GKB
Enterprises

Home

Publishing

William Robertson Smith

Additional papers

Contact Details

Contact:
Website design by
Araucaria Computing

The Portals of Discovery

—Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
— James Joyce: Ulysses (Scylla and Charybdis).

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d
that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race,
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity
much rather: that which purifies us is triall,
and triall is by what is contrary.
— John Milton: Areopagitica.

No one ever under-estimated Robertson Smith’s intellectual stature. As Carnegie Simpson wrote:

It may be questioned if any man in modern times has displayed a greater variety of brilliant gifts than did William Robertson Smith during the trial both before his Presbytery and in the subsequent appeal to the higher courts. In Old Testament criticism he was facile princeps, but his talents seemed unlimited. In pure theology, he taught his hearers the doctrine of inspiration from the great divines as few had taught it before. In law, he showed a knowledge and an acumen that overwhelmed professional authorities. In sheer dialectic he was irresistible, and many a time left his opponents lying pierced under the fifth rib. And with it all emerged the man’s simple religious, protestant, evangelical faith. The Church was trying him, but he was educating the Church.1

Even in the final throes of the Free Church of Scotland’s protracted sacrificial process, Smith’s talents were conscientiously noted by his accusers, almost as if his misdemeanours were thereby accounted all the more reprehensible. Thus the final motion recommending his dismissal observed:

That all this [the publication of the article “Hebrew Language and Literature”] has deepened the convictions entertained by a large section of the Church that Professor Smith, whatever his gifts and attainments, which the Assembly have no disposition to undervalue, ought no longer to be entrusted with the training of students for the ministry.2

The question of Smith’s temperament was quite another matter. To Principal Rainy (and to many of the old guard within the Kirk) Smith was “an impossibility”3 – perhaps in part because of his formidable and thus intimidating intellect, but also because he felt impelled, again and again, to utter so plainly and uncompromisingly those findings which were the fruits of his studies in the Hebrew Bible. Such boldness was somehow felt to be quite unacceptable – and certainly consonant neither with academic nor ecclesiastical respectability. If Smith’s clerical peers could not confess openly to feeling personally disturbed by his “advanced views”4, it was a simpler matter to conclude that the open expression of such views was bound to be “unsettling” to younger minds. When Rainy informed the Assembly that “[t]his matter began with the publication of the article ‘Bible’” , he was, of course, disregarding the long developmental process which had shaped Smith’s character and personality – in childhood, through the years at Aberdeen University, at New College, and during the five subsequent years of travel and study which had elapsed before the storm broke in 1876. Rainy studiously repudiated also the profound shifts in public attitudes which had been growing increasingly evident in the course of the preceding half century and which could scarcely be ignored by the 1870s.5

Truth and error

In 1874, John Morley, Liberal politician, agnostic, and editor of the Fortnightly Review, published one of the forgotten minor classics of late Victorian prose, an “essay” entitled On Compromise.6 It represents a compelling plea for the honest and open expression of doubt, for the eradication of hypocrisy and dissimulation in both politics and religion, and for the abandonment of that spirit of compromise (in the pejorative sense) whereby error is actively condoned on the grounds of expediency or “safety”. The influence of John Stuart Mill’s masterly and much more familiar treatise On Liberty is evident throughout the book but Morley’s essay is less abstract and closer, in time and relevance, to the events surrounding Robertson Smith’s trial. Morley’s vigorous attack on double standards, obfuscation and equivocation are directed principally towards the Church of England yet they may be seen to apply with equal if not stronger force to the actions and attitudes of the Free Church of Scotland.

