You Must Wager: A Genealogy of Commitment

There are two and only two philosophies of life, the true and the false; all the apparently infinite varieties are varieties of the false. Or rather there is only the True Way and the false philosophies. For the Way cannot be codified as a philosophy: that would be to suppose that perfect knowledge of the whole of reality is possible, indeed that it is already known. The Way is only a way, the method we must adopt if we are to obtain any valid knowledge.

- W.H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer

W.H. Auden, poet and pariah of cosmopolitan life, wrote these words in the summer of 1939. Despite their homiletic tone, the Auden who penned them had not yet returned to the Anglican faith of his upbringing. That came some months later, after the outbreak of the Second World War drove the final nail into the coffin of his vaguely Marxist faith in the inevitable advent of a better world. Read in that light, these words are the ledger of a dawning conversion. We witness Auden realizing another sort of inevitability: that of krisis, and the decision it demands. Except the only guarantee, he now notices, is the choice itself. There is no absolute assurance of outcome, and every philosophy that tries to sell you the certainty of its system is an elaborate lie. What’s left is the way, and only at the end of its path will the truth be known. For the moment, there is only the decision.

Auden’s meditation could have been the epigraph for C. Kavin Rowe’s One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions. Like Auden, Rowe is struck by choices and the irrevocable difference they make. “At its heart,” the opening line reads, “this book is about the fact that we can live only one life.” It’s a startlingly simple claim. “We all go only one way,” explains Rowe, and that’s “toward death.” Precisely so, the “human condition is such that” one must “choose how to live from among options that rule one another out.” To make one choice is not to make many others. “The path from birth to death” is “a path of lived affirmation and of negation, and not one without the other.” These comments amount to a statement about the irreversibility of time and the meaning death lends a finite life. They are realities we cannot fail to know. And yet, it’s the argument of Rowe’s book that many New Testament scholars work in willful ignorance of these basic facts. Which is to say, they’ve not only missed the point of the New Testament entirely but also failed to acknowledge an inextricable feature of human life—a case of bad faith.

Modern scholars misstep, Rowe claims, by thinking Early Christianity a discrete entity—call it a religion—capable of comparison with other such entities in the Ancient Mediterranean, or any other time and place for that matter. Rowe focuses on scholarly reconstructions of the relation between Christianity and Stoicism because this happens to be a topic currently in vogue among New Testament scholars. Such scholarship, he notes, often proceeds by cataloguing parallels in Stoic and Christian texts, or by contrasting the Stoic and Christian views of a predetermined topic like God, providence, or nature. Rowe has a name for this sort of exercise. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, he calls it “encyclopedic inquiry.” Its roots began in the nineteenth century when Enlightenment optimism in a “unitary rationality” and “cosmopolitan” confidence in a “unified world” still held sway. “There is nothing,” insists the encyclopedist, “we cannot understand.” Even realities far removed from the modern European vantage are open to reason’s rapacious gaze. If some topics remain opaque at present, the encyclopedist calmly notes, that’s simply because we lack the data, not because there is anything inherently unknowable from our current perspective. Give us enough time, they say, and the “translucifying power of scholarly reason” can and will get to the bottom of whatever question needs answering. The relationship between Christianity and Stoicism is no different.

In reality, encyclopedic inquiry is no longer tenable. Nietzsche, and later Foucault, uncovered the false pretensions of the encyclopedia and exchanged its outmoded method for a “genealogical” style (179-181). Where the encyclopedist once saw a unified system of knowledge, the genealogist sees only the anarchic play of opposing forces. “Rationality” as such, the genealogist insists, is only a story peddled by those in power. For, truth be told, there are just as many kinds of rationality as there are claimants to authority. Cosmopolitan confidence in reason’s all-seeing power never really recovered from this discovery of difference. But if academics of the New Testament and its environs are aware of the revolution Nietzsche’s heirs wrought, their work certainly doesn’t reflect it. In fact, Rowe argues, “recent studies of the New Testament and ancient philosophy have by and large been conducted as if the encyclopedic style of knowing were a viable way to study ancient texts.” That is, they’ve gone on pretending as though early Christianity and Stoicism were merely two more entries on their long list of studied specimens instead of the lived patterns of life they actually were.

