22. The Marble-Hearted Fiend

It is difficult for modern people to sympathize, let alone agree, with what was once a common precept and often taken for granted in our own culture: that ingratitude is the most terrible of all sins. Distasteful, hurtful, selfish, a vice—ingratitude is for us all these things. But we do not ordinarily think it the most heinous crime of all, worse, for example, than murder or hatred or robbery. Yet Kant as late as 1797 called it "the essence of vileness and wickedness," a horror so evil that it was almost unimaginable to normal human beings. Long before Kant, a medieval Latin adage declared, Ingratitudo peccatum maximum, "Ingratitude is the greatest sin of all."¹ The idea was expressed in English by John Lydgate in 1439:

For of al vicis, shortli to conclude,
Werst of alle is ingratitude.²

Something has dramatically, and fairly recently, changed in our attitude towards ungratefulness, and it is worth considering both sides of the question. What made ingratitude so wicked from the Middle Ages on, and why did outrage at lapses in gratefulness grow to a climax during the Renaissance? The section after this one will address the second question: What has reduced in passion (though not removed) our reactions to ingratitude today?

The loathing of ingratitude had historical roots in feudal and tribal social rules. Later it came to depend on a vivid realization of gratitude's importance for coherence in society—and of ingratitude's corresponding destructiveness. And eventually people began to understand that the responsibility for encouraging gratitude in everyday human relationships fell squarely on the shoulders of every individual person. Gratitude had to be taught by fathers and mothers to children—but could not be enforced by law. Therefore a perceived rise in ungrateful behaviour was not only a terrifying threat to society as a whole; it was also something that only the moral outrage of people witnessing ingratitude could address. What we often hear is that outrage in full throttle.

We have already seen how loyalty, as the binding force of benefactions from a lord and the duty of a vassal to "give" in return, helped to hold feudal hierarchies together. People talked then of loyalty and of fealty (allegiance or fidelity) rather than of gratitudo, which was a word created during the thirteenth century out of the earlier Latin term gratia. The arrival of the word gratitudo was a small sign of the dawning of profound social changes. Feudal practice was gradually being replaced by centralized government, codified law, and the spread of commerce; society was of necessity coming to depend on new kinds of ties to keep it together. Gratitude became during this later period the subject of a good deal of engrossing discussion: in any culture, as we saw, words for emotions both stress and define, when definition is felt to be necessary, segments of the continuum of human feelings. Gratitude emerged partly as a replacement for feudal loyalty, adding increasingly strong doses of freedom and equality while attenuating—though keeping—notions of moral obligation and faithfulness.

Ingratitude too was a newly formed word. The concept obviously resembled treachery against those to whom loyalty was owed, and accordingly it inherited feudal vituperations against breaking faith with one's lord. But treachery is all action, frequently political action, and involves hypocrisy and cunning; it is a word cognate with trickery, from French tricher, "to cheat." "Ingratitude," however, was from the beginning less political, more personal than full-blown treachery; it was a vice very often committed and suffered at the level of everyday life. It meant being unkind to anyone who has treated us well, not helping him if we can do so—especially if he is in need—and failing to respect him. It also included the feelings and attitudes that result in failure to do a good deed when it is one's "turn" to perform one. People continued habitually to speak of gratitude and ingratitude as things done rather than thoughts or emotions, but the implication of internalized personal feeling had become stronger than it was in either feudal loyalty or treason. Now the very emphasis on the personal was what made ingratitude base.

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century within the tradition that produced the term gratitudo, says that this virtue has more to do with feelings than with deeds or words, although one must always thank a benefactor and give back when one can; even the poorest person can at least thank and honour the giver. Aquinas, referring carefully to Seneca, writes that there are three degrees of gratitude and three corresponding levels of ingratitude.³ The first and highest level of gratitude is the recognition of a grateful receiver, who turns his attention to the giver and accepts the favour given, together with the obligation—indeed the desire—to respond that it creates. The prior disposition to be grateful is important here: a person is not ungrateful if he is unaware of a favour and fails to repay it, but is predisposed to do so if he knows. The lowest degree of ingratitude, corresponding to the highest of gratitude, begins with not recognizing the reception of a favour, "whether by forgetting it or in any other way." The forgetfulness here is not what Aquinas calls "a natural defect," a lapse of memory, but rather the deliberate ignoring of a favour or the refusal to admit that a benefit has been given. This becomes a mortal sin if inward contempt motivates it, or if something necessary to the benefactor's welfare that could be given to him is deliberately withheld. It amounts to thinking of a kindness with loathing, and returning evil for good. Aquinas is no doubt recalling here accusations of this kind of wickedness in the Old Testament Psalms, and the execration in the New Testament of what is called "the sin against the Holy Spirit."⁴

