Divinus in Caro: Karol Wojtyła’s Ontological Personalism Between Theomorphism and Technomorphism
Keywords:
personalism, theomorphism, technocracy, efficacy, self-determination, human dignityAbstract
Modernity’s crisis of human self-understanding has been characterized by two opposed reductions of the person. On one side, a theomorphic tendency frames the human being exclusively in relation to the divine, often at the expense of the creature’s own integrity and agency. On the other, a technomorphic tendency reduces the person to a manipulable object of technology and biology, flattening human existence to measurable functions. This paper argues that Karol Wojtyła’s ontological personalism mediates these extremes through a deeper retrieval of the person as divinus in caro—the divine image manifested in flesh. Wojtyła’s philosophy of the acting person, centered on efficacy, self-determination, and transcendence of the person in act, both affirms the human orientation to God (thus correcting technocratic reductionism) and insists on the creaturely reality and freedom of the person (thereby correcting one-sided theocentrism). In four parts, the argument unfolds the anthropological dilemmas of theomorphism and technomorphism and shows how Wojtyła’s integration of classical metaphysics with phenomenology preserves the irreducible uniqueness and dignity of the human person, offering a philosophical defense of the person as both subject and end of moral action.
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