One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions by C. Kavin Rowe (review)

This new book by C. Kavin Rowe is extraordinarily ambitious. It constitutes a challenge not only to the manner in which early Christianity and Stoicism have been compared since the rise of historical criticism (and even before), but also to the whole way New Testament scholarship has been working since the second half of the nineteenth century whenever it has moved outside the specifically early Christian (and partly the Jewish) tradition(s) to elucidate the Christian texts. The central thesis critiques what (following Alasdair MacIntyre) Rowe calls “encyclopedic inquiry” (2), which basically attempts to study, say, Stoicism and early Christianity at the same conceptual level. Instead, Rowe contends, to understand either of these two bodies of thought and practice—not just fully, but at all—one must oneself live either. Because one cannot do this for both at the same time (their truth claims are “incommensurable” [passim]), a Christian scholar cannot understand Stoicism, and vice versa. The most one can do is to place the two fundamentally different “narratives” in “juxtaposition” (6) while also acknowledging that the presentation will necessarily be skewed, since it will reflect the scholar’s own position as either a Christian or a Stoic. (Those who are neither presumably cannot understand anything.) Since Rowe writes as a Christian, he states this: “I must acknowledge that in practice I am unable to understand certain Stoic things—perhaps even central patterns of reasoning” (205). Here the “in practice” does not do justice to his own stark claims. Instead, he should have written “necessarily.” Of the exercise of “narrative juxtaposition” that he presents, he says this: “It is an attempt to reason Christianly about Roman Stoicism as my second first language while acknowledging that because I can do this only as an outsider, the way may in fact be closed” (204). Here he should have written: “. . . while knowing that because etc., the way is in fact closed.”

With such stark claims (and due to its many qualities besides) the book deserves a much more extensive discussion of its basic hermeneutics than it can receive here. In fact, one can only do full justice to it by attending to the way it gradually develops its hermeneutical position over its nine chapters. Part I (Chapters One-Three) describes fairly conventionally (see below) the three Stoics Seneca (One), Epictetus (Two), and Marcus Aurelius (Three). Part II (Chapters Four-Six) describes St. Paul (Four), St. Luke (Five), and St. Justin Martyr (Six). The crux of the matter in Part III (Chapters Seven-Nine) first develops the view from MacIntyre of “traditions” and the rootedness of reason, rationality, and thought within such traditions understood as forms of life (Seven). It also shows the failure to acknowledge this view in scholars of the supposedly “encyclopedic” way of thinking (exemplified by Abraham Malherbe and myself). Chapter Eight develops and applies the alternative manner of “narrative juxtaposition” of Stoicism and early Christianity. Finally, Chapter Nine addresses the fundamental, underlying issue of “translatability” by presenting and rejecting Jeffrey Stout’s criticism of MacIntyre and even MacIntyre’s own acknowledgement that translation between “traditions in conflict” is in fact possible: “As we will see . . . even MacIntyre’s account is finally insufficient.” (250). The gradual unfolding of Rowe’s argument reaches its climax in two footnotes—314nn50 and 52—references from the last three pages of the book proper, 256 and 258. There he states, in a manner that one may be allowed to see as a clear expression of neoorthodoxy, that he does not “believe in the division between philosophy and theology” and claims that MacIntyre errs in “trying to solve the problem [of translation] he creates by his description of traditions without resorting to explicitly theological descriptions of change/conversion.” Thus, theology provides the answer to a problem supposed to be distinctly philosophical, not just with regard to the comparison between Stoicism and Christianity, but also with regard to...