Personalistyczne rozumienie kontemplacji
A Personalistic Understanding of Contemplation

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to show the meaning and significance of contemplation in the framework of modern Christian thought, which captures man as a per- son. It seems that personalism provides an opportunity to avoid approaches that reduce human prayer to a psychophysical, emotional, contentless and altogether unreal process of self-transcendence. All dimensions of human life are important, but fragmentary approaches do not exhaust the content of the phenomenon of the person. Consequently, too, they can lead to a wrong understanding of the relation- ship with God. For this reason, the article discusses three important topics in personalistic framework, that is: subject, object and essence of contemplation. The re- search method can be described as personalistic (the hermeneutic research key is the person). The starting point of the analysis is to discuss the inner personal structure of man and in light of this to look at the phenomenon of contemplation, the inner and outer world of human life. The analysis refers to the theological and spiritual tradition of the Church, as well as to the teachings of the saints. It tries to evaluate older approaches in a comprehensive and sometimes creative-critical way. It takes the revelation contained in Scripture as its primary source. The main conclusions of the analyses are as follows: the contemplative subject is the whole human per- son (despite the fact that the main role is played by the mind); the main subject is the Communio Personarum (the Uncreated Persons, the Holy Trinity); contemplation — thanks to God’s grace — is a relationship with the Personal God, it is the “perfecting” of the inner structures of man towards union with the Divine Persons (the internal human structure becomes similar to the internal structure of the Uncreated Person); it is a process that can be called Christification (making one Christ-like), divinization, eschatologization of the world of created persons — the individual person and the social person (the entire human family).

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