By 1871, government legislation had finally eliminated the formal demand for conformity to the Thirty-Nine Articles7 in relation to academic posts at Oxford and Cambridge, while ecclesiastical tests of orthodoxy had largely been removed in respect of public appointments generally.8 Morley argued, however, that clerical attitudes had not changed materially: there remained a deep fear of change and a corresponding reluctance to face up to new circumstances. The picture which he paints is vividly evocative of the Free Church of Scotland’s reaction to Robertson Smith’s encyclopaedia articles:

Those who dwell in the tower of ancient faith look about them in constant apprehension, misgiving, and wonder, with the hurried mien of people living amid earthquakes. The air seems to their alarm to be full of missiles, and all is doubt, hesitation, and shivering expectation… While thought stirs and knowledge extends, [the Church] remains fast moored by ancient formularies. While the spirit of man expands to search after new light, and feels energetically for new truth, the spirit of the Church is eternally entombed within the four corners of acts of parliament. Her ministers vow almost before they have crossed the threshold of manhood that they will search no more. They virtually swear that they will to the end of their days believe what they believe then, before they have time to think or to know the thoughts of others.9

Quoting Newman to the effect that what the Anglican Church sought and admired were “sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No”,10 Morley asserted that the Church had become yet more dedicated to “the triumph of the political method in spiritual things, and of the subordination of ideas to the status quo”.11 Quite erroneously (at least in the case of the Free Church of Scotland) Morley believed that the “private Churches” were largely free from the perverse repression of what he described as “the free play and access of intellectual light”.12 In the established church, he wrote, there was a prevalent assumption that the educated individual was privileged to exercise his own mind freely, provided that the unlearned remained undisturbed in those traditional beliefs imparted to them by the Church.13

Within this “dual doctrine”, founded upon a long-established belief in the social “utility of error”14, lay (so Morley argued) the source of that hypocrisy which pervaded Victorian society at every level.15 There existed two “castes”, the one controlling, the other controlled: those who were competent to think for themselves, and those (including women, children and the lower classes) who were incapable of rational thought and who consequently needed direction in matters of belief:

… supposing that the enlightened caste were to consent to abandon the common people to what are assumed to be lower and narrower forms of truth,—which is after all little more than a fine phrase for forms of falsehood,—what can be more futile than to suppose that such a compromise will be listened to for a single moment by a caste whose first principle is that they are the possessors and ministers, not of an inferior or superior form of truth, but of the very truth itself, absolute, final, complete, divinely sent, infallibly interpreted? The disciples of the relative may afford to compromise. The disciples of the absolute, never.16

Social progress, urged Morley, depended on “the gradual displacement of error, step by step”, for:

All error is what the physiologists call fissiparous, and in exterminating one false opinion you may be hindering the growth of an uncounted brood of false opinions.17

The intentional preservation of error might induce a comforting sense of “social ease” but the ultimate consequences were “mischievous”:

By leaving the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give ease to an existing generation, but the present ease is purchased at the cost of future growth. To have been deprived of the faith of the old dispensation is the first condition of strenuous endeavour after the new.18

Compromise in the negative sense was to be found, Morley insisted, in three distinct forms: “disingenuousness” arising from undue deference towards tradition or towards other people’s opinions; “positive simulation” in the shape of a false outward conformity to conventional orthodoxy; and “pusillanimity” in failing to act on one’s convictions.19 In the Robertson Smith case, the unhappy instance of A.B. Davidson is perhaps the most obvious example of the last of these three.20 Disingenuousness and simulation may readily be discerned in the public discourse of most of Smith’s active opponents, and Robert Rainy’s speech to the 1881 Assembly illustrates both features. Despite his renowned skills in addressing and manipulating his audiences, Rainy displayed manifest discomfort on this occasion and, as Smith himself was to remark, the Assembly had accordingly been subjected to “a long and rambling speech”21 characterised by tedious circumlocution, lengthy parenthetical qualifications and, at times, patent equivocation. Rainy’s words were characterised, moreover, by that sapient “mistiness” which Morley (quoting Newman) had identified as a leading element of both political and ecclesiastical pronouncements. The following sample of Rainy’s tortuous style on this occasion is typical:

… Professor Smith [in the article “Bible”] took a method which also struck most of us as novel—I mean this, that whereas there had been, I do not say an authoritative consent, but a practical consent, as to the view of such matters that was, on the whole, safe and congruous to our way of looking at Scripture, and the connection of argument on that subject—on many of these points Professor Smith saw fit to vary from that. I do not say that this was to be regarded as of itself a ground of objection. But at the same time I wish to say this, that matters of that kind which, in themselves, severally and separately, may not be suitable to be taken in hand for censure, might conceivably—and that is all I say as they bear on inquiry—they might conceivably indicate a mode of dealing with evidence, and reaching conclusions that might awaken anxiety in the Church, and call forth concern in connection with the principles on which this chair was taught.22

