Sense and Nonsense: Gratitude

After he referred to St. Francis of Assisi and Social Darwinism in his eloquent address to the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Governor Mario Cuomo was briefly interviewed by Larry King on KCBS. King remarked on the reference to St. Francis. Cuomo then went on to G.K. Chesterton’s comment that St. Francis may have been the only real democrat who ever lived. Needless to say, I am prejudiced in favor of anyone who knows about Chesterton, though I wish Mario Cuomo would also pay attention to what Chesterton said about human life. (See my “The Rarest of All Revolutions: G.K. Chesterton on the Relation of Human Life to Christian Doctrine,” American Benedictine Review, December, 1981.) This reference of Governor Cuomo reminded me that I had not read Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi for some time. Eventually, in the Library of Xavier Hall at the University of San Francisco, I found a 1944 edition of this wonderful book, originally written in 1924.

Everyone, no doubt, has his favorite theme in Chesterton, who remains one of the most quoted authors in the English language. My own favorite, I think, is Chesterton’s explanation of the virtue of gratitude. Indeed, I would suspect that gratefulness is the single most revealing element in a human being’s character. Like anything else, to be sure, gratitude can be corrupted into some sort of fawning or into a kind of lethargic inertness. But in itself, it reveals how we understand the world and our presence in it.

The first step in understanding gratitude is the simple realization that there is something beyond everything, something over which we have no control, but to which we respond as an existence given to us. “The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else,” Chesterton wrote. “He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything is made.”

What does it mean, we might ask, to appreciate “nothing”? The mystic, in Chesterton’s view, will be fully aware that all else but God is unnecessary. If anything but God exists, it does so because of something in God and not something in itself. This means that intelligent beings who know what they are can choose to reject what they are, can choose to build their own worlds. This is what used to be called “pride” in the old spiritual books.

The opposite of pride was the choice to accept the fact that reality, including oneself, was more wondrous than we could have ourselves imagined. Chesterton put it this way: The “sense of the great gratitude and the sublime dependence was not a phrase or even a sentiment; it is the whole point that this was the very rock of reality. It was not a fancy but a fact; rather it is true that beside it all facts are fancies.” All facts are fancies — not our “facts” but God’s “fancies.” There are things that need not exist but do exist because of what God is like. Creation, as the medievals said, is the vestige of God; we humans are not gods, but we are his images.

And this was the basis of that courtesy, that democracy, that Chesterton saw in St. Francis. “What distinguishes this very genuine democrat from any mere demagogue is that he never either deceived or was deceived by the illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his (St. Francis’) taste in monsters, he never saw before him a many-headed beast. He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous.” This is, of course, the reality the politician in particular is most likely to forget, the reality of the particular life in all its forms. The unique variety of each of our own kind cannot be exhausted in, or even comprehended by, the political community. Aristotle understood this when he discussed friendship. This is how Chesterton put it:

There never was a man who looked into those burning brown eyes without being certain that Francis Bernadone was really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave: that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document. Now for this particular moral and religious idea there was no external expression except courtesy.

Courtesy, of course, is our response, at its best, to what others are. It is a sign of our gratitude, not merely for our own existence, but more especially for that of others, whom we could not imagine, yet who exist.

One of the more obvious solutions to the problem of evil is to conceive a world in which no finite, free, intelligent beings could exist. This, presumably, would save the embarrassment of having a God who “allowed” evil. But we have a God who did not listen to our logic. The great temptations, they say, are moral. I suspect, however, that they are also metaphysical. A world in which no gratitude existed would be necessarily a world in which our kind could not exist. And it is strange, that the closer we arrive to pride, the closer we arrive to a world in which gratitude does not exist, only our own definition of how the world ought to be.

Not everyone ought to be a friar or a monk, yet the world should contain a few of them. Of the controversy about whether Franciscans ought to own property, Chesterton wrote:

Saints were sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans.

That there are many different ways to God seems commonplace. What is not commonplace is the way each of us reaches God. The gift of gratitude includes the fact that God’s ways are not our ways, for our ways lead only to ourselves, and we are not God. This latter, again, is why we can be ultimately grateful.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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