Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin posed this question to identify one of the biggest dividing lines among writers and thinkers, and perhaps human beings more generally. He drew the idea from an ancient Greek poet, who had expressed it in the form of a proverb. “The fox knows many things,” wrote Archilochus, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Some thinkers see the world through a single, overarching vision of reality which gives meaning and significance to all things, incorporating all knowledge and experience. In Berlin’s framing, these are the hedgehogs. Others pick up all sorts of ideas and insights from a wide variety of sources and contexts, moving wherever evidence (or fancy) takes them, often without integrating or even reconciling their ideas with each other. These are the foxes.
Hedgehogs are holists; foxes are pluralists. Hedgehogs have a satisfying explanation of everything, but they can tend toward the fanatical. Foxes see the complexity of the world, but they can be inconsistent and self-contradictory.
Berlin gives plenty of examples from history. Dante, a hedgehog, gave masterful expression to the all-encompassing, coherent worldview of high-medieval Catholicism. Shakespeare, the ultimate Renaissance man, was a fox, toggling between poetry and prose, tragedy and comedy, male and female, philosophy and banter. Plato was a hedgehog who knew one big thing, expressed in his well-known parable of the cave with its famous distinction between reality and mere shadows; Aristotle was a fox who knew many things, which is why his thought is so much harder to summarize.
It is not difficult to apply Berlin’s categories to leading figures of church history. Augustine of Hippo was a hedgehog, one of the greatest who ever lived; few people in history have expressed an overarching vision of reality as coherent as his masterwork, The City of God. Alcuin of York, who lived a few centuries later, was a fox: a mathematician, poet, theologian, and liturgist whose wide-ranging educational syllabus was used for centuries after his death. Desiderius Erasmus, a leading figure in the late-medieval Renaissance, was a fox: brilliant, inventive, polymath, and inconsistent. His near-contemporary Martin Luther, the 16th-century Reformer, was a fiery, zealous hedgehog: a hammer to whom everything looked like a nail.
This is not to say that the disagreements between these individuals should be reduced to matters of style, let alone personality type. The fault lines between Luther and Erasmus, or John Calvin and John Wesley, are far more substantial than that. At the same time, it is not surprising that a hedgehog like Luther would consider a fox like Erasmus to be evasive, slippery, woolly, and compromised. Nor is it surprising that Erasmus, in turn, would find Luther simplistic, doctrinaire, totalizing, and lacking in nuance.
More cautiously, we could reflect on different biblical authors in the same way. Isaiah is a hedgehog, who knows one big thing—that for salvation we need to trust the Lord alone, not armies, payoffs, or idols—and is not afraid to say so. Solomon is a fox, whose insights are wide-ranging and wise but hard to summarize or synthesize into one system. Paul is a hedgehog, whose one big thing—the grace of God in Christ—permeates every letter and virtually every paragraph he wrote. Luke reads more like a fox, whose broad research and distinctive interests (prayer, prophecy, women, the poor, the Spirit, forgiveness, Gentiles, innocence, and so forth) are ideally suited to his task as a historian.
One benefit of recognizing these distinctions is that they help us take authors on their own terms. If hedgehogs apply the tools they learned studying Isaiah or Paul’s letters across the whole of Scripture, they will unintentionally mangle books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or James—just as a fox’s approach to wisdom literature might not translate seamlessly to works of prophecy or epistles.
Another benefit of thinking this way is that it can prompt us to broaden our influences. I am an instinctive hedgehog, drawn to clarity and coherence. So when I started to study theology, I naturally gravitated to fellow hedgehogs like N. T. Wright, John Piper, and Tim Keller. (Knowing one big thing does not mean agreeing on what that one big thing is!) In the last ten years I have spent more time learning from foxes like Peter Leithart, Fleming Rutledge, and Alan Jacobs, who each work with a wide range of ideas that I cannot quite synthesize. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next decade saw me swing back to hedgehogs again.
I like to think our awareness of hedgehog and fox tendencies has other benefits too, such as enhanced creativity and mutual understanding. But mostly, as Berlin himself said, it is an intellectual game, a fun way of thinking about important ideas and the people who came up with them. The focus of Berlin’s essay was the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who was “by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.” Ten years into writing this column for CT, perhaps the opposite is true of me.
Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.
Spirited Life: Spirited Life is a collision between biblical reflection and charismatic practice, aiming to make people happier in God.
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