Adapted from Introduction to the 1993 Ignatius Press edition of
Love & Responsibility by Karol Wojtyla [p 13]
One work by the Author of quite exceptional importance . . . . is ‘Person and Act’ [The Acting Person], the work in which the Author has given the fullest account of his views on the subject of the human person. The subject matter of that work is connected [very closely] with the question of responsible love, which is the main theme of Love and Responsibility.
The person,
through its own action
and the action of another person,
becomes the object and subject of responsible love.
The person is an actor in the drama – dramatis persona – in which it writes ‘its truest history’, the history of love or of its negation.
The text of Love and Responsibility would be impoverished at its very core if some way were not found of making the necessary connections with ‘Person and Act’ and putting it in the context of K. Wojtyla’s ‘Treatise on Man’.
from Chapter 2, “The Person and Love” [p114 of Love & Responsibility]
Looked at in terms of psychology, love can be seen as a specific situation. . . . whether we think of its internal or its external aspect it is a concrete situation, and therefore unique and unreproducible. The external concreteness and uniqueness of the situation which we call love is closely connected with its internal aspect, with what is within each of the persons, who are as it were actors in the drama of their own love. Love is certainly a drama in the sense that it is made up of happenings and of action (to do, to act is the meaning of the Greek word ‘drao’, from which ‘drama’ comes).
Thus, the ‘dramatis personae’ discover the plot of this drama in themselves, perceive their love as a psychological situation unique of its kind, and one of great and absorbing importance in their inner lives. A person is of course, among all the varied objects of the visible world, that unusual one which is endowed with an inner self of it own, and is capable of an inner life.
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