I No Thanks
I’d like to start by saying thanks – but you probably guessed that I would. ‘Thank you’ is perhaps the first word a speaker at such an occasion as this should utter. But it is of course part of a pattern of polite exchange that permeates our social interactions – and of which we have grounds, perhaps, to exercise a certain hermeneutics of suspicion. A kind invitation to give the Cable lecture has come; and it was a kind invitation – it certainly was not a necessary one. It wasn’t simply my turn. I couldn’t say my reputation left the organizers with no alternative. And yet, the invitation was an invitation with obligations attached – a certain expected level of preparation on my part, an appropriate recognition of the occasion and so on. I was, truth be told, certainly not simply persuaded to accept the invitation by dint of my simple beneficence; there was the promise of a prestigious platform, an informed audience, a chance for publication and so on.
So our thanks, when we offer them, are a veneer of gratitude designed to cover over an interaction which we all know is really a matter of exchange. Thank me, if you will, but don’t let’s pretend that I am not myself completely chuffed to be giving this lecture. And I thank you, certainly, but we all know that I am not here by grace alone.
It’s the problem presented for us by tipping – a practice only sometimes observed in Australia of course. It is meant to be a gratuity (which is its other name): yet, as Australians discover when they inadvertently forget to tip a taxi driver or a waiter or a bell-hop in another country, there is nothing gratuitous about the tip at all. It is expected. We are obliged – and we accept the obligation because we want to fit in. The nostalgic pretense of the freedom to give and receive remains attached to the practice like the stub of a tail on an animal which has evolved beyond the need for such appendages.
We have, as the Jacques Derrida once pointed out, a deep longing for the dynamics of gift and gratitude – even though we can see quite easily when the language of giving and thanksgiving is deeply tainted. It is why we continue to thank shopkeepers, though all know they haven’t given us a thing and our cold hard cash is all the thanks they want. It’s why we pretend that corporate giants like McDonald’s and Woolworths and Penrith Panthers are the benefactors of all kinds of social goods, though we all know that their generosity is simply advertising by another name and that they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t bring in golden returns. It’s why, even though governments have to argue for that strategic value of giving overseas aid to their voters, lest they be seen to be simply throwing away their tax revenues on causes that won’t bring a good return, we still call it ‘aid’. It’s why, though we catch ourselves questioning the motives of the givers of gifts and of those who volunteer their time to help for no apparent return, we still award them badges and gongs, and celebrate them as latter day saints.
It was Immanuel Kant who proposed that, in order to qualify as properly moral, acts ought to be performed with a purity of motive and absolute disinterest. If an agent performs an act merely because his natural sympathy for others prompts him to do so, Kant thought that this is less morally worthy than performing an act from a sense of duty. There are echoes here of the debate at the end of the seventeenth century engendered by the teachings of the French poet and priest François Fénelon, who argued that even wishing for your own salvation is a corruption of your motives and thus it is better to wish yourself damned, in order to keep yourself pure. The problem for human beings is that we know no such acts, and we cannot disentangle our own interests from our motivation to do whatever it is we have in mind. If selfless motivation is the precondition for a moral act, then can anyone name a single such act or claim to have done such a deed? Can we really describe a gift with no strings attached, and a pure act of thanksgiving in receiving a gift, when the strings are so clearly visible and so firmly anchored?
We are, then, faced with a dilemma brought about by two deeply-held convictions. The first, following Kant, is that only disinterested actions are truly moral. The second, a claim impressed on us by evolutionary biology as we shall see, is that there are no such disinterested actions.
Altruism is not, then, all that it seems. And if it is to disappear, the possibility of true giving and real thankfulness also vanishes. Are we not perhaps better off simply accepting our own selfishness and learning to like it? This observation of course takes us to the twentieth century, during which great systems of scientific and economic thought have been pressed into service so as to make a positive virtue out of human self-interest. Greed, it would seem, is good – and possibly the only good. And with that observation, we might well conclude that our thanks have no meaning.
Among the things at stake in this discussion, however, is human wellbeing. There is at present a renewed interest amongst the psychological guild in the role that gratitude plays in human happiness. For example, psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough of the University of California have described the benefits of a regular practice of thanksgiving and a disposition of gratitude as including better physical health and enhanced mental alertness. People who score highly on a measure of gratitude testify to, as Emmons puts it, ‘higher levels of positive emotions, life satisfaction, vitality, optimism and lower levels of depression and stress.’ The published studies note that religious people score particularly well on these, but argue that you don’t have to be religious to be grateful. But if thanksgiving is nothing more than a confidence trick, or an impossible and nostalgic fantasy, then it seems like it is going to be a hard sell.
