As a response to a gift, gratitude is an obligation. But what kind of obligation is gratitude, especially gratitude to God? Martin Luther placed gift at the heart of his understanding of God’s relation to creatures and thus brought this question to the heart of Christian life. Gratitude and its obligations are key themes, as well, in Anthony Kronman’s massive Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, which charges Christianity in general and Luther in particular with encumbering modern humans with an overwhelming existential burden and thus sapping our lives and our world of meaning.Footnote ¹ Before we engage these arguments, however, we need to explore a prevalent theological account of gratitude that lends some plausibility to his critique.

1.1 Gratitude as Repayment

For Thomas Aquinas, gratitude is a virtue ‘annexed’ to justice, to giving to others what is their due.Footnote ² When it comes to gifts we receive from others, we have no legal debt to repay, but we do have a moral one. It consists in recollecting the kindness shown and, above all, in paying them back.Footnote ³ The need for repayment, a prevalent intuition in many cultures, is rooted for Thomas in a metaphysical principle and is part of the natural order:

The natural order, at work in relation to divine and human benefactors alike, requires repayment (recompensatio) for the benefit received freely.

To understand Thomas rightly, it is important to distinguish between (1) thinking of gratitude itself as a form of repayment, in which case gratitude is given as repayment and thus in place of other forms of repayment and (2) considering these other forms of repayment a constitutive feature of gratitude in addition to giving thanks. In the first case, the fact that I have an obligation to thank my benefactor is taken to imply, first, that I owe the benefactor thanks, which is to say that thanks is her due. A gift sets up a moral relation of debt, where the debt is repaid with thanks. In the latter case, there is this same logic of obligation and debt, but repayment of the benefit itself is required. I owe something more than thanks.Footnote ⁵

Thomas holds the latter view. Gratitude requires three things. First, to recognize the benefit. Second, to express thanks for it. And third, ‘to repay (retribuat) the favor at a suitable place and time according to one’s means.’Footnote ⁶ Thanks alone do not discharge the debt of gratitude.

The logic of debt requires that repayment cover the entirety of the debt and possibly a bit more: the repayment must be as great and as good as that which it repays. The same applies to the debt of gratitude: the greater the favor, the greater must be the gratitude for it. When determining the amount of gratitude, we must enter into the calculation the fact that the benefactor was not bound to confer the favor. Since the favor was given gratis, the ‘beneficiary is under a moral obligation (ex debito honestatis) to bestow something gratis in return,’ argues Thomas. He continues,

Thomas recognizes and, importantly, affirms that it is not possible always to pay back as much as, let alone more than, what we were given. A son can never adequately repay parents the effect of the beneficence received from them, namely ‘to be and to live.’Footnote ⁸ Even less can a creature repay God for the gift of life and of the entire creation. Nevertheless, Thomas believed that humans ought to do ‘what [they] can’ to repay God’s favor; one owes repayment only ‘according to one’s means,’ as he puts it in the passage on repayment quoted above. Such lesser repayment can be morally adequate in part because Thomas shares the view that ‘gratitude depends chiefly on the heart’ because the kindness for which it is repayment depends chiefly ‘on the heart (affectus) rather than the deed (effectus).’Footnote ⁹ When, as in the case of God’s gift, ‘no equal repayment’ is possible, ‘the will to pay back would be sufficient for gratitude.’Footnote ¹⁰ Sufficient, but inadequate nonetheless, we should add: the debt is only deemed to have been paid, but in fact has not been paid. Repayment of gratitude to God is always and inescapably incomplete.Footnote ¹¹

1.2 Gratitude as Recognition

The problem of an unpayable debt and the burden of indebtedness arises if we think that gifts generate moral debts, which gratitude is supposed to repay in equal or even greater measure. Only thus do givers get their due. Let us call this the repayment account of gratitude. This is a common way of thinking about gifts and gratitude, and, like Thomas and Seneca before him, many believe that it reflects the natural order of things.

