truth]... from real things in the World, on which God has printed the marks of his Wisdom (numbers, weights, and measurements), and from the dictates of the human Mind, which, if carefully applied to things, is capable of finding the numbers, weights and measurements of them all better than the most ingenious of men could dictate.12

Comenius has three distinct ideas here:

(1) The “real things in the [external] World,” upon which God has imprinted numbers, weights, and measurements;

(2) The “dictates of the human Mind,” which enable the Mind to discern those numbers, weights, and measurements;

(3) The correspondence between the World and the human Mind based on the “marks of [God’s] Wisdom” (numbers, weights, and measures) that God had imprinted on both.

11 Panorthosia XI.8-10; trans. Dobbie, 177-8. A similar idea is found in Comenius’s English Preface (dated 1650) to his Physicae ad lumen divinum reformatae synoposis (ET, Synopsis of Physicks: Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light, London, 1651). Here the corresponding “three principles of Philosophy” are “[the Testimonie of] Sense, [the Light of] Reason, and the Guidance of God [Scripture]”

12 Panorthosia XI.16; trans. Dobbie, 181.

Sárospataki füzetek 25