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

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 appealed to other texts: “Existence is the most perfect of all things, for it is compared to all things as that by which they are made actual: for nothing has actuality except so far as it exists” (ST I.4.1 ad 3);⁶ “all...perfections belong to [God] in virtue of His simple being” (De ente V, §3);⁷ “there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God” (ST 2.3c); “existence is that which makes every form or nature actual; for goodness and humanity are spoken of as actual, only because they are spoken of as existing” (ST I.3.4c).

In brief, since any perfection is actual only insofar as it exists, it is esse that enables the interpersonal perfections to exist as actual perfections. Hence, God’s act of existing, which exists pure and simply beyond any potentialities, exists as a self-communication so perfect as to generate the persons of the Holy Trinity. It is thus not surprising that Clarke relies most heavily on the Holy Trinity to argue that existing is per se relational, self-diffusive, and self-communicative.

Aware that characterizing the act of existing as necessarily self-diffusive and self-communicative has been taken, in the history of philosophy, as precluding God’s freedom to create our world, Clarke points out that Aquinas argues that since the Trinity perfectly expresses the self-diffusiveness and self-communication of existence, God’s freedom to create remains intact:

Calling on the Christian revelation of God as Triune in his inner life, [Aquinas] points out that there already exists in God a supremely perfect and complete self-communication in the inner life of God, where the Father pours out his entire divine nature as gift to the Son, and both together to the Holy Spirit, in an infinitely intense self-diffusiveness of the divine being and goodness. And this self-communicating love, which is the very nature of God, of being at its fullest, is of its nature necessary, i.e., not a matter of free choice. Once this necessary self-communication is present, eternally so, in the inner life of God, then the further self-communication in the creation of a finite world is no longer necessary but can be a purely gratuitous, free overflow, since the basic law of being as self-communicating has already been taken care of with infinite perfection.⁸

After agreeing with Aquinas about Trinitarian perfection, Clarke disagrees about the necessity of creation. Clarke argues that although God is free to create any particular world, He must necessarily create some world: “Given an infinitely good and loving personal being, it seems to me one can say that it is inevitable that it will pour over in some way to share its goodness outside of itself, though one cannot predict just how”⁹; inevitable, because anything less would be a violation of Clarke’s basic law...