A Christian Vice?

In a 1917 article, Joseph William Hewitt notes that the Greeks did not view ingratitude with the same horror as modern writers (among modern writers, he lists Thomas Elyot, Shakespeare, and the Spectator). From the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, "we find a deep, indeed an extreme, horror of ingratitude. I do not find anything like it in Greek literature, nor much in Latin until Seneca, who certainly gives the ingrate a very lose place in the moral scale, ranking him below the homicide, the tyrant, the thief, the adulterer, and the traitor. Xenophon and Aristotle insist on the necessity of gratitude, but they do not put ingratitude in the same ill light in which Shakespeare views it. To him it is the worst of vices, cancelling all counter-obligations, even those of patriotism, and punishable by the severest penalties heaven or hell can send."

In part, this difference is the product of a modern expansion of ingratitude. Where Greeks would charge someone with injustice, perjury, treachery, inhospitality, moderns include all under ingratitude: "The ancient will accuse an ingrate of forgetfulness or of injustice. Instead of ungrateful he will call him base, or shameless (lacking in AIDOS), or coventous, or suspicious, or peevish."

Richardson's Clarissa provides Hewitt with a key example: "he emphasizes over and over again the ingratitude of Lovelace the rake to Clarissa his victim, though the story affords no slightest hint of any favor accorded him by the object of his passion, anything at all to be ungrateful for." At times, 18th-century writers charge women with ingratitude when they refuse the flattering advances of a lover: "This idea is preeminently modern, especially if we leave out of account the instances in which either the man or the woman has fairly earned the loved one's favor by some signal service. The eighteenth century writers, especially Dryden, are fond of importing the charge of ingratitude into their love passages." Dryden renders a passage from Ovid that reads per tuas undas as "Thy flood, ungrateful nymph." Bringing ingratitude into erotic love is unusual in ancient literature.

Is ingratitude a specifically Christian vice?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 19, 2006 at 05:57 PM

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