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An Invitation to Wisdom and Schooling |
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Foreword
Charles E. Thompson
Georgia State University
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John A. Comenius
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Among the special gifts of scholarship are new insights into
familiar classics. Ayers Bagley has presented us with such a gift. Inviting us to look
anew at John A. Comenius' extraordinary textbook, the revolutionary Orbis Pictus (1658), he enables us to see a cornucopia of meaning. His method is iconic -- a method
rarely used by historians of education -- and the result is uniquely illuminating.
Comenius
sought to strengthen the learning of linguistic symbols by visual means. In Orbis
Pictus, sensible things are suggested by representative images,
non-representative visual devices (i.e., pictorial signs), and by words (i.e., verbal
symbols). Creatures and artifacts are shown and named; ideas are indicated by pictorial
signs and verbal symbols. Even God has both a pictorial sign and a word. Some one hundred
and thirty years before Kant, Orbis Pictus embodied the dictum that
"concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind."
The Orbis Pictus exhibits the combined influence of Renaissance
attention to the things of this world and the Reformation impulse to instruct. In
successive translations it follows in time and space the branching of its Latin trunk into
various vernaculars and thus reveals a Reformation awareness of the unity of things amid
the plurality of tongues.
Comenius recognizes no radical split between nature and man. "The grasshopper
chirpeth ci ci" early in the text, and later the grasshopper's improvidence,
contrasted with the industry of the pismire, helps define the human virtue of diligence.
Using nature as a guide to moral good is of course a practice older than Aesop. Comenius'
treatment of nature and human good is, among other things, an empirical rebuke to the
formalism of the is-ought distinction that makes 'proper' science value-free and hence no
guide to good conduct. Perhaps more importantly, Comenius' illustration of the referents
of words embodies a fundamental insight of modern science, that language can be insanely
misleading unless chained to empirical phenomena, albeit his motive may have been
primarily to use the senses as an aid to mastery of the arts and sciences. Nevertheless,
the Orbis Pictus is an antique semiotic.
Of the many interconnecting insights that Bagley presents in his essay, perhaps the
most exciting is the demonstration that here in early modern times is to be found a
resolution of an issue which still vexes. Language, Comenius seems to say, is imperial. It
is about nature and it is about civilization. Education is the door connecting the realm
of language and the realm of things. Yet language, imperial because it is about all things
from God to grasshoppers, still cannot stand alone, nor pass by itself as education. The
door swings both ways; education, making key use of the iconic, connects language and
things, whether those things are natural or artifactual. Knowledge of language and
knowledge of things need each other and nourish each other. That is the modern insight,
and here we are shown the emergence of pedagogy from its cocoon of arid grammatics and
scholasticism.
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God
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection
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Diligence
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection
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AN INVITATION TO WISDOM AND SCHOOLING
Ayers Bagley
University of Minnesota
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Title Page
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection
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The most famous children's textbook of the early modern era, the Orbis
Sensualium Pictus (1658) of John Amos Comenius, is also one of the least
understood iconographically.1 The fame as well as the enduring usefulness of Orbis traces to its ingenious integration
of three features: encyclopedism, bi-lingualism, and visual imagery. Some later editions
of the text increased the scope of its subject matter and its variety of images.2 Some editions increased the
number of languages represented to three, four, and more.3 But the essential Orbis remained discernible.
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Although Comenius advertised his work as a "little encyclopedia" of things and human employments obvious to the senses, the text is richly endowed with
symbolism, personifications, and allegory.4 From beginning to end, it is laced with meanings not self-evident to the senses. The
implicit content is not readily accessible; ambiguity attends even some of the apparently
simple lessons. And at certain points it is possible to detect motifs probably outside the
deliberate intentions of author and illustrator. Among the instances of special interest
for iconic studies of education are the "Invitation," which begins Lesson I, the
lesson on "School" (XCVII), and the "Close."5 An examination of these lessons
may reveal meanings and motives helpful in explaining more of the cultural significance of Orbis Pictus.
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Invitation
1672 London Edition |
Come boy! Learn to be wise.
