Narracja, świat przeżywany, tożsamość – polskie narracje łączące wątki religijne i narodowe

Invoking combined national and religious themes, although distinctly less widespread in Poland today than it used to be, has not disappeared. The article proposes an analysis of this phenomenon using the category of the narrative, well-suited for describing phenomena spanning culture, history and social life, as well as the category of life-world derived from phenomenological sociology, as they can complement the already successfully used tool: the category of identity. As religion is based on a sacred story and an ontology which encloses immanence within a transcendent perspective, the idea of the nation seen “from the inside” also exploits a mythicized retelling of a community’s history, and in cases such as the Polish one, the national community is also situated in a transcendent ontic frame. The Polish narrative wich intertwines religious and national threads displays several variants, in which the proportions of elements of both systems of meaning differ. Three types are distinguished in the article: the romantic narrative, the classical Catholic-national narrative as the narrative of the Volkskirche, and the hierophanic-prophetic narrative based on the belief that there is an intense relationship between the sacred and the earthly fate of nations. The author also discusses ontologicaltheoretical and methodological assumptions in the approach to the issues in question.