Gratitude: An Intellectual History is an intellectual feast that gives you choices: you can consume the content in several different ways. The impatient, or reviewers with deadlines, can read an Introduction that deftly summarizes Western civilizations’ views on gratitude in very few pages. The gourmet can sup deeply into chapters well-researched enough to withstand the palate and spicy enough to stay fascinating.
This is a live reading. You get my opinions as I have them while reading sections of the text. The blog is only lightly edited (very lightly) and so is shamefully quick to dismiss deeply researched claims. The merit of such an exercise is that others can read the book with me and compare their thoughts to me and you must read the book. If you cannot afford a hard copy, get the e-copy. If you cannot get the e-copy, demand your library get it, partly as an act of gratitude toward the author for giving us a very good discussion of a very important topic.
At the end of his chapter on the Greeks, I was worried that Leithart’s image of Greek thought was valuable, but too simple to work. Now when reading an intellectual history that is readable the most annoying complaint an author can receive is the charge of simplifying the case. Of course he must simplify the case or each chapter would be books, not a book. There is great value in a thesis complex enough to give the reader, academic or casual, the sweep of an argument. The devils living in the details are not exorcised by this approach, but the framework allows deeper study and interaction with the mass of materials. The thesis (“Greek gratitude was about a circle of giving.”) keeps the huge amounts of data from allowing humans to make reasonable conclusions. To pick a different case, the thesis that “America has been a force for good in the world” will have a million exceptions and a critic may even come to disagree strongly, but the simple thesis allows an approach to the details. It is the sorry thinker who takes the safe approach and says: “America has been a force for good and evil in world history.” No kidding: that tells nothing the reader does not already know. The stark thesis (which in hands as skillful as Leithart’s) will provoke thought and may even be closer to the truth than the “safe” opinion.*
My concern with Leithart is not then that he simplifies Greek thought: I do too. “Greek thought” is too vast to say much that is interesting or useful without simplifying. My concern is that his simplification of Greek thought on gratitude misses an element so key to Greek thinking that it is less useful than it could be. To use Leithart’s image of shapes: Greek thought was a pyramid where each brick was connected to a brick on its level by bonds of gratitude and to the level above it by bonds of piety and duty. Gratitude might extend weakly to levels above and beneath one’s own level, but the main link between the classes was duty and piety.
Rome is glorious, the incarnation of Greek ideals and vices combined with the discipline and unity no Greek could ever achieve. The Romans also perfected a system of patronage, a complex set of relationships between unequals, that the Greeks could not match. Leithart calls it next in importance to family relationships and this seems exactly correct.
Rome loved law and even in relationships, but law is supreme grace and beauty are lacking. And yet Leithart softens my hatred of the Roman tyrants by reminding me that genuine affection existed in these relationships. When Sam calls Frodo “master,” we see the best of the Roman system. Jeeves was greater than Wooster. Feudalism was not perfect, but it was human and Americans have seen the best of it in Downton Abbey.
Yet as Leithart explains the ideal patronage relationship never existed and one suspects it always was exploitative. Defenders of the Roman order, and Leithart is not that, often sound like defenders of American slavery. It is true that the Jefferson Davis plantation tried for a patriarchal paradise on the order of Owen’s utopian schemes, but men were still slaves and human rights were still abused. The Roman patrons gained honor for major projects, aqueducts or theaters, but the poor were with them always. Leithart points out that the Romans invented the idea of the “worthy poor” as the patron had to come to grips with the fact that sometimes charity harms.
Gratitude was the basis of empire and given the success of Rome I should pause and ask if the gratitude and the success were related. Isn’t it obvious that a thankful and grateful people are more successful? It is true, but I do not recall, apart from our holiday of Thanksgiving, this attitude receiving much cultivation in my education. Gratitude is an attitude expressed in a series of actions and I know by experience that attitudes can be cultivated and my actions made more effective by training.
I must look to educating myself in gratitude.
