When the publisher sent me Gratitude: An Intellectual History, I felt sure this would be a book worth reading. First, the topic is needed if my own life and the lives of my students are any indication. Grateful? Not so much. Second, the author writes like an angel and thinks from different angles than the normal Christian intellectual.
The test of my feeling of anticipation is to blog the book as I read it for all the world to see. My thoughts on the topic and each section will be unfiltered and done in real time. Like any “live blog,” this means even lighter (see none) editing than usual. These are raw thoughts delivered in hopes that some will be sushi and not all simply undigestible.
Peter J. Leithart is an ambitious man. He writes on many topics and intends to reform the reformed while doing so. He is a model academic: learned but not obscure and the rarest of scholars: a public intellectual. For most of us being called a public intellectual is an insult meaning that neither the public or intellectuals read our works. In that his books are read by the public and are intellectually nourishing, Leithart fits the description when the description was a compliment.
Whatever he is about to say on gratitude, I am grateful Peter J. Leithart exists.
Introduction: Of Circles, Lines, and Soup Tureens
Leithart wants to start a discussion on gratitude by writing an academic history of Western European ideas about the appropriate response to a gift. This is not the usual way people respond to failures of Google and Amazon searches, but it is promising way to rescue a topic from the New Age or Metaphysics section of the Net. Of course, the book runs the risk of getting classified on virtual shelves as “new age” or fluffy simply because it is about gratitude, but the introduction, a fly over of Western history, should deter the intellectual fainthearted, though it might also deter a type of intellectual.
Why?
Leithart is setting up so much in this Introduction that I cannot imagine even his capacious mind succeeding, but even such failures are illuminating. A sound thinker is always fun to watch and since I am likely to agree with his conclusions, th0ere is also the joy of seeing an argument made that should be made.
At the end of the Introduction, I suspect that the book will sadly be less about gratitude and more about Western civilization as seen through changing ideas toward gratitude. I need to think about gratefulness, but the story of the West (as outlined by Leithart in his Introduction) may be too great a temptation to a traditional Christian theologian. Is there ever a talk or a book or a blog post where conservative Christians are not tempted to go Spengler?
His preface posits two essential views of gratitude as a relationship: circular and linear. Ancients tended relationships that depended on “circular” relationships: you scratch my back and I scratch your back. Patronage was not a bad word: to the victor belonged the spoils. Moderns (and a few ancients) saw the problems of such a system and began to prefer relationships based on abstract ideas: I love the state and serve her for the greater good. The linear relationships have a coldness to them that caused the creation of a private sphere, including family, where the circular relationships could continue.
The difficulty for secularism is that no abstract principle has enough force or obviousness to remove the bad types of patronage. Secularism, whether in Enlightenment forms or more recent incarnations, always has a problem finding a basis for morality. “Reason” has been tried and found wanting: Lenin though of himself as reasonable as he butchered his thousands, Mao as he killed his millions.
Christianity has a “circular” view of morality, but because God is good and an unlimited giver of good gifts to his children, the circle does not depend on human reciprocity. I can give to humans with no capacity to give to me (like future generations) with the surety that God will make the accounts balance and even bless me superabundantly either in this life or the life to come. While Christians have never gotten this quite right, it is still a revolutionary idea. Leithart suggests the the Reformation balanced out a tendency of Christians to “give to get” in this life, but that more recently Christians have fallen into the trap of forgetting that God is the giver of good gifts.
Heaven is for real and it is full of treats for us and this is a good thing! A false piety may have prevented us from seeing the obvious: super abundant Love and Goodness delights in reciprocity. Human reciprocity is not necessary, because Divine reciprocity exists. This is hopeful and helpful, even if we never quite get it right.
I should give without the expectation of getting, but I should get with the expectation of delightful giving . . . not out of reciprocity, but because I can give. We are asked at the end of the Introduction what we would do if we received a horrific soup tureen from a beloved grandmother. He proposes many answers, but tells us to keep thinking about it.
And so here at the end of the Introduction is my simple answer: I would love it eventually. I would study it until I saw its virtues (it must have some) and related it so closely to her that I could not help love it. That has happened to me often and has never failed. Maybe I am missing something, but I wonder what Professor Leithart would say to this idea (based on Platonic Christianity).
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