is a cognitive organ that senses the truth. The oldest Russian chronicle, The Tale of Bygone Years, thus speaks about the acceptance of Christianity in Rus: in the year 987 the Kievan prince Vladimir the Great sent envoys to neighboring peoples to inquire and report on different religions. They disapproved of Islam and Judaism, as well as western Christianity. As they did not find beauty, purity and joyfulness there, they reasoned that those laws were not good. They chose Greek Christianity as the most beautiful and therefore the most truthful in their judgment. Thus they reported to the prince about the ceremony in the temple of St. Sophia in Constantinople: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty” (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, 10). St. Cyril perceived Sophia as his spiritual fiancée. Thrice she appeared to Solovyov, who recorded his mystical experience in the poem, Three Meetings. During his journey to Egypt he woke up once in the desert and the air smelled of roses. He saw all that has been, that is or shall be in her radiant countenance – the unity of all things where the ugly and bad were also given meaning by the whole and become a part of the beautiful and good. Thus, Comenius beheld his All-Wisdom just as Kellner-Hostinský did when he speaks of “the Minerva of the Tatra Mountains”, “the Slovak Athena” or “the golden shining queen of the castle of Slavonic science” (Hostinský 1851, 122, 125; Hostinský 1847, 483). He addresses her and she replies. This personification is no superfluous metaphor, but a methodological necessity. A personal relationship is a requirement of inner knowledge, just as outer knowledge requires a certain impersonal distance. It concentrates the emotional and volitional powers of man into intuition, which when purified enables him to see archetypes. “Blissful is the one who might have beheld this star with his own spiritual eye, for he saw the celestial maiden – the truth” (Hostinský 1851, 162). Each branch of nations is endowed with a particular gift, and yields flowers and fruits by the time it discovers its own abilities and begins to draw from them. The Slavs shall contribute their “spiritual eye” along with Romanic empiricism and Germanic rationalism: “The Slavonic people shall give spiritual vision to the world... The most special moment in Slavonic science must be vision“. So Slavonic science has its own epistemological principle that is going to enable a new worldview, from which a unique Slav culture shall grow. This dormant gift manifests itself latently in Slavic devoutness: “The Slavic people believe because there is a spiritual eye in them which no nation before them had” (Hurban 1846, 10–11). From the beginning, the first generation of the Štúr group was already in dispute over the noetic principle of Slavonic science, distinguishing it from the western one. Ctiboh Zoch opined that Hurban does not know exactly what he wants to say when speaking about the spiritual eye and integral vision: “He wants to see the Slavonic science of the fu52 (16) Emil Páleš
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