Abstract
Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Comenius is historical evidence of the revolutionary development of language didactic in the seventeenth century. However, this book is not only a simple encyclopedic Latin study book with pictures, but a little theology work containing Christian cosmological universalism as well as a pedagogy which provides principles for educational practice and social realizations of a theological ideal in a very new and creative form of iconography. While studying Latin seems to be the main purpose of his work, the authentic intention of the author lies in a panpedagogical call to a religious-educational mission for rebuilding humanity and society during and after the 30 Years War. In this article, we will show the historical and pedagogical meaning of this book through component analysis, framework analysis and iconographical interpretation. In addition, we will also approach Comenius’ concept of Pampaedia through an iconographical shortcut, highlighting a picture in “Invitatio” and “Clausula”, which is presented twice in this book.
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Notes
According to Smith (cf. Smith 2000: 225), this book went through 21 editions in the seventeenth century, 43 in the eighteenth, 33 in the nineteenth and 9 in the twentieth. It was translated into at least 12 European and 7 Asiatic languages (Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Mongolian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese).
It is true that Orbis Sensualium Pictus has been one of the most frequently used school books for a century following Comenius’ death in Europe (Reble 1995: 114; Sturm and Groenendijk 2006: 114f). However the question if it was the first school book with pictures worldwide is a matter of debate. For example, the historical fact that two books with pictures, namely 入學圖說 (IpHakDoSeol 1390; Kwon 1990) (Fig. 1) and 三綱行實圖 (SamGangHengSilDo: 1434/1490; Seol 2008) (Fig. 2), have been around two centuries earlier than Orbis Sensualium Pictus, which was used in East Asia for propagating Neo-Confucianism and ethics (cf. Jang 2000).
4. Representatively, Ĉapková defines Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Comenius as “a little Bible for children” (1970: 23) and she makes remarks on how it is a representation about the “connection between didactics and pansophy on a mediaeval religious setting” (1970: 15f). Also the study by Smith (2000) with focus on the harmonious interrelation of reason, the study by Schwarz and Martin (2002) on Comenius in the context of contemporary public education in America, and by Woo (2009) with focus on the Christian cosmological universalism by Comenius belong to this research tradition.
Ĉapková (1970: 13f) analyses them into four categories (God, the World, Terrestrial Nature, Man, Providence and the Last Judgment), Menck (2000: 98) into six categories (God, the World, Nature, Man, Providence, the Judgment), and Müller (2010: 374) into ten categories (De Deo, ontological perspective, nature area, domestic area, space development, book/school/science/virtue, man in an ordered system, urban life, aspect of kingdom, religion/Judgment).
Due to the fact that the so called “iconographical method” has been settled down as a meaningful research method in contemporary pedagogy these last few decades (cf. Herrlitz and Rittelmeyer 1993; Lippitz 1993; Mollenhauer 1983; Mollenhauer 1986; Mollenhauer 2003; Rittelmeyer and Wiersing 1991; Schulze 1990; Schulze 1993; Woo 2008a, b; Wünsche 1991), an extra comment on it will not be given in this article. Just a few things in the context of this article needs to be mentioned; (a) if we cast back to the origin of this method, we can meet Comenius, (b) while researchers in pedagogy in the last few decades were mostly in a passive role simply to interpret classic masterpieces or pictures drawn by children, Comenius played an active role to create an original source for hermeneutical work through converting language texts into picture texts, (c) this became, at the same time, a source for pedagogical practice, and as a consequence of it, (d) this became an important motive for dissolving the border between pedagogical interpretation and pedagogical practice.
“So out of ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field.”(Genesis 2:19-20: The Holy Bible 1989).
It is not clear whether the decision on the amount of categories (150) in Orbis Sensualium Pictus was based on the panpedagogical belief of the author or rather on the consultation of the publisher in consideration of the commercial ground (cf. Toischer 1913: 172). However there must have been critical reactions, even in the seventeenth century, towards the medieval-oriented cosmological concept of order and the corresponding categorization in Orbis Sensualium Pictus. According to Ballauff & Schaller, “the pansophy by Comenius and his pedagogy proved not to be contemporary any more. His idea and project in its essence did not get agreement from his contemporaries and even from his admirers.”(Ballauff and Schaller 1970: 189) The enlargement of categories from 150 to 320 categories and removal of the theological frame (God & The Last Judgment) in Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Gailer (1835; cf. Gailer 1979) provide a skeptical motive in terms of the universality of the cosmological universalism presented in Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Comenius.