Rainy remarked upon the air of “decision and confidence” with which WRS had advanced his radical views and observed that he himself had been criticised for not recognising such decisiveness as a virtue. Perhaps, he acknowledged with momentary candour, Smith’s boldness did represent “strength, and courage and clearness”; yet, for his part, the contrary tendency, far from being “the result of timidity or unclearness” illustrated a more respectable and reverential resolution “not to be sure of things which God has not given you the means of being sure about”.23 New ideas, especially when put forth with vigour and decisiveness, raised questions which could not be passively heard in relative equanimity:

Now this is the state of things in which we find ourselves at the end of five years. It appears to me that this itself—this complication of the convictions stated, of the manner of stating them—of the persistency and the aggravations—I am not speaking of moral aggravations, or aggravations of culpa, but the increased intensity and perplexity of the problem raised for us—these are the circumstances that really raise the question of continuing to entrust the training of students to Professor Smith.24

And Principal Rainy proceeded to invoke the dubiously conceived notion of a “reserve power”, conveniently vested within the Church, as the most appropriate and expedient means of removing Smith from his chair at the Aberdeen College, acknowledging that the process of libel could not effectively touch his victim. He concluded:

It is a very grave burden to my own mind. A man who, with his known scholarly accomplishments, and God forbid that I should suggest a doubt of what, with my whole soul, I believe, who, with his believing heart, has a power to impress himself on the public mind the most signal of the whole staff of our professors,25 but, more than that, a man who tells that he desires no other and no better thing than to serve you, and to serve Christ in his professorship… Yes, fathers and brethren, think well what you do. It is a great sacrifice not to Professor Smith merely. It is a great sacrifice to us. If you doubt your power, do not use it; but if you believe that the case has arisen, has become such a case—a complication threatening [such] grave and serious issues that it is no longer fit that even this professor should be maintained in the office which he occupies … then, if you think that, you must act, and you must take the responsibility and the unpopularity of your action.26

It was an effective peroration to an otherwise protracted, convoluted and, at times, decidedly insecure address to the Assembly. Rainy may well not have realised how close he had come to arguing for the suppression of free and open expression of speech on the grounds of naked expediency.27 That stalwart opponent of Huxley, St George Mivart,28 whose fervent Catholicism would scarcely have recommended him to the Free Church of Scotland, had lost no opportunity in the periodical press during the 1870s to attack the atheistic implications of Darwinism and had openly avowed the social utility of error, on the grounds that, should theism ever be abandoned, it would be prudent for a philanthropist “to select from amongst what he deems the mythologies of his day that which he considers the most calculated to promote human happiness, and to, more or less, support it”.29 The search for truth was justified, argued Mivart, only insofar as the reality of a personal soul and the existence of human free will were underwritten by an absolute assurance of divine goodness within the “theistic postulate”.30

Mivart’s subsequent fall from grace, well-documented in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, bears some analogy with Smith’s own story, while being in certain respects still more disturbing.31 As a scientist and a liberal Catholic, Mivart explained, he had eventually become unable to endorse the Church’s claims of utter infallibility and dogmatic immutability.32 His personal and dramatic change of view had emerged from a prolonged study of the modern proponents of the higher criticism:

For many years I experienced but few difficulties in this matter [of Catholic beliefs in relation to Scriptural inspiration], but after a careful perusal of the works of Reuss, Bishop Colenso, W. Robertson Smith, Wellhausen, and Kuenen, I felt it necessary to test the amount of tolerance which could be extended by Catholic authority to views which it seemed to me had become necessary ones for us to hold.33

With a plain allusion to Robertson Smith’s “Bible” article, Mivart cited the heterogeneity of the Scriptures and the folly of treating each book – indeed each word – as uncompromisingly and literally inspired:

