Assuming the model

Jonathan Z. Smith’s classic point is here rejected in favor of the power of scholarly work on ideas. As all comparativists know, Smith argued that the reason things seem similar to scholars is because the comparative models they make require similarity for their intelligibility as comparative tools. Such models do not, however, actually discern similarity as much as presuppose it or, in Smith’s language, invent it through the “associations” that come with the shape of memory. To risk a tautology, then, the basic point of Engberg-Pedersen’s model—that Paul and the Stoics understand the philosophical logic of conversion and progress in the moral life in significantly similar ways—presupposes the philosophical viability of the model itself. Such viability, however, is tied to the encyclopedic view that life is not determinative of thinking as such; it can instead be cordoned off from pure reason, the domain of ideas. In claiming to focus upon “ideas as ideas,” Engberg-Pedersen repeats the encyclopedists’ conviction that reason’s reasons work the same way regardless of the human lives in which they are actually found. Thought is thinkable, that is, in abstraction from life.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 189

<idle musing>
Which, as this chapter has argued, is impossible! Again, still mulling over what this entails.
</idle musing>