Leis-Schindler calls three of four symbols in the middle of Fig. 3 “three Hebrew J in the third inner circle” and interprets them as symbol of God. But he does not offer an explanation about the associative connection between this Hebrew letter and God. Perhaps he might have thought that this Hebrew letter has a similar sound with the German word “Gott” in seventeenth century or in a certain dialect of contemporary German. Nevertheless the fourth symbol “ㅜ” of [Fig. 3] still remains unexplained, which means that the hypothesis by Leis-Schindler was not fully identified. Another possibility, that these four symbols were a form of tetragrammaton, needs also to be taken into consideration.
Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”(Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 5: 8. The Holy Bible 1989).
One evidence for this argument is the fact that an image of a human face is to be seen in the picture “Invitatio” of the test printing (1653: Fig. 15), which was made under the title of Vestibuli et Januae Lucidarium, but not in Fig. 14 in Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658). The anthropomorphism skill appears twice in Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Figs. 6, 11). However a whole face appears just once in Fig. 6 as the core of the cloud, while there is only “one big eye” as the core of the sun in Fig. 11. It is not clear what was the intention of this anthropomorphism, whether to evoke friendliness in children or something else. And based on the comment of Comenius himself on Fig. 11 that the “one big eye” is “the provident eye of God”, this seems not to be a personification, but an instrument to stress the all-knowing attribute of God through the symbolic functionality of an eye.
The explanation by Ĉapková, that “religion education was practiced from early childhood at home in seventeenth century and therefore the construction of Orbis Sensualium Pictus, which might seem to be unusual from today’s perspective, was possibly not that strange for the people in that time” (cf. Ĉapková 1970: 21), seems to be reasonable at first glance. But at the same time, it is necessary to take the academic tendency of Descartes, who was one of Comenius’ contemporaries in the beginning period of modern science and who has met Comenius once for an academic dialogue (cf. Heesakkers 1996), and also the critical reactions to the medieval setting of Orbis Sensualium Pictus from the contemporaries of Comenius (cf. [footnote8]) into consideration.
Surely this kind of semantic feature assignment is done on a symbolic-metaphoric dimension. Leis-Schindler defines the symbolic-metaphoric function of cloud in Orbis Sensualium Pictus as “separation of the sublunary and translunary world or a spiritual world of God which lies above the stars” (1991: 228). What he gives as additional examples for the “concealment of God” is the “scene of Moses with the Ten Commandments on the mountain Sinai” (cat. 146) and the “scene of baptism and the Second Coming of Jesus” (Fig. 10). However the former was not illustrated in Orbis Sensualium Pictus, and the latter is one of six pictures in Fig. 10 and is therefore of relatively little importance. Apart from these cases, there is also a case in which Comenius describes the cloud as a natural phenomenon in a very neutral and dry, namely in a natural and scientific way (cat.7, “the clouds”).
One example is Category 101 “Philosophy” (Fig. 8). In this picture, the “sun” is portrayed ambiguously, namely as a “symbol of God and God’s creature at the same time.” A nature scientist points to the sun in this picture and Comenius comments on it that “The naturalist vieweth all the works of God in the World.” However it is not clear whether it is the sun as God or as a creature which is pointed to by the nature scientist in the picture.
In the Christian art history, the icon “eye” symbolizes “the all-knowing God.” While this icon appears normally pairs of two, Comenius presents it in singularly, namely as “one big eye” in Fig. 11 in Orbis Sensualium Pictus. According De Chapeaurouge, it belongs, strictly speaking, not to the tradition of Christianity, but to the ancient Egyptian tradition, even though it is not clear how it came into Christian art. He assumes that “one big eye at the center of an equilateral triangle means in most cases an all-knowing and all-mighty God of wisdom and of trinity” and that this sort of symbolization began to appear more frequently in Christian art in the seventeenth century. The earliest example for it is in a picture (1683) in the Church in the City of Blaubeuren. But he seems to have ignored the example 25 years earlier in Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Comenius (cf. De Chapeaurouge 1987: 145f). By the way, Fig. 3 can also be seen as a metaphor for “one big eye.”
Not all of the pictures in Orbis Sensualium Pictus seem to have been sketched by Comenius. According to previous studies (cf. Toischer, 1913: 175f; Laufhülle, 2004: 644f), they were probably made by P. Kreuzberger and other anonymous helpers. It is also said that Comenius could not do the proofreading and even that the German text was not written by Comenius but by a certain Sigmund von Birken. In spite of all these blind spots which weakens the reliability of this book to a certain degree, one thing is clear; there have been direct intervention of the author to the picture in the “invitation” and “the close.” The differences between the test printing and its regular publication in detail, please see Turnbull (1957).
There are, if rarely, even statements which seems to be rather aggressive; “truly, sincerely and seriously wish for the banishment of darkness everywhere and the increase of Light in men’s mind.” (Comenius, 1986: 22) or “Things are subject to human dominion, to be managed only by men who are wise in the fullest sense of the word” (Comenius 1986: 39).