It is enough to make the gorge of any honest man rise through profound disgust at such trifling and double-dealing with things declared to be so sacred that matters of mere life and death are nothing in comparison. In very truth the Bible is a complex collection of most varied documents. They contain much that is admirable and valuable, but also legends, myths, contradictory assertions, accounts expressly falsified to suit later times, mere human fictions and words spoken in the name of the Lord without having any authority for attributing to them such a sacred character. There are stories which merit most reverent treatment, and there are stories no more worthy of respect than the history of Jack and the Beanstalk.34

That such blunt talking could by now be sanctioned within the pages of a respected journal, and such sentiments candidly expressed within the public domain, is indicative of the remarkable shift in attitude and practice which had occurred by the end of the Victorian era.35 It is also testimony to the steady propagation of modern, popular scientific writings, to the widening dissemination of agnostic opinion and, not least, to the posthumous influence of Robertson Smith, all of which factors served to bring about the notable “paradigm shift” in Biblical criticism. Smith’s own acceptance of evolutionary principles enabled him to hold to the belief in a process of “progressive revelation”, within which his own work could quite readily be incorporated. In retrospect, however, the suddenness of the transformation in theology had more in common with the “punctuated equilibrium” variant of evolutionary theory, whereby change occurs violently and even catastrophically, after a long period of apparent quiescence, as the result of the slow growth of hidden tensions which eventually create intense instability and become unsustainable.36

Nur keine Compromisse! 37

Even as the prospects for victory faded and his own loyal supporters began to show signs of discouragement, Smith maintained an almost indomitable optimism38 and he repeatedly penned hortatory slogans to them during 1880 and early 1881. Hopeful of winning over the more Laodicean amongst the faithful, he wrote for example to Lindsay:

What I wish to say is, Il faut de l’Audace. It will never do to be afraid of the people you call Adullamites. We must for once get these men – all men who care for the Free Church – to come out and take their due part. It is far too late to confine ourselves to the received influential people for aid.39

While admiring his sanguine temperament, not all of those broadly sympathetic to Robertson Smith entirely approved his pugnacious and uncompromising pertinacity. Walter Smith was one of those advising the merits of an eirenic approach – if not of actual compromise – for the sake of recovering lost support following publication of the article “Hebrew Language and Literature” in 1881. He adds in a postscript:

On reading this hurried note over, I find there is just one thing to be added. Please put off your war-paint, & come out as a man of peace, who clings to the church because he loves it, & the evangelic truth which it maintains. All this you can do without compromise of your freedom or your convictions. Put your heart into it & for the present never mind your head. They know the latter already, but not so much of the former. If they did they would be ashamed of themselves.40

The penultimate statement was certainly apposite. For those who knew Smith neither as an intimate friend nor as a pupil, and whose perception of his character was obtained from the barrage of polemical exchanges in the press, it was scarcely possible to be aware either of his lively sociability or of his genuine interest in the spiritual welfare and advancement of the Free Church. For those influenced only by the vituperative pamphleteering sustained over a five year period, it was hardly credible that Smith could be conceived as other than a merciless intellectual threat to traditional beliefs and values. Yet WRS possessed relatively little of the obsessive in his nature, beyond a drive (inherited and acquired) towards academic perfection and an inextinguishable desire to elicit the truth.41 Those traits, nevertheless, were sufficient to place him, in terms of intellectual openness and candour, at the opposite end of the spectrum to such men as Robert Rainy, whose practised use of Morley’s “mistiness” by means of obfuscation and the balancing of contrary opinions renders their services invaluable for the delicate maintenance of stability within the institutional corridors of power.42 By virtue of his personality, however, Robertson Smith could never have tolerated the kind of tergiversation repeatedly demonstrated by Rainy in his lecture series, The Bible and Criticism:

The absolute adoption of any opinion, prematurely, avenges itself. For, once it is absolutely adopted, it then demands to be applied. While it is in suspense, it is inactive; when finally embraced it acts. It becomes, and must become, a stepping-stone to new conclusions, wider and deeper than itself. Now, more patient and prolonged reckoning with difficulties might have brought fresh lights and new modifications; under the influence of these, any truth that is in the theory could have been safely and accurately applied to further investigations. But a position, when hastily adopted, must be hastily applied. Then more or less, it betrays us on to unsound ground, by-and-by to be reconsidered and abandoned, but with increased confusion in the mean time.43

