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

The author attempts to contribute to the debate about the value of Aquinas’s account of love to philosophical personalism. He argues 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. First, the author offers 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. Second, he examines Aquinas’s notion of self-love, distinguishing between the good and bad kinds of self-love. Finally, he shows how self-love actualized in self-friendship creates the possibility for friendship with others.