But gifts and gratitude are not unalterable ‘natural’ phenomena; they have a cultural history.Footnote ¹² Their character is variable depending on economic and political arrangements and prevalent anthropologies and social imaginaries. A plausible alternative way of thinking about gifts and gratitude is available. Take, first, gifts. One can think of them as completely free, with their recipients not owing anything to givers, let alone equivalent or greater returns. Granted, a great deal of ink has been spilled arguing to the contrary. Marcel Mauss’s interpretation of gift exchange in so-called archaic societies as obligatory and reciprocal has loomed large.Footnote ¹³ Jacques Derrida has gone to the very edges of existence to find a place for the ‘pure gift,’ untainted by the demand for reciprocation, in death itself.Footnote ¹⁴ Even so, cogent defenses of the possibility of truly gratuitous gift-giving have been elaborated, by Kathryn Tanner for example.Footnote ¹⁵ This is not, however, the occasion to rehearse them. Suffice it to say that there is nothing logically self-contradictory about this understanding of gifts, and their actuality is at least plausibly defensible, above all in the case of God’s giving.

With this account of the gift in place, we can, of course, continue to think of gratitude as a repayment, except that such gratitude, rather than being an appropriate response to the act that elicits it, effectively undoes the gift, turns it into a clandestine bargain.Footnote ¹⁶ If we accept both the repayment account of gratitude and this alternative account of gifts as completely free, the only proper gift would be an anonymous one which renders the recipient’s giving thanks to the giver impossible.Footnote ¹⁷

But what if the ‘repayment account of gratitude’ is just the counterpart of the ‘debt-creating account of gifts,’ rather than the articulation of some unalterable, ‘natural’ essence of gratitude? What if along with the gift, we also take gratitude out of the economy of debt and repayment? This is exactly what we propose. The function of gratitude, we contend, is not to pay for the gift. Instead, gratitude is the way to recognize the gift for what it is – a gift, something that does not have to be, indeed, cannot be paid for. In contrast to the repayment account of gratitude, we will call this the recognition account of gratitude.

Construed in this way, gratitude has four dimensions. First, we recognize that what we have received is a gift rather than, for instance, an entitlement (e.g. a contractually specified payment), an investment (e.g. money we are to manage for the giver), or the fruit of a lucky find (e.g. an ancient coin my son found in our yard).Footnote ¹⁸ Second, we indicate that what we have received is a benefit to us, or at least that we take the giver to have intended it as such. Third, we implicitly recognize the moral worth of the giver on account of the moral worth of their deed: they acted freely and yet to the benefit of someone other than themselves. Fourth, we do all this not with resentment but with a measure of joy – joy over the giver, joy over the gift, joy over having received the gift and having been set in a non-binding relation to the giver.

In short, gratitude recognizes joyfully the reception of the gift as a gift as well as the giver and their act as worthy of praise. As in the repayment account of gratitude, in the recognition account, gratitude is an obligation – an obligation entailed in receiving a gift as a gift. By recognizing the nature of the transaction, givers and their acts are rendered truthfully and, in this way, they receive their due, it being the case that, on the account of the gift to which this kind of gratitude is an appropriate response, what they intended was, to quote Seneca, ‘to be of service and to give pleasure to the one to whom’ they have given the gift.Footnote ¹⁹

How do we decide between repayment and recognition accounts of gratitude? Explaining his reason for the repayment account, Thomas Aquinas writes: ‘the effect must needs always be directed to the end of the agent.’Footnote ²⁰ Well and good. But why cannot the goal of an agent – in this case, a giver – be simply to benefit the beneficiary, and to benefit themselves, if at all, only by the fact of the beneficiary having received the benefit rather than by anything they may do for us in return? Seneca certainly entertains that possibility.Footnote ²¹ If so, why must the benefit always also return to the giver in the form of the recipient’s repayment? It is not clear to us what Seneca’s and Thomas’s answers to this question are.

For someone like Thomas Hobbes, the reason why the benefit must always return to the giver lies in the theory of motivation according to which ‘of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good.’Footnote ²² Gratitude must therefore be a repayment even if it is done in the form of the ‘cheerful acceptation’ that honors the benefactor.Footnote ²³ By honoring the benefactor, gratitude increases the benefactor’s power, that is, the ‘present means, to obtain some future apparent Good.’Footnote ²⁴ In giving freely, that is the good the benefactor is seeking. If an agent always seeks their own good in their free acts, no gift will be given without expectation of an at least equivalent return, in whatever currency that return may be paid, and no gratitude will be sufficient without this expectation having been met. In fact, gratitude itself will always be an attempt to ensure the good of the beneficiary. The goal of gratitude is to ensure that the benefactor does not ‘repent’ of ‘his good will.’ Those who express gratitude and those who give gifts each seek only their own good.