The second level of gratitude is saying "thank you": the verbal expression of felt appreciation. Ingratitude's second degree, accordingly, is declining to indicate that a favour has been received. This can be twisted into actually finding fault with benefits given ("looking a gift horse in the mouth"). The third degree of gratitude is giving something back, "at a suitable place and time, according to one's means." And correspondingly, the third (and least serious) level of ingratitude is failure, where it is possible, to return a favour. Aquinas treats ingratitude with moderation, however, and also puts gratitude and ingratitude "in their place," declining to see them as either the highest virtue or the lowest vice. For him, love is the highest and the central virtue; gratitude is an aspect and a result of love.⁵ Ingratitude is blackest when it not only falls short of love, but actually destroys the habit of loving.

Five centuries later, Immanuel Kant (for whom gratitude still is not a feeling but a dutiful and appropriate action) speaks of a kind of ingratitude that is a fault so grave, it is almost incredible that anyone would commit it.⁶ For him, the three most horrific vices are inhuman when unalloyed. These are (sheer) ingratitude, (all-consuming) envy, and (utter) malice. Other wick-ednesses Kant thinks are human because "indirect": he takes it for granted that the human mind has no immediate inclination to wickedness. For Kant, therefore, the kind of ingratitude that issues from pride or selfishness is "human," and so is ungratefulness resulting from a lack of understanding. Not so when someone is guilty of the vilest ingratitude, where a man "cannot bear his benefactor and becomes his enemy." The other two worst vices, envy (wanting to be the only happy person) and malice (directly desiring the misfortune of another), are private or at least localized sins. Treating one's benefactor, knowing he is a benefactor, as one's enemy is worst of all because this is an evil that most obviously produces society-wide effects. "Such ingratitude is of the devil," writes Kant. "...If such conduct were the rule it would cause untold harm. Men would then be afraid to do good to anyone lest they should receive evil in return for their good. They would become misanthropic, haters of men."⁷ As Hobbes has put it, this kind of ingratitude might bring to an end all peaceful human interaction and unleash uncontrollable violence (Hobbes's "Warre") upon humankind.

The word gratitudo, once coined, included a reference to the sentiments that a person will, out of his virtue and therefore "naturally," feel. It continued, of course, to refer to an appropriate or proper action, what society deemed suitable because it fitted into conventions and social norms. Ingratitude was therefore an anti-social vice and, as the opposite of the "normal" virtue of gratitude, "unnatural." Ingratitude, adding to disloyalty and faithlessness a disregard for someone's love shown in acts of kindness, came to seem not only improper but immensely cruel, and as such the behaviour of a beast, not a man. In English speech, "kindness" and "unkindness" kept, into the seventeenth century, the connection with "kin" that we examined earlier: ingratitude as "unkindness" could feel close to filial impiety, so deeply unnatural was it.

Other people were responsible for making these judgments and for denouncing ingratitude as abnormal. Before the triumph of modern individualism people were interdependent to an extent that we can barely imagine today. In cities and towns they resided—as we would see it—in such close quarters as to live "on top of each other." They often knew one another from childhood, watched each other, judged each other, kept one another in order, and punished misdemeanours through social strategies, such as destroying reputations and casting the reprobate out of the group, so essential to anyone's well-being. It was the group's duty to prevent or at least discourage ingratitude in particular. For gratitude was a virtue that, despite what was agreed to be its vital importance for the functioning of society, the law could not enforce. We have seen that "gratitude"—even where it is thought of as primarily action, a "return"—should be given as a gift is given, gratis. And the more gratitude is acknowledged to be something felt, the less it can be thought obligatory. Legal support for gratitude would destroy its essence. And therefore legal enforcement is not allowed to punish ingratitude.⁸ Even in modern society, therefore, the opinions of other people often step in and exert on the seriously ungrateful the pressure that is social disapproval.

