Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (July 21, 1916 – February 7, 2000) was a Canadian professor of comparative religion who from 1964–1973 was director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard Gazette said he was one of the field's most influential figures of the past century. In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably and controversially questioned the validity of the concept of religion.

Smith was born in Toronto to parents Victor Arnold Smith and Sarah Cory Cantwell. He was the younger brother of Arnold Smith and the father of Brian Cantwell Smith.

He received a B.A. with honours in oriental languages in 1938 from the University of Toronto. After his thesis was rejected by Cambridge University, supposedly for its Marxist critique of the British Raj, he and his wife Muriel Mackenzie Struthers spent seven years in Pre-Independence India (1940–1946), during which he taught Indian and Islamic history at Forman Christian College in Lahore.

In 1948 he obtained a Ph.D in oriental languages at Princeton University, after which he taught at McGill, founding in 1952 the university's Institute of Islamic Studies. From 1964 to 1973 Smith taught at Harvard Divinity School. He left Harvard for Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS, where he founded the Department of Religion. He was also among the original Editorial Advisors of the scholarly journal Dionysius. In 1978 he returned to Harvard. In 1979 he received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University. After his retirement from teaching, he was appointed a senior research associate in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1985. He died on February 7, 2000.

In his best known and most controversial work, Smith contends that the concept of religion, rather than being a universally valid category as is generally supposed, is a peculiarly European 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 obserbable rituals, art, music, theologies, etc.) and personal faith. (p. 194)

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, Cantwell Smith points out, is Islam which he describes as the most "entity like"' (p. 85). In a chapter titled The special case of Islam, Smith points out that the term Islam appears in the Qur'an, making it the only religion not named in opposition to or by another tradition. (p. 80). Other than the Prophet Mani, only the Prophet Muhammad was conscious of the establishment of a religion. (p. 106). 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" (p. 43).

By way of an etymological study of religion (religio, in Latin), Smith further contends that the term, which at first and for most of the centuries denoted an attitude towards a relationship between God and man (p. 26), has through conceptual slippage come to mean a "system of observances or beliefs" (p. 29), a historical tradition which has been institutionalized through a process of reification. Whereas religio denoted personal piety, religion came to refer to an abstract entity (or transcendental signifier) which, Smith says, does not exist.

He argues that the term as found in Lucretius and Cicero was internalized by the Catholic Church through Lactantius and Augustine. During the Middle Ages it was superseded by the term faith, which Smith favors by contrast. In the Renaissance, via the Christian Platonist Marsilio Ficino, religio becomes popular again, retaining its original emphasis on personal practice, even in John Calvin's Christianae Religionis Institutio (1536). During 17th Century debates between Catholics and 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 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" (p. 47).

Smith concludes (p. 48-9) by arguing that the term religion has 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.

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

The anthropologist and writer on religion and post-colonial studies Talal Asad has said The Meaning and End of Religion is a modern classic and a masterpiece.

• Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis (1943, 1946, 1963), Victor Gollancz, London, ISBN 0-8364-1338-5
• The Muslim League, 1942-1945 (1945) Minerva Book Shop, 57 p.
• Pakistan as an Islamic State: Preliminary Draft (1954), Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 114 p.
• Islam in Modern History: The tension between Faith and History in the Islamic World (1957), Princeton University Press 1977 paperback: ISBN 0-691-01991-6
• The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), Fortress Press 1991 paperback: ISBN 0-8006-2475-0
• The Faith of Other Men (1963), Dutton, ISBN 0-453-00004-5. from seven CBC radio talks
• Questions of Religious Truth (1967), Scribner
• Religious Diversity: Essays (1976), HarperCollins paperback: ISBN 0-06-067464-4
• Belief and History (1977), University of Virginia Press 1986 paperback: ISBN 0-8139-1086-2
• On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies editor, (1981), The Hague: Mouton Publishers: ISBN 90-279-3448-7, Walter De Gruyter Inc. hardcover: ISBN 90-279-3448-7, paperback: ISBN 3-11-010020-7, 2000 reprint: ISBN 3-11-013498-5
• Scripture: Issues as Seen by a Comparative Religionist (1985) Claremont Graduate School, 22 p., no ISBN
• Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (1989) Macmillan paperback: ISBN 0-333-52272-9, Orbis Books 1990 paperback: ISBN 0-88344-646-4
• What Is Scripture?: A Comparative Approach, Fortress Press 1993: ISBN 0-8006-2608-7
• Patterns of Faith Around the World, Oneworld Publications 1998: ISBN 1-85168-164-7
• Faith and Belief, Princeton University Press 1987: ISBN 0-691-02040-X, Oneworld Publications 1998: ISBN 1-85168-165-5
• Believing, Oneworld Publications 1998: ISBN 1-85168-166-3
• Wilfred Cantwell Smith Reader (2001), Kenneth Cracknell editor, Oneworld Publications, ISBN 1-85168-249-X