Thanksgiving Is Contemplation
Occasionally in the history of philosophy we find one celebrated figure or another making the claim that some languages are uniquely fit for the task of thinking, with Greek or German usually taking the laurel. That would have come as a surprise to Ramanuja or Zhu Xi, I suspect; at any rate, I have always been convinced that the English language can lay claim to at least one philosophical merit which gets to the heart of the matter: I mean the root shared between “thank” and “think.”
As forgetful as we tend to be of the wisdom of the past, after all, we still associate gratitude with thoughtfulness and memory. Someone remembers to say thank you, to send a message, a note, or a card, and instinctively we call them thoughtful. This is a small thing. But I would suggest that wherever we find practices of ordinary excellence—of hitting the mark, of doing or faring well—we find launching points for reflection that, extended far enough, can lead us onward in the recovery of the forms of wisdom for which we today are so desperately hungry.
Consider, then, what we are doing when we give thanks. We are giving voice to our gratitude for good things received, by our words, gestures, or the expression of our faces. Terms for thanksgiving in other languages are suggestive here: think of eucharisteia, gratiarum actio, or acción de gracias, where the idea of exercising or acting on our gratitude, on acknowledgment of a gift or grace, is explicit. Someone is kind to you, or remembers you unexpectedly, or handles a small fault with discretion and grace, and it comes naturally to respond with gratitude.
What exactly does this response communicate? What does gratitude “say,” or, what is the thought in gratitude? Love is a felt recognition of the good, desire of the good’s attainability, sorrow of its loss, joy of its presence—what about gratitude? Can we place it among these? Yes, I would suggest, and in a way that helps clarify gratitude’s place among the most philosophical of the soul’s movements. With love and joy, gratitude is a felt recognition of the good—a good not only present, but a good received. Put differently: gratitude is the felt recognition of the good as gift. Something received is something given by another, after all, whether or not the identity of the giver is clear in a given case.
The core insight that dawns on us in the experience of gratitude, I take it, is this: “Here is a good”—perhaps a very precious good—“that I have received and did not, nor ever could, produce for myself.” The good that evokes my gratitude—like friendship, family, insight, or beauty, the highest and dearest goods a human life can welcome—thus also brings home to me the contingency of my connection to this good, the way I depend for this good on the beneficence of others. “This need not be, could so easily not have been—and yet it is, and how good that it is all the same.”
Gratitude gives us insight, in other words, into the being of the good and of its causes. Giving thanks exercises and communicates this insight. Even in its humblest forms, thanksgiving is thus already a form of contemplation. The practice of contemplation, after all, is among other things a matter of learning to see things whole, to see what things are and why, to see how things hold together as causes and effects in their integrity, and to dwell restfully in that vision. In its most complete forms, we recognize what we have received as a gift given by another for the sake of our good, and thus as the effect of another’s love for us.
More succinctly: to contemplate is to see and to savor. By not taking the good for granted, thanksgiving pauses and rests in what we have received; by acknowledging this good comes not from ourselves but from another, thanksgiving sees the good in light of its cause. This is as much the case whether we are thanking a friend for a memorable evening of conversation, family for the warmth of home, or the Giver of all good things. In its own way, then, a habit of giving thanks is already a kernel of wisdom, a habit that answers to the human mind’s calling to receive the goodness of truth in its fullness.
Aquinas was doing more than giving us a punning heuristic when in his Latin he observed that wisdom (sapientia) is a form of delicious knowledge (sapida scientia). To come by degrees to see this for ourselves, as with the exercise of any excellent habit, calls for us to practice it with a deliberate determination. But in the measure that we do, we can come to recognize that the wholehearted practice of thanksgiving rejuvenates. It makes the mind young again. It does this because, against the deadening influence of custom and hardship, it keeps us attentive to the good, keeps us savoring it. The freshness, the resilience of the inward eye in the face of life’s hardships, gives this attitude its childlike character, a childlikeness that enables us, in the biblical language, to receive the world anew as our kingdom and inheritance. Or, as wrote the English poet of grateful and childlike vision, Thomas Traherne:
You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a sand exhibits the wisdom and power of God: And prize in everything the service which they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your Soul, far more than the visible beauty on their surface, or the material services they can do your body. Wine by its moisture quenches my thirst, whether I consider it or no: but to see it flowing from His love who gave it unto man, quenches the thirst even of the Holy Angels. To consider it, is to drink it spiritually. To rejoice in its diffusion is to be of a public mind. And to take pleasure in all the benefits it does to all is Heavenly, for so they do in Heaven. To do so, is to be divine and good, and to imitate our Infinite and Eternal Father.
The habit of thanksgiving brings a clarity and freshness of vision, which, as Traherne’s writings suggest, likens us both to the child and to the Heavenly Father. It does this by enabling us to see through to the original goodness that persists beneath the flaws in things. It keeps us alive to this original goodness, despite our self-blinding tendency to take such goodness for granted. When we give thanks, then, we do more than cultivate a human virtue (though this is no small thing). We contemplate the good we have received and, at our best, share in a glimpse of that original vision that saw in each created thing: “It was good.”
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