Should Christians Be Stoics? (Part 3)

Comparisons and Conclusions

Let me just admit at the get-go that this was not an easy post to write; figuring out how to summarize complex ideas while representing them well is not an easy task. Thankfully, my editor Merna Eisenbraun helped me get some things into better shape; remaining problems are mine alone.

So what do the Stoics have to do with the Christians (of the first and second centuries, or now)?

Or, to address the matter a bit differently, are they in any way comparable? How should we go about comparing them? Can we use Stoic principles to help us in our lives?

Comparison

Prof. Rowe thinks that we make a mistake if we assume that we can examine Stoicism/the Stoics and Christianity to determine what we can benefit from in each. His starting point is Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that there are “three versions of inquiry”—inquiry being the way that we investigate to arrive at truth—that have been used and that have shaped us in the post-Enlightenment era (the last two centuries): encylopedia, genealogy, and tradition (p. 176; more below on each of these terms and what they mean int his context). MacIntyre has argued that, if you choose one approach, doing so de facto rules out using the other two. Most importantly for Rowe, if you choose encyclopedia as your mode of inquiry, you cannot get to the heart of any issue in a way that makes comparison possible. Sneak peek: Rowe believes that only if we think about Stoic–Christian relationships as a conflict of traditions will we see the matter clearly.

I confess that I’m as guilty as the next person—well, all of us moderns gravitate in this direction—of primarily using encyclopedic inquiry as the primary way of thinking about things. Let’s look at this more closely.

The encyclopedic approach to knowledge arose out of the sciences, and the sciences encompassed all fields of knowledge. “There was no such thing as the possibility of different types of knowledges” (p. 177); knowledge was a unified whole, and the only way in which knowledge was divided was by subject area (not, therefore, by research method, etc.). Biology, philosophy, chemistry, philosophy, physics, and ethics were all susceptible to “scientific inquiry.” All knowledge was rational; everything was intelligible, if only we had enough information. Knowledge was progressive. Inquiry throughout history was ever upward, ever onward. New information was incorporated into old information or used to revise the old. Past thought was always evaluated in light of the present, with the conviction that the present represented the high point of intellectual progress. In addition, knowledge was “timeless,” never dependent on historical (or other) circumstance, never contingent.

This quite ideal approach to human knowledge no longer is seen the way it was even 50 years ago: postmodernism has pretty well seen to that.

Despite the apparent death of encyclopedism, it lives on in practice. A look at any college or university’s curriculum shows that there is no field of study that is excluded from research and teaching. For the university, somehow, “all knowledge fits together in some way.” That many students today don’t believe this at all and will defend “their truth” and the belief that the only arbiter of truth is the individual doesn’t rule out the goal of the university. Note that the very title “university” proclaims the idea that it encompasses everything.

“Where the encyclopedist presupposed unitary rationality, a unified world, and progress toward truth itself, Nietzsche, the original genealogist, saw no such things” (p. 179). Instead of steady progress toward an apex of knowledge in the present, this approach picks and chooses this or that from the past as a precursor to the present; the modern philosopher “uses the ancients in the way he sees fit” (p. 180). There is no objectified truth.¹ The 21st-century saying “You have your truth, and I have mine” comes out of this. There is no “Truth” with a capital T; there is only the accumulation of metaphors, words, descriptions, and illusions. The genealogist “does not so much make arguments that go toward anything as he does take a momentary stance, pose as a critic for the time being” (p. 180). Consistency is not required. Disagreements are not amenable to being resolved. (MacIntyre, per Rowe, traces some of these changes through the various prefaces to historical editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a quite interesting discussion.)

The basic result is fragmentation—and, I would say, even what we see as the isolation of knowledge into separate “silos.”

