Gratitude is Part of Justice
The Octet Collaborative team has recently been reflecting on gratitude. We’ve been consistently humbled by the doors the Lord has opened for the gospel at MIT, and by the partners he’s provided in our pursuit of human flourishing, intellectual hospitality, and wisdom for the vocation of science and engineering. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and so many other generous supporters: the “Collaborative” in our name has been ever-present and ever-growing.
With this in mind, it seemed appropriate to return to the topic of gratitude in our year-long series on the virtues and their critical role at MIT. We explored gratitude once before this year, just before Thanksgiving in 2022. There, we noted both the commonalities and the distinctions between recent positive psychology research on gratitude and the Christian understanding of what it means to be grateful. But we didn’t specifically consider gratitude as a virtue. So here, we add four brief, but meaningful, points.
If gratitude is a virtue, then it is a habit that can be learned and deepened.
In the essay that began this year’s series on Virtue, we noted that according to moral theologian Jennifer Herdt, virtues “are stable dispositions that enable an agent to respond and act well.” They are, that is, very much like habits: character traits that we can acquire and build up by repeated action, not personality traits that we are simply born with (or not). This means that if you find yourself struggling with ingratitude, there is something you can do about it!
Positive psychology has provided plenty of evidence for this: “gratitude interventions” like regular journaling reasons to be grateful can have a tremendous salutary impact. But Christians can look to the more ancient wisdom of the scriptures to find the same thing. Psalms that exhort, “Give thanks to the Lord, O my soul!” (e.g. Psalm 103) remind us that sometimes we need to preach to our own souls, rousing them to gratitude when they are mired in complaint. The fact that even Psalms of lament like Psalm 138 urge gratitude remind us that thankfulness is neither reserved for times of ease nor a means of covering over life’s inevitable trials: on the contrary, it is precisely when we suffer that we most need to be moved toward gratitude for the loyal love of a God who redeems our lives from the pit.
What are the practices that inculcate gratitude? They are many and varied, but they all seem to come down to paying attention, deliberately, to the goodness of God and the goodness of his creation. If we suffer from ingratitude, we might ask ourselves - where has our attention been drawn? Have we been distracted from our vocation to follow Christ and the vocations of church, family, friends, work, and care for his creation? And have our distractions been to things that tend to diminish our gratitude? If my attention is drawn to social media dozens of times per day (a modest estimate, according to recent data), does what I see there tend to build up gratitude or discontentedness, anger, and a sense of being alone in the world? The apostle Paul’s wisdom has never been more relevant: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8) To build gratitude, find practices of re-directing your attention to such things - in scripture, in prayer, in community.
2. Gratitude is part of justice.
We’ve been referring frequently in this series to Thomas Aquinas’ account of the virtues - dense, often challenging, but always rich and helpful. Thomas locates all of the virtues under the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, temperance. It’s often instructive simply to observe which of the four a given virtue is associated with, and that’s certainly the case here. Gratitude, according to Thomas, is part of justice.
What does this mean? Justice, Josef Piper tells us in The Four Cardinal Virtues, is simply giving to each what is his due. Two points follow from this about gratitude.
First, gratitude is something that we owe to our benefactors; those who show us grace, mercy, kindness, generosity, etc., are due our gratitude. This is simply another way of saying that being grateful isn’t just a personality trait that you either have or you don’t: it’s a virtue that you are meant to acquire, and a failure to show gratitude to those to whom it is due is a real shortcoming that holds us back from living the fully human life that we are meant to live. Don’t settle for a life of ingratitude!
Second, Pieper also points out that gratitude is only due to those who have done something to earn it. This challenges the common notion of being grateful to impersonal entities like “the universe.” There are ways that we can love the universe or anything in it, but only another person can be gracious, merciful, generous to us; justice requires gratitude only within these relationships.
(Both of these points, of course, point above all to the gratitude we owe to God.)
3. Gratitude escalates.
We’re all too familiar with the way retaliatory violence can escalate. A tragically humorous explanation is provided by a character in Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, who observes that in a feud, “A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in- and by-and-by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."