What doth this mean, to be wise?
To understand rightly, to do rightly,
and to speak out rightly, all that are necessary.
Before all things, thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds,
of which mans speech consisteth;
which living creatures know how to make,
and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate,
and thy hand can picture out.
Afterwards we will go into the world,
and we will view all things.
-- "Invitation" Orbis Pictus, London
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The Taylor
1672 London Edition |
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I.
Orbis opens with a modest yet perplexing woodcut of two figures, a man
and a boy, standing alone in a landscape. In the distance, a city can be seen, its spires
and substantial architecture are indicated sketchily. The figures are identified in the
text as Magister and Puer, i.e., schoolmaster and boy (or child). Their gestures suggest
communication. Nothing about their appearance indicates that they are on the way to or
from agricultural labors or any determinate employment.6 They are dressed in accordance
with the apparel described in the lessons on the "Taylor" (LXII) and the
"Shoo-Maker" (LXIII). Consider the lad; he is no barefoot country boy. He wears
shoes, stockings, wide pantaloons, a buttoned doublet, full collar and cuffs.7 He holds his hat in polite
deference to the schoolmaster with whom he is in dialogue.8 The schoolmaster has a full
white beard. With hat and cloak over his other apparel, and his walking stick in his right
hand, which might also serve as a ferule, he is a commanding figure against the skyline.
"Come Boy!" he says, "learn to be wise." And the boy consents. Is this
not quite ridiculous? The whole thing appears absurd, if it is considered literally as a
picturing of actual practices of the time.
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The Traveler
1672 London Edition
School
Albrecht Dürer
1510
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Perhaps the Invitation and its imagery should be
summarily dismissed as an artifice. Schoolmasters did not in fact roam the countryside
gleaning unlettered boys from vacant fields. In the 1650's in Northern Europe, the country
side was not a place for pleasant strolls. The economic devastation and moral degradation
of the Thirty Years War made it ill advised for the unprotected, young or old, to wander
far afield.9 The
lesson on the "Traveller" (LXXXII) warns of robbers, cites the need for a
traveling companion, and cautions against departures from the "Highroad."
Schoolmasters
did their teaching in schoolrooms. That was the traditional fact. That was also the fact
of iconographic convention.10 It is true that school iconography of the early modern era includes some open-air teaching
scenes. They are exceptional. The best known is by Albrecht Dürer. But Dürer's class and
master sit beside a wall, and the presence of the master's large pillow and the
schoolboys' benches suggest that shelter is nearby.ll Some other examples of open air
teaching include more elaborate furniture, which casts doubt on the degree to which the
imagery was intended as naturalistic.l2 Spatial ambiguity sometimes results from juxtapositions of naturalistic representations
and things of the mind. Consider Geiler von Keiserberg's master and students: Where are
they? In or out? The tree suggests open-air, but it is an alphabet tree, a botanical
specimen that flowers only in the imagination.l3 A similar kind of example occurs in other textbooks, especially in images that have
reference to astronomy which may be emblematic of the macrocosmos.l4 Stars are shown on high and no
lines define walls or windows, yet the master or student is seated on a chair or stool,
again suggesting either imaginary space or nearness of an architectural interior.
Just as viewers today can be counted on to recognize that alphabet trees are imaginary,
so early modern viewers would understand that the Invitation and its imagery were not to
be taken literally. Lesson I becomes more meaningful--indeed, it can be seen to set the
main assumptions of the text--when it is approached as metaphor rather than in terms of
the work-a-day world. That the Lesson mixes metaphors will become apparent in due course.
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Alphabet Tree
Geiler von Keiserberg
1490 |
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Concentrating first on what is not in doubt concerning Lesson I, this much
can be noted. A model student, a model teacher, and an ideal relationship between them
have been introduced to the reader. What characteristics are evident in the models and the
ideal? First, the boy: As a puer, he is someone who has passed from the speechlessness of
infancy to the second stage of life.15 His experience to this point has rendered him mannerly, curious, and docible. Note that
when he does not understand a term, he asks for its meaning. ("What doth this mean,
to be wise?") And when he perceives the need for additional help in overcoming his
ignorance, he expresses his readiness to learn: "See, here I am; lead me in the name
of God.
