Wilfred Cantwell Smith

“Who is Wilfred Cantwell Smith?” You may well wonder.

He was born in 1916 and he died in the year 2000. His life has been described by many philosophers as one who had made tremendous inroads to our understanding of religious pluralism. He is best known as the author of his controversial book “The Meaning and End of Religion” where he contended that ” … the term ‘religion’ is a peculiarly European construct of surprisingly recent origin.” In other words, the term “religion” as we know it today was non-existent until the nineteenth century.

According to the philologist Max Muller, the root of the English word “religion“, the Latin ‘religio’, was originally used to mean only “reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety.”

Smith questioned the wisdom of thinking and talking in terms of one’s religious belief. He wanted us to take a bold step forward to move beyond individual religious traditions and to think of religion as the historical and cultural expression of human ‘faith‘.

In his book ‘The Meaning and End of Religion’, Smith did a chapter by chapter demonstration of the fact that none of the supposed founders of the world’s major religions had any such intention. On the face of it, there was just one exception, Smith conceded, and this was the Islamic faith. In a chapter titled The special case of Islam, Smith argued that the prophet Muhammad would have been, above all others perhaps, profoundly alarmed at any suggestion that he was starting a new religion. Smith pointed out that the Arabic language did not even have a word for religion, strictly speaking: he detailed how the word din, customarily translated as ‘a form of religion’, differed in significant important respects from the European concept of the term ‘religion’.

Smith suggested that practitioners of any given faith did not historically come to regard what they do as ‘religion’ until they had 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. He concluded by arguing that the term ‘religion’ had now acquired four distinct senses:

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.

 

Smith argued that Christians, as an example of a particular religious grouping, should not be making exclusive claims to truth and salvation in Jesus Christ. Instead, Smith was of the view that a Christian, or for that matter, any person should have a moral duty to respect the identity and the religious beliefs of others with whom the world was shared.

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In June 1979, Wilfred Cantwell Smith received an honorary doctorate degree from Concordia University and his citation by Charles Davis reads as follows:
“Mr. Chancellor, I have the honor to present to you Wilfred Cantwell Smith, outstanding scholar, creative administrator and acknowledged leader in promoting mutual understanding between people of different religious and cultural traditions.

“Born in Toronto, he began his education there, but continued it in Cambridge, England and in Princeton in the States. In between, he went to India and became the representative among Muslims of Canadian Overseas Missions Council and there began his long list of publications with the book, Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis.

“In 1949 he was appointed Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University, and two years later he organized McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies. The launching of the Institute allowed him to give institutional expression to a conviction that pervades his life’s work, namely that the study of religion is the study of persons and thus a study demanding interpersonal dialogue. He was able to give broader expression to that same conviction in the wider context of a multilateral dialogue among students from a variety of religious traditions when in 1964 he became Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. After nine years Smith came back to Canada for a period, but Harvard has recently persuaded him to return for the creative task of developing a new program in religious studies. His continuing strong presence in Canadian life is however shown by his election last month as President of the Canadian Theological Society.

“Mr. Chancellor, Smith is one of those select few scholars who change the structure and course of their discipline. He has combined impeccable scholarship of a most rigorous kind with a humane vision of comparative religious studies as our religiously plural world of persons coming through dialogue to a disciplined self-consciousness of its own variegated and developing religious life. It is a vision that has inspired and continues to inspire many students.

“Mr. Chancellor, it is a distinct honor to present to you, on behalf of the Senate, and by the authority of the Board of Governors, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, that you may confer on him the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.”