These interactions took place on the periphery of mainstream philosophy in both the continental and analytical traditions, but some of them resulted in clearly recognizable patterns, movements, and schools, so that the idea of TRIERTIUM is not entirely new in Central Europe.
Its geographical position historically predestines it to create connections, relationships and syntheses, as is already evident from the courageous apostolic synthesis of Eastern and Western Christian wisdom and culture in the missionary work of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the patrons of our Faculty. It is noteworthy that their spiritual project was inspired by the mystical encounter with the Divine Wisdom (Sophia) and the aspiration for a new unity of all sciences and arts in the Christian Logos, embodied in the new Slavic alphabet and script. The ecclesiastical, political and artistic synthesis associated with the reign of Emperor Charles IV in Prague radiated a similar universalism, which is all the more evident because its subsequent lack led to the radicalism of the Hussite movement and the Czech Reformation in the 15th century. Later, the great Moravian theologian and philosopher Jan Amos Komenský, or Comenius (1592–1670) attempted to renew this all-embracing perspective. His pansophy is probably the most comprehensive early modern synthesis of philosophy, theology, all the sciences and the arts in Trinitarian metaphysics; moreover, it passes into metaphysics in the sense of practice and realization according to the logic of what Comenius called “triertium” or Trinitarian art, and aims at universal political and religious reconciliation in a vision of “alternative” globalisation.
This is why TRIERTIUM follows the earlier Central European projects of the so-called “Bamberg Trinitarian School” (Heinrich Beck, Erwin Schadel) and Czech Comeniology (Karel Floss, Pavel Floss), which rediscovered Comenius’ legacy in the context of 20th-century philosophy. Because Comenius’s Trinitarian Metaphysics prophetically anticipated the problems to be revealed through the future influence of Jakob Böhme’s mystical triadism on German Idealism, it is also covertly linked to the creative attempts at a radically orthodox interpretation of Böhme’s philosophy in Franz von Baader or Schelling, authors who directly inspired the 20th-century Trinitarian ontology project associated with a letter by Klaus Hemmerle (1929–1994) to Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) known as Theses Towards a Trinitarian Ontology (1976). Recent engagement with Hemmerle’s work in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, has stimulated broader academic interest, culminating at the 2019 New Trinitarian Ontologies Conference at the University of Cambridge. This renewal has been affirmed by a series of subsequent initiatives and events like the Prague project “Trinitarian Ontology of the Human Person” (2021–2023), or the 2021 New Trinitarian Ontologies European Academy of Religion Panel in Münster (31. 08. 2021) and the 2023 Persons from the Trinity Conference in Prague (26. 04. 2023). These events generated a lively debate between representatives of Anglo-American and European philosophy and theology about the promises that can be associated with the theological transformation of philosophy linked to the Trinitarian ontology project.
