This essay was published as the editorial for the International Journal of Christianity & Education 28:2, July 2024.
Scholarly discussion of the relationship between Christianity and education is, of course, far from being a recent endeavor. The study of how faith is implicated in education is a task in which an array of past reflection remains relevant, as recent articles in this journal drawing from Augustine, Tertullian, and Barth attest. The work of major past theological thinkers is widely available via translations of primary and secondary texts. Yet a widespread decline in interest in and provision for the study of history of education in recent decades (Christou, 2009) undermines our capacity to engage carefully with the history of Christian engagement specifically with teaching and learning.
As a symptom I point to the recent reception history in English of one of the most significant educational treatises in the history of Christian writing, the Didactica Magna (Great Didactic) of John Amos Comenius (Comenius, 1973). Comenius, a 17th century Moravian bishop, wrote extensively, presciently, and influentially on various aspects of education. The Didactica Magna is his most well-known and widely circulated educational work, and currently the most easily available to English-speakers. Yet there are grounds for thinking that access to be problematic.
As I have worked through the early chapters of the Didactica Magna in Latin with the goal of eventually completing a fresh translation into English, I have sought the support of past engagements with the text. I have at hand five different German translations and two French translations (with abridgments). I am, of course, also consulting the existing English translation by M. W. Keatinge, originally published in 1896. Though at times eloquent and apt, this sole English translation not only reflects the diction and assumptions of its own era (not least in its use of gendered language), but also contains frequent inaccuracies and omissions. Two brief examples will serve to illustrate the barriers created by translation choices to a theologically interested reading of Comenius in English.
In Chapter 1, Section 3, in a passage in which Comenius represents God speaking to us about the grounds for universal education, Keatinge (1917: 25) has:
To thee, finally, lest anything should be lacking, I have given Myself in personal communion, joining My nature to thine for eternity, and in this distinguishing thee from all created things, visible and invisible.
The Latin text (Comenius, 1973: 27) is:
Tibi deniqve, neqvid deesset, meipsum dedi nexu hypostaticô, meam tuae naturam copulans in aeternum: qvaliter nulli Creaturarum, visibilium aut invisibilium, contigit.
While “personal communion” is not unjustifiable as a translation of “nexu hypostaticô,” it obscures the likely reference here, in the context of talk of the uniting of divine and human natures, to the hypostatic union according to which Christ was both fully human and fully divine. The language of “personal communion” seems to shift the emphasis to the quality of our relationship with God. Yet Comenius’s argument seems to be that universal education is required because of the fundamental dignity of human nature as having been caught up into union with the divine nature at the incarnation of Christ. This is a claim with consequences, implying (as Comenius notes elsewhere) that the grounds for deserving education precede any specific human identity markers such as gender, economic status, or ethnicity. In earlier encounters with this opening section of the Didactica Magna, I missed the force of this argument, no doubt in part through not reading carefully enough but I think also abetted by the translation choice. I suggest the following as a clearer rendition of the sentence:
And finally, so that you would lack nothing, I gave you myself in a hypostatic union, joining my nature with yours in eternity in a way granted to no other creature, visible or invisible.
A little later in the same chapter, Comenius follows this argument with a wish that every educator everywhere would have a consciousness of this divinely conferred dignity of human nature engraved upon their hearts. Keatinge (1917: 26) renders the chapter’s final flourish as:
Would that this could be done to all who undertake the task of educating men, that they might learn to appreciate the dignity of the task and of their own excellence, and might bring all means to bear on the perfect realisation of their divinity!
This translation suggests a process of divinization that sounds as if it could be in potential tension with Comenius’s generally clear-cut creator-creature distinction. Yet if we turn to the Latin text (Comenius, 1973: 27), we find no talk of realizing one’s divinity:
Hoc utiqve agendum est omnibus, qui homines formandi obeunt munus, ut hujus dignitatis, et excellentiae suae memores vivere omnes condocefaciant: et ad hujus sublimitatis asseqvendum scopum omnia media dirigant.
