I once said to Rowan Williams: 'God has given you all the gifts and, as your punishment, he has made you Archbishop of Canterbury.'I might have added: 'at this time', for the issue over which the Anglican Communion is so divided is one that might have been specially selected to tear Rowan in two.
And it has been a particularly bad Passiontide, with almost all the newspapers ranged against him.
In the year that Rowan Williams became archbishop, he delivered the highly prestigious Dimbleby Lecture.
Shortly afterwards, I was at a New Year's Day party with a number of Oxford intellectuals, including Roy Jenkins and philosopher Bernard Williams, none of whom was exactly soft when it came to the inadequacies of the clergy.
All had stayed up late to listen and all were genuinely impressed. What is even more remarkable is that when I spoke to Philip Bobbitt, on whose long, dense book, The Shield of Achilles, the lecture had focused, Bobbitt said that Rowan, more than anyone else, had understood what he had been trying to say.
And this is a subject, war, peace and the course of history, which would come quite far down the list of Rowan's academic specialisations. Add to this the fact that he reads about 11 languages, has translated works from Russian and Spanish, and has written scholarly books on a wide range of subjects, and it is clear that he has been given truly remarkable gifts.
Shakespeare warns us about 'desiring this man's art, and that man's scope', but where Rowan is concerned, I unashamedly do both.
So what has gone wrong?
It began in the long period between the announcement of his appointment and him taking up the post.
He was known to be supportive of gay and lesbian people and a campaign against him from certain conservative evangelicals began almost straight away.
Some of the letters he received at this time, including some from fellow bishops, were deeply hurtful.
But the pivotal point was his refusal to go ahead with the consecration of Jeffrey John, whom I had nominated as Bishop of Reading.
In retrospect, the archbishop and I could have handled things differently, but there were two things against us.
One was the fact that the Anglican Communion was already dividing on the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson in the United States, and opponents, quite wrongly in my view, put Jeffrey John in the same category (because Jeffrey had been celibate for a considerable period of time).
Second, we did not anticipate the flood of emails from round the communion, stirred up by one or two evangelicals in the Church of England, which put huge pressure on Lambeth.
It became clear to the archbishop that if he was going to have any hope of holding the Anglican Communion together, he could not be associated with the consecration of Jeffrey.
That remains a great sadness, Jeffrey, while doing a great job as dean of St Albans, would still make a superb bishop.
For Rowan, it was a devastating decision to have to make.
All his sympathies are with gay and lesbian people, and he is an old friend of Jeffrey.
But he has a very high regard for the doctrine of the church and, as archbishop, it is his responsibility to safeguard its unity.
Rowan was trained at Mirfield, the most Catholic of the Church of England's theological colleges.
Like most Anglo-Catholics, he will have been tempted on occasion to become either a Roman Catholic or Orthodox, with their much stronger doctrine of the church.
For, sometimes, the Church of England can feel like a bunch of squabbling interest groups held together only by the fact of establishment and one longs for a much greater sense of belonging together.
Furthermore, as a deeply learned historian, Rowan knows well that splits in the church are virtually impossible to mend. The churches that broke away over the Council of Chalcedon in 451 are still for the most part separated.
The extent of his personal trauma - trying to hold together his convictions and his role as archbishop in what claims to be a branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church - became clear at a private meeting of the House of Bishops where he simply shared what was in his heart for more than an hour.
There was a profound receptivity and one tough-minded bishop, of a rather different mind from that of the archbishop, was reduced to tears.
Apart from the divisive gay issue, there is the language which Rowan uses. People claim he is obscure.
Actually, he can be very simple, but his mind is such that he cannot think a sentence without at the same time thinking every possible qualification and nuance. It is no accident that he is also a published poet of repute, with some of it almost as difficult as Geoffrey Hill, whose poetry he hugely admires.
But his style is hardly made for our simplistic, untruthful, soundbite culture. A good example is contained in his book, Christ on Trial.
Rowan reflects on the silence of Christ, as recorded by Mark's Gospel.
Jesus simply refused to answer the questions put to him about who he was and Rowan writes: 'What is said will take on the colour of the world's insanity; it will be another bid for the world's power, another identification with the unaccountable tyrannies that decide how things shall be.
Jesus described in the words of this world, would be a competitor for space in it, part of its untruth.' Rowan will know, better than most of us, that anything he says will be part of the world's untruth and the more he conforms to the expectations of a headline culture, the more untruth there will be in it.
One of the threads running through his writing is the idea that true religion always leads one to question oneself, rather than make claims over others.
Jesus is not a possession or a badge of superiority, but the one before whom you stand, in gentle self-questioning. So those who know the archbishop often remark on his humility and profound spirituality. It is this which will carry him through.
Passiontide is when Christians try to enter more deeply into the anguish of Christ. It has been a particularly painful Passiontide for Rowan.
After the American church made it clear that it will not go along with the compromise hammered out at the bishops' conference in Tanzania (alternative pastoral oversight for dissenting congregations), criticism came not just from evangelicals, but also from his natural constituency who believe Rowan has not been supportive enough of gay people.
'Not a good week,' commented Andrew Brown in the Church Times, reviewing some rude comments made about him in the papers and their blogs. But Rowan writes well about the danger of self-dramatising our predicaments and will be on guard against it.
As much as anyone, he deserves the joy which Easter offers, except that 'deserve' is not in the Christian vocabulary.
Easter is about gift, yet Rowan, like few other writers, knows that the Christian faith does not offer easy consolation; in some integral way, the sublime hope it gives is linked to our human anguish.
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