‘Christianity's entrance into the world was a surprise’ (p. ix). Demonstrating this surprise was the burden of World Upside Down, C. Kavin Rowe's previous book. One True Life is something of a sequel, but whereas World Upside Down traced the surprise of Christianity as it ran into ‘common pagan culture’ (p. ix), One True Life considers emergent Christianity vis-à-vis Greco-Roman philosophy by letting the texts of three Roman Stoics and three early Christians talk to each other.
Parts I and II prepare for this conversation by devoting an exegetical chapter to each of the three Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) and the three Christians (Paul, Luke, Justin Martyr). The arrangement of these chapters is thematic, the style dialogical, and the prose unburdened by all but the essential details of historical reconstruction and so free to be an interpretation of the texts. Students of these traditions will naturally have their questions (e.g. Does reading the Stoic authors with an eye for their shared Stoicism neglect the distinctiveness of each philosopher and evade debates within the tradition? Is ‘repair’ a radical enough word to capture what the Christians mean when they say ‘salvation’?). But Rowe's interpretations are informed and, what's essential for the arc of the book, they enable him to tell the Stoic and Christian stories and so consider what it might mean to compare these traditions.
Stories, comparison, and traditions: these words identify the movement from parts I and II to part III and indicate why One True Life is not just another study in the genre of comparative research. Rowe's contention is that Stoicism and Christianity are ‘traditions’. He borrows this concept from Alasdair MacIntyre (though he allows the lived complexity of Stoicism and Christianity to expand MacIntyre's intellectualized understanding of traditions), and means by it ‘forms of life’ that are historically situated, morally grained, communal, and learned by living (pp. 182–4). His concern with most comparative studies of Stoicism and Christianity – he focuses on Abraham Malherbe and Troels Engberg-Pedersen – is that the traditions are not treated as traditions of life but as aggregates of ideas like God, ethics, Providence, cosmos and human beings that are detached from their tradition-specific habitat and then compared on the ostensibly neutral ground of academic enquiry. Rowe labels this approach ‘encyclopedic’ (MacIntyre again) and among his several well-aimed criticisms two form the core of his critique.
First, the common vocabulary that appears in both Stoic and Christian texts is not translatable across traditions. While the words used by the Stoics and Christians overlap, this shared vocabulary is deployed within incommensurable grammars. To make this point Rowe, with references to the texts studied in parts I and II, constructs the respective narratives that make Stoicism identifiably Stoic and Christianity identifiably Christian. Rowe asks that the stories he narrates be judged on whether they elucidate the individual texts, render the classification of texts as Stoic or Christian sensible, and facilitate the work of thinking the traditions in relation (p. 207). In these terms, his narratives succeed, and the net effect is to demonstrate that Stoic and Christian words only have meaning within the language game that is the constitutive narrative of their tradition. Within a story in which there is no cosmic beginning and no qualitative difference between creation and creator (i.e. the Stoic story), there is no way to say what Christians mean by the words ‘God’ and ‘creation’ (and on the examples go). To speak the language of either Stoicism or Christianity one has to be speaking within the grammar that is the entire narrative – which leads to Rowe's second and fundamental contention.
Stoicism and Christianity are both traditions of life – that is, both traditions insist that the truth of a form of life is learned by living. And here's the catch: you can only live one life. One cannot live the Stoic life as a Christian nor the Christian life as a Stoic. And because these traditions are mutually exclusive – you can't live both at once – and because they both claim to be the true life, the relationship between Roman Stoicism and early Christianity is best described as a conflict of rival traditions.
This does not mean, however, that a conversation between Stoicism and Christianity is impossible. While the encyclopedic method should be scrapped because it ignores the untranslatability and lived reality of traditions of life, Rowe does think Stoics and Christianity can talk. But this conversation between traditions is never neutral; it is conflict and summons – rivalry and a call to conversion. This raises some questions. Are lives actually lived hermetically within the narrative of a single tradition or is human existence entangled in multiple histories and stories? If the truth of a tradition is only knowable within and at the end of a life within a tradition how do we talk about conversion and the faith that's tied up with it? (Rowe explores this briefly, but I suspect aspects of his earlier telling of the Christian story – revelation is as an act of the creator that awakens faith in the human creature – has unexplored implications.)
But I also think Rowe is right: we only live one life. The question posed by the rival traditions of Stoicism and Christianity is ultimately the deep and unnerving question posed by this book: what is the One True Life?
