Love and the Metaphysics of Being: Aquinas, Clarke, and Wojtyla

Abstract

The metaphysics of Aquinas reconciles–for the most part1—a tension between W. Norris Clarke and Karol Wojtyla arising from Wojtyla’s claim that to exist fully requires ethical choices: one must freely choose to obey the law of the gift and find self-fulfillment in self-transcendence.2 Choosing self-transcendence enables the moral agent to actualize potentials and to achieve the fullness of existence. But since self-transcendence presupposes that one is relating to something or someone other than oneself, the ability to choose self-transcendence is the ability to choose to be relational. Such a choice seems to be at odds with Clarke’s identification of relationality as intrinsic to being: “being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally flows over into being as relational.... To be fully is to be substance-in-relation.”3 As such, being is necessarily diffusively good, receptive, and intrinsically self-communicative.4 In support of this, he cites Aquinas as stating that communication is the “very meaning (ratio) of actuality (SCG III, chap. 64).”5 He could have also