ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH Comenius always insisted that man's ‘true work’ was concerned with goodness he was certainly not an anti-intellectual. The virtue of the poor and humble showed the power of divine grace but it was no excuse for ignorance. Certainly Comenius was suspicious of the men of learning. Their superficiality, contentiousness and pomposity grieved him ‘to tears’ and he found nought for his comfort in their pretensions. His great aim was to make knowledge the possession of every man, not the specialism of the few, and he condemned any attempt to turn learning into a mystique. He himself was not a profound scholar in any particular department although he was well read and interested in a great many subjects. He took the universe for his text-book and in that sense he was an encyclopaedist for he believed that every single aspect was in some way related to the whole. The object of knowledge was to understand the unity of all things not to amass facts and for this purpose Comenius believed that the means were all ready to hand – the physical universe, ‘open to be read in every clime and in every age by all men’ – the ‘universal notions’ of the human mind ‘the same for man and woman, for the child and the old man, for the religious and the irreligious’ – and finally the divine revelation ‘for ever unveiling more mysteries’ (Via Lucis IV). Thus encyclopaedic knowledge is not knowledge of every particular thing but a unified understanding of the universe, the self and of all the practical activities of God and man.
