Logika religii i mistyka wiary

In 2020, in Poland, a national commemoration of two eminent religious philosophers was celebrated: it was dedicated to the memory of Friar J.M. Bocheński O.P. and Pope St. John Paul II. In the paper, I recapitulate fundamental ideas of The Logic of Religion (1965) by the former author and sum up the key issues of the doctoral thesis The Doctrine of Faith in St. John of the Cross (1948) by the latter. I also mention St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Ascent (1870), because in Polish translation this book is entitled A Logic of Faith. In order to compare those heterogeneous conceptions of religious faith I reach out to logical semiotics, and using its tools I try to find a symbolic meaning of religious speech that could be accepted equally by religious thinkers and by non‑believers. I propose to understand religious speech as having not only literal sense, and not only a metaphysical meaning, but also, as I claim, the power to activate values that guide human behavior. I hope this is a conciliatory proposition because it places semiotics on a neutral footing among religious dogmas. In this perspective, mysticism can be described as a pragmatic aspect of language that emerges when a user refers to a transcendent reality