The tendency today is to conceive of Aquinas’ virtue theory in individualistic terms, as

though the practice of virtue is a personal matter for each one of us in isolation from the
communio of the Church. This individualistic reading of virtue has led to some confusion
about, and criticism of, Aquinas’ notion of person and his ecclesiology. Indeed, Aquinas has
often been accused, in following the Boethian formula of person, of robbing the person of its
essential relationality, in contrast (it is claimed) to the accounts provided by Richard of St
Victor and Bonaventure.
This confusion, however, has largely arisen from an interpretation of Aquinas’ virtue
theory inherited not from Aquinas himself, but from his later commentators. In fact, there is no
such thing as virtue properly speaking detached from the ecclesial communio in Aquinas, for
whom all virtue, both acquired and infused, finds its expression within the context of
interpersonal relations. The form of the infused virtues is friendship with God, with whom a
relationship is not simply unmediated, but mediated through the Church in Christ.
In his hierarchy of the “virtues of indebtedness”, Aquinas places gratitude last,
following upon religion, piety and observance. Gratitude is last, not because it is of least
significance, but because it represents the turning point in the exitus et reditus of God’s creative
plan. It is only when one recognizes the debitum imposed by grace, which is a debt of love, that
one is able to respond to that gift and make grateful return in love and friendship. Given that an
infinite gulf exists between God and the creature, the return of gratitude to God is only possible
through participating in the gratitude of Christ. Consequently, gratitude properly speaking has a
liturgical and sacramental character. All other acts of gratitude between creatures are grateful
only by analogy. It is for this reason that Aquinas’ preferred term for gratitude towards God
throughout his corpus is “gratiarum actio”: a term which has a distinctive liturgical character,
and descriptive of praise and worship. In the exchange of gift and gratitude, free agents are
bound in a mutual exchange of love. For Aquinas, this paradigm is most perfectly exemplified
in the totally gratuitous self-offering of Christ to the Father, and the participation of the rational
creature in that offering.
While a number of philosophical and theological treatments of the notion of gift have
emerged in recent years, there has been very little attention given to the corresponding notion of
gratitude. And, similarly, while the notion of gift in Aquinas has been the subject of
considerable contemporary study, the necessary corresponding notion of gratitude in Aquinas
has not. Where gratitude has emerged as a topic of study, it has largely been from a political
and psychological point of view. More often than not in these studies, gratitude is treated of as
an emotion or affective state. For Aquinas, gratitude is not an emotion, but a habitual openness
to the process of theosis.