Gratitude

An Intellectual History

Peter J. Leithart

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781481301886
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Gratitude is often understood as etiquette rather than ethics, an emotion rather than politics. It was not always so. From Seneca to Shakespeare, gratitude was a public virtue. The circle of benefaction and return of service worked to make society strong. But at the beginning of the modern era, European thinkers began to imagine a political economy freed from the burdens of gratitude. Though this rethinking was part of a larger process of secularization, it was also a distorted byproduct of an impulse ultimately rooted in the teachings of Jesus and the apostle Paul. Christians believed that God stood at the center of the circle of gratitude. God was the object of thanksgiving and God gave graciously. Thus, Christians taught that grace cancelled the oppressive debts of a purely political gratitude. Gratitude: An Intellectual History examines changing conceptions of gratitude from Homer to the present. In so doing, Peter J. Leithart highlights the profound cultural impact of early Christian "ingratitude, " the release of humankind from the bonds of social and political reciprocity by a benevolent God who gave—and who continues to give—graciously.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1“Why ‘gift’ exactly?” John Milbank asks. And he answers, “[G]ift is a kind of transcendental category in relation to all the topoi of theology, in a similar fashion to ‘word.’ Creation and grace are gifts; Incarnation is the supreme gift; the Fall, evil and violence are the refusal of gift; atonement is the renewed and hyperbolic gift that is forgiveness; the supreme name of the Holy Spirit is donum (according to Augustine); the Church is the community that is given to humanity and is constituted through the harmonious blending of diverse gifts (according to the apostle Paul)” (Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon [London: Routledge, 2003], ix).

2I meant to refrain from the easy mockery of the self-help genre, but in a recent page-through of an Amazon.com search for books on gratitude, I came across this astonishing title, Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You, by Deborah Norville (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008). The title is doubly, unintentionally, Nietzschean: first, because it seems to express the subtle power of the weak, and, second, because it treats gratitude as an aggressive power. On Nietzsche, see chapter 9.

3Margaret Visser says that English speakers say the word “thanks” a hundred times a day (The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009], 8).

4A starting point is found in John B. Carman and Frederick J. Streng, eds., Spoken and Unspoken Thanks: Some Comparative Soundings (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 1989).

5Different as we are from Greeks and Romans, gift giving still runs in a circle in the modern West. At Christmas, we complete the circle of giving and return immediately, and when we give a gift or do a service in other circumstances, we usually expect at least an expression of thanks, which in many cases is enough to complete the circle. Typically, we also expect the person on the receiving end to remember the favor we have done and to act toward us in a way that expresses his or her gratitude. Parents, for centuries one of the paradigm cases of gratitude, expect their children to respect them for the sacrifices they make. Friends are affronted by friends who neglect to return grateful loyalty for favors they have done. One of the puzzles of my story is that theorists of giving miss this circularity, and tell us that gifts ought to be lines stretching infinitely into the distance.

6The term is Peter Brown’s.

7Jacques T. Godbout, “Homo Donator versus Homo Oeconomicus,” in Antoon Vandevelde, ed., Gifts and Interests (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 25.

8Margaret Visser makes a heroic attempt to show that freedom, equality, individualism, and giving and gratitude constitute a “constellation” of values that are necessary for our society to function (Gift of Thanks, chap. 23).

9This illustration brings up issues of the gratitude as a form of social deception that I have been unfortunately unable to pursue much further in this book. For some reflections, see the discussion of Rousseau in chapter 7.

CHAPTER 1

1For the latter, see the description of Odysseus after Athena bestows charis on him.

2There were other words for gifts—doron, for instance. But charis was the one most intimately linked with thanksgiving.

3Sophocles, Ajax, 522.

4Bonnie MacLachlan, The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4–11; J. W. Hewitt, “The Terminology of ‘Gratitude’ in Greek,” Classical Philology 22, no. 2 (1927): 142–61; James R. Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (Wissenschaftliche Unter-suchungen zum Neuen Testament 2 Reihe, 172; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 1–210. MacLachlan (5) speaks of a “single movement of grace and response.” While it is true that archaic Greek literature rarely includes explicit expressions of thanks, Hewitt can argue that there is no real attention to gratitude until Seneca only because he has predefined gratitude as a sentiment or a matter of verbal etiquette (J. W. Hewitt, “Some Aspects of the Treatment of Ingratitude in Greek and English Literature,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 49 [1917]: 37–48). We should rather recognize that gratitude took a particular form in the Greek world, the form of return gift and service rather than the polite expression of thanks.

5Claude Moussy, Gratia et sa famille (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 38–39,174.

6Moussy, Gratia, 77.

7Moussy, Gratia, 53, 71.

8Cicero, De inventione 2.66, 161, quoted in Moussy, Gratia, 280.

9Moussy, Gratia, 293.

10The word ingratus was ancient, but Tertullian was the first to use ingratus as a strict substantive, indicating an ungrateful soul (Moussy, Gratia, 185–86, 352).

11Thanks to John Barclay for sharing some of his forthcoming work on Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming), which proved to be enormously helpful for me throughout this chapter.

12Iliad, 1.470–90. On the role of Thetis in the epic, see Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2011), pt. 1.

13Homer, Iliad, 1.625.

14Lucian, On Sacrifice.

15Robert Parker, “Pleasing Thighs: Reciprocity in Greek Religion,” in Gill, Postle-thwaite, and Seaford, Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, 108–9: “one gift or act endowed with kharis, power to please, will call forth another, which will in turn evoke yet another.”

16See Jorg Rupke, Religion of the Romans, trans. Richard Gordon (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 149: In some ways, “a sacrifice resembles a contract, it acquires a judicial component—my gift commits the god, morally at any rate, to giving me in return something I value. The commitment is mutual; of course I will give thanks to the deity who has given me something by sacrificing in my turn again. There is thus a ceaseless cycle of obligation and gratitude, which the usual concentration on individual exchanges expressed by the phrase do ut des tends to obscure. There is a chain of actions, a reciprocity of gifts.” Parker emphasizes that in both human-human exchange and human-divine transactions, “an exchange of kharites is not an exchange of goods, the value of one strictly calculated in relation to the value of the other, the exchange taking place automatically once a particular asking price has been met; it is an exchange of favours, a voluntary, if socially prescribed, expression of a relationship of friendship” (“Pleasing Thighs,” 118–19). See also the comments on this issue in Barclay, Paul and the Gift.

17Diodorus, Library of History, 3.56.3–5.

18Dio Chrysostom, Oration, 1.40–41. On God as Patron and Benefactor, see Jerome Neyrey, “God, Benefactor and Patron: The Major Cultural Model for Interpreting the Deity in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 27, no. 4 (2005): 465–92.

19Seneca, De beneficiis, 4.7.1.

20Iliad, 2.

21Iliad, 8.238–41. See the discussion in Sarah Hitch, King of Sacrifice: Ritual and Royal Authority in the Iliad (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 97–98.

22Iliad, 1.35–42.

23Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 11.8.

24Quoted in Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 54.

25Quoted in Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 55.

26Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace, 190.

27Ζευς μοι χαριν ενδικως εχει, lines 767–68. On this theme of divine gratitude, see J. W. Hewitt, “The Gratitude of the Gods,” Classical Weekly 18, no. 19 (1925): 148–51. Hewitt concludes with a neat summary of the difference between Greek and Christian conceptions: Greek religion, “which discovered no impassible gulf between god and man, the relations of man to man and god to god were supposed to ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Of Circles, Lines, and Soup Tureen
• I—Circles
• II—Disruptions
• III—Reciprocity Rediscovered, Reciprocity Suspected
• A Theistic Modernity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Indices