On two meetings of Jan Patočka with the educational work of J. A. Comenius

From the complex Jan Patocka’s comeniological investigations the author limits himself on his two meetings with J. A. Comenius’s educational work in which he meditates more impressively about its being topical with a view to our time, and the future of the scientifically-technical civilisation. Through a sagacious fenomenological analysis he finds that two spiritual streams were influencing the development of Comenius’s educational thinking, and that the functioning of the open soul contemplatively turned to the inner of the man, to his spiritually moral values, and the closed soul directed to the activity of a man struggling for the chamge of the human society, the power and government over the world. Patočka deducts that Comenius succeeded to develop a magnificient educational project from the clash of these two contradictory streams, and gave so a reliable guide in the hands of the man enabling him a constant enrichment of his life and making it always more human so that in the spirit of that project not only school but the whole life of the man are becoming the workshop of humanity, officiana humanitatis. At the same time just the functioning of the open soul became the base and theu niting vault ceiling of Comenius’s educational work, an apeal to spiritual conversion of the contemporary scientifically technical civilization. That is where Patočka does see its inspiring topical relevance.