<em>Latinitas</em> i <em>Cyrillianitas</em>. In Search of the Soul of Europe

Abstract

This article illustrates the axiological-conceptual categories ofCyrillianitas and Latinitas, devised by the author in order to systematize the multiform and multilingual cultural legacy of the Slavic countries. Mikołajczak recalls the main interpretative categories of the Slavic cultural-historical legacy (Slavia Latina,Slavia Orthodoxa, Slavia Orientalis, Slavia Occidentalis, Slavia Romana, Slavia Christiana, Slavia Cyrillo-Methodiana): in the author’s opinion, the Cyrillo-Methodian tra- dition shows the inadequacy of the categorizing formulas that interpret culture only from the point of view of single confessional, ethnic or institutional determinants. According to Mikołajczak, it would be more appropriate to single out categories which, without claiming to embrace all the wealth of historical reality, may integrally bring together both, the cultural and the religious levels of that experience, and at the same time may take their distance from the model of the two opposed Slaviae. Such categories instead should take the point of view of the Cyrillo-Methodian oecumene as their own in order to find what unites the Slavic countries and binds them to Europe. Mikołajczak formulates these two categories as Latinitasand Cyrillianitas. While the former is not new in scholarly literature, the latter is understood by the author to includee not only the most ancient experience of Slavic Christianity before the schism and the definitive divergence of Rome and Constantinople, but also all the subsequent phenomena that define the logos and the ethos of the culture that has developed from the seeds sown by the two brothers from Thessaloniki.