VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

nected with the outer and the individual with the collective. Individual subjectivity (stages of mental development) corresponds with individual objectivity (stages of biological organization), collective subjectivity (types of culture) and collective objectivity (forms of civilization) (Wilber 2000). The Slavs have in this regard their own long tradition in the form of sophiology. The quest for integral wisdom, in which Truth, Beauty and Goodness become one, is a dream, a longing of Slavic peoples and their future mission. A line of eminent personalities starts with Cyril among the Slavs, who were led by the intuition of Sophia and who try to put this intuition into practice. They include John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) in Bohemia, Bronisław Trentowski (1808–1869) in Poland, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) in Russia, and the group around Ľudovít Štúr (1815– 1856) in Slovakia, especially Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817–1888) and Peter Kellner-Hostinský (1823–1873). They shared a quest for such knowledge, which integrates all components of the human personality as well as all spheres of life, and yields primarily the moral enrichment and elevation of the people, rather than technological and material gain. Comenius’ opus magnum is his General Consultation on an Improvement of All Things Human. He earned the titles “teacher of nations” and “the father of modern education” for his lifelong efforts in pedagogy and the improvement of humankind. Education has three goals according to Comenius: 1. to know the world; 2. to know and master oneself; 3. to raise oneself up to God. In comparison, the goal of scholarship for Bacon is little more than to know nature, subjugate her and exploit her for the fulfillment of one’s own wishes. The second and third points are missing. Pansophia, i.e. universal wisdom or All-Wisdom, was the very means of general improvement on which Comenius laid a lot of hope. Central to his work is the emphasis on the inclusiveness of knowledge. According to Comenius, everything should be viewed in terms of the “triple eye” or the “three books”, or the “three open sources of divine wisdom” – namely the senses, reason and revelation: “If something is not sufficiently inferred from the senses, reason and the Holy Writ, if it does not connect harmoniously with the rest, it must not be uttered” (Komenský 1988, 92). Whoever wants to abide by one of the aforesaid principles alone shall fall into the abyss of errors, Comenius warned. Whoever wants to rely exclusively on sensory knowledge shall not rise above the naiveté of a simple man; he cannot conceive of the sun being 400-times bigger than the Moon, for example. Whoever wants to abide by reason only and omit the senses shall succumb to delusions and build castles in the air, as happened to some philosophers in the past. And whoever wants to neglect both the senses and reason, and draw knowledge solely from the Holy Writ shall succumb to blind faith and stipulate all kinds of nonsense and superstition as dogma. “Only he who learns to master things through his own senses, his own reason and his own immediate testimony of God – only he can know that he is not deceiving himself” (Komenský 1992, 328). Itisnecessarytofeedallsourcesoflight(knowledge) into one stream – “all luminaries from 44 (8) Emil Páleš

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