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Whereas the student must be ready to learn, he also needs a qualified
teacher. The master of Lesson I immediately reveals his qualifications. He is an elderly
male in the sixth age of life approaching the seventh and last. He is an initiator of
dialogue, challenging a potential student with ideas and goals that are intelligible but
not yet fully comprehensible. He is gentle, God-fearing, and identifies himself as a
guide. He knows the way that leads to wisdom: |
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M. Before all things, thou oughtest to
learn the plain sounds,
of which man's speech consisteth;
which living creatures know how to make,
and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate,
and thy hand can picture out.
Afterwards we will go into the world,
and we will view all things.
Here thou hast a lively and vocal alphabet.
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In sum, the competent teacher states the long range purpose of education
("wisdom") and the related goals of learning (true understanding, right action,
and correct speech concerning what is necessary), specifies the tasks of learning and
their order, and then provides a method for accomplishing them. The ideal relationship
between teacher and student is clear in some respects. It is one in which age guides
youth. More specifically, the sixth age of life before declining to disability bestows its
legacy on the rising generation; newly awakened aspirations are given direction by
judgment most mature.16 Must the relationship be limited to males? Orbis indicates nothing otherwise, although
Comenius elsewhere in his writings insists on education for girls.17
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II .
Genesis. The Invitation welcomes interpretations that range beyond moral meanings
to allegory. The teacher and the boy in the fields call to mind God and Adam and the
beginnings of language. Comenius selected the pertinent passage from Genesis to establish
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The Lord God brought unto Adam every
Beast of the Field, and every Fowl of the air, to see what he would call them. And Adam
gave names to all Cattell, and to the Fowl of the air, and to every Beast of the Field. (
II Genesis 19,20) |
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King Peleus presents Achilles to Chiron
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The roles of the teacher and boy in the field are not identical to those
of God and Adam. After all, the teacher and the boy are inheritors, as are Everyboy and
Everyteacher. Yet their location in the natural landscape, far from architecture,
associates them with the primeval condition of Genesis. Close to nature, the boy is to
learn an alphabet evocative of the animals named by Adam. The heritage of Genesis is
carried forward.
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Initiation. Without denying the allusion to Genesis, is
there any way to explain the fact that the encounter between the boy and the teacher
occurs far from their community and in vague circumstances? Why is the boy not presented
to the teacher? Parents, at least one parent or a guardian, would normally do this. The
oldest education imagery in Western civilization depicts such a presentation scene. King
Peleus hands over Achilles, his son, to Chiron who is to become the boy's teacher.18 Similarly, Jesus is
introduced to his would-be teachers by Joseph or Mary or by both of them.19 It was an enduring theme still
vital when Orbis was composed.20 The absence of the parents at the point of encounter, the isolation of the teacher and boy
in the countryside, and all that subsequently transpires, tends to support the idea of
initiation. The Invitation corresponds strikingly in several respects to a rite of
passage.
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Mary takes Jesus to School
16th c |
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The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, has written
helpfully on the subject of puberty rites and traces of them in the modern world.
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The tribal initiation introduces the novice into the world
of spiritual and cultural values and makes him a responsible member of the society. The
young man learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of
adults, but also the myths and the sacred traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods
and the history of their works; above all, he learns the mystical relations between the
tribe and supernatural beings as those relations were established at the beginning of
time. . . . In short, through initiation, the candidate passes beyond the
"natural" mode of being--that of the child-and gains access to the cultural
mode; that is, he is introduced to spiritual values.21
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The author goes on to identify additional features of such
rites. "Any age-grading initiation requires a certain number of more or less dramatic
tests and trials: separation from the mother, isolation in the bush under the supervision
of an instructor. . . The sudden revelation of sacred objects. . .22 Other practices are also
cited which may or may not be part of puberty rites, varying from culture to culture.
