Thanksgiving and Gratitude

    Thanksgiving is a holiday devoted to the virtue of gratitude which, one could argue, finds less than hospitable ground in the modern world. The Lockean position on nature, that it furnishes only worthless materials that gain value through an imposition of labor, could not be more inconsistent with gratitude; in fact, Locke specifically undermines any conception of nature that would inspire reverence for the evidence it gives us of God’s providence. Instead of gratitude for what nature provides Locke encourages pride in our mastery and possession of nature—we take pride in ourselves as the only part of nature that can refashion nature. It is hard for beings who fancy themselves as radically self-sufficient or autonomous to be grateful for anything.

    Christian humility and gratitude are not abrogations of human pride—we can be reasonably proud that we are the only creatures created in the image of God and that we are the height of His creation. However, this pride is always tempered by the recognition that we are not fully self-sufficient beings, that the creaturely nature we have pride in is something in itself to be grateful for, and that we are as much defined as human beings by dependence as we are by independence. The Christian account of the soul is always a combination of self-assertion and self-restraint, and this is evidenced by the necessary dialectic in Thomas between humility and pride.

    Besides being closer to the truth than the Lockean account regarding human nature, Christian psychology more accurately captures the nature of political liberty—following Aristotle, we cultivate our natures as political animals through the dual exercise of ruling and being ruled, by reconciling our individual eros for independence with the reality of mutual dependence. Thanksgiving is a fantastic time not just to reflect upon gratitude and the peculiar obstacles modernity poses to it but also the true meaning of political liberty within democratic life.