MacIntyre’s third type of inquiry, tradition, as summarized by Rowe: “In contrast both to encyclopedic and genealogical inquiry, the narrative of traditioned inquiry ‘treats the past neither as mere prologue nor as something to be struggled against, but as that from which we have to learn if we are to identify and move toward our telos [‘goal’] more adequately” (p. 182). Traditioned inquiry requires learned skills; one cannot come to it with no preparation at all (as would be true for the encyclopedic approach, in which anyone can do the work, at least in theory); and it is cooperative (rather than individual; either of the two other approaches can be individual). Finally, Rowe says, tradition describes “the forms of life that were ancient Christianity and Stoicism” (p. 183), and this distinguishes them from post-Enlightenment approaches to knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that it is as traditions that we should compare them.

As an example of how the encylopedic and genealogical types of inquiry are misleadingly modern, Rowe brings forward the fact that “there is no word for morality as such in any ancient or medieval language” (p. 192). This was new to me. “Morality” is an abstract idea, and what we moderns mean by that word is what ancient peoples would associate with a “traditioned way to live a full human life” (p. 193). Instead of an abstraction, “both the Christians and Stoics say that we cannot see clearly without habituation into their specific traditions of practical thought” (p. 195, emphasis mine). In short, for ancient peoples, habits of life were inseparable from thinking about life. As moderns, we see our job as requiring us to separate ourselves—standing back from ourselves—in making an attempt to be “objective.” For the ancients, however, “[T]here is no objectifiable thinking faculty—the mind qua mind or soul qua soul—that can know truth apart from the much denser reality of the I that lives” (p. 197).

Here’s the result: “[W]hat could appear as a demand to embrace a true way of life appears instead as information to be assimilated” (p. 198). Instead of “you will know what’s true by living this way” we have “here’s some interesting information from the past: make up your mind if you want to integrate it into your life.” Rowe’s primary point: unless you actually “convert” to a different tradition, you cannot fully understand it. An analogy may help: even if we know more than one spoken human language, we live and speak in one primary language (English for me, of course), and any second or third language will, to some extent, always remain somewhat “foreign” to us, no matter how much we absorb it over time. One could, with enough work, learn a second language sufficiently so that it became primary. But we would then be leaving our first “first language” for a second “first language,” and our original “first language” would in fact become secondary.

These realities affect any ability to compare traditions of belief.

Traditions in Juxtaposition

The subhead immediately above is the chapter title of the section where Rowe brings comparisons to a head.

Here I will quote some of Rowe’s summary of Stoicism directly, because it’s quite clear. Comparison is best seen through the stories that each tradition tells about itself.

[T]he Stoic story does not take the cosmos to be running on its own according to physical laws given by God from the outside—or, in contrast to a Jewish or Christian understanding as if Providence [was the name we give to] active direction by a God who is distinct from the cosmos in its entirety.... the cosmos has its own eternal resource for its direction. Precisely because such direction is what reason is, the grain of the cosmos is a rational one.... Fortuna [goddess ‘luck’] is only a name for a way the world appears to us, not a name for a contradiction to divine reason.

In other words, the cosmos functions according to reason, and if we learn to function according to reason, we will be in harmony with the cosmos (seeing all of this as a divine principle of sorts). Dealing with our perceptions (especially of “luck,” the randomness of our lives) requires us to be both both rational and mortal. That’s our nature, and the sooner we can learn from experience and from those who have gone before to be rational and to accept our mortality, the truer our lives will be. Rationality helps us to recognize what is within our control and what is not, and to live accordingly. This leads to a virtuous life, characterized by “prudence, justice, courage, and moderation” (p. 213).

This, in essence, is the Stoic story.

For Christians, story is even more central. Their story runs back to the founding of the world and God’s purposes for doing so. What follows in Scripture is an extended story (with many mini-stories encapsulated), which begins not with “all that is” (the Stoics) but with “God’s creation of all that is not God” (p. 216). The Scriptural story is “the story of God’s dealings with all that is not God” (ibid.). Instead of training oneself to be virtuous, to do good through reason (the Stoics), the problem in Christianity is much larger, because of sin; “we cannot overcome ourselves”: “The good I wish to do … I cannot” (quoting Paul, Rom 7:19; p. 217). Furthermore, death is much more than an inevitable element of the cosmos; it is the final enemy.