But is this how God gives gifts? Is this how humans, at their best, should give them? In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the crowds gathered to listen to him this teaching: ‘But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful’ (Luke 6:35–36). There is a tension in the text between expecting nothing in return and being promised a reward. But the command that human character and behavior align with the God who is merciful and kind to the ungrateful and wicked suggests that we not take the heavenly reward as a make-up for foregoing worldly repayment. The text suggests a vision of God who, while commanding humans to practice a divine kind of love, ‘expects nothing in return’ for the gifts God gives. It implies also a corresponding vision of humans whose being and reward are one and the same: to be and to act as the children of just that kind of God. Gratitude to this kind of God and gratitude to the children of this kind of God cannot consist in repayment.

Martin Luther can be read to advocate a vision of God, human beings, gift-giving, and gratitude like that implied in this Gospel text. Arguably, this vision is in fact the very core of his theology.

1.3 Luther’s Gratitude to a Loving God

‘The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it,’ writes Luther in the last thesis of his Heidelberg Disputation (1518). In the proof offered for the thesis, he explains: ‘Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.’Footnote ²⁵ The negative part of these formulations is critical: God’s love is not about finding what is pleasing to it; it does not seek its own good. Consequently, when God bestows good, no repayment is needed. That is not just because no repayment is possible since God is fully self-sufficient and since everything humans could possibly have with which to repay God would be, ultimately, a gift from God in the first place.Footnote ²⁶ Equally importantly, and perhaps more fundamentally, no repayment is needed because the requirement of repayment would misconstrue the nature of God’s love: unlike (sinful) human love, which, Luther says, seeks ultimately its own good, divine love does not seek any good for itself, but instead bestows good on others. In his 1535 Lectures on Galatians (the biblical text to which he was ‘betrothed,’ his ‘Katie von Bora’),Footnote ²⁷ Luther writes:

To try to repay God for benefits, let alone to give God an initiating gift to which God would be obliged to respond,Footnote ²⁹ is to misrecognize both one’s nature as a creature and the moral character of the Creator (see Rom. 11:35).

The way Luther explains the absence of sacrifices before the Fall and the nature of sacrifices after the Fall illustrates well both God’s free giving and the corresponding account of gratitude (which we have called the recognition account of gratitude). In the Garden of Eden, humans’ first home, God ‘does not prescribe the slaughter of oxen, the burning of incense, vows, fastings, and other tortures of the body. Only this He wants: that he [Adam] praise God, that he thank Him, that he rejoice in the Lord, and that he obey Him by not eating from the forbidden tree.’Footnote ³⁰ There is no suggestion that praising, thanking, rejoicing, and obeying are ways of repaying a debt owed to God for the gift of existence in a world described as ‘very good’; rejoicing would seem a particularly odd currency for paying off a debt. The list contains appropriate ways of responding to God, including obligatory recognition of benefits received in gratitude and praise. After the Fall, God did institute sacrifices. But they ‘had no other purpose,’ writes Luther, than to set before early humans the ‘hope of future deliverance and [to] exhort them to show their gratitude’ to the God of love.Footnote ³¹ Sacrifices in Genesis 4 are not repayment to God for gifts received; like the sacraments of the later church, Luther thinks of them as reminders for humans of God’s gifts, past and future.Footnote ³²

Luther’s Commentary on the Magnificat contains one of his best articulations of the primary effect of God’s generosity on humans’ relation to God. It shows up in the concluding section of a longer passage in which he aligns God’s love in creating the world out of nothing and God’s love in elevating the presumed ‘nobodies’ of the world. Luther writes:

Divine gifts do not create the burden of obligation to love God; debtors are not likely to love their creditors, which is what givers are if they must be repaid. Because divine gifts are free, they generate spontaneous joy in God and love for God. The command to love God assumes God’s free gift giving.

In the Commentary of the Magnificat, Luther addresses explicitly only the relation between God’s giving and love for God. In The Freedom of a Christian, he applies the same logic to God’s gift and love for neighbor.

