Meg Giordano
The following is a very brief taste of my dissertation. It is an excerpt from a book chapter I contributed to a festschrift for my dissertation mentor, Bob Sweetman: Gestures of Grace: Essays in Honour of Robert Sweetman, eds. Joshua Lee Harris and Héctor Acero Ferrer (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023).
From the opening of Chapter 3: “Gratitude in Thomas Aquinas: A Spiritual Exercise of Alignment with the Good”
This essay is adapted from a larger work that engages the subject of personal violence, understood as that which hinders human flourishing. The project as a whole considers how a specific reading of Thomas Aquinas’s account of human nature (with attention to the Aristotelian and Proclean influences upon his thought) can guide us in our human task of adopting affirming rather than violent orientations toward others. Thomas’s treatment of human existence is sensitive to both a horizontal orientation of human beings in their operations within the material world and a vertical orientation of human beings in their status as created, dependent beings – a sensitivity nurtured by the influences of Aristotle’s account of human nature, Proclean Neoplatonism, and Scripture. The project addresses the account of human flourishing that such a reading of Thomas provides (a flourishing in which nature and grace collaborate), what violence against such a vision of human flourishing would entail, and how we can shape our dispositions and concrete practices to affirm the flourishing of our neighbors.
However, even with such a reflective commitment to the flourishing of others in hand, a subsequent problem emerges: people can, and often do, ‘fall away’ from the good that they intend to inhabit and enact. That is, this project concerns the further problem of the ordinary ways in which people of good will do harm to the people around them in the world, even in contrast to a vision of the good they have come to know and love. The project examines varying things that can contribute to such a loss of connection to the divine good that is our principle (including the constellation of problems associated in Thomas with the notion of acedia, or torpor). It considers how alienation of the soul from the natural orientation of the intellect to grasp the good of the universe as good (synderesis), and of the will to love the good (complacentia) can cause the human agent to mistake one thing for its opposite, and go into act with those false apprehensions in hand.[1] That is, a person in such a state of disconnect can falsely view what they might otherwise repudiate as violence to be instead an instrument of their own good, with tragic results.
Where this essay picks up the narrative, the issue at hand is how we can maintain our connection with the good, and even restore it when it has waned. Through this lens we will consider, as a spiritual exercise, the efficacy of gratitude as a disposition that helps to align a person’s orientation to divine good. In this essay I presuppose an initial connection with and orientation to the good as divine gift (a theme established in earlier chapters of the larger project), and I go on from there to consider how human activity subsequently affects the reception and realization of that gift.
The situation this essay is addressing may be compared to a technological device that has poor connectivity with the radio, cellular, or WiFi signal that it needs. It does no good to focus on the immediate problem of why the device won’t do the things we expect it to, or does them badly. It won’t help to refer to the reliability of past connectivity. The appropriate response would be to reposition/reorient the device such that it can receive the signal in the present – sometimes by changing position, somethings by refreshing the receptivity by turning off and on again, etc. One needs to reawaken the device exactly as a receiver before it can return to its status as a doer. Similarly, it will not do to simply direct oneself, however strictly, to ‘just do’ the things we know but aren’t doing. People can be dismayed, when they discover that they have ‘fallen away’ from practices of charity, respect, or justice, for example, that once were important to them – practices and values that they have known and loved. If that is a person’s reality, but they on some level wish it were otherwise, possibly they have to some degree ‘lost the signal’ of the divine good. Before they can re-establish themselves in the activities of participating the good – i.e., in doing the good – they need to be reawakened simply as a recipient of the good. My claim is that varying human activities of gratitude do this very thing. Gratitude most basically, and far more importantly than any ‘behaving nicely’ aspect of it, postures a person specifically as a recipient of a good from a source outside of themselves. It quite literally re-aligns the soul to the source of their good. The further claim of this text is that we access this source of the good through relational, social, and sacred contexts that constitute human beings’ place in the universe. The positioning of ourselves toward (or within) these contexts precisely as sources of our good is the human art of gratitude.
A helpful distinction to clarify my claim regarding the efficacy of gratitude can be made between the notions of “grateful for” and “grateful to.” In the view of this work, the former is an affirmation of the goodness of a gift itself – related to the key Thomistic notion of complacentia;[2] the latter is the active orientation of a person as a receiver of a gift toward the source of the good bestowed. The former is more properly identified as a disposition; the latter, an activity – taken together, they constitute a ‘dispositional activity.’ In one sense, the former is conceptually and experientially prior to the latter – we have to engage both the goodness of something and the givenness of something before we can express appreciation to the source of the gift.[3] This would seem to be the natural order of operations in gratitude. However, in another sense, the act of turning oneself toward a benefactor as a source of bestowed good is a positional/relational activity that is available to us even when the ‘knowing and loving’ disposition of the first mode has failed – i.e., when a person has ‘fallen away’ from a good they have known and loved.[4] It is the claim of this project that ‘gratitude to’ in this way can work retro-actively, as it were, to reawaken the ‘gratitude for’ that is entailed in human participation of the good.[5] Gratitude-to can be undertaken as an ‘intervention’ to reestablish gratitude-for.
