Irenic Method: Comenius's strategy was to let an impartial, authoritative text serve as "touchstone" to resolve disputes. In religious disputes, the touchstone was Scripture. For natural philosophy he intended to create a pansophic text, often referred to as Janua Rerum, to fill that function. (And to prepare it he would refer to "things themselves," the Book of Nature.) He proposed reading and using the texts in similar ways--for example, finding common ground in religious controversies (e.g., predestination) or philosophical feuds (e.g., on the heaviness of fire) by showing that the authoritative text supports multiple viewpoints, or that it supports none.
Irenic Ethic: Even with an adequate method, the success of irenic activities depends on the attitude or temperament of participants. Comenius encouraged both theologians and philosophers to cultivate a number of virtues conducive to dispute resolution, including tolerance, public-spiritedness, humility, and individual conscience.
Comenius's irenic dispute-resolution method was a poor fit for science. The irenic ethic, however, deserves close attention, for it bears a strong resemblance to the four norms, first articulated by Robert Merton in 1942, that sociologists have historically recognized as characteristic of modern scientific communities: namely, universalism (contributions to discourse are to be judged on their merits, regardless of proponents' nationality, religion, class, etc.), communalism (science is to serve the public interest; results and methods are to be shared openly and disseminated widely), disinterestedness (professional humility, emotional detachment, openness to new arguments and evidence), and organized skepticism (no arbitrary limits to inquiry). (Naturally, these norms reflect an ideal and are adhered to only imperfectly in practice.)
The norms of communalism and disinterestedness imply a process of peer review: submitting one's truth claims to the scrutiny of the peer group. Long before modern institutions of scholarly peer review were developed, Comenius and his collaborator Samuel Hartlib proposed what were effectively systems of peer review among theologians and among natural philosophers, in keeping with the irenic ethic.
This research throws long-debated questions about the impact of Comenius and his collaborators on the first modern scientific institutions such as the Royal Society of London into a new light. It also suggests an area for inquiry that has been largely neglected since Merton's time: what is the "prehistory" of the norms of modern science in early modern religious, scholastic, and humanistic circles, and how is it that the norms coalesced when and where they did?
The presentation will be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of religion, and historians of science.