Wisdom required

That someone would need to be wise in order to read texts well is as far from encyclopedic understanding as it is from modern natural science in which wisdom is not taken to be requisite for interpreting the “behavior” of a proton. And yet it is endemic to the notion of tradition as a craft of inquiry. There is an “understanding of [a tradition’s] texts which becomes available only to the transformed self” (82). But this creates an apparent paradox: “Only insofar as we have already arrived at certain conclusions are we able to become the sort of person able to engage in such enquiry so as to reach sound conclusions” (63). How, then, does such transformation occur?—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 183 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)