But a longing for the law to punish the ungrateful frequently recurs in human history. Ancient Romans appear occasionally to have found it irresistible, once a slave had been freed, to try to claw back some of that freedom by demanding favours from him. Should he fail to comply, the ex-slave was deemed "ungrateful" for the freedom he had been given.⁹ Attempts were apparently made to pronounce a freed slave's "ingratitude" punishable by law, the ultimate application of which would mean that he could be re-enslaved. If they were in fact made, these attempts ultimately failed; we have no proof that the emancipation of a slave was ever revoked for ingratitude. Some scholars believe, however, that Seneca wrote De Beneficiis in order to warn the Emperor Nero not to commit the error of making "gratitude" legally enforceable.¹⁰

But when people discussed the necessity of upholding gratitude in society, and insisted that gratitude was obligation, they habitually pointed to passages in ancient literature to show that there had indeed existed nations that punished ingratitude through recourse to the law.¹¹ Jonathan Swift satirizes this reliance on the practice of "some other Countries" when he makes the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels consider ingratitude a capital offence: "Ingratitude is among them a capital Crime, as we read it to have been in some other Countries: For they reason thus; that whoever makes ill Returns to his Benefactor, must needs be a common Enemy to the rest of Mankind, from whom he hath received no Obligation; and therefore such a Man is not fit to live."¹²

Ancient Greeks enjoyed describing oddities in the behaviour of foreigners partly for their amusement value, but also as a means of defining what Greek culture was not, and occasionally to show how Greeks could learn from others to behave better. Xenophon describes the ways of the Persians in his day, the fourth century BC, marvelling at many of their fine social rules. The elite core of one hundred thousand men who lived in the royal palace of Cyrus were, for example, never allowed to spit, blow their noses, or show the slightest inclination to fart. They were never seen leaving a group in order to urinate.¹³ Xenophon attributes this superhuman bodily control to Persian abstemiousness from drink, and to the fact that they worked and therefore sweated so much. Their upbringing was rigorous and, he says, "began at the beginning."

Boys accepted for education in the royal palace were taught immunity to any temptation to commit improper or immoral acts. "The boys go to school and spend their time in learning justice," writes Xenophon, the implication being that whereas elite Persian boys studied justice, Greeks learned merely to read and write. "...As a matter of course," he goes on, "boys ... bring charges against one another, just as men do, of theft, robbery, assault, cheating, slander, and other things that naturally come up; and when they discover anyone committing any of these crimes, they punish him, and they punish also anyone whom they find accusing another falsely." And there follows a passage that has been endlessly quoted down the centuries as fundamental for thinking about ingratitude, and especially for suggesting that ingratitude should be punished by law. We notice again that "gratitude" here means mainly a duty to "give something back":

And they bring one another to trial also charged with an offence for which people hate one another most but go to law least, namely, that of ingratitude (acharistias); and if they know that any one is able to return a favour and fails to do so, they punish him, and severely. For they think that the ungrateful are likely to be most neglectful of their duty toward their gods, their parents, their country, and their friends; for it seems that shamelessness goes hand in hand with ingratitude; and it is that, we know, which leads the way to every moral wrong.¹⁴

Xenophon gives away in this last sentence the didactic purpose—for his Greek readership, since Persians would be unlikely to read his account—of his description of the perfect Persian upbringing. He has thought about ingratitude, and he wishes, as many have done since, that people would bring their children up to appreciate the damage that ingratitude can cause. Among the Persians gratitude was a matter of upbringing, in this case apparently by means of the "trials" staged in the palace school. However, unlike theft, robbery, assault, and so on, strictures on ingratitude were not codified as law. This was by no means clear when the many subsequent quotations of Xenophon on this subject begin with "And they bring one another to trial..." "They" were children, but the truncated passage sounds as though adult Persian society functioned in this way. People felt free then to wish that their own society would take ingratitude seriously enough to punish it by law (which might in fact have been Xenophon's wish).