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Mary and Joseph take Jesus to School
16th c |
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If the Invitation is less than a paradigmatic example of an initiation
rite, the resemblances are impressive. The Invitation prepares the boy for the
"sudden revelation" of a sacred object, in this case a sign of God, which is
introduced in Lesson II. "Through puberty rites," Eliade observes, "the
novice gains access to the sacred world, that is to say, to what is considered real and
meaningful in his culture . . ."23 That is a reasonable summary of the basic purpose of Orbis Pictus.
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It is not only the Orbis Invitation that reveals traces
of the theme of initiation. The whole process of Latin language study in the modern era
can be viewed as a puberty rite.24 When Latin ceased to be a living language, that is, when it was no longer the language of
families, the learning of Latin became increasingly a "rite de passage."25 In this connection, it is
fitting that Comenius should have described his first highly successful textbook as a
"door" to languages, namely, the Janua Linguarum.26 The point is not that
Comenius or other early modern educators thought of Latin study as a puberty rite. It is
rather that key features in the process might be understood as survivals or echoes of
something anthropologically primitive, albeit in forms "devious and vague."27
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The Liberal Arts
Chartres Cathedral
West Front, Right Portal |
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The Janua and Orbis, which is an
illustrated condensation of the Janua, comprise doorways different from
the medieval curriculum. The latter can be seen at Chartres. In the middle of the 12th
century, personifications of the Seven Liberal Arts were sculpted into the fabric over the
right-most western portal of the cathedral.28 The allegorically-minded would have had no difficulty in seeing the results as a
confirmation of the religious importance of the school curriculum, that the trivium (three
ways) and the quadrivium (four ways) formed a legitimate archway into sacred space. But
that space was within the cathedral. Comenius' textbooks, in the spirit of the
Reformation, were gateways to the world at large, all of which was to be
recognized as infused with religious significance.
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God
1672 London Edition |
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This brings us back to the boy and his preceptor in the fields. The boy,
we know, will be led to the sign of God after passing through the alphabet, and then he
will be shown progressively the whole of God's creation, first in its totality, and then
analytically, passing on through a series of classifications of existence.29 He will learn, too, of the
future, which reveals God in final judgment, the Lord of his creation. It is a chastening
vision accompanied by a promise and a threat. Orbis at its Close finds
the teacher and the boy physically where they began, but the boy is now prepared for the
great world, having been imbued with true impressions and the very structure of knowledge.
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Invitation
1659 English Edition |
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Pilgrimage. The closing speech of the teacher reminds the
boy of a promise fulfilled. The teacher had said at the outset of the text that he would
take the boy into the world and show him all. And so he did. As soon as the necessary
preparations had been made--learning the alphabet and establishing theological
bearings--the journey began from on high. The god's eye view has its advantages. The world
can be seen as a whole; it can also be seen taxonomically. When entire categories meet the
eye, the vista is indeed divine. There are the heavens and the earth, the world, the
elements, terrain, minerals, birds and beasts, and many other forms of life. Europe
commands the largest interest. Its several kingdoms are noted, and then attention comes to
focus on a city, the most complex form of human association analyzed in Orbis.
The boy was enabled to view it outside and in, to study its institutions, e.g., family,
church, governmental bodies, market, theaters, prison. As the teacher said in summary:
"Thus, thou hast seen in short all the things that can be shewed, and hast learned
the chief words. . ." It was a trip to remember. It was, in a sense, the first phase
of the pilgrimage of life, but only the first. "Go on now," bade the teacher,
"and read other good books diligently, and thou shalt become learned, wise, and
Godly."
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St. James
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The notion of pilgrimage may have occurred to the copyist who produced the
images for the English/Latin editions of Orbis. This speculation is
warranted by a small detail. Although the copyist faithfully reproduced most of the
original illustrations, he took away the hat the teacher had worn in the German edition of
1658 and replaced it with one in a style long associated with St. James in his role as
pilgrim.30 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.31
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Hinting at pilgrimage, the copyist offered a sensible means of
interpreting the otherwise puzzling imagery of the Invitation. There is sufficient text to
recommend the interpretation. Besides the passages in the Invitation and the Close, there
is also the lesson on Ethics (CIX) which describes life as a "way" and
"path," and shows a youth imitating Hercules on the road of life, halted
temporarily at the crossroads of moral choice.32
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Looking outside the text, it may be noted that there was a revival of
interest in pilgrimage during the second half of the 17th century.33 One of the more lasting
expressions of this interest is John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684).
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Invitation
1659 English Edition |
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Orbis personified. Might the teacher in the Invitation be
a personification of Orbis itself? This would help explain why the
teacher and the boy are not depicted as observers in the illustrations. Only in the Lesson
on the school is it possible to detect a vague resemblance between the figures of the
Invitation and the schoolmaster and reciting boy. But the cut is insufficiently detailed
to permit a positive identification. A second reason for construing the Invitation teacher
as Orbis personified proceeds from Comenius' prefatory statement. He
proposes that Orbis be introduced to the child at home.34 Thus, Orbis would begin to teach the child before he went to school. Comenius also likens Orbis to "a man clad in a double garment," as he explains that the dual columns of
textA Latin and vernacular, are synonymous.35 This is not proof that the Invitation teacher was intended as Orbis, only
that Comenius was prepared to use the book/ man simile. Even if the Invitation teacher
were intended as Orbis personified, this would not erase the allusion to
God and Adam nomenclating (Genesis II :19,20) or the correspondences with the themes of
initiation and pilgrimage.
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The Preface to Orbis makes clear that Comenius intended a
continuity between home and school as well as between levels of schooling. Why then the
discontinuity of the Invitation with both the family and the school? Comenius does not
address the point. In fact, he says very little about the iconography of Orbis.
He claims that the book represents "all visible things" (a gross exaggeration,
of course), that some of the images reduce the invisible to the visible "after their
fashion," and that the textual descriptions and their ordering follow the Janua;
he adds that the Orbis alphabet employs "the Image of that Creature,
whose voyce the letter goeth about to imitate. . ."36 He says no more about the
imagery.
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Invitation
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection |
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III .
From 1666 and through the eighteenth century, continental editions of Orbis,
following a revised Nuremberg edition, replaced the original image of the Invitation with
one that emphasizes book learning.37 The teacher and the boy are again far from the city, and again they appear unaccompanied.
But the teacher is shown seated in a fine chair on a platform or unenclosed porch. Beside
him is a table with several open books; behind him is tall shelving filled with hefty
volumes. The setting and accoutrements suggest that the teacher is an enshrined sage to
whom the boy has made a pilgrimage. As in the earlier seventeenth century illustrations,
the figures are given gestures to indicate communication. The shelvesfull of volumes are
consistent with the teacher's closing adjuration to read more books. Although the
circumstances depicted do not exclude the idea of initiation, the nomenclature theme of
Genesis is overwhelmed by the immediate presence of furniture and library. A modest
counterpoint is formed by the small animal--a fox or dog--racing across the field in the
middle ground. The illustrator's attempt at a visual integration of manufactured objects
within a pastoral ambience brings forward the idea that nature and culture may comprise an
harmonious whole rather than a conflict of opposites.38
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IV.
Teacher and student symbolism. The Invitation and the Close idealize the teacher
and the student along lines of tutor and pupil, sage and disciple. The teacher becomes a
preceptor, a guide to life, a way-shower. In connection with the notion of pilgrimage, he
takes on the attributes of a tutelary saint and guardian. The relations are all one to
one, such as might be found in those palaces where princes are invested with resources at
the disposal of royalty. When the tutor/student configuration of values is developed to
its ultimate, the role of teacher becomes a form of parenting. It might even be seen as
more valuable than the role of biological parent. So, in the opinion of John Clarke,
Headmaster of Lincoln School in 1624, "Alexander was right in claiming that he had
owed more to Aristotle his teacher than to Philip his father."39 Families give birth to
children; teachers birth their minds.