Principal Rainy clearly had Smith in mind when he delivered those words, although it is characteristic of his approach that he skirts clear of any direct allusion to the controversy. The argument is one which, taken to an extreme, would immobilise any action whatsoever and vitiate any prospect of change or development; as such, it surely validates Smith’s warning to Simpson about Rainy’s “jesuitical” cast of mind. Not only would the idea of such temporising have been anathema to Smith, given his active and insatiably inquiring temperament, but the argument, as presented, stands wholly contrary to the principles of scientific investigation. Where Rainy would indefinitely postpone action of any kind, pending further illumination of some unspecified nature, the scientific method presupposes verification or falsification through application – the conscientious and remorseless “testing out” of hypotheses.

Robertson Smith’s friends were always conscious of the dangers inherent in his impetuosity, his forthrightness and (at times) his irascibility. In an impressive speech to the 1881 Assembly, Dr Alexander Whyte,44 speaking to the counter-motion in Smith’s favour, observed:

I am not here to defend or apologise for all the things that may have helped to make Professor Smith obnoxious to some of his brethren. He has the vices, no doubt—we all have—he has the vices that accompany his intellectual and moral virtues. He has the temper that is always ready to be generated in a temperament like his. He has not always had a bridle in his mouth when his opponents were before him. All that is no doubt true, but let him who has always shown sympathy with the anxieties of his foes cast the first stone.45

And he went on:

He is fitted by gifts, by learning, by sagacity, by descent, and by personal piety, to serve you as few men in any generation possibly can, and you are sitting here deliberating how you can speedily cast him over your walls to the scorn and rejoicing of the besieging enemy. Surely, surely the Free Church of Scotland will not brand herself as such a hard-hearted, short-sighted, panic-stricken mother to her loyal, if adventurous son.46

But the Free Church did so. Carnegie Simpson argued, perhaps with some justification, that Smith’s failure to see (or empathise with) the perplexities of his opponents was illustrative of “a remarkable intellectual simplicity” and he continued, rather more speculatively:

William Robertson Smith had the passion of the lover for truth. You could see it in that pale face with its sensitive, indeed petulant, mouth, and its large, bright, eager eyes. And he assumed that his Church shared that love… He never doubted that she would be equally ready to learn new ways of truth as these seemed to be discovered. This does not mean that Professor Smith assumed that the Church would at once agree with his views. But what surprised him was that they should provoke resentment, charges of heresy, proposals of proscription.47

That “simplicity” is perhaps better termed openness and trustfulness, attitudes undoubtedly born (like his evangelical faith) of Smith’s remarkable early upbringing at the manse of Keig under his father’s Hebrew text48 — a loving-kindness tempered by sternness. There exists a curious comment by the father that, “I venture to say that really he [WRS] was never young in the ordinary sense”49 and it is difficult to judge whether this refers solely to the son’s intellectual precocity or alludes also to his temperament. Certainly, some anecdotal evidence paints the picture of a boy whose primness and often sarcastic pedantry could at times be overbearing, in contrast to the more boyish behaviour of his equally intelligent and highly-achieving younger brother, George.50 The personal reminiscences of others is less condemnatory.51 The powerful attachment between father and son remained intimate and apparently unconstrained until Pirie Smith’s death and seems to contrast powerfully with the openly-expressed ambivalence of John Stuart Mill towards the excessively strict training which he received at the hands of the elder Mill.52 Nevertheless, it is certainly plausible that some of Smith’s subsequent disputatious and rebellious stance towards the Free Church may be explained in Freudian terms as an unconscious projection of the boy’s unresolved childhood battles with his father, regardless of the fact that William Pirie Smith actively encouraged the intellectual sparring between himself and his eldest son.

