The Czech pedagogue and pansophist, Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), has a strong claim to be the first prophet of the age of enlightenment. From 1641 onward, he argued passionately and at great length that European civilization was on the eve of an unprecedented ‘age of light’, brought about in no small part by the invention of print, the European voyages of discovery, the reformation of secular and divine learning, and new means of understanding the natural world. Within his writings on education and reform, ‘light’ is far more than a metaphor: it is a metaphysic, permeating his understanding of knowledge, learning, the past, his present moment, the future, and indeed human history as a whole. Yet, far from being acknowledged as one of the Enlightenment’s precursors, Comenius became one of the figures the philosophes most loved to hate, thanks largely to the portrait penned by Pierre Bayle. The reason for his banishment is clear: Comenius did not disguise the fact that his expectations were grounded not merely in technological and philosophical progress but also in more mystical forms of enlightenment, including prophecy, both canonical and enthusiastic. The Moravian’s paradoxical fate therefore offers a revealing case study of the way in which the Enlightenment canon was constructed by embracing some figures and ostracizing others; and this process suggests a fourfold agenda for this paper. The first two tasks are to sketch the nature of Comenius’s expectations for the future and to ground them in the writings on pedagogical and related reforms for which he is most famous. The third is to outline the reasons why he was banished so completely from the canon of forerunners of the Enlightenment. The concluding task is to recapture some of the ways in which Comenius’s unique case can be related to older and broader traditions that might constitute mystical roots of the Enlightenment.