Ingratitude, Xenophon believes, is the companion of shamelessness, by which he means that ungrateful people are capable of caring nothing for the opinions of outraged others. Honour and shame are opposites that support each other. The true enemy of shame is not honour but shamelessness, which is both a refusal to keep the rules of honour and a resistance to the pressures of shame; it is the ultimate falling-off in an honour culture, and, as Xenophon perceives, "leads the way to every moral wrong." If in an honour culture people cease to care about reputation, then important moral matters that cannot be regulated by law are left with nothing to maintain them. Ingratitude is one of these ungovernable matters; in conjunction with shamelessness it can also lead to the dismantling of an honour system. For if gratitude helps knit society together, ingratitude will prevent relationship from forming and break the links already in place.

Xenophon's point that ungrateful people are likely to go on to commit many other crimes against gods, parents, country, and friends was also to have a long history; it is one of the pillars, constantly referred to, that support the idea that ingratitude is part of every sin—and that ingratitude itself implies every other wickedness. Seneca was to say that ingratitude is worse than murder, tyranny, adultery, robbery, sacrilege, or betrayal, "unless it be that all these spring from ingratitude, without which hardly any sin has grown to great size."¹⁵ The suggestion is that every crime, in its general denial of the necessity of obeying rules of behaviour, involves a breaking away from society. But ingratitude is the worst sin because, as a movement of sheer rejection, it accompanies the preliminary fracture, and then goes on to encourage further breakage. A maxim of Publilius Syrus became, in sixteenth-century English, "We have named all the naughtiness that can be objected when we have termed a man unthankful."¹⁶

Blanket denunciations of ingratitude as a force for disintegration in any social system also found support in what Aquinas and others saw as gratitude's first requirement, which is remembrance: no memory, no gratitude. Readiness to feel gratitude will, in turn, encourage remembrance, while those disposed to be ungrateful will forget what they owe to others. In the Old Testament, memory and praise are the components of what we call "thanksgiving." Memory links the present to the past, and the deliberate recall and recounting of past benefits is itself a form of gratitude. Civilization, and culture generally, require memory and tradition. The latter (literally, from the Latin, "a handing on") means a kind of gift, from what has been learned through experience, from the past to the present. The society that now accepts the gift is therefore "grateful" to the past. And rejecting the past may be considered an act of "ingratitude."

People have always thought of the capacity for deliberate recall as a distinctively human trait: refusing to remember kindness, therefore, is not only a sign of contempt to a giver and of a general desire to subvert social norms, but also a falling-back of humanity into what is animal—that is, lower—in us. In human beings with their memory and their innate intelligence, ingratitude was perceived as inhuman and unnatural; it has often been said to make human beings resemble rocks or animals. In Shakespeare's King Lear, for example, Goneril and Regan are called "tigers, not daughters."¹⁷ Virgil's Dido excoriates the faithlessness of Aeneas with a similar thought:

False one! no goddess was your mother,
Nor was it Dardanus who founded your line,
The flinty rocks of jagged Caucasus begot you!
Hyrcanian tigresses did give you suck!¹⁸

A modern African proverb asserts that "the gratitude of a donkey is a breaking of wind."¹⁹ It means that to expect gratitude from people who are unaware that gratitude exists—whose humanity simply cannot be appealed to—is to court disappointment, and worse. For "natural" though gratitude is in human beings, thanklessness is in a sense more "natural" still. Ingratitude is "lower" and therefore more fundamental in us, whereas gratitude is "higher": we have to strive to learn what it is, to feel it, and to act on it. Some have thought that, despite the word's being formed as a negation of gratitude, it was ingratitude that came, and always must come, first because it is easiest and most basic. Ingratitude is unmindful, closed, and essentially inert; it shares some of the characteristics of stone. The worst kind of ingratitude adds to unreachable indifference, immobile as death, the horror of a lively and intentional cruelty. When King Lear cries, "Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend!"²⁰ the contradictoriness of the image turns ingratitude into a monster of inexorable evil, at once cold and furious, filled with intentional malevolence and yet unmoved. It is a beast with a heart of stone.