Therefore, in this essay I consider gratitude as the activity of identifying and aligning oneself specifically as an ongoing recipient of good from exterior sources, and specifically to those sources. I will start with an examination of Thomas’s treatment of gratitude in general. Then, I will go on to examine concrete contexts in which Thomas envisions and explores varying activities of gratitude – first, in terms of gratitude toward God, and second, in terms of gratitude toward other humans. Following in the steps of earlier work in the thesis, I will create an abbreviated inventory of activities and orientations that a Thomistic account of gratitude prompts us to regard as contra-violent ways of living in the world. Thus, the discourse, while relying on Thomas’s theoretical account of gratitude and human existence, will be oriented intentionally toward the practical – and will, for that reason, not be exhaustive nor absolute in its conclusions. I hope to suggest, in the spirit of a spiritual exercise, a view of human cognitive/affective activities that could be fruitful in the human work of ordering ourselves to the good, and thereby loving and affirming our neighbor.
[1] Aquinas, ST Ia79.xii; IaIIae.94.i.ad2 (re: synderesis); IaIIae.3.v.co; IaIIae.25.ii.co (re: complacentia). All references to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae in this essay: Latin text based on the Leonine Edition, 1888–1906; English translation by Laurence Shapcote of the English Dominican Province; accessed at: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.
We see this disorientation addressed in Thomas’s commentary on Isaiah 5:20. The text in the Vulgate (with the Douay-Rheims English translation) states: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” – “Vae qui dicitis malum bonum et bonum malum, ponentes tenebras lucem et lucem tenebras, ponentas amarum in dulce et dulce in amarum.” Thomas identifies the first phrase with the practical effect in the act, the second with the effect on the intellect, and the third with the effect on the affections; see: Aquinas, Commentaria cursorial super Isaiam ch. 5, l.3, n.192.
[2] Properly speaking, gratefulness for a specific gift already given indicates ‘joy’ or ‘enjoyment.’ A disposition of gratefulness for life itself, and the goodness of the universe – understood as gift in the cosmic sense – indicates complacentia. What enjoyment and complacentia have in common, Frederick Crowe explains, is the loving of the good that is an affective response to the good that is, contrasted with the desire entailed in the pursuit of a good that is absent. Frederick E. Crowe, “Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas,” Theological Studies (Baltimore) 20, no.1 (1959): 1–39, at 18. See: Aquinas, ST IIaIIae.28.ii and iii.
[3] For the insight of this first articulation of the distinction I am indebted to Jeremy Wilkins (Boston College). Ref.: 2017 Aquinas Studium, Toronto, Ontario, “Conversatio” session 30 May 2017, examining Aquinas’s ST IIaIIae.23.vi.ad 1. My articulation of a subsequent implication of it is in response.
[4] To some, distinguishing these aspects of gratitude can seem artificial, or even nonsensical, given that experientially the two often occur simultaneously. An example may help to illustrate the distinction and illumine the connection to the question of this essay. Think of a young person opening a birthday gift. Sometimes they tear right into the gift and experience the excitement of gratitude-for before they learn who it was from, and then subsequently experience gratitude-to. Sometimes they read the card carefully and experience gratitude-to right alongside the gratitude-for. Sometimes the experience of receiving a gift from someone the young person feels especially safe around and loved by informs the receiving itself, such that a prevenient gratitude-to marks the gift already as something to be valued and enjoyed, something to be grateful-for. This last possibility becomes especially significant when a young person is for some reason ‘off their game,’ in a bad mood, or in some way disposed to be ungracious. In terms of this study’s consideration of the ethical-ontological significance of loving and participating in the divine good given to us as a gift, it is just such a situation that we are especially interested in.
[5] Though this has been stated in a number of ways, it bears repeating: in Thomas, restoration of the basic view of the universe as good and as divine gift – the complacentia that is the effect of charity in the soul – after it has been diminished by mortal sin requires some kind of divine intervention and grace. It is this thesis’s reading of Thomas, moreover, that such divine benevolence and assistance paradigmatically reaches individual persons through secondary human causes, contexts, and activities (note: though outside-the-natural miracles are recognized in Thomas, surely the notion of humans mediating divine bestowals of grace is itself a wonder).
Meg Giordano 
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