II George R. Price and the Problem of Altruism
These themes swirl around the remarkable life story of American population geneticist and physical chemist George R. Price. Price worked on the Manhattan Project and later for IBM on the mathematical modeling of free markets. But it was his discovery of the mathematical formula now known as ‘Price’s equation’ which was to become his signal achievement. As Price described it, organisms are more inclined to show altruism towards each other the more genetically similar they are. Altruistic behavior is more likely to be offered to a parent, a sibling or an offspring. That is: these close relatives have a 50% match in genetic makeup, and compel from each other a greater likelihood of altruistic acts. The likelihood of an altruistic act decreases with every step further away, genetically speaking. So, nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles are less likely to exhibit altruistic behaviours to one another; and cousins less likely still. Just think who you’d be prepared to donate a kidney to, for example. As the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson puts it, ‘[C]ompassion is selective and often ultimately self-serving’.
And this is the nub of Price’s argument. Altruistic acts, those Christians might label ‘gracious’, are much less likely the further genetically removed from one another two organisms happen to be. So-called ‘altruistic behaviour’ is not what it seems: it is the work of the providence of our genes taking care of themselves – creating in us perhaps the illusion of mighty aspirations and noble sentiments, but, pragmatic little blighters that they are, clinging remorselessly to their destiny. We might imagine that we are people of principle; but these principles, however fine they sound, are only speaking the language of self-interest.
But there was a twist in the story of George R. Price. Following a bout of cancer, Price had moved to London in 1967 to work at the Galton laboratory with the leading geneticist William Hamilton and gained more recognition for his work from the scientific guild. However, in June 1970 Price had an abrupt conversion experience. He told his friends ‘On June 7th I gave in and admitted that God existed’. Formerly a militant atheist, he now reckoned that the circumstances of his life could not have been coincidental. Not long after, he started attending services at All Soul’s Langham Place, home of the well-known evangelical Anglican preacher John Stott.
After a period of intense study of the Bible, Price’s conversion to Christianity led to him to do as much random and unselfish kindness as possible. To complete strangers, including the homeless, he gave an increasing amount of material support, inviting them to stay in his own home to the point where he could himself no longer go home. To his dismay, the people he helped stole his possessions. Price, who often slept at his laboratory, slid inexorably into a depression from which he never fully emerged. On January 6th 1975, he took his own life by cutting his own carotid artery with a pair of nail scissors.
The tragic tale of George R. Price has been lately retold in a full biography by Oren Harman. The aptly named Price, unable to accept the conclusion of his own theory, which he nonetheless is unable to repudiate, attempts to live out a contradiction of his genetic and biological fate. The attempt utterly destroys him as a person – he loses his material goods, his sanity and ultimately his life in this quest to defeat the inexorable power of the genes. As Harman explains:
…no matter how much he wanted to forget himself, in the end he couldn’t. How could he discern if his selflessness was not just a masquerade, the self fooling the self only to please the self and nothing more?
And yet Price’s life is a curious kind of martyrdom. It stands as a witness to the possibility of a break in all the deterministic circuitry he so carefully described. The agonia of Price reveals that there is another human possibility; but it also displayed the impossibility of that possibility. There is another way to imagine the human story; but as Price discovered, it is fraught with suffering and rejection.
I started somewhat cynically, perhaps, with the thought that conceiving of a pattern of grace and gratitude in human relationships is not really feasible in the post-Darwin, post-Freud world. Where there is no giving possible, there can be not thanksgiving. What we have instead is merely calculable exchange – cost and benefit. If the wheel of fate is turned by our genes or even by some other mysterious and impersonal force like the economy, then we cannot receive its gifts as gifts or its goods as goods. We can only cling to them as we may. No matter the health benefits of gratitude, we can’t uphold the fiction of blessing a remorseless providence. Thanking your lucky stars is not true gratitude – it is simply resignation. It is like thanking the poker machine that finally gives you a win.
But Price’s sorry life points us in a different direction – a direction he learnt from his study of the gospels and saw in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In that life could be discerned a life of truly sacrificial giving – one which not only modeled for humankind the possibility of a true gratitude, but one which promised to empower human beings for a thanks expressed ‘not only in our lips, but in our lives’.