Thomas makes a very interesting and beautiful point about gratitude when he asks “Whether the repayment of gratitude should surpass the favor received?” (ST II.II.106.6) Gratitude should also escalate, generating a virtuous cycle in contrast to the vicious cycle of retaliation. Why? Because gratitude is part of justice. What do we owe to those who have been generous, but to be generous in return - and how can we say we have been generous if we repay only as much as they gave us? Aquinas quotes Aristotle to this effect: “We should repay those who are gracious to us, by being gracious to them in return.” “And this is done,” he goes on, “by replaying more than we have received. Therefore gratitude should incline to do something greater.”
4. Gratitude is a binding agent.
All this talk of justice and repayment might sound a bit cold, even transactional. Thomas will have none of it! For him, gratitude binds us to one another relationally, not transactionally. He makes this point when he asks “Whether one is bound to repay a favor at once?” (ST II.II.106.4)
Now pause for a moment, and think of how you would answer that question: one of the joys of reading Thomas is trying to guess how he will answer the questions he poses.
“It seems that a man is bound to repay a favor at once,” he begins, and this tells you immediately that he’s going to argue for the opposite. Should we feel gratitude immediately? Well, yes, of course: “As regards the affection of the heart, repayment should be made at once.” Why wait to repay your benefactor’s graciousness with grace of your own? One reason is simply practical kindness: “As regards the gift, one ought to wait until such a time as will be convenient to the benefactor.” If you help me move, I probably shouldn’t show up next weekend to help you move unless you are, in fact, planning a move!
But Thomas gives a more profound answer to the question of why we are not bound to repay a favor at once. This time he quotes Seneca: “He that hastens to repay, is animated with a sense, not of gratitude but of indebtedness.” This is truly profound, and cuts to the heart of what often masquerades as gratitude. It is possible - indeed, I would wager that for many of us it is all too familiar - that when given a gift, our gratitude is mixed and perhaps even overwhelmed with the sensation of having been put in someone’s debt. And for those of us who have been formed to be modern, independent, autonomous Americans/westerners, the sensation of indebtedness can be profoundly disconcerting.
Thomas would say: it should not be. Of course we should avoid a lifestyle of indebtedness (Romans 13:8) - and he recognizes that when we owe a contractual debt, we need to repay it on time to maintain justice. But he makes a distinction between this kind of debt and the moral debt that we incur when someone is gracious to us: the only way to avoid this kind of debt is to refuse grace altogether, which would, of course, be to the utter ruin of sinners in need of God’s merciful salvation. He claims that being willing to live in a state of moral indebtedness is in fact a part of gratitude, as it is implied by the willingness fully to honor our benefactors as they are due. “In fact, if… one wished to repay at once, favor for favor, it would not seem to be a virtuous, but a constrained repayment. For, as Seneca observes… ‘he that wishes to repay too soon, is an unwilling debtor, and an unwilling debtor is ungrateful.’”
This means that gratitude doesn’t motivate a transactional approach to settling accounts: it allows for long-term relationships of mutual grace and generosity, where one day I may be in your debt, another you may be in mine, and we never really have to “settle the score” and cut things off between us.
As a postscript - one final point to add to these four, which have followed from our exploration of gratitude as a virtue. We’ve just noted cases where Thomas relies on the authority of Greek and Roman philosophers to support his argument. Elsewhere in the question on gratitude, Thomas quotes Luke 7 (a parable about the forgiveness of debts of differing magnitudes) and 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (“give thanks in all circumstances”), and there is no question that he is a thoroughly biblical thinker. But he is not afraid to draw wisdom from many sources, including from outside the Christian tradition. Thomas knew that all truth is God’s truth, and he knew that God had given wisdom even to those who didn’t refer it back to him in faith. This mindset and practice has lessons for those of us who pursue the human flourishing that we believe comes with the advance of God’s kingdom and the spread of his gospel, even as we frequently make common cause with those of other faiths or of no faith at all.