The Romans knew gifts of service and time were less dangerous and often more effective than gifts of money. Sometimes what a person or a city needs is money, but most often people need people and money is a dangerous substitute. The Empire fell when men repaid their gratitude to the Empire in taxes rather than in their lives.
Roman gratitude was owed first to the nation and then to parents. Friends came a distant third. It is a sign of our times that most of my students would find such a hierarchy shocking. What do I owe America? I owe her my safety, much of my prosperity, and gratitude impels me to serve. This does not mean I have to be uncritical of my country, but it does produce proper love my country in me. My parents are chiefly responsible for my life (under God), my earliest education, and shaping my morals. My duty of gratitude to them is very great.
As for my friends, there my relationships are more equal and so my debt is easier to discharge. Cicero, my favorite Roman moralist, urges us to give generously the way nature does: we plant a small seed and receive a greater harvest.
Leithart sees a flaw in Cicero’s ethics that damned the Republic to Imperial rule and made Roman justice a nightmare for many. Leithart describes the rise of the power brokers, people who sold access to the best patrons, and their role in securing the tyrant emperor as the father of all gifts and obligations. If you do not know the patron, the evils of greed and toadying are even more likely than if you have a personal relationship with your benefactor. It is easier to call Caesar divine without a smirk if you do not know Caesar.
Seneca did his best to prop up Roman values at the start of the Christian era. If Aristotle’s goal was the creation of the magnanimous man who gave to inspire a love of his greatness, Seneca wanted gratitude to function as a social glue. For Seneca the give and take of gratitude were the chief benefits for society, binding us together with a hundred pleasant obligations. We love to give to those who have given to us. Seneca made ingratitude not just evil, but the evil: tearing apart families, destroying nations, and killing the soul.
Seneca wanted Romans to give intentionally for the good of the community. The giver should receive a return, but he should give even if no return came. Seneca saw the real benefit of the gift as being in the intention of the giver. If you gave joyfully and with a good heart, then joy and goodness would follow even if the receiver turned out to be an ingrate or a Scrooge. Because a gift is fundamentally an attitude and not a “thing,” everybody can be generous.
The poor man with a generous heart can be as magnificent as a rich man. If nothing else, I can “publicize” the reception of the gift and how wonderful it was. Recently, I was discussing the honorifics given to the church to great leaders of the most (holy, glorious) and the thoughtful respondent said that he and his family would hate such titles. This is good of him, but bad of him if he does not let us bestow them. If earned, it is the joy of a poor man to grant verbal honors to his benefactor and the duty of a man to receive them. Saint Peter may not wish to be called a “prince,” but his leadership makes him a prince to me.
Seneca said ingratitude came from pride, greed, envy, and forgetfulness. Seneca demands every man be grateful, since gratitude is a virtue of the disposition not the gift itself. Slaves, children, everyone can be give the gift of a grateful heart and do so even if they never receive a benefit in return. “Virtue is its own reward.”
A cheerful slave could put his master in his debt. A poor man could give more than a rich man.
And yet Seneca failed his ideas by placing the First Citizen, the prince, outside the system. The Emperor was the gift giver supreme and all good things flowed from him as from God. Seneca did not escape tyranny, he provide a rational justification for it. If Aristotle’s generous man was too autonomous, captive to nothing about his own glory, Seneca’s virtuous man was a subject of the Imperial person. In the age of Augustus and Tiberius this might have seemed harmless, but Commodious and the Thirty Emperors were coming. Could any man feel thankful for the rule of Gallus?
Even while Seneca was writing a great philosopher was penning a work to Rome: Paul. Leithart promises to explain the Pauline “better way” in his next chapter.
*As a live reading, I must report that at this stage of my thinking about the book, I received a kind note from Peter Leithart. I am so grateful (Christian sense) he was kind enough to respond and so appreciative of his work. I also got to meet him at a recent conference at John Brown University where he turned out to be as interesting in person as his book . . .
If he is still reading this: thank you Peter Leithart for existing and writing this book.
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