Rather than blindly revel in reason’s power (like the encyclopedist) or arrogantly glory in its unmasking (like the genealogist), Rowe proffers a third option. Early Christianity and Stoicism, he suggests, are neither tidy encyclopedia entries nor unstable rhetorical constructs but rather rich “traditions of inquiry” with their own particular “stories” about the way things are. They are, in other words, “narratives in juxtaposition.” It’s not possible to compare Stoic and Christian takes on discrete philosophical topoi, because their respective doctrines only make sense within the overall pattern of reasoning their stories encode. Such traditions must be taken in toto or not at all, and piecemeal sampling from some “reconstructed philosophical smorgasbord” will always obscure more than it clarifies. This alone ought to be a coup de grâce for recent scholarship on the Stoic/Christian question. But, in fact, Rowe’s claim is stronger still. “Thick” traditions of inquiry like Stoicism or Christianity, he contends, are actually incomprehensible to those uncommitted to their particular way of life. Sure, we can attempt to learn other traditions as “second first languages,” adopting their perspective as far as we’re able, but total translation from one grammar of life to another remains impossible. This claim not only bars the modern scholar (who, in classically liberal fashion, claims no tradition) from truly comprehending the claims of the New Testament. It also prevents Christian intellectuals, like Rowe himself, from fully understanding Stoicism.

How, then, do Rowe’s first three chapters—on Seneca (ch.1), Epictetus (ch.2), and Marcus Aurelius (ch.3)—escape his own critique of scholarly forays into rival traditions? Well, they don’t. “I must acknowledge,” he says, “that in practice I am unable to understand certain Stoic things—perhaps even central patterns of reasoning.” The book itself, then, starts to look like an extended demonstration of its own central claim. Rowe places the Stoic stories alongside the narratives told by three early Christians—St. Paul (ch.4), St. Luke (ch.5), and St. Justin Martyr (ch.6)—to survey the limits of comparison itself. A third part (chs.7-9) assays the fallout of the first two and asks whether comparison between rival traditions is even possible. 

Here Rowe wagers a Kierkegaardian correction to MacIntyre. If MacIntyre thinks it possible to learn a “second first language” well enough to judge it inferior to one’s own, Rowe presses the “praxis” of practical reason even further. Rival traditions, he claims, ultimately demand a “criterionless choice,” what Kierkegaard dubbed the “leap of faith.” It would, in other words, require nothing less than becoming a Stoic to measure the success of Rowe’s rehearsal of their most basic beliefs, let alone the relationship these claims bear to the way of life called Christian. Stoicism, he writes, “is a certain kind of historically dense and elongated wager; so is Christianity.” Each makes an incommensurable claim, and the only way to know for certain which is telling the truth is to become one or the other. Failure to heed the call to conversion rival traditions make, Rowe argues, indexes the extent to which our scholarly efforts remain foreign to the fundamental aims of the ancients. 

Gambler by Kamila Szutenberg

Any engagement with this book that does not attend to the existential claims at its core will likely be exercises in the same sort of scholarly delusion it diagnoses. It simply won’t do to respond by citing examples of scholarship that perform the kind of comparison between Stoic and Christian sources Rowe so problematizes—as if the very existence of these studies is sufficient evidence to disprove the argument. The claim is not, after all, that no such book or article exists; on the contrary, it’s obvious just how many of these volumes line the shelves of university libraries. Rather, Rowe’s point is that, in the end, these reams of scholarly effort just fail to achieve much sense. That’s all. It’s not clear whether Rowe expects his intervention to halt the production of encyclopedic scholarship. But, then again, I suspect it won’t be all that surprising, from Rowe’s Wittgensteinian vantage, if people choose to go on speaking nonsense to one another. That’s just part of the game. What One True Life offers is an invitation to play a different one, the stakes of which could not be higher.

Taylor Ross is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program of Religion at Duke University. He studies historical theology and the reception of late ancient texts in the modern period.