III A General Thanksgiving
Christian worship is a political act – as much as any placarding waving demonstration or any conniving behind the scenes number-crunching. In worship, Christians bow to a power above and beyond Kings and Presidents. They name Jesus Christ as the supreme Lord. They proclaim a name that is above every name. In Christian worship we are reminded that reality isn’t what it appears to be.
That is the remarkable achievement of the Book of Common Prayer. It draws the worshipper into the world as the Scriptures describe it – a world in which only God is Almighty and yet supremely merciful and in which human beings are utterly dependent on him, for life and for new life. That contemporary revisions of the liturgy have de-emphasized the sovereign power of God by preferring to address him by any name other than ‘Almighty’ loosens a knot that binds the theology of the BCP very tightly together.
This theology is nowhere more evident than in the prayer entitled ‘A General Thanksgiving’, which has rightfully been called one of the treasures of the Book of Common Prayer. It made its first appearance in the BCP in 1662 and was, it is said, composed by one Edward Reynolds, a churchman sufficiently nimble to have been a leading Presbyterian during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the Bishop of Norwich after the Restoration. He perhaps adapted some material penned by Elizabeth I herself.
That the prayer is so widely known is surprising given that is not formally part of a particular service, but an optional addition. It achieves its prodigious effect through a couple of striking but simple devices – the alliteration of ‘humble and hearty’ and the crisp rhythmic patter of the phrases ‘for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’ and ‘not only with our lips, but in our lives’ – a nice piece of iambic pentameter.
Properly understood, thanksgiving in prayer is the appropriate response to grace. Since faith is merely a taking hold of the promises of God, thanksgiving could never be more than this. Faith and thanksgiving are linked in just this way in the story of the tenth, Samaritan leper who alone returns to Jesus in thanks and to whom Jesus says ‘your faith has healed you’. (Luke 17:12-18). The story is as much an indictment on the nine, Israelite lepers who were ungrateful as it is a celebration of the gratitude of the Samaritan.
So, the accent from the beginning of the prayer is on the empty-handedness of the believers in even approaching God. In this it dovetails thematically with the BCP as a whole. He is addressed as ‘Almighty God’ and ‘Father of all mercies’ – the attribute of mercifulness corresponds to the unworthiness of the servants who here come before him to offer their thanks. In the first lines the repetition of the word ‘all’ stands out: ‘Almighty’ ‘all mercies’ ‘all thy goodness’ ‘all men’ – the prayer is comprehensive. It cannot name a thing that is good that does not proceed from the hand of God. But already, general and special providence are intertwined – the mentions of mercy and unworthiness remind us of the blessings of redemption as well as creation. We approach God not merely as dependent creatures, but as unworthy ones.
The thanks offered are therefore ‘humble’ – what else could they be? – and ‘hearty’. These humble thanks are brought forward without a sense of attempting to twist the divine arm, or to cajole God into becoming somewhat more pleased. There is therefore a nakedness about this thanks – it is not offered as a performance, as the dancing and self-slashing off the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. Already the ground for the approach of the divine throne has been established by God himself. This is an expression of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, with its emphasis on humility not as a precondition for the sinner’s acceptance, but like thanksgiving itself, as a result of the initiative of God in the work of redemption. As Karl Barth once said,
To thank God is obviously to act as He so kindly and liberally invites and demands, and therefore simply to come to Him as suppliants with our needs.
The second sentence of the prayer likewise continues to intertwine common and special grace. In ‘creation and preservation; we recognise that we are not self-originating beings, nor do we sustain our own life – but that we owe our very existence and ongoing life to God. By this prayer we pitch ourselves into the story of God’s ways with the world – that out of nothing he brought something and that he purposes it to be for his glory.
The sentence however paints all these blessings as secondary compared to the display of love found in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Not that the thanks is for the redemption of the world, and not just for our redemption, continuing the expansive scope of the prayer, and echoing Paul’s language in Romans 8. The memorable twin phrases ‘for the means of grace and for the hope of glory’ provide a rhythmic summation of the sentence. From the divine hand comes not only grace but its means by which it is received. ‘The means of grace’ is shorthand for the Word and Sacraments. And here is a hint as to the great theological principle upon which this thanksgiving rests: that the gift of God is none other than his loving gift of himself. That is what makes the love of God so inestimable: ‘God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God set his only Son into the world so that we might live through him’ (1 John 4:9). That is what is conveyed to us by the means of grace – God himself comes to us as a gift.
