In so far as all things, visible and invisible, owe their existence to God's gracious generosity, theology is, first and foremost, a consideration of God, but thereafter of everything else in its relation to God; all is fair game. Hence, a feature of some recent theology is its focus on everyday categories, such as place, human affections and spiritual emotions, such as forgiveness, or faculties, such as the intellect or imagination.
Another important category is gift. ‘No one disparages gifts. Gift – especially in the singular, especially capitalised – is a hurrah word’(p. 195), but the human response of gratitude has it seems hardly ever been singled out for special theological attention. Peter Leithart's key and correct insight is that this is worth doing. In offering a rich and detailed intellectual history of gratitude his book contributes, therefore, not only to its broader cultural and intellectual understanding, but also to a burgeoning theological literature. The author is clear, however, that this is an intellectual history and not the last word; he takes good care to deflate the subtitle, as this is not a global history but a Western one, and will be content even if many of the book's claims are subsequently challenged, so long as ‘it puts gratitude more frequently into the indexes, search engines and syllabi’(p. 16).
But what are gratitude's characteristics? This depends when we are talking about. Hence, the book is organised chronologically from Greece to Rome, backtracking via the biblical tradition and through the New Testament, to modern philosophy and political theory, ending in the late modern. Summarising 2500 years of intellectual history in a manageable way is no mean feat, however, particularly when this is marked by three disruption: ‘the disruption of early Christianity, the disruption of the Reformation, and the disruption of the Enlightenment’ (p. 5).
To help bring some order to all this Leithart usefully appeals to circle versus linear approaches to gift giving in which gratitude is implicated. Circle accounts imply reciprocity or indebtedness of some sort: X gives A to Y, therefore Y is obliged to give B to X. Linear accounts, on the other hand, imply no closure or return, but simply a transmission of gift. Another conceptual frame is whether gratitude is culturally expected or not, and, indeed, the extent to which cultures can be considered cultures of ingratitude. Christianity is curious in both these regards according to Leithart. First, because the circle of indebtedness in which givers and recipients are caught up is an infinite one in which all giving, receiving, and thanking are ultimately carried up into the infinitely gracious love of God. Second, because the early Christians were accused of ingratitude by the authorities, who resented Christians’ refusal to give thanks to gods or to value worldly goods and favours. Ingratitude, then, ironically begins with a misunderstanding of the Christian, if Leithart is correct, and intensifies until the late modern which is, in his view, a quintessential culture of ingratitude. Key moments in this story are the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when following the disruption of ‘ancient and mediaeval circles of reciprocity…It was not clear what exactly had been unleashed on the world’ (p. 120), and, of course, the Enlightenment when ‘(i)n place of traditional and infinite Christian circles, they offered an empty space for rebuilding or a pure line of duty’(p. 160).
Throughout its historical survey, the book ranges sure footedly across disparate literatures and readily achieves its aims, and could easily become the standard primer for the field. Reflecting a successful course taught by its author, I can imagine it being easily pressed into similar service by others. The text's pedagogic feel is further heightened by a clever and appealing thought experiment: ‘grandma's soup tureen’. Suppose grandma has given you an ugly (to your eyes) wedding gift of a soup tureen. What should you do with it, and how should you express gratitude? Do you feign liking? Would it be right to store it away? To bin it? To use it to feed the cat? Leithart sets up his worked example at the start of the book and invites the reader to bear the infamous tureen in mind as she reads through the various epochs of gratitude. Then, like the unmasking of an Agatha Christie mystery, he quickly and light-heartedly assesses the epochs’ responses at the end of the book - not without considerable humour, as I shall leave the reader to discover.
There are many rich sections of this book worth careful reflection. I especially appreciated its clear treatment of late modern discussions of gift and gratitude by Derrida and Marion, and Milbank's theological response. Derrida deconstructs gift until it become the impossibility, while Marion reduces gift to pure givenness. For Milbank, by contrast, the paradigm case for gift giving is the gift exchange of (romantic) love, where reciprocity is delayed as a form of non-identical repetition. Part of the reason Milbank is able to make this claim is that he treats erotic-agapeic love, desire, and being as intimately entwined, whereas for Marion they are separable. Milbank, however, does not engage fully with the infinite circle if Leithart is correct.
Despite its many strengths I found the book's idealistic conclusion, ‘(t)o retain, and to build on, modernity, atheistic modernity must be replaced by its only real alternative – a theistic modernity’ (p. 230), more aspirational than readily achievable. My guess is we shall need to live and express gratitude in a less coherent, plural, and human world than this for some time yet! That said, this is bound to become the benchmark for and beginning of further investigations of the topic. One aspect that could be easily developed is the existential-experiential dimensions of all this. Leithart does not explore this in any great depth, his is not that sort of book, and to do so would most likely involve not only a further theological, but also a well-developed psychological, and possibly literary excursion. But such an exploration could now be most useful.