The text is a brief commentary on two parallel texts recording Jesus’ great sermon (whether on the mount or on the plain): Matt. 5:43–48 and Luke 6:27–36. They are explaining the signature command of Jesus to love enemies and in the process address the more general issue of bestowing goods and gratitude. Luther quotes the text from Matthew about God who makes God’s sun ‘rise on the evil and on the good’ (5:45). Underscoring a theme exclusive to Luke, he repeats multiple times that God’s generosity and the generosity of God’s human children should in no way be tied to gratitude or ingratitude. The central claim of Luther’s passage sums up the thrust of both Gospel texts: ‘For a man does not serve that he may put men under obligation.’ God’s gifts do not make humans God’s debtors, serving to place humans under obligation to love God above all things and neighbors as themselves in repayment for love received. Correspondingly, human gifts do not make their recipients into debtors, placing them under obligation to repay. Instead, God’s gifts, received in thanksgiving and praise which recognize them as gifts, motivate and enable people to love God and neighbors willingly and with joy.

Gratitude to God and to humans is not a repayment for the simple reason that gifts do not incur repayable debts. What makes joyful love of God and neighbor possible is God’s free gift-giving which itself does not put humans under obligation and which humans ought to recognize in gratitude but do not have to repay. Granted, love of God is a duty for a Christian, but it is not a duty of gratitude to God grounded in an infinite debt, but a duty of obedience to God grounded in the fact that human fulfillment lies in the alignment of human character with God’s. And this normative vision of human character is grounded in the yet more fundamental fact that human being as such is constituted by the presence of God.Footnote ³⁵

1.4 A Counter-Gift as Great as the Gift

In Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, Anthony Kronman offers an intellectual history of the West as the story of human relation to the world as home; it is a narrative of the loss of the world as home and its hoped-for recovery. At the center of the story of loss is gratitude to God, the heavy burden of the impossibility of thanking God adequately and the resentment born out of that frustration. The result, Kronman claims, is the disenchanted world of rights and the expulsion of love and gratitude, both essential elements of home, from public life. For Kronman, Luther is the main villain of the story, the worst exemplar of the tribe of world-unhoming Christian theologians whose progenitor was the Apostle Paul. All of them ‘have insisted, over and over again, on God’s remoteness from man and on our utter incapacity to be grateful to him in the measure his gifts demand.’Footnote ³⁶ If our reading of Luther above is convincing, one of the central claims of Kronman’s book is misguided.

Contrary to what his talk of divine gifts demanding impossible gratitude may suggest, Kronman rejects the historically widely accepted repayment account of gratitude that we have encountered in Thomas Aquinas. For him, genuine gifts are expressions of love for another person for their own sake. Gratitude is, of course, the appropriate response for the goodness received, and a grateful person will be moved by the wish to return.Footnote ³⁷ ‘Nothing, perhaps, is more characteristic of gratitude than this,’ Kronman writes, and continues, ‘A gift that is meant for us arouses an affection for the one who has made it, so long as we are not crippled by envy.’Footnote ³⁸ Crucial for his account is that the return to which the grateful person is moved differs categorically from repayment. ‘A debt is a burden and repayment is a relief,’ he writes. ‘The joy of loving in return for love is something different. It is a joy of bringing a gift of one’s own to those whose unbought love’ a person has received.Footnote ³⁹

So far, Kronman’s account of gift and gratitude tracks closely with Luther’s: gifts are expressions of love for the recipient and they create no debts. The proper response to gifts is gratitude; unless blocked by envy, they arouse the joy of loving the giver and giving in turn. So why is Luther his anti-hero? Because in Kronman’s view humans can in principle ‘never return [God’s] love with one that is as good and as great’ as is God’s love for them.Footnote ⁴⁰ But exactly this is what they, Kronman believes, insuppressibly yearn to do. An ‘abysmal gap’ separates God and humans, God being both too distant and too different from them. God is the creator and they are creatures; God is self-standing and needs nothing, but they have received from God their very existence along with everything they need to live.

But why do humans think that they must give God a gift that is as good and as great as God’s was to them? Kronman gives two reasons. First, the Christian God demands such an impossible gift. Or so Kronman says. He gives no evidence for this claim. True, the kind of love God does demand – to love God with one’s whole being and to love one’s neighbor as oneself – is impossible for humans to achieve. But God nowhere demands that human love be as good and as great as God’s; the demand would be preposterous.Footnote ⁴¹ Even Thomas, who advocates the repayment account of gratitude, seeks to accommodate differences in power and possibility between givers and receivers; as we have seen, the requirement is to ‘repay the favor at a suitable place and time according to one’s means.’ So does Seneca.Footnote ⁴² Any plausible account of gratitude must have a way of accommodating differences in power and capacity among agents. Kronman’s account of Christian gratitude to God doesn’t.

