John Amos Comenius, Tommaso Campanella, Francesco Patrizi, Renaissance philosophy, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, pansophy, metaphysics

The aim of the paper is to analyse Comenius? relationship to Renaissance Neo-Platonism and especially to compare Comenius? views with Tommaso Campanella, his most important predecessor in this regard. In the 1640s, Comenius significantly improved upon the Campanellian theory of successive worlds by revising his original linear ascendant model and replacing it with a cyclical model. Comenius thus occupies a special place in the Neo-Platonic tradition: In the standard Neo-Platonic schema, new worlds are created by moving away from the original unity, through increasing disharmony; in Comenius? concept, it is the activity of autonomous man which gives rise to a new reality and leads the universe to the ascendance to its culmination.