SMITH, WILFRED CANTWELL

SMITH, WILFRED CANTWELL . Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) was a historian of religion, a comparative theologian, and an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. In 1949 Smith founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where he matched Muslim and Christian appointments. He later succeeded R. L. Slater as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (1964–1985), quitting Harvard for Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to dissociate himself from U.S. militarism during the Vietnam War years. While at Harvard, Smith coordinated the university's first undergraduate concentration in religious studies.

After majoring in oriental languages at the University of Toronto, Smith studied theology under H. H. Farmer and Islamics under H. A. R. Gibb in Great Britain. In 1941 he joined the faculty of Forman Christian College in Lahore (in present-day Pakistan), then a center of multireligious dialogue. An admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru more than Mohandas Gandhi, Smith deplored the 1947 partition of India because he considered nationalism to be morally bankrupt.

As president of the Student Christian movement in Canada following the Depression era, Smith embraced John Macmurray's personalist philosophy and the Social Gospel movement. Smith's first book (rejected for a doctorate by Cambridge University) stressed class-based socioeconomic determinants in religion and politics. Stalinism, however, cured his enthusiasm for Marxist immanentism. Concluding that self-criticism requires a transhistorical referent, Smith linked issues of justice to a prophetic sense of transcendence. Thereafter, he vehemently challenged the practice of restricting the humanities and religious studies to a social science orientation.

A Princeton University doctorate (1948) led to publications on Islamic modernism, in which Smith juxtaposed "objective" cultural history and "subjective" faith. He noted the conflict in Islam between secularly educated professionals, who are needed to run a state, and traditionalists, who define statehood according to conservative interpretations of sharī˓ah (theocratic law).

Islamic insistence on divine transcendence and its ban on idolatry reinforced Smith's polemic against reifying conceptions in and of religion. He gained international attention with a call to abandon the word religion as an academic category. This proposal was rejected, but his terms for construing the data—cumulative tradition and personal faith—were widely adopted. The former can be studied by any observer; the latter requires participation in the evolution of a tradition.

Smith's typical method was to analyze the changing meanings of key words, illustrating lost nuances by citing original senses in other languages (e.g., Arabic words for truth ) and ruminating on shifts from verb to noun and singular to plural forms. To him, singular usage of religion and scripture resists reifying phenomena. From failures to adduce universally accepted definitions of such terms, Smith concluded not that linguistic essentialism is wrong but that misconstruals show insensitivity to necessarily tentative, metaphorical references to transcendence. A liberal, Smith's fundamentalist Calvinist upbringing was apparent in his assumption that earlier meanings are truer, later meanings being distorted by rationalization.

A major trilogy on faith, comparative history of religion, and world theology (published in 1977, 1979, and 1981) linked early believing to beloving, denied that belief (in the sense of hypothetical opinion) is what religion is about, and argued that existential trust is what relates human beings to the transcendent, however named. Among Ernst Troeltsch's categories, Smith emphasized the mystical-poetic.

Smith rejected as positivistic contemporary faith in pseudoscience and condemned the technocrats who dismissed humanizing concerns as irrelevant for decisions leading to the bombing of Hiroshima. Without sacrificing the scholarly rigor of historians of religion (often criticized for antiquarian fixation on texts), he emphasized living religion and dialogue, not just for gathering information, but as essential to becoming true to others and oneself in plural affirmations of transcendence.

Unrepentant over using Christian theological categories, Smith insisted that religious studies are about people responding to God Buddhistically, Christianly, secularly, and so on, focusing on different paradigmatic symbols. He pointed out that the Muslim homologue to Jesus is not Muḥammad but the Qurʾān. His final major work, written with his wife Muriel, was a study of scriptural dialogue through texts.

Dubbed an "experiential-expressivist," Smith considered himself primarily a historian in the global tradition of Arnold Joseph Toynbee, appealing to knowable but not fully describable "facts" of human relationship. In Smith's view, comparative, personal data are intuitively grasped and cogent if expressible in terms derived from two or more starkly contrasting traditions, such as Hinduism and Islam in India. Against academic fragmentation, he essayed a world history of religion as the cultural product of humanizing faith, of which the faithful are the final arbiters. According to Smith, true relationships are only validated by participant observers through "colloquy." Beyond both objective and subjective approximations is the truth and goodness, which the "critical corporate self-consciousness" (Smith, 1997, p.123) of spiritual and intellectual peers discerns.

Critics among philosophers of religion (e.g., John Hick, Ninian Smart) and later deconstructionists challenged the insider-outsider dichotomy intrinsic to Smith's conception of faith and tradition and his privileging of insiders. His hermeneutic of recovery rather than suspicion obscured how radical his insistence was that truth is dialogical. In global politics, Smith expected Muslims, Christians, humanistic atheists, and others to converge on the truth that matters. Mark Heim argues that, theologically, this was not pluralism, as Hick and Smith supposed, but ecumenical inclusivism, which wrongly assumes that religious ends are the same for all. In theology, Smith was more Muslim-Methodist than Trinitarian, foregrounding Jesus' humanity, not claims concerning his divinity.

Bibliography

Bae, Kuk-Won. Homo Fidei: A Critical Understanding of Faith in the Writings of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Its Implications for the Study of Religion. New York, 2003.

Cracknell, Kenneth, comp. William Cantwell Smith: A Reader. Oxford, 2001.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Islam in Modern History. Princeton, 1957.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind. New York, 1963.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Religious Diversity, edited by Willard G. Oxtoby. New York, 1976.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Belief and History. Charlottesville, Va., 1977.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Faith and Belief. Princeton, 1979.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion. Philadelphia, 1981.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis, 1993.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective, edited by John W. Burbidge. Albany, N.Y., 1997.

Whaling, Frank, ed. The World's Religious Traditions: Current Perspectives in Religious Studies, Essays in Honour of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. New York, 1984.

Peter Slater (2005)