Second, Kronman believes that humans have a deep yearning to return to the original giver a commensurate reciprocating gift, to give them or someone else in turn ‘a gift of equal magnitude.’Footnote ⁴³ The inability to do so is, along with the inability to feel gratitude, ‘the worst disaster that can befall a human being.’Footnote ⁴⁴ He does not offer any support for the claim, nor does he explain the origin of such a yearning. But we can safely infer that Kronman thinks recipients will feel diminished if they are unable to give a commensurate gift in return, so that when the gap is great, as in the case of God and humans, recipients can only ‘feel contempt’ for themselves.Footnote ⁴⁵ But irrespective of how humans tend to feel, to insist that the return gift must be equal to the original gift – as good and as great – is to make a category mistake. Such calculation belongs to the repayment account of gratitude, which Kronman rightly rejects. If gifts are expressions of love for recipients for their own sake, any return gift must reflect the possibilities of the original recipient, in which case the problem of impossible gratitude disappears. In fact, nobody is then incapable of adequate gratitude.

Kronman ascribes spontaneity to gift-giving and therefore endorses what we have called a recognition account of gratitude. At the same time, he implicitly retains a repayment account of gratitude, only the repayment is in his case a requirement not of justice but of an inner psychological yearning. A tension between the spontaneity of the gift and the compulsion to correspondingly great expression of gratitude in the form of a return gift is at the core of Kronman’s account of gift and gratitude. And this tension is paired with another: between the need to affirm equality of human givers and receivers so that their gifts and return gifts can match in magnitude and the stubborn reality of their de facto inequality. Kronman removes inequality between God and humans by denying the existence of a transcendent God. But he is left with de facto inequality among human givers and receivers with fatal consequences for his entire project. Since certain forms of human inequality are ineliminable, as long as receivers feel that they must give return gifts ‘as good and great’ as those they received, most will be left with contempt for themselves and envy of others on account of their inability to do so.Footnote ⁴⁶ Which will make them want to turn all benefits into entitlements, precisely the modern tendency Kronman’s Confessions is written to counter.

1.5 Back to Luther

Martin Luther, Kronman’s villain, ought in fact to be his savior. Building on Luther, we argue that a commensurate reciprocating gift is not a requirement of gratitude.Footnote ⁴⁷ The requirement of gratitude is recognition of the gift as a gift and joy in having received it. Affection for the giver and a wish to return love is certainly a hoped-for consequence of the reception of the gift with gratitude. But it is no more than that. Here again, it would be a mistake to think that in most cases the responding love must be ‘as good and great’ as the initiating one.

For Luther at the center of the human predicament is not a gift-induced-and-divinely-demanded-but-actually-impossible commensurate return gift. It would be un-godlike and therefore ungodly of God to require such a return. From his perspective, the demand for commensurate return is a self-imposed and self-defeating obligation humans project onto God. That projection entails a twofold misrecognition. One concerns the metaphysical character of God and consists in the assumption that God and humans exist on the same plane of being. The consequence is the belief that God and humans compete for the same ‘honor space’: the more honor is ascribed to God, the less of it can be ascribed to human beings. As many theologians have noted, God and humans are not in such a competitive relationship. The second misrecognition concerns the moral character of God, and it consists in failure to appreciate that God is love and therefore does not bestow love only to those who are worthy or who, after receiving it, make themselves worthy of it.

Summing up both points, we might say that frustrated yearning to give God a gift ‘as good and great’ as the one received from God is not an enactment of faith that is bound to lead to dethronement of God and the emergence of the world of humans acting as if they were self-sufficient and competing demi-gods, as Kronman argued. Instead, that yearning is a consequence of a failure of theological imagination and an inability to rejoice in the sheer generosity of the non-competitive Giver at the origin of our existence, rather than experiencing ourselves as diminished by it. All this is not to say that we do not, many of us at least, chafe at our creatureliness and crave the ability to establish our equality with God through an equal return of God’s gifts. To do so, however, is to turn away from the truly appropriate form of gratitude to God revealed in Jesus Christ – joyful recognition of the goodness of God the giver and of what God gives – and to harm ourselves, and likely each other, in the process.