Shakespeare, indeed, often chose to hold ingratitude up for scrutiny on stage. For this is, to begin with, a peculiarly dramatic vice. We have noted the importance of other people—onlookers—as judges and potential victims of ingratitude's danger and its nastiness; in the theatre we may all of us take on this witnessing and feeling role. In King Lear, Shakespeare sets ingratitude and filial impiety side by side and in interaction. In Timon of Athens he shows a man generous to the point of folly, exploited and ruined by ungrateful "friends" until he becomes a misanthrope, a hater of humanity. Macbeth is not only a treacherous regicide but the murderer of his loving benefactor. Coriolanus is a hero, but—although his first word in the play, ironically enough, is "Thanks"—he is also a man obsessive about his honour, in the manner of Aristotle's megalopsychos or large-souled man: he refuses to accept benefits, and when a favour is nevertheless done him, forgets about it; he treats a kindness as though it were unkindness. Rome is ungrateful to him—but he is himself ungrateful to Rome.²¹

But Shakespeare's horror at ingratitude cannot be accounted for merely in terms of dramatic potential. For him, ingratitude issued both in personal cruelties of all kinds and in the general rupture of the ties that create and support human relationship. In a paroxysm of suffering, King Lear calls upon the raging storm winds to "strike flat the thick rotundity of the world" which gave birth to "ingrateful man": the world's end, suggested by the storm, seems to Lear in his extremity to be no more terrible than the perniciousness of his two thankless daughters. Indeed, human ingratitude is actually worse than anything the savage elements can inflict:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure!²²

The cosmos, even in its destructiveness, is innocent. It is human beings who are capable of specifically directed, deliberate cruelty, even to parents and to those who have shown them kindness.

Shakespeare inherited the classical and medieval loathing of ingratitude as treason and as faithlessness, as the source of every kind of wickedness. Yet his hatred of ingratitude—wounding, pitiless, ugly, and inhuman—is so intense that we sense in it not only anger but also a measure of fear. He seems to have had a premonition that the new imperial and commercial era was bringing with it vastly increased and uncontrolled greed and selfishness, which relied on wanton heedlessness of the traditional virtues of community and personal interrelationship. The old certainties embodied by hierarchy and obligations were also breaking down. At the moment of transition in which he lived, all the modern vices—greed, heedlessness, selfishness, refusal either to respect or to remember—readily seemed to be caught up, instanced, and rooted in ungratefulness.

He portrays ingratitude as a monster, with cannibal proclivities exhibited when family members "devour" each other, or when we see a city "like an unnatural dam ... eat up her own."²³ For ingratitude tears society apart in order to feed the voraciousness of those "on the make." A monster—the word derives from Latin moneo, "I point out" or "I warn"—is a creature that mixes species which evolution has carefully separated out, and is therefore unnatural. It crosses categories, making "sameness" into "otherness," for example, when it turns people's fellows into their fodder as cannibals do; it arouses horror and fear in us, and rises up as a warning that things are going terrifyingly wrong.

Ingratitude in Shakespeare is a motiveless iniquity. Why are Goneril and Regan, unlike Cordelia, ungrateful? Why is Iago full of envy and hatred? There are no "explanations."²⁴ It is foolish, however, to deny the existence of such evil in human beings, monstrous—another meaning of which is "unbelievable"—as it is. Lear is foolish for trusting that his daughters will return his goodness to them; Prospero thought his brother would not harm him; Timon gave to unworthy people who later on abused him. Gratitude, on the other hand, requires all that is highest in human beings. From the receiver, it calls for recognition, memory, intelligence, consideration, and justice. From the giver, when generosity is met with ingratitude, it requires forbearance, acceptance, and refusal to turn sour, no matter how hurt he might feel. If memory, justice, forgiveness, and the rest are expressive of human nature at its best, then so is gratitude. If not, then ingratitude is "natural," and all that we should expect.