Post Script | October 24, 2022

The different "time" of talent and virtue

There are lots of new subscribers to Post Script, and I want to say a quick hello to you! I’m glad you’re here! In these Monday letters, I write about faith and its habits, books and other miscellany. I hope you’ll find these reflections helpful.

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I had an interesting phone conversation with Collin Huber this week. I met Collin many years ago through RightNow Media, and he is currently the editor of Fathom Magazine and author the Substack monthly newsletter, The Foreword. He also works as a for-hire writer and editor. Collin is writing an article for Christianity Today about platform in the world of Christian publishing, and he wanted to talk to me about it.

In case you’re unfamiliar, platform is a way of trying to measure a writer’s influence. How many social media followers does she have? How many speaking gigs does she schedule, and how large are those audiences? The industry assumption is obvious: the bigger the platform, the more successful an author will be to market her book.

As I prepared to talk to Collin, I looked back at the proposal I wrote for Teach Us to Want and submitted to InterVarsity Press at the end of January 2013. That proposal made no mention of any social media metrics. In fact, the only hard “platform” number I had in the proposal was unique blog views. Truthfully, I can’t believe they didn’t put the proposal straight into the garbage.

In ten years, things have changed in the world of publishing. Social media continue to proliferate, and authors are expected to do more and more to market their books. It’s tempting for every aspiring author to either despair at this reality or to meet it with the resolution to grow their “brand.” Both, I think, are unwise responses.

If I may, I think Dante would have had something to say about the second temptation. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been trying to discern God’s call to greater vocational diligence in my life, and part of this has included committing myself to deeper, slower, better reading. I finally opened Dante’s Divine Comedy—which I’d bought in March—and started the Inferno.

It’s everything I didn’t expect. I anticipated a dense, boring text that I’d have to muster a lot of resolve to get through. Instead, Dante’s hell is vividly drawn. I’ve felt my own imagination kindled as I’ve absorbed his images and poetic language, even laughed at his farting demons.

But perhaps what’s been richest about my reading of Dante’s Inferno is the perceptivity he brings to the portrait of human nature, especially human vices. We see lust and greed, thieving and hypocrisy in hell. We see the slothful lying at the bottom of the river Styx, the only evidence of their presence tiny bubbles that rise to the surface and break.

At points in his narrative, Dante breaks the fourth wall to tell readers what he will and will not disclose in his Commedia. Sometimes he even pauses to remind us of his poetic talent, as compared to the great poets of the past: Homer, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan. It seems a little braggy of Dante, though as one professor in the lectures offered through Baylor conceded, “We’ll give it to him. He’s Dante.”

In Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Virgil and Dante are walking along when Dante beholds the sight of the fires of hell gleaming like a field of fireflies below him. It’s a sight that grieved Dante to see for the first time, and it grieves him to recall it in his writing.

I know that I grieved then, and now again

I grieve when I remember what I saw

and more than ever I restrain my talent

lest it run a course that virtue has not set;

for if a lucky star or something better

has given me this good, I must not misuse it (l. 19-24).

I stopped short at these two tercets. Reread them if you need to.

I know that I grieved then, and now again

I grieve when I remember what I saw

and more than ever I restrain my talent

lest it run a course that virtue has not set;

for if a lucky star or something better

has given me this good, I must not misuse it (l. 19-24).

Listen to what Dante is saying: I saw something in hell that was terrible. I could write about what I saw, and I know I have the talent to convey that scene with compelling force. But I hesitate. I “restrain my talent.”

The question for Dante isn’t, “Can I do this work?” but “Is this the course that virtue has set?” Or better, “If this talent has been given to me by God, what good use of it does God require?”

Perhaps it seems strange to quote Dante to address the questions of platform and author branding, but I think Dante might say this to an aspiring author: your talent is of limited worth. Commit to the long slow work of cultivating a virtuous life.

That sounds like good advice for any aspiration, any vocational calling. It reminds me of the interview Tim Keller gave to Mike Cosper on a bonus episode for The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Keller talked about the typical pattern of celebrity scandals: they cultivate their gifts rather than their experience of God’s grace. (I’m sure Katelyn Beaty offers a more thorough and thoughtful commentary in her book, Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church, which I haven’t yet read.)

There are surely lots of reasons we’re tempted toward the exhibition of talent rather than the cultivation of virtue. One reason is related to impatience. Incredible talent can get you onto American Idol without too much waiting. But virtue? That’s a long-haul effort requiring the slow burn of faithfulness. Who has that kind of time to wait?

As I was rereading Rebecca DeYoung’s fantastic book, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, I was reminded how many of the vices emerge from impatience. (P.S. I mentioned this book in a recent ERB podcast conversation Chris Smith hosted with me and James K. A. Smith about our books on time.) Vainglory, as an example, has an appetite for shortcuts. For the vainglorious, image is everything. They don’t want to follow the course that virtue sets. They want to showcase their talents, and they want standing ovations in response.

Let me be clear: I’m not above the temptation to shortcut virtue. But as an antidote, I am trying to cultivate habits and practices the bank the fires of faithfulness, this proverbial long obedience in the same direction. Those habits and practices include: reading Dante and sending this letter; having Sunday morning breakfast with my husband and showing up to Wednesday’s small group. They include daily exercise and regular sleep, a Bible reading plan and praying the hours. They include church on Sunday morning and family Zoom on Sunday night.

I practice these rhythms all very imperfectly—with the mustard seed of faith to believe that God knows my frame and remembers I am dust (Ps. 103:14).

This is natural segue to remind you that if you preorder In Good Time,  you can join me in January for conversations about writing a rule of life, which I’m defining as: a means of grace by which we pattern our lives to live in faithful response to God’s voice.

Learn more here and here and here.

“For if a lucky star or something better

Has given me this good, I’d better not misuse it.”

Yours,

Jen