A more literal translation would be:
Certainly this should be done to all who take up the office of forming people, so that they instruct all to live mindful of this dignity and of their excellence, and that they might direct all means to pursuit of the path aiming toward such a surpassing goal.
Aiming at a surpassing goal does not seem quite the same thing as realizing one’s divinity. At the very least, it can be said that Keatinge’s translation does not help the reader to focus with much theological precision on Comenius’s Christian arguments about the foundations of the educational enterprise.
Keatinge’s translation remains after more than a century the only complete English translation of the Didactica Magna. Parts of it were anthologized in a collection of Comenius excerpts published by UNESCO in 1957 with a foreword by Jean Piaget (Comenius, 1957), and one still occasionally encounters new journal submissions relying on this collection. In this anthology the chapters of the Didactica Magna in which Comenius develops his specifically theological arguments about education are omitted. The anthology also includes a few chapters from the Pampaedia, a later and more developed articulation of Comenius’s key educational arguments. The Pampaedia was the subject of a better translation by A. M. O. Dobbie (1986), but it enjoyed only a brief spell in print and is now difficult to obtain. Given the patchy accessibility of Comenius’s work in English, it is perhaps not too surprising that basic errors of fact and interpretation are not uncommon when Comenius is discussed by English-speaking scholars (one recent example is detailed in Smith, 2017). Anyone freshly engaged by the recent increase in more substantial writing in English on Comenius (see, e.g., Hábl, 2017, 2022) has limited options for pursuing questions further into the primary texts.
Naturally, some of the points detailed above are in and of themselves of specialist interest. Yet it is hard to overlook the disparity between scholarly attention to a figure such as Comenius, a Christian thinker widely regarded as one of the most significant educational theorists in Western history, and the attention and care devoted to more squarely theological figures of similar stature. In an empirically focused age, Comenius’s more speculative approach to articulating pedagogical principles seems unlikely to return to best-seller status. If all we need is a quick survey of bygone pedagogies, then brief summaries of Comenius’s ideas will suffice. But if the task of understanding in the present how Christianity might relate to education includes building upon a careful understanding of how that relationship has been understood in the past, there are reasons beyond the pragmatic for caring about access to past reflection.
Perhaps Comenius is an outlier here, but I doubt it; the challenges of accessing his work properly leave me wondering what else we are missing or seeing through a distorting lens. Our ability to delight in and learn from those who have in the past shared and contributed to our calling is in some measure related to our means of access. Our interaction with the past ought to include not just the occasional appeal to a theological hero or report of past error, but a wider care taken with the recorded history of past Christian educational thought, lest we be caught repeatedly reinventing the wheel using resources of questionable reliability amid diminishing awareness of what has already been worked out in past reflection. Against a background of declining investment in history of education in general, it seems worth asking where the resources and energy for adequate engagement with primarily educational thinkers of the Christian past will be found. Christian scholars, part of a trans-historical communion of saints and adherents to beliefs that suggest the importance of care taken with the words and lives of others past and present, have few reasons to be overly impressed with a technocratic presentism in scholarly reflection on education and many reasons to work for sustained engagement with their intellectual tradition.
References
Christou T (2009) Gone but not forgotten: The decline of history as an educational foundation. Journal of Curriculum Studies 41(5): 569–583.
Comenius JA (1957) John Amos Comenius on Education. Paris: UNESCO.
Comenius JA (1973) Ausgewählte Werke I. Hildesheim: Georg Ohms Verlag.
Dobbie AMO (1986) Comenius’s Pampaedia. Buckland: Dover.
Hábl J (2017) On Being Human(e): Comenius’ Pedagogical Humanization as an Anthropological Problem. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.
Hábl J (2022) The Restoration of Human Affairs: Utopianism or Realism? Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.
Keatinge MW (1917) The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius. Part II: Text. London: A & C Black.
Smith DI (2017) The history of theological education: An extended review. Christian Scholar’s Review XLVII(1): 51–57.