Gratitude—both gratitude to the human persons around us and the ultimate gratitude toward the personal God—brings to us a sense of order and peace, a grounding in truth that sets us free.
Gratitude, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, Balduin V. Schwarz, Joseph Ratzinger, and Romano Guardini (135 pages, Hildebrand Project, 2023)
The great spiritual teachers tell us that gratitude—the habit of thankfulness—is a necessary ingredient in life and an essential component to the health of the soul. But how does one achieve gratitude in a world of overabundance, where our senses and minds are continually deadened and dulled by the complexities of living? How do we arrive at a deep inner thankfulness for the fundamental gifts of life, obscured as they often are by hundreds of subsidiary cares and worries? The present short book may not give an immediately practical answer to these questions, but it will help thoughtful readers to understand what gratitude is and to explore this soul-state in greater depth.
Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) is by any measure one of the major Christian thinkers of the 20th century, yet he doesn’t seem to be all that widely known, at least in the English-speaking world. The reason for this is surely that his works have only slowly been brought out in English translations. That has been chiefly the work of the Hildebrand Project, the organization devoted to promoting the German philosopher’s work. Among the many books Hildebrand Project scholars have published in recent years have been a number of small volumes compiling Hildebrand’s shorter writings on specific topics.
Thus, we have Gratitude—and here is a special treat, too, because in addition to the extended title essay by Hildebrand, there are pieces by one of his most distinguished students, Balduin V. Schwarz, and by two other German gentlemen named Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini. An all-star team if there ever was one—it’s a pity Hans Urs von Balthasar couldn’t have dropped in too.
Ratzinger himself, as Pope Benedict XVI, said that “when the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.” And an earlier pope, Pius XII, conferred on Hildebrand the title “twentieth-century doctor of the Church.”
Hildebrand’s insights are always luminescent, exalting. Whether he is writing about the evidential power of beauty or about value as the grounding of ethical action, Hildebrand gets to the heart of the spiritual problems that underlie all of our lives if we want to live as spiritually aware and mindful human beings rather than cogs in a machine (and this, as it turns out, is what gratitude is all about). Ratzinger and Guardini of course need no introduction to readers of this journal. Reading the words of all four of these giants, one feels oneself soaring aloft with some of the greatest and most inspiring of minds. One can surely find no better teachers on earth—and, praise heaven, one doesn’t need a doctorate in philosophy to understand them—their prose is all clarity and light. Ratzinger’s essay is actually not about gratitude as such, but its content is altogether complementary to the subject at hand. It is entitled “Faith as Trust and Joy—Evangelium.” Ratzinger speaks of the need to find a grounding for our lives in “meaning” and “joy,” which comes from finding an authentic self that opens itself to the Other, who is God. Our happiness depends on a union of truth and love, and this implies affirming the goodness of existence as such—something God did by coming among us in the person of Jesus. Self-transcendence, overcoming the limitations of the ego, is the goal.
Perhaps such transcendence is the central problem in attaining to gratitude today. It’s easy enough to be grateful for this or that gift or benefit or blessing. But to be actively thankful for the whole cosmos, for existence itself, all day and every day—is this possible? Is it not a bit Pollyanna-like? How does one overcome the inevitable weariness and matter-of-factness that the cares of everyday life instill?
Hildebrand addresses this problem when he writes of the necessity of one’s attitude toward life being grounded in “a full apprehension of values.” To see all things and persons in the proper light, in their goodness and uniqueness, is to be “truly awake,” in contrast with the “state of half-wakefulness” and “obtuse indifference” in which one merely drags oneself along, apathetically fulfilling one’s practical duties and taking everything for granted. To be truly awake and alert is to have a proper wonderment at the mysteries of reality, which is the beginning of philosophy and scientific and creative activity. To be grateful is to see what is truly there, to apprehend all things as they truly are—an unmerited gift from above. True, we may not be capable right now of feeling constant gratitude for the fundamental gifts of our being and existence; but we will attain to this more and more as we continue to walk the path of “our transformation in Christ.” Under the influence of Christian joy, little by little the jaded neutrality will fall away and a shining core of love and gratitude will be shown.
Very well, one might say; but after all, we do not live exclusively in a bed of roses. What about things that do not appear to us as blessings? What about the thorns in life, the sufferings, crosses, frustrations, calamities, sicknesses—and indeed, death itself, the very negation of anything good and the thing that overshadows from a distance every blessing we enjoy?
Any theory of gratitude is going to have to take into account the presence of evil in our lives, and Hildebrand realizes this. He turns his critical eye toward various attempts of believers to deal with crosses and moral and physical evils. On the one hand, we believe that God permits evils in order to draw an ultimate good out of them—a good which we may not comprehend until the next life—and that suffering allows us to join ourselves in communion with Christ, who took all the sufferings of the world upon himself.
Does this mean, then, that we should be grateful even for evils and crosses, thanking God for allowing us to suffer?
No, answers Hildebrand. A true recognition of the objective truth of things does not permit us to obliterate the profound difference between blessings and sufferings, or to call evil good. Sufferings are there for the sake of ultimate joy, but sufferings and joys are different at their core and demand a different response from us. Hildebrand proposes: “gratitude is the response to all the positive gifts, and submissive, loving acceptance is the response to the crosses.” Nor, one assumes, are we supposed to go out looking for crosses and sufferings, but rather humbly accept them when they come, bearing them in union with Jesus and having faith in God’s overarching plan.
We can and should be grateful to the people around us; Balduin Schwarz suggests that this kind of gratitude bears an implicit argument for the existence of God who is a Person. This is because there can be no gratitude without a person to be grateful to, and how else do we explain our natural feeling of gratitude for life and creation? If these things are merely there by chance, how do we explain our need to thank someone for them? Balduin’s argument is much richer and more subtle than this bald outline suggests.
Toward the end of the collection, Romano Guardini movingly suggests that gratitude is the morning mood, the feeling we have about the world when we first wake up refreshed by the night’s sleep and ready to begin a new day. As things and events wear us down throughout the course of the day, those sentiments of gratitude become submerged; “but they were there in the morning, and they will be there again tomorrow morning and will bring order into our existence.”
And that is what gratitude brings to us—both gratitude to the human persons around us and the ultimate gratitude toward the personal God: a sense of order and peace, a grounding in truth that sets us free.
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The featured image is “La prière, église Saint-Bonnet” (unknown date) by Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.