Robertson Smith’s religious faith

In terms of the dichotomy proposed by the eminent American psychologist, William James, in his Gifford Lectures,53 a religious believer fell either into the class of those who were “once-born” and “healthy-minded”, or amongst those who were “twice-born” and “soul-sick”.54 A life-long and secure conviction of one’s religious faith, accompanied by spiritual self-assurance and a firm sense of union with the divine, characterised the former individual – “developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis”.55 The spreading belief in the theory of evolution was conducive, thought James, to such a temperament:

The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have neither been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme.56

The “healthy-minded” Christian believer was little cumbered by an enduring sense of sin. By contrast, James’s “sick soul” possessed a “low threshold”57 for doubt, guilt and spiritual pain:

The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.58

Within the terms of James’s broad categorisation, there would be little question as to placing Robertson Smith firmly at the “healthy-minded” end of the continuum. Temperamentally ebullient and cheerful, he seems never to have been subject to crises of conscience, nor did he suffer those agonising doubtings of faith which were so characteristic of many Victorian writers – for the “soul-sick” include all those Victorians whose faith wavered or crumbled under the tensions imposed by the scientific and rationalistic Zeitgeist.59 On the Jamesean hypothesis, the “healthy-minded” believer had no need of the regenerating or re-integrating impact of a conversion experience – and this applies well in Smith’s case. In his “Memorandum”, the father noted that, after many severe childhood illnesses (before the age of twelve):

… we had the consolation of learning that a work of grace was wrought upon him and in such a form that he was at length delivered from the fear of death … That the change wrought upon him was real, we had many satisfactory evidences – not the less satisfactory that there was no parade of piety, no sanctimoniousness, but a cheerful performance of daily duty, truthfulness in word and deed, and a conscientiousness which we could not help thinking was sometimes morbid.60

It is not entirely clear what William Pirie Smith meant by “a work of grace” but it was certainly not envisaged as any sudden, dramatic transformation, for father and son alike were adamant in their disapproval of an ostentatious or histrionic piety. In his 1882 memorandum, the father wrote:

Once and once only did I deal with him personally about his spiritual state and the most I got from him was “I am not sure”. To say the truth I do not now and I never did approve of the practice, at one time, and perhaps still, very usual, of asking young people, or for that matter old people too, such questions as Have you been converted? Are you a child of God? And the like… So the custom was not in use in our family; and we have no cause for regret on that account.61

Seven years earlier, in his end-of-session address, “The Place of Theology in the Work and Growth of the Church”, Robertson Smith had warned his students in just those terms against embracing a religious life that was emotionally subjective, inward-looking and intellectually shallow:

It is supposed that a man is saved by believing that he is saved, by gaining, through some kind of empirical experience, a conviction that he has passed from death to life. Of course such a faith is not belief in God, but something internal to oneself, and therefore has no true relation to any true knowledge of God, and gives no starting-point for a theology. But the people who hold these views … are a kind of Protestant mystics … and when they become sufficiently conscious of their own position to separate from the Church, they form these monotonous sects, whose one spiritual weapon is the ever repeated question, “Have you believed?” and whose theology consists of abusive polemic and millenarian dreams.62

There were strong hints in the same address of Smith’s growing dissatisfaction both with the low standards of theological knowledge demanded by the Free Church and with the inadequate administrative competence of its “higher courts”. “Loose, unshaped knowledge,” he protested, “never leads to clear and decided action”; and he continued boldly:

Every attentive student of the past history of Scottish Presbyterianism, and especially of the last few years, must admit that the larger problems that lie before a Church which aims at visible catholicity, are not yet even theoretically solved—that they remain problems partly because our higher Church courts are not sufficiently skilled in the practical application of our present theological ideas, but partly also because these ideas themselves are on many points too unclear and defective to serve present needs.63

Yet WRS was facing his personal Scylla and Charybdis, one plainly deriving from the values so intensively inculcated by his father. The weaknesses of his own Church were not simply a threat to its own survival; they reflected the more general shortcomings of modern religious practice in the face of humanist attacks upon the traditional preserves of Christianity. Smith’s lecture to his students came only nine months after Tyndall’s Belfast address in August, 1874, and none of its implications had been missed:

When the assertion that theology perishes but religion remains passes from mouth to mouth … the formula in question is nothing more than a cant phrase, which decently veils pretentious ignorance, or nothing less than a disguise of affected sentiment cast over the nakedness of shamefaced atheism. The contest must now be between the developed systems of the philosophy of Christianity and the philosophy of the religion of humanity.64

By a process of benevolent yet ineluctable conditioning, William Pirie Smith had bestowed on his son not only a deep and unshakeable Christian faith but also an equally powerful commitment to the best Reformation principles of humanist learning and scientific study, as these had developed and matured within the eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish philosophic tradition – and those principles were to be for ever at odds with much of what the son witnessed of the intellectually indifferent practice and theologically static precept of the Free Church.65 John Tyndall and Robertson Smith had much in common, in terms of scientific curiosity, driving enthusiasm, quick combativeness and fine skills in communication. What perhaps so antagonised Smith towards Tyndall was a subconscious realisation of the genuine affinity between the personalities of the two men.

Robertson Smith’s religious faith, however, rested on even surer foundations than those stemming from the schooling obtained at his father’s hand. It was the whole ethos of family life, in all its aspects, at the Free Church Manse of Keig which gave form and shape to his life-long beliefs – although these became subtly transmuted as his thought broadened and his ties with the Free Church weakened. A favourite Victorian metaphor was that of stratification – and Smith himself found this an admirable vehicle for explaining the growth and development of religion:

The record of the religious thought of mankind, as it is embodied in religious institutions, resembles the geologic record of the history of the earth’s crust; the new and the old are preserved side by side, or rather layer upon layer.66

Moreover, his last major work, The Religion of the Semites, gratuitously discloses, layer upon layer, the manner in which his own religious faith was laid down in childhood and subsequently transformed through the creative intellectual ferment of the passing years. Careful excavation reveals the core elements, although the surface picture – the directly visible landscape of Smith’s mind – has been transformed by the passage of time and the impact of his life events. The almost idyllic picture of early religion is recast out of his own childhood memories, and shaped afresh by a deterministic rationalism:

A man did not choose his religion or frame it for himself; it came to him as part of the general scheme of social obligations laid upon him, as a matter of course, by his position in the family and in the nation… A certain amount of religion was required of everybody; for the due performance of religious acts was a social obligation in which every one had his appointed share… Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.67

The central theme of his Burnett lectures (Smith told his audience at the outset) was to be “the great subject of sacrifice”, for “[t]he origin and meaning of sacrifice constitute the central problem of ancient religion”.68 But first he had to account for the origins of morality. The blood ties of kinship, Smith argued, together with the social obligations arising out of tribal affiliation, formed the basis for that reciprocity of behaviour out of which developed a sense of morality, itself the core human feature of Christianity.69 There was no better analogy than the domestic one:

The relation of a father to his children has a moral as well as a physical aspect and each of these must be taken into account in considering what the fatherhood of the tribal deity meant in ancient religion… The moral aspect of fatherhood, again, lies in the social relations and obligations which flow from the physical relationship—in the sanctity of the tie of blood which binds together the whole family, and in the particular modification of this tie in the case of parent and child, the parent protecting and nourishing the child, while the child owes obedience and service to his parent.70

And the behaviour of Smith’s Semitic god bears a striking resemblance to what we know of William Pirie Smith’s management and nurture of his own children:

The Semitic nature is impatient of control, and has no desire to be strictly governed, either by human or divine authority. A god who could be reached when he was wanted, but usually left men pretty much to themselves, was far more acceptable than one whose ever watchful eye can neither be avoided nor deceived … the sense that the god was always near, and could be called upon at need was a moral force continually working in some degree for the maintenance of social righteousness and order.71

But it is in discussing the primal nature of mankind’s relationship with God that Robertson Smith is at his most eloquent – in presenting his vision of the tribe or nation as an extended family, with the deity presiding genially over all his offspring and with this relationship being cemented by a communal act of carefree celebration, in which:

… the habitual temper of the worshippers is one of joyous confidence in their god, untroubled by any habitual sense of human guilt, and resting on the firm conviction that they and the deity