One of my most common struggles is the sense of coming up against a sense of my own limitations. This comes to me most frequently in the sense that I don’t have enough time to do everything that I’d like to do. But this is related to a frustration with myself that I am not more clever or capable. If I were those things then I would get things done more quickly and they would be of a higher standard.
I was reminded of this feeling this week when I listened to a podcast interview with David Bentley Hart. Hart, for those who don’t know, is a theological and philosophical thinker and writer of various intellectual and literary talents. He is a brilliant, irascible and fascinating man with a significant following due to the prodigiousness of his ability and the quality of his output. I first encountered him about ten years ago through his book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies and then subsequently when I was doing my MA in Theology when I read The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. For a long time I was inspired by him. I suppose that I wanted to be like him: to be erudite and to write well and to produce something of the same kind of intellectual value. But, over the years that I’ve been aware of him, I’ve realised that I’m really nothing like him at all. I am sure that I have qualities that he doesn’t have but mainly this feeling is one of acceptance: acceptance that this is a man of great intellectual gifting which I simply do not have. His ability to read and process information, for example, is way beyond mine. And his strengths with language leave my poor efforts in this area looking paltry. In many ways, it is ridiculous for me to even think about comparing myself to him. But it’s one of those things which I find very hard not to do.
It’s not been a particularly painful or negative process to understand this sense of limitation and to accept it. In many ways this is a necessary part of becoming a mature human being: understanding one’s capacities and limitations. Studying at King’s College London and Oxford helped me in this way as I was exposed to many brilliant people - students and academics - whose intellectual gifts are far greater than mine.
I haven’t thought about Hart very much in recent times but this podcast episode brought this back to me. The guy interviewing him asked him which authors inspired him in his fictional writing and he couldn’t even answer the question specifically because the answer was really hundreds and thousands of authors: so many had he read that it would be impossible even to narrow it down. He also repeated something I’ve heard him say a lot of times which is that he doesn’t even like theology and he’s note even that interested in it and yet he writes (or has written) theological books essentially to pay the bills. For anyone who has read any of his theology, that is an extraordinary statement given his mastery of the subject and ability to communicate it: he doesn’t even like it and yet he has managed to produce this level of output.
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