Monday, July 06, 2009

Comenius anticipated the Enlightenment, Only With God Intact

Comenius; Why I Write About Him

By John Taylor; 2009 July 06, Rahmat 12, 166 BE



My little project over the past year on the Badi' Blog has been to
examine John Amos Comenius's Universal Reform, or Panorthosia, in
detail. One of my central purposes in making this heavy commitment was
to demonstrate that every major feature of the so-called Enlightenment
project is not only discernable but also unmistakable in this book,
the first 10 Chapters of which were published in 1657, and the
remainder written over the last decade of the author's life, which
ended in 1670. This was thirty years before the Enlightenment is
supposed to have begun. What are enlightenment values? Here is a
succinct statement written last year by one of the stately atheists of
England, A.C. Grayling,


"When people talk about `Enlightenment values' now, they tend to mean
a modernized and somewhat idealized take on the 18th-century version.
Enlightenment values today are commitments to individual autonomy,
democracy, the rule of law, science, rationality, secularism,
pluralism, a humanistic ethics, the importance of education, the
promotion of human rights." (A.C. Grayling, "How Humans Dared To
Know," New Scientist, 26 July, 2008, p. 43)


It can be seen that, with the obvious exception of secularism, these
enlightenment ideals are all laid out by Comenius in a purely
religious context, each carefully documented as a legitimate offspring
of Biblical teaching. Even the idea of "enlightenment" is there -- in
fact this is the title, Via Lucis, or Way of Light, of another in
Comenius's series known as the Consultatio. It is true that most
Christians of his and subsequent times chose to reject the gentle,
principled tolerance of Comenius in favour of exclusivist dogma and
fundamentalism. Indeed it was not until Abdu'l-Baha laid out the
Baha'i principles a century ago that we see this path of peace and
enlightenment blazed once more in religious thought.


The exception we mentioned was secularism, the complete rejection and
expulsion of religion from the public thing. Comenius proposed instead
the image of politics as the head and body of a bird, and religion and
natural philosophy as the two wings that keep it in flight. Humanity
cannot fly without all three of these essential organs. What we now
call "humanism" has been appropriated by anti-theists, who imagine
that the bird can get out of the dust with a body and only one wing.
Rather, Comenius proposed, God is the highest ideal of true humanism,
since the entire bird was created in His image. This, Comenius
proposed, is a neutral enough ideal for both scientists and
politicians to invoke without taint of parochial bias.


"The method of organising the Political Community can best be derived
from the Idea of the Image of God, as follows: 1. Men should behave in
the same way towards the image of God (which means himself and his
fellow-men) as he should behave towards God. 2. Since mankind is God's
image, we should show the same behaviour towards it as God does, for
God is setting us an example." (Panorthosia, Ch. 12, para 8, pp. 190)


Unlike many religious, Comenius held that what we cannot learn from
scripture, the book of God, we can and should derive from God's other
book, the book of nature, that is, natural philosophy, what we now
call science.


"Then again ideas of a true political system can be derived from the
natural world, (e.g. the economist learning wisdom from the ant and
the politician from bees), and also from the artificial world. And far
from passing this over, as if the resemblances were purely accidental,
we should take it seriously, as reflecting God's everlasting wisdom
designed for our present purpose. For these creatures certainly take
their activities seriously, and the works which they produce are just
as real as ours ought to be. Thus any living, organic, and systematic
body is purely and simply God's representation of the idea of harmony
to which any political body must conform." (Panorthosia, Ch. 12, para
8, pp. 190)


This use of nature as educator about harmony and model for society
ties in to my other major writing project, proposing a new,
zero-environmental footprint construction along with the social
reforms that would enable it to be built.




John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/



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