April, 2004 - Review

April, 2004 Edition

Review Article

Wilfred Cantwell Smith
three reissued volumes

Patterns of FaithAround the World
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998, pbk., 154 pp., UK £9.99, USA $14.95, ISBN: 1851681647

Believing - an Historical Perspective
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998, pbk., 138 pp., UK £12.99, USA $19.95, ISBN: 1851681663

Faith and Belief: the Difference Between Them
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998, pbk., 360 pp., UK £14.99, USA $22.95, ISBN: 1851681655

Reviewer: Angela Jagger, Open University, UK

In the spring of 1968 I was privileged to participate in a seminar led by the late Canadian scholar of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who died in 2000. The seminar was given for graduate students in the Religion Department at McMaster University and based on a lecture he had delivered in January of that year at Toronto entitled “Faith and Belief ”, in which it was clear he was working on the ideas developed in his later books Belief and History and Faith and Belief. It is indicative of the way in which his work underwent long periods of gestation that much of that lecture was clearly a draft of what was to become the introduction to Faith and Belief published in 1979. That he felt that his ideas were still worth bringing to another audience almost a generation later still, is demonstrated by the fact that both these books have been recently republished by Oneworld under different titles: Believing - an Historical Perspective and Faith and Belief: the Difference Between Them. The third book in the trilogy, Patterns of Faith Around the World, has had a slightly different evolution. Originally entitled The Faith of Other Men, it is the earliest and most accessible of the three, being based on a series of broadcast talks given in 1962 and a lecture given in 1961. This, though, is not a straight reprint as are the other two, but it has undergone a light revision, principally aimed at giving a more inclusive bent to the language.

Common to all three is the theme of ?faith? and what humans beings have understood by this quality, which Smith sees as perhaps most characteristic of what it is to be human. One might see his academic career as falling into three main stages. First as a student of Islam with a background in oriental languages and time spent in predominantly Muslim countries, he taught in a Christian mission college in that part of the Indian subcontinent, pre-and post-partition, that became Pakistan. This experience formed the foundation for a return to Canada and the founding of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. Secondly he developed a wider interest in the study of religion beyond what he would call ?the Islamic instance? and spent some time as Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. Thirdly, in later life, he moved towards what felt was a more overtly theological approach in his search for a world theology beyond the narrowly Christian. But the quest to understand the nature of faith is the thread that runs throughout his mature work, from an appreciation of the faith of the Muslims that he met in the subcontinent and of those with whom he worked at McGill, through to his work in retirement. It is in these three works, however, that faith becomes the ostensible focus, and the way in which he pursues his goal is typical of his idiosyncratic style of scholarship.

For Smith faith is the quality that defines religious life, but he wishes to go beyond this to suggest that it is the defining quality of human life. He felt he was breaking new ground in his attempt to examine faith as such, rather than, as most theologians or thinkers within different traditions have done, with the object of faith. Faith was to be distinguished from belief. Although originally in the Christian tradition these terms referred to the same quality, and were both used to translate the word pistis in the New Testament, the change in meaning through time of the word ?belief ? in English, led to much confusion. Faith was concerned with persons, whereas belief came to refer to propositions. This assertion is based on detailed work in Believing - an Historical Perspective, completed before its companion volume, in which he traced the history of the term ?believing?. Thus he argued, particularly post-Enlightenment, ?belief ? came to imply a lack of certainty, and in the modern world accepting something that is probably not factually true:

My prize example of this trend is taken from the ...Random House dictionary, published in New York in 1966. The first entry under the word 'belief ' defines it as 'an opinion or conviction', and at once illustrates this with: 'the belief that the earth is flat'. What could be more casually devastating? The first example that comes to mind for the compilers, and then the readers, of this impressive work is a belief that is false.... And indeed one would hardly use the word 'belief ' today for the view that the world is round, one realises on reflection. In the late twentieth century we would hardly say 'He holds the belief that the world is round'.1

In Faith and Belief Smith tries to examine the concept of faith in itself and sees an aim of his work as ?the search for conceptual clarification of man's (sic) relation to transcendence.? 2 In doing so he attempts to explicate the relationship between the concepts of faith and belief.

Characteristically throughout these two pieces Smith uses definition and the evolution of the meanings of words as a tool to argue his point. He applied the same method in his earlier work The Meaning and End of Religion, where by looking closely at the term ?religion? he argued that faith was not the same as religion. ?Religion? should be abandoned in favour of the pair of terms ?faith? and ?cumulative tradition?. In these later pieces he concentrates on faith.