Compare with the “stick” in the category 97 “School” in Orbis Sensualium Pictus.
I follow the English translation by Hoole and Bardeen (1887). However, the sentence “I, by God’s help” is not the correct translation from the original German version by Comenius. It was originally “Ich/mit Gott” (Ego, cum Deo: I, with God) and both of them are semantically not the same. The Korean translation (Nam 1999) and Japanese translation (Inoguchi 1998) show the same translation as the one by Hoole & Bardeen.
For this change of perspectives in the case of Fig. 12 (“The Last Judgment”), we need to refer to the description of the scene in the Bible. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.”(Mathew 25:31, The Holy Bible 1989). It should be assumed that there is no audience, but all people are participants in The Last Judgment. As a consequence, this picture needs to be read not from the reader’s perspective but from God’s (i.e. “the Son of Man” in Fig. 12) perspective.
In this sense, the interpretation by Schulze that the topic of Fig. 14 is “strolling of a student and a teacher” is possibly a superficial understanding without a systematic consideration of the iconographical context of Orbis Sensualium Pictus. As Bagley (2010) rightly pointed out, Fig. 12 should be read rather as a metaphor, not as a sketch of a real situation. The hypothesis by Schulze that Comenius has corrected the left and right side of Fig. 15 (1653) into a reverse direction in Fig. 14 (1658) due to a simple reason of a visually bilateral symmetry seems to be rarely provable (cf. Schulze 1993: 157; Schulze 1990: 111f).
In regards to the change of icons of the “hat” from Fig. 15 into Fig. 14, another interpretation by Bagley (2010) needs to be mentioned. “Comenius … replaced it with one in a style long associated with St. James in his role as pilgrim. The teacher now has an appearance reminiscent of the Saint whose church in Santiago de Compostela was for centuries a destination of pilgrims from all over Europe” This interpretation seems to be reasonable in its historical context considering the pilgrimage movement during the second half of the seventeenth century in Europe. However this interpretation seems to be difficult to be included in the present study. The focus on pilgrimage does not match the idea of the present study, namely the collinearity system (sun—teacher’s head—student’s head).
“God has created the sun not to be observed alone, but to enable us to observe His other works, that is, not to blind us but to provide us with light” (Comenius 1986: 93).
Wedgewood writes about the meaninglessness of the miserable Thirty Years War as follows; “There was no compulsion towards a conflict… The war solved no problem. Its effect, both immediate and indirect, was either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”(Wedgewood 1949: 526) From Comenius’ perspective, this historically miserable situation was a disorderly labyrinth which was caused by the greed and mistake of human being (cf. Comenius 1997: 41f: Comenius 1970).
A further investigation about the so called Lucis-philosophy of Comenius and its influence on the history of pedagogy will not be made in this article due to the limits of space. However it is necessary to remark that Comenius has shown his great affection for contrast of light-darkness not only in Orbis Sensualium Pictus but in all of his works. His late work Via Lucis (1668; Comenius 1997) is a good example to see his dualistic viewpoint in terms of light and darkness, order and disorder, the educatedness and uneducatedness: “Light as a remedy for disorder—there is no more effective remedy than the cosmological light for the cure of dark disorder of human beings” (Comenius 1997: 41). The contrast between order and disorder is also a basic motive in his work Labyrinth of the world and the paradise of the heart (1623; Comenius 1970). The title itself presents his dualistic viewpoint. As proposed in the present article, there are icons which imply dualistic viewpoint regarding brightness and darkness, order and disorder, right and left in Orbis Sensualium Pictus. It is noteworthy to remark that the function of education or the role of the educator, through which the two different worlds can and should be lead into a homogeneous world (cf. Woo 2009).
This collinearity (the sunshine—head of teacher—head of student) can also be read as an iconographical indicator to show how Comenius conceived (a) the relationship between the divine light and human reason (“reason is in the divine light in man”: Comenius 1986: 33: cf. Comenius 1986: 23) and (b) the position of educator between the God and the student. In regards to the dualistic interpretation of Fig. 14, especially in terms of “teacher versus student” and “culture versus nature”, is that there is no definite irreconcilable status of two separate worlds, but a process of becoming (or being expected to be) homogeneous through education and institutions: “truly, sincerely and seriously wish for the banishment of darkness everywhere and the increase of Light in men’s mind” (Comenius 1986: 22).
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Woo, JG. Revisiting Orbis Sensualium Pictus: An Iconographical Reading in Light of the Pampaedia of J. A. Comenius. Stud Philos Educ 35, 215–233 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9487-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9487-y