Steiner's reading of Comenius, whose Temple of Pansophia carried the old mystery-wisdom into the modern age of the intellect as universal education.
Comenius and Pansophia in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of Jan Amos Comenius, the seventeenth-century Czech educator, and his unfinished Pansophia, the plan for a Temple of universal wisdom uniting all knowledge, science and piety. In the lecture cycle published as GA 167 (Present and Past in the Human Spirit, 1916), Steiner presents Comenius as a sensitive spirit of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, one who carried genuine mystery-impulses, the old temple-building wisdom, into the new age of the intellect rather than letting them survive only as secret tradition. Comenius reworked the symbolism of Solomon's Temple into a school of all-wisdom open to every human being, the seed of modern universal education.
Comenius and Pansophia names the way Rudolf Steiner read the Moravian educator Jan Amos Comenius (1592 to 1670) and his project of pansophy, a Temple of universal wisdom. For Steiner, Comenius stood at the turning of the post-Atlantean epochs and translated the ancient temple-building mysteries into a science of all-wisdom meant for every child, founding modern education in the process.
In Steiner's Own Words
So there we have Amos Comenius in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the beginning of our era, a man who knew: Now is the time of change, a new age is dawning. What was before must be translated into the form of the outer intellect. It must not be kept in the form of mere tradition. Tradition went back to the last thing that was revealed, to the building of the temple. Whether one took the Greek temple or the Temple of Solomon is irrelevant. It all came down to the building of the temple, to the images of the temple, and everything was taken from the images of the temple, symbolically, imaginatively.
What it Means Today
Comenius is remembered by historians of education as the father of the modern textbook, the author of the Orbis Sensualium Pictus of 1658, the first picture book made for children. Steiner asks us to see what stood behind that gentle primer. The same man who drew God, the heavens and the crafts in 150 woodcuts was building, in his unfinished Pansophia, a Temple of all-wisdom modelled on Solomon's Temple, in which the senses, reason and divine revelation were the three forests that supplied the timber. Education, science and piety were one structure, not three subjects.
The most searching modern reader of this Comenius was the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka (1907 to 1977), who spent decades editing Comenius's Latin works and founded the field now called comeniology. Patočka argued that Comenius was not a naive optimist but a thinker of crisis, a man who, after the Thirty Years' War scattered his Moravian church, staked everything on a wisdom that could be shared by all rather than hoarded by an elite. Thalira synthesis: where Patočka reads Comenius as the philosopher who answered the collapse of one world with a school for the next, Steiner reads the same gesture as an esoteric act, the conscious carrying of temple-wisdom across the threshold of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, so that what the Mysteries once guarded for the few could ripen, as ordinary universal education, for the many.
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