Learning what God is like is completely different, too. For the Stoic, one learns from an esteemed, recognized teacher, a Stoic “guru” (my label, acknowledging that it is culturally and historically inaccurate, I suppose; but the label fits). For the Christian, however, the reality of God is reflected most clearly in the community of those who have joined the tradition, who are a part of the new creation. The community as a whole is the light to the nations (p. 220). The Christian message is “Come join us, for we know the truth” (p. 221). This message has profound political implications as well: Christians obey the government but are in tension with it because they refuse to confess anyone other than Christ as Lord.

As already noted, death is not the end. People are embodied persons who die but will, like their Lord, be resurrected at some time in the future, and in that future the entire world will also be remade by the one who created it. The end of the Christian story involves real personal, individual resurrection and re-creation of the entire world.

[Rowe now has a section in which he compares/contrasts the perspectives of Stoics and Christians on God and the world, humanity/human beings, Jesus, death, and politics/society (pp. 226–34); I’m not recounting these to keep this post shorter.]

Rival Traditions

How, then, can a modern person who wishes to know truth proceed? Rowe thinks that most people nowadays are retreating from engaging entire traditions; they prefer a bricolage approach. Contemporary approaches tend toward picking and choosing this or that idea, or moral element. A person picks odds and ends that appear to fit together; she starts, typically, by noting problems in self or others that need to be solved, and then evaluates and sorts relevant actions from various sources into what appears to be a workable shelf-full of practical solutions. A new problem comes along, so we look for a new solution from the vast array of possibilities.

Rowe says: this approach would be decried by both the ancient Stoics and the first Christians. Both would have said that a person needs to inhabit a way of life that is patterned by the tradition. “In the Christian and Stoic sense of true, you have to make a decision for one and not for the other with the life you live” (p. 245). You don’t get to pick and choose; this notion would have been entirely nonsensical to adherents of either “philosophy.”

Here comes the rub.

“If the claim is that we have to live in a certain way of life in order to learn how to reason truly about the truth of all things, then we can never know ahead of that life whether the claim is true or not. We simply dive in—or don’t” (p. 257; emphasis mine). “Kierkegaard [contrary to many Christians today] was closer to the truth: no matter how many criteria we may find for living in one way or another, we cannot make them add up to a [rational] judgment about a true life before we live it. ‘Come join’ is not the same as ‘test and confirm’” (ibid.) “Pascal was finally right. We cannot know ahead of the lives we live that the truth to which we devote ourselves is the truth worth devoting ourselves to. So we wager our lives one way or the other” (p. 258). Rowe (and I) have cast our lot with Pascal: his wager is where we end up.

I’ve quoted Rowe at length in the paragraph above because I found it nothing less than thrilling. I, too, think Pascal and Kierkegaard saw the realities we face. It’s my sense that any person who wrestles with the nature of life and what it is good to commit to will come to this place: that we are wagering everything, everything, on the truth of the Christian Gospel story.

We may from time to time find bits of the bricolage, as it were, that are congruent with the truth embraced by the Christian tradition, and these odds and ends may occasion a modest bit of rejoicing; but all that flotsam is nothing more than fragments from traditions that are in fact rivals. We may appreciate them; but we should recognize that any congruence is nothing more than accidental. In the end, comparison of the bricolage is unhelpful.

1. A recent tweet from a philosophy/ethics professor at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, Megan Fritts: “Just had one of the weirdest teaching experiences of my life. My ethics lecture on how we can/should respond to evidence was completely derailed because (after investigating the sea of blank stares), I discovered, ALL 22 STUDENTS are dogmatic doxastic voluntarists.” “Doxastic voluntarism” is a technical label in philosophy that is difficult to explain in short order; the professor explains it best, in this specific case: “Every single one of [my students in this class] thinks that we can choose to believe (literally) anything we want, at any time.” Prof. Fritts was deeply frustrated that in a course on ethics there was no point—so the students!—of discussing ethics; ethics is a completely personal matter. If one is then dogmatic about this, the result is that there’s no point in discussing anything with anyone else, because we all (to use a common trope) “have our own truth,” and that “truth” is not susceptible to evidence or discussion or argument or presuasion, etc.