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The boy of Orbis is equal to the investment in him. He
perceives and values the master's teachings. Indeed, in the later Nuremberg editions, the
designer of the imagery seems to have given the boy the initiative. Instead of the
unexplained encounter first depicted in the seventeenth century editions, the boy now
appears to present himself to the sage in his hermitage study. "See, here I am, lead
me..." This has the ring of individual choice, of a person in the act of making a
commitment. Seemingly premature in a boy so young as the one depicted in the Invitation,
the sentiment is nonetheless in accord with early Protestant emphases on the central
importance of individual conscience. Still, the Orbis boy exhibits more
conscience than is likely in a pre-abecedarian. The image and the dialogue are more
convincing as testimony to Comenius' pedagogical principle that the teacher should look
for evidence that the student is ready to learn the kind of lessons intended.40
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A School
1672 London Edition |
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V.
Schooling. Among the social institutions visited in Orbis is a
school, presumably a Latin grammar school. It is an inner city institution. "The
public buildings," according to the text, "are in the middle of the city, the
church, the school, the guild-hall, the exchange.''41 The school is described as an
officina, that is, a workshop or a manufactory. According to the Janua,
the parent text of Orbis, the grammar school is of political
significance.42 What does it signify? Not power; that is a property of other agencies: "The temple or
church, the court, the armory or storehouse, the treasury and the granneries. . .are the
strength of a city." The school belongs to a different category of the common good:
". . . cisterns, clockes, diales and schools, well ordered. are token of good rule
and government."43 Thus, the school is classed among public utilities--timekeeping and waterworks--which,
when operating smoothly, are indicators of well-managed government.
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A School
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection |
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Differences between the imagery of the Invitation and the school raise
questions pertinent to assumptions about optimal conditions of learning. The Invitation
depicts a tutorial relationship. One student enjoys the undivided attention of a master
teacher who takes him from alphabet to God and all around the world. Now consider the
circumstances of the classroom teacher and his students. He is an institutional
functionary. He sits in a chair facing some seventeen youths. It is not for him to show
them the world. Rather, he hears their recitations, emends their written lessons, and
applies the rod or scourge to their persons when they talk to one another or otherwise
misbehave.44 What is the meaning of the contrasting circumstances of teaching and learning displayed in Orbis? Is the tutorial the ideal and the classroom the prosaic actuality?
Is the tutorial best and the classroom a compromise, the lot that falls to children whose
parents cannot afford the best?
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The Girl's School
Abraham de Bosse
1660 |
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Orbis offers no direct answer to the question of tutorial
versus class instruction. (Elsewhere Comenius argues for public instruction in socially
integrated schools.)45 But the question may be irrelevant to Orbis in the first place. If the
Invitation teacher is Orbis personified, then every child who has an Orbis thereby has his own private tutor. Of such a tutor it might be said that he is always
present, never tires, and never punishes. Whether or not the child has the best or second
best teacher now becomes a question of the quality of the instructional system embodied by
the text.
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Comenius did not propose Orbis as a replacement for
teachers living in the flesh. He spoke of it rather as a "new help for schools."46 The help was in the special
method of the text: an illustrated encyclopedia with text in two languages, words and
things cross-referenced throughout by numbers, and all main topics made alternatively
accessible by means of a back-up system of indices, one in Latin and one in the
vernacular.
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The Close
1781 Nuremberg Edition
Ghent University collection |
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Orbis can be appreciated as a special outcome of
sixteenth and seventeenth century questing for the perfect method in philosophy, science,
and pedagogy.47 The works of Peter Ramus on method, Francis Bacon's new method--the Novum Organon--Rene
Descartes' Discourse sur la Methode are among the main expressions of the
intensified interest in finding the way to certain knowledge.48 Joining in the search,
Comenius brought unique qualifications. He was inspired by evangelical religious beliefs,
stimulated by Baconian empiricism, and instructed in encyclopedism by Heinrich Alsted, a
follower of Peter Ramus.49 Out of these elements and through direct experience as a classroom teacher, Comenius
developed his own method. He called it Pansophism.50 Orbis Pictus was to be the text that would initiate children into the Pansophic way of looking at the
world. It would start them on the pilgrimage of mind, tutoring them in the relationships
of words and things.
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View the Notes Here
You may also browse through additional Orbis Sensualium
Pictus images
without the textual accompaniment here.
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