I’ve spent my life reading great men and so, though I can only appraise greatness from that habit and distance, I thought I would offer some thoughts on becoming a great man. Not because I know personally, but rather because I think I have seen something of it in all my reading.
I offer this because I am convinced that we need more great men and that there has been a dearth of great men for a very long time now. It is difficult to be great unless there is greatness in your midst to emulate. Maybe every generation believes that they are living during a shortage of greatness but greatness started dying out when I was a much younger man, and there hasn’t been much to replace the likes of Bahnsen, Van Til, Rushdoony, Clark, Conquest, Nisbet, Berman, etc. — men who have all died in my lifetime.
It strikes me that the first thing to be said about greatness is the desire to be found faithful to the Lord Christ and His cause. If a man has that desire and pursues it then he will be great whether he is acknowledged as such or not by his contemporaries and his times. The reality of being faithful to one’s creator and redeemer pushes one increasingly out of selfishness, pride, and self-centeredness. One begins to realize how little one is and how awful it is to think of oneself as the pivot upon which everything turns. This, by necessity, means that genuine humility is part of what it means to great. Great men don’t think they are great. They have seen how big God is and seeing how big God is they have a proper appraisal of self.
Of course, humility is something that comes from the outside in — the school of hard knocks, pain and disappointment, dreams unrealized and all that. God must give the gift of humility and the giving of that gift is often painfully received. It is as if greatness is only achieved by being familiar and friendly with failure and conversant with hurt while at the same time not allowing all that making one bitter and angry. Greatness typically comes through a back door unexpected. Read the biographies of truly great men and note how often they failed.
After this humility there is the necessity for wisdom and wisdom is different than knowledge and is, like humility, a God given gift. Scripture in the book of James tells us to ask God for wisdom and He will give to the man who is not double-minded. Who do you view as great? Chances are you also see them as being wise. Perhaps we have such a paucity of great men today because there is so few who have heaven sent wisdom as combined with heaven given humility. If you want to be great, therefore, be much in prayer that God would give you wisdom. I read once, years ago, (I think it was from D. Martyn Lloyd Jones) that when a man wants wisdom the way a drowning man wants air then he will know he longs for wisdom. I think you will agree that if there was ever a need for a generation of wise men, as God counts wise, it is this generation. Will we avoid subjugation without it?
Greatness also requires countless hours of practicing and refining whatever gift it is that one has been given. Greatness doesn’t typically come by natural ability alone. I have seen numerous people with natural ability who, because they didn’t practice and refine that natural ability never became great. In some ways natural ability gets in the way of greatness as people rely on their natural ability and so do not hone it and grow it. Consider R. J. Rushdoony. Rush clearly had natural ability. He came from a long line of clerics himself. However, Rush read and studied like a starving man eats. The knowledge he had at his fingertips was astounding. If you listen to his lectures though you realize he was forever honing and expanding his natural ability. He didn’t rest on his laurel or his past learning. The man was forever reading and studying. Rush’s greatness then wasn’t only from natural ability. If you want to move to the field of athletics it is much the same. Those who are considered great in their sport, no doubt had natural ability, but that natural ability could only take them so far. If they did not practice, hone, and sweat, they would have never become the GOAT. So, if you want to be great you have to put the time in. You have to deny yourself the play time (the me-time) that others might pursue.
Perhaps oddly enough, if one desires to be great one has to also develop other interests. Michael Polanyi points this out in his book “Tacit Knowledge.” Polanyi wrote that the mind has to find a way to rest from its pursuits and so it has to find a way to disengage. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. As such, greatness must work, but it also must know how to disengage with profit. Polanyi suggests that many insights have been gained into one’s discipline by greats while their mind was disengaged and so distracted from its particular expertise.
Greatness is achieved when it is achieved in the context of peers. The peers may be who one is competing against. The peers may be those who are aiding and abetting in a mutual pursuit. Peers/friends makes one better and draws out from the well of one’s talents and giftedness even more ability. It is good to be pushed and peers and friends can do that. Sometimes the pushing is collegial, sometimes the pushing can be competitive but it is unlikely that a man will be great who is not himself surrounded by other great men. Edison had his Tesla. Graham Bell had his Marconi. Brady had his Manning. Clark had his Van Til. Patton had his Rommel.
This next one is not universal but in my reading great men are often characterized as having great wives and family. In my reading there seems to be something about the stability of a strong family life that allows those with ability to develop their embryonic greatness. There is a proverb that supports this. “Behind every great man stands a great woman.” My mother-in-law used to morph that by saying; “Behind every great man stands a surprised mother-in-law. I will say this. A man whose family is in shambles can never be a great man. If a man is great that will bleed into his family life in some way and often will be seen in his own children.
Finally, for our purpose, greatness is often a matter of “the man meeting the moment,” which is to say that men should pursue greatness but it is up to God to ordain it so that the prepared man meets the moment he was prepared for. I suppose many great men have lived and died that have remained completely unknown because that moment that their greatness was best suited for, in God’s sovereignty, never came to pass.
It should be the prayer of all men that God would make them great in His service while at the same time praying for contentment with what God has and does not have for them in the way of achievement. It should be our prayer that we would once again live among a people characterized by the number of great men in their midst.
