Norwid a personalizm chrześcijański I połowy XX wieku

Norwid has a special position in the history of Polish Personalism. He might be called a precursor in this area, even though some Polish Romantic poets and philosophers also expressed ideas which were later used to construct a personalist approach in the 20-the century. However, of all of them, Norwid was undoubtedly the most consistent and diligent thinker. Putting together Norwid’s vision of Man with the visions of the French personalists of the first half of the twentieth century shows striking similarities existing between them. It is the ontological and epistemological grounding of these philosophies which is common: moving beyond cogito and the conviction about the necessity of metaphysics, negation of the contradiction between faith and reason, the approach of philosophandum in fide, Pavlov’s concept of truth, grounding in Thomistic philosophy, non-systemic approach and dialogic search for truth in the manner of Socrates, as well as suspicious attitude towards idealism, etc. This parallelism is, however, best seen in the particular anthropological issues. The key joint position is the appreciation of the phenomenon of a human being, enlightened by the mystery of the Incarnation, acceptance of Thomisitic hylomorphism and giving full consideration to the whole reality of a person (spirituality and corporality); questioning of spiritualist and naturalist monism. In other words, the search for the integral man. Another important common point is the issue of a person’s freedom, understood as her/his ability of auto-determination, selfdirection and self-improvement, constant transcendence of human ‘nature’ in the direction of the nature altered in the manner of Christ. Mournier’s approach to inter-personal communication (dialogue) was also very close to Norwid, they also agreed on such problems connected with this type of communication as its deformations, perversions, social conventions, the interplay of illusions and masks. Norwid and the French personalists had also similar views on such issues as the pilgrimage aspect of manhood, visions of history and creative time in which the Kingdom of God is ripening, critique of the bourgeois civilization of money, etc. . Norwid’s anthropology and the personalism of Mournier and Maritain are penetrated by the same atmosphere of tragic optimism, the climate of heroism and struggle. This comparison allows to state that the history of thinking about Man in the first half of the twentieth century went (of course, in the context of the Christian philosophy) the way in which Norwid ‘designed’ and predicted it, the way he considered to be future-oriented