The third sentence of the prayer now takes the worshippers back through that truth, and shows Christian thanksgiving for what it is. It is now not a thanksgiving but a supplication, beginning ‘And we beseech thee’. Thanksgiving in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ in fact must first of all be a request to God to make us truly thankful. Our hearts are not, in their unredeemed state, prone to gratefulness. In fact, it is characteristic of humankind in our state of rebellion against the creator that ‘we did not honour him as God or give thanks to him’, as the apostle writes in Rom 1:21. We cannot thank God without asking him to alter our hearts that might be ‘unfeignedly thankful’. George Herbert, writing perhaps some three decades before this prayer was penned, put it this way in his poem entitled ‘Gratefulnesse’:
Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,
Give one thing more, a grateful heart.
Likewise, the praise which issues from a believer’s lips and is displayed in his or her life is itself the work of God in them, springing from that ‘due sense of all thy mercies’. The movement described in the prayer is from the work of God on the understanding which will transform the heart (as the seat of the will) and thence to the life of discipleship – that praise of God might be the result. This prayer shows that, to use the words of the contemporary Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Thanking God and glorifying him belong together.’ And both, it turns out, result from the work of the divine hand in the lives of human beings, just as we see in the recitative from Psalm 51, ‘O Lord open thou our lips/And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise’, or in the response to the reading of the Law in the Communion service asks ‘Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law’. It is God himself who fashions a thankful heart in us.
‘A General Thanksgiving’, then, names three features of a Scriptural pattern of grace and gratitude. In the first instance it identifies the one to whom thanks is due – the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Second, it underlines the complete empty-handedness of the believer approaching the Almighty and merciful Father, from whom they have received all benefits – not only as dependent creatures but as rebellious sinners reconciled. Third, the prayer reminds us that the gift of God is none other than God himself – in the incarnation of the Son of God. Fourth, the thanks that come from the lips of the pray-ers of this prayer are themselves the result of the giver of this gift – such that we might even say that the ability to utter the words of thanksgiving are themselves the result of grace. In the life and death of the Son of God, the theoretical possibility of a human freedom to act in self-sacrificial love is actualized. …‘Peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die; But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’.
IV Thanks
But does this prayer break the curious deadlock found in the world of George R. Price? It does not offer an argument to counter the logic of the various determinisms that bedevil us. It does not untangle the thorny difficulty of genes and altruism; it does not play a logical trump card against Derrida’s cynical observation that we all out for ourselves, really.
But it helps us to see the dilemma posed by Kant’s view of right conduct in a new light. Kant demanded complete disinterest as the standard by which virtuous actions could be measured. The Christian gospel narrates a story of interested self-sacrifice. The divine action that the prayer remembers is not motivated by obligation, but by merciful love. And because the gift that God gives is the gift of himself, it is a completely, utterly interested gift. That is to say: God does benefit from the giving of his grace – though of course, this is not out of any need or incompleteness. The gift returns to the giver – and so, in strictly logical terms there is no pure gift. But there is, as Anglican theologian John Milbank points out a ‘purified gift-exchange’. Love, in hoping for the good of the other, is not necessarily wishing its own demise or disappearance. To say thanks for such a gift is not to bind one’s self to some contract, but to bind oneself to the giver.
That there are no completely disinterested acts, no technically altruistic deeds, is therefore not the crushing blow to our longing for there to be a pattern of grace and gratitude available in human life. Complete disinterest was never the aim; indeed, complete disinterest is the stuff of machines, not human beings. But the prayer of thanksgiving remembers an act of purified interest: the free, suffering self-sacrifice of the Son on behalf of his enemies, to reconcile them to God. And that act stands as a rupture in the tight membrane of the kind of fatalism with which we have been wrestling. It shows that there is in human living the possibility of true giving and true receiving; and it empowers it. To thank God for his gift is to seek to give like God, but also to give with God.
And the divine gift inaugurates a community within human history who gathers not on the basis of genetic relationship or on account of kinship ties. Though the story of the Bible is intertwined with genealogy, ultimately the New Testament is insistent that the people gathered together in Christ have a spiritual and not genetic fraternity. They are Abraham’s children according to the Spirit, made one in Christ Jesus where the old classifications of humankind no longer have provenance. And they are called to practice love in such circumstances – most especially to the one with whom they have the least biological affinity.
A nice idea and no more? Perhaps. But could it be that the existence of the idea in human consciousness, as represented by ‘A General Thanksgiving’, is enough? As novelist Marilynne Robinson notes in her book ‘Absence of Mind’, the reductionism of much contemporary parascientific thinking about humanity utterly fails to explain the appearance of such ideas. Where did they come from, if we can only think with our genes?
