Comenius, John. _The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the
Heart._ Translated and introduced by Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk.
Preface by Jan Milic Lochman. (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press,
1997). (Classics of Western Spirituality, #90). 250 pp.
Reviewed by Alice Browne, alicebrowne@mindspring.com.
The Czech writer John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) is best known as an
educational theorist. He believed that a pupil's failure to learn was
usually the teacher's fault, and that learning should be a pleasurable
experience. In keeping with this emphasis on enjoyment, he was a
pioneer in the use of pictures to help children learn and form
concepts. His textbook, _Orbis pictus_ (1658), was the first of a
genre of educational picture books which went on for centuries.
Comenius was a member of a small Hussite group, the Unitas fratrum, and
represents a strand in seventeenth-century Christianity which grieved
over confessional differences and yearned for peace and reconciliation
between churches and nations. _The Labyrinth of the World and the
Paradise of the Heart_ was written early in the Thirty Years' War,
before Comenius himself was finally exiled from Czech lands for
religious reasons.
The _Labyrinth_ tells the story of a pilgrim who wanders through
the world, investigating all professions and walks of life, and finding
them corrupt and unsatisfying. In despair, he is called inward to his
own heart, where he encounters Christ, who purifies it and teaches him
about the true, divine source of joy. The book's greatest strength is
its highly visual style of allegory; the title _Orbis pictus_ (The
world in pictures) would suit this book as well as Comenius' textbook.
Comenius' allegory is imagined in ways which give it clarity and a
surreal vigor; it rarely sinks into the kind of plodding allegorical
representation which adds nothing to the ideas it portrays. For
example, his description of the auditorium representing the legal
profession has real imaginative energy: "All along the sides there were
painted walls, blockhouses, fences, ramparts, bars, rails, and
partitions. Through these there were gaps and holes, doors and gates,
bolts and locks, and together with them, various larger and smaller
keys and hooks. Pointing all this out to one another, the people
measured where and how one could or could not pass through." (p. 119)
At first the pilgrim is impressed, but then he becomes disillusioned
because law only concerns property, is based on the whim of a few, and
generates disagreements in interpretation. "... one either built or
tore down the walls or gaps as the thought occurred to each ... For the
more a person could break through a barrier or make an opening and
close it up again, the more pleased he was with himself and the more
others envied him. Some, however, (also wishing to demonstrate their
intelligence) stepped forward in opposition, claiming that one should
set up a barrier or make an opening in some other manner." (p. 120)
Disagreement appears more tragically when the pilgrim describes
different Christian groups fighting over what is validated by the
touchstone of Scripture: "... some were killed when the quarreling and
fracas increased. The stone, however, remained; for it was round and
very smooth. Whoever grasped it could not hold onto it. It
immediately slipped out of his hands and continued to turn behind the
railing." (p. 131) The pilgrim's encounter with the churches also
provides one of the book's rare moments of narrative suspense. One of
his worldly guides prevents the pilgrim from following a group of true
Christians, despised by the world. "When I saw them going in and out
behind a certain curtain in the choir, I wanted to go in and see what
they had there. But the interpreter pulled me back. " (p. 133)
The invisibility of true Christians' pursuits to worldly eyes is in
keeping with Comenius' otherworldly ideals, and with his literary
strategies in the short second part of the book, _The Paradise of the
Heart,_ where allegory illuminates the inner world and the cosmos,
rather than the social world of human life. "I entered into my heart
and found that it was dark. But when with blinking eyes I looked about
a little, I could see a faint light coming through the cracks, and I
distinguished up above, in the vault of this little chamber, a large,
round, glass window. But it was so dirty and smeared with grime that
hardly any light could penetrate. Looking about here and there by this
dark, meager light, I perceived some pictures on the walls which seemed
once to have been beautiful ... In the middle of the chamber, I saw
some broken and damaged ladders strewn about; likewise, broken pulleys
and large wings with broken feathers. Finally, clock wheels with
broken or bent cylinders, teeth and rods were all scattered randomly
here and there." (p. 187) After the pilgrim's heart and its contents
have been repaired and purified, he sees the world in the light of
God's glory: "Before me, I saw the world as a great clocklike machine,
composed of visible and invisible parts. Transparent and fragile, it
was fashioned completely from glass." (p. 200)
The work is not mystical in the sense of explicitly articulating
personal experience or vision; however, the high value Comenius places
on interior, other-worldly religion with a weak institutional structure
is part of the context which makes the seventeenth century so rich in
spiritual autobiography and accounts of religious experience. The
conventions of allegory can often be seen in vision narratives of the
time. Comenius himself was interested in contemporary visionaries and
prophets, and gave an eyewitness account of the visions and trances of
a young Polish woman, Christina Poniatovia (_Lux e tenebris,_ 1665).
The visions of these prophets often read like allegories that are far
more stilted and conventional than Comenius' own. If the book is not a
document of seventeenth-century mysticism in the most direct,
experiential sense, it can still illuminate it as a document of the
period's sense of symbolic representation and of interiority in
religion. The translation is a valuable addition to an excellent
series.
Paulist Press