Faith for Smith is diverse but not so diverse as belief. Faith cuts across religious boundaries and thus has a generic quality. He is concerned to demonstrate this quality by examining what he seesas different instances of faith. Faith is the motivating force behind different religious expressions whether they be in symbols, beliefs, rituals or scriptures. It is faith that relates human beings to transcendence. As Smith's thought developed over the years it is possible to see a growing preference for the term ?transcendence? over the term ?God?. Thus it is possible for him to include Buddhists in his analysis of faith. In Faith and Belief he discusses the point that for the Buddha and for Buddhists there is permanence in the flux of the universe that is to be discovered in the universal Dharma, a firmness which is to be trusted by Buddhists who follow the eightfold path.

In Patterns of Faith Around the World Smith gives examples of particular symbols that people from different faiths have found meaningful as an aid to look at what faith means for them. So for Buddhists, he gives the example of a young boy's initiation ceremony, which re-enacts the Going Out ceremony of Gautama, the Buddha. This suggests the leaving behind of dependence on others and the growing into maturity and setting out on the Buddhist way. He is attempting to elicit in this attractive book an insight that people of another tradition might gain into what it means to be Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim etc. He consistently avoids the use of nouns such as Buddhism, Hinduism etc., which he sees as reifying into a system something which is active and personal. For him the adjective and the verb are more truly evocative of the faith he seeks to explore.

Throughout his works Smith overtly referred to the method he was using and the terms he applied most frequently to this were ?historical? and ?comparative?. He was also concerned to make clear that he was by inclination an intellectual, seeing his particular role as one of clarification.

Suspicious of linguistic philosophy, which dominated the philosophical scene in the West during the formative part of his career, he nevertheless acknowledged that he shared with it the concern for the meaning of words and appreciation of the ways that they are used. Tentatively he saw himself as moving towards theology, but primarily he was a historian and it was as a historian that he examined the role of faith in the lives of individuals. Controversially he contended that this meant he was examining the relationship of human beings to the transcendent. For Smith the empirical approach of the historian demonstrated that faith was a natural and wholesome condition of being human and the denial of faith was an aberration. So he was critical of Western secularism, which he felt, needed to be raised to an awareness of its own cultural and historical conditioning. This was a conclusion that he was driven to by his comparative approach. By looking at the broad sweep of human history so it was possible to see that throughout that history, faith had been what was essential to being truly human.

What is the value of reissuing these works, so long after their original conception? In his lifetime Smith was always someone who set his own agenda. He claimed that much of his original thinking was a reflection on his own experience of encounter with individuals of different religious back grounds. In the field of inter-faith dialogue it is now a common place to say that encounter is between persons rather than systems of belief, yet much of that insight is owed to Smith. He believed that such encounter on a significant level would enable meaningful insight into the faith of the other with the implication that what was in common was a relationship with the transcendent.

For the individual involved in encounter, one may ask if it is possible to gain such an appreciation of the faith of another. Smith acknowledged that faith itself is not uniform. It may be what he called narrow as well as broad and wholesome, but one may question whether he was being too optimistic, even as far as wholesome faith is concerned, in expecting mutual recognition between those who feel themselves to be committed participants in faithful activity. For the student of religion Smith's ideas raise the whole issue of how religion may be studied in the academic world, and whether it is possible to treat religion, or indeed any subject, in an ?objective? manner. Is it possible for the student to enter empathetically into the world of the other? Yet for the theologian or his/her counterpart in different faith traditions is not Smith denying the distinctiveness of the respective understandings of the objects of faith, by concentrating on faith itself? For many, belief does make a difference. Can only the ?insider? understand? Is it appropriate to see the faith of a Buddhist as generically like that of a theist? Smith indicated that his study led him to the conclusion that ?it is the faith of Muslims that has made the Qur'an the Word of God. It is the faith of men and women that elevates a system of symbols to the religious level. Without this human involvement, the system would remain inert.?3 Many might concur with his contention that it is the faith behind any human system that enlivens it. Many might also agree with his assertion that it is this faith that is the key factor, but the reality has to be faced that for many faithful adherents it is not primarily the faith of human beings that gives validity to revelation. Smith himself indeed did see transcendence as being prior, but the interplay between this and his stress on the human character of faith is one that needs further exploration than it is possible to give here.