Wilfred Cantwell Smith

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The Reverend

Wilfred Cantwell Smith

OC FRSC
Born(1916-07-21)21 July 1916
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died7 February 2000(2000-02-07) (aged 83)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Other namesW. C. Smith[1]
Spouse
Muriel Struthers
​
(m. 1939)​
[2]
Children
Ecclesiastical career
ReligionChristianity (Presbyterian)
Church
Ordained1944[3]
Academic background
H. H. Farmer[8]
  • John Macmurray[9]
  • H. B. Sharman[10]
  • Ernst Troeltsch[11]
  • Gregory Vlastos[12]
    • Academic work
    DisciplineReligious studies
    Sub-discipline
    Institutions
    Main interestsReligious pluralism
    Notable worksThe Meaning and End of Religion (1961)
    Influenced

    Wilfred Cantwell Smith

    Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard University Gazette said he was one of the field's most influential figures of the past century.[18] In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably questioned the modern sectarian concept of religion.[19]

    Early life and career

    Smith was born on 21 July 1916 in Toronto, Ontario, to parents Victor Arnold Smith and Sarah Cory Cantwell.[20] He was the younger brother of Arnold Smith[21] and the father of Brian Cantwell Smith.[2] He primarily received his secondary education at Upper Canada College.[6]

    Smith studied at

    Islamic history at Forman Christian College in Lahore
    .

    In 1948 he obtained a

    Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1985.[27]

    Death and legacy

    Smith died on 7 February 2000 in Toronto.[17] His papers are preserved in Special Collections and Archives at the University Library at California State University, Northridge.[28]

    Views on religion

    In his best known and most controversial work,[citation needed] The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (1962),[16] Smith examines the concept of "religion" in the sense of "a systematic religious entity, conceptually identifiable and characterizing a distinct community".[29] He concludes that it is a misleading term for both the practitioners and observers and it should be abandoned in favour of other concepts.[16] The reasons for the objection are that the word 'religion' is "not definable" and its noun form ('religion' as opposed to the adjectival form 'religious') "distorts reality". Moreover, the term is unique to the Western civilization; there are no terms in the languages of other civilizations that correspond to it. Smith also notes that it "begets bigotry" and can "kill piety". He regards the term as having outlived its purpose.[30]

    Smith contends that the

    construct of recent origin. Religion, he argues, is a static concept that does not adequately address the complexity and flux of religious lives. Instead of the concept of religion, Smith proffers a new conceptual apparatus: the dynamic dialectic between cumulative tradition (all historically observable rituals, art, music, theologies, etc.) and personal faith.[31]

    Smith sets out chapter by chapter to demonstrate that none of the founders or followers of the world's major religions had any understanding that they were engaging in a defined system called religion. The major exception to this rule, Smith points out, is

    Qur'an, making it the only religion not named in opposition to or by another tradition.[33] Other than the prophet Mani, only the prophet Muhammad was conscious of the establishment of a religion.[34] Smith points out that the Arabic
    language does not have a word for religion, strictly speaking: he details how the word din, customarily translated as such, differs in significant important respects from the European concept.

    The terms for major world religions today, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism, did not exist until the 19th century. Smith suggests that practitioners of any given faith do not historically come to regard what they do as religion until they have developed a degree of cultural self-regard, causing them to see their collective spiritual practices and beliefs as in some way significantly different from the other. Religion in the contemporary sense of the word is for Smith the product of both identity politics and apologetics:

    One's own "religion" may be piety and faith, obedience, worship and a vision of God. An alien "religion" is a system of beliefs or rituals, an abstract and impersonal pattern of observables.

    A dialectic ensues, however. If one's own "religion" is attacked, by unbelievers who necessarily conceptualize it schematically, or all religion is, by the indifferent, one tends to leap to the defence of what is attacked, so that presently participants of a faith – especially those most involved in argument – are using the term in the same externalist and theoretical sense as their opponents. Religion as a systematic entity, as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a concept of polemics and apologetics.[35]

    By way of an

    abstract entity (or transcendental
    signifier) which, Smith says, does not exist.

    He argues that the term as found in

    Protestants, religion begins to refer to an abstract system of beliefs, especially when describing an oppositional structure. Through the Enlightenment this concept is further reified, so that by the nineteenth century G. W. F. Hegel defines religion as Begriff, "a self-subsisting transcendent idea that unfolds itself in dynamic expression in the course of ever-changing history ... something real in itself, a great entity with which man has to reckon, a something that precedes all its historical manifestation".[38]

    Smith concludes by arguing that the term religion has now acquired four distinct senses:[39]

    1. personal piety (e.g. as meant by the phrase "he is more religious than he was ten years ago");
    2. an overt system of beliefs, practices and values, related to a particular community manifesting itself as the ideal religion that the theologian tries to formulate, but which he knows transcends him (e.g. 'true Christianity');
    3. an overt system of beliefs, practices and values, related to a particular community manifesting itself as the empirical phenomenon, historical and sociological (e.g. the Christianity of history);
    4. a generic summation or universal category, i.e. religion in general.

    The Meaning and End of Religion remains Smith's most influential work. The

    postcolonial scholar[citation needed] Talal Asad has said that the book is a modern classic and a masterpiece.[40]

    Works

    See also

    References

    Footnotes

    1. ^ Asad 2001, p. 205.
    2. ^ a b c Ferahian 1997, p. 27.
    3. ^ a b c d Ferahian 1997, p. 28.
    4. ^ Ferahian 1997, p. 33.
    5. ^ Ferahian 1997, p. 28; Stevens 1985, p. 10.
    6. ^ a b Cameron 1997, p. 10.
    7. ^ Cameron 1997, pp. 10, 35.
    8. ^ Cameron 1997, pp. 35, 38.
    9. ^ Cameron 1997, pp. 32, 38.
    10. ^ Cameron 1997, p. 14.
    11. ^ Cameron 1997, pp. 23, 38.
    12. ^ Cameron 1997, pp. 28, 38.
    13. ^ Eck 2017, pp. 22–23.
    14. ^ Bhargava, Rajeev (29 November 2016). "How the Secular Diversity of India Informed the Philosophy of Charles Taylor". Newslaundry. Retrieved 3 November 2020.
    15. ^ "Deaths". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. 9 February 2000. p. A18.
    16. ^ a b c Fallers 1967, p. 120.
    17. ^ a b Shook 2016, p. 905.
    18. ^ Putnam, Hilary; Eck, Diana; Carman, John; Tu Wei-Ming; Graham, William (29 November 2001). "Wilfred Cantwell Smith: In Memoriam". Harvard University Gazette. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. Archived from the original on 7 October 2009. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
    19. ^ Smith 1991.
    20. ^ Ferahian 1997, p. 27; Kessler 2012, p. 148.
    21. ^ Graham 2017, p. 86.
    22. ^ Cameron 1997, p. 21.
    23. ^ Cameron 1997, p. 10; Ferahian 1997, p. 27; Stevens 1985, p. 10.
    24. ^ Aitken & Sharma 2017, p. 1.
    25. ^ a b c d Petersen 2014, p. 94.
    26. ^ Davis, Charles (1979). "Honorary Degree Citation – Wilfred Cantwell Smith". Montreal: Concordia University. Archived from the original on 2 October 2015. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
    27. ^ Aitken & Sharma 2017, p. 2.
    28. ^ "Guide to the Wilfred Cantwell Smith Papers" (PDF). Online Archive of California. 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2022.
    29. ^ Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1962). The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind. New York: Macmillan. p. 119. Quoted in Fallers 1967, p. 120.
    30. ^ Rahbar 1964, pp. 275–276.
    31. ^ Smith 1991, p. 194.
    32. ^ Smith 1991, p. 85.
    33. ^ Smith 1991, p. 80.
    34. ^ Smith 1991, p. 106.
    35. ^ Smith 1991, p. 43.
    36. ^ Smith 1991, p. 26.
    37. ^ Smith 1991, p. 29.
    38. ^ Smith 1991, p. 47.
    39. ^ Smith 1991, pp. 48–49.
    40. ^ Asad 2001, pp. 205–206.

    Bibliography

    Further reading

    External links
    Professional and academic associations
    Preceded by President of the
    American Academy of Religion
    1983     		Succeeded by
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