PERSONHOOD AND FORMATION : A PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHT FROM AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
The paper identified a direct link between the concepts of personhood and formation. The establishment of this link is warranted by the interdependency in their functionality analogous of the metaphysical theory of matter and form. Formation does not take place in vacuum; human beings are the ones formed for the office of the shepherds of souls in the Church. It follows necessarily, therefore, that the person of the seminarian avails the formation program the bedrock for its functionality. The paper acknowledged the importance of formation as it is obvious in the plenitude of documents from the Church at different levels and epochs emphasizing that the seminarian be formed after the mind of Christ. Moreover, it noted that such documents are very often grounded on various perspectives and theories on the human person from philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, the paper argued strongly from the African purview on the human person that understands the human person as a being ontologically connected and in a relational existence with other realities. Recognizing this in the formation process will go a long way in enhancing the formation program of Seminarians. To achieve its aim, the paper consequently employed the tools of critical, analytical and comparative methods of inquiry. This revealed that with a philosophical insight from an African perspective, there exists an understanding of the similarity between personhood and formation, the latter being a series of conscious activities which an individual is not born with, but something one sets out intentionally to achieve.
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