Securing the Foundations: Karol Wojtyła's Thomistic Personalism in Dialogue with Natural Law Theory

Introduction

Any attempt to exhaustively present the contributions of Karol Wojtyła's Thomistic personalism as elaborated in his pre-pontifical philosophical writings to the theory of natural law is surely not a task that can be easily reduced to a summary overview of Wojtyła's ready-made arguments. In his writings, John Paul II did not, in fact, reflect extensively on the topic of "natural law" as an immediate object of his philosophical enquiries. We can find only a few explicit references to it in his 1969 magnum opus The Acting Person, while a substantial philosophical argumentation on this subject in the immediate textual context of these references is virtually nonexistent. In his only philosophical text explicitly dedicated to the topic of natural law, entitled "The Human Person and Natural Law,"¹ also from 1969, a more extensive elaboration on brief references to St. Thomas Aquinas's definitions of natural law is completely absent. Even in his later pontifical documents, John Paul II hardly ever extensively referred to natural law in its classic Thomistic formulation until his 1993 encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor.² However, such a notable absence of explicit references to natural law did not discourage Kenneth L. Schmitz, the author of one of the most significant studies of Wojtyła's philosophical project, from repeatedly highlighting the importance of Wojtyła's "personalist approach to natural law" and of his underscoring the "personal dimension within the metaphysics of natural law."³ How can an author who is so reluctant to avail himself of classical natural law discourse be, at the same time, celebrated as an important contributor to its more adequate comprehension?

In this paper, we will aim to postulate that Wojtyła enters into an enriching dialogue with the Thomistic theory of natural law, in both its classical and its contemporary formulations, on a specific systematic level that does not directly engage the classic elements of natural law theory (such as natural inclinations, first precepts of natural law, etc.). We will show that Wojtyła, rather, grounds his most important contributions to this theory within the framework of his specific methodology of Thomistic personalism,⁴ which he held to be essential to secure more completely the foundations⁵ that natural law and its adequate understanding offer to the moral and legal normative "grammar" of the humanum.

The Personalistic Value of the Human Act as the Immediate Conceptual Context of Wojtyła's Contributions to Natural Law Theory

In order to present Karol Wojtyła's contributions to natural law theory, we will first have to delimit the immediate conceptual context of his arguments on the topic. In his writings, he touches upon the topic of natural law in three distinctive ways. First, he sometimes only incidentally refers to some general topics of natural law theory while pursuing his personalistic line of argumentation, only to arrive at the already firmly established conclusions within the theory itself.⁶ Second, he sometimes, though seldom, explicitly refers to the concept of "natural law" (Polish: prawo naturalne) in order to invoke elements of the classical theory of natural law and to touch upon elements of his philosophical contribution to the theory from the perspective of Thomistic personalism.⁷ Finally, Wojtyła, at times, and without explicitly invoking the term, provides arguments that represent his genuine, more developed contributions to the theory of natural law from his own specific philosophical perspective of Thomistic personalism.

The first approach to the concept of natural law is not taken into consideration in this paper, while the second has already been thoroughly researched at length by other authors.⁸ Instead, this paper seeks to present the key elements of Wojtyła's third approach to the understanding of natural law—namely, his arguments on the enriching potential of viewing natural law from the perspective of the analysis of the personalistic value of the human act as the immediate object of philosophical analysis.

We have elaborated at greater length on Wojtyła's concept of "the personalistic value of...