Love of Self as the Condition for a Gift of Self in Aquinas

Perhaps the most well-known and provocative element of Wojtyla’s ethical anthropology is that the meaning and purpose of human life is rooted in a complete gift of self. Michael Waldstein has effectively argued that Wojtyla’s account is not novel; rather, Aquinas develops his account of love and friendship in a similar gift-of-self framework. I believe Waldstein is correct both in his argument and in showing the value of Aquinas’s account of love to debates in philosophical personalism. I wish to contribute to this debate by arguing that to understand adequately Aquinas’s account of love in general and the aspect of the gift of self in particular, we must appreciate the importance of his account of appropriate self-love; moreover, self-love and love as a gift of self constitute two foundational poles on which we should base any development of a theory of love within Thomistic personalism. I will proceed by offering brief overviews of Wojtyla’s concept of love as a gift of self and Waldstein’s comparative study of Wojtyla and Aquinas on this issue. I will then examine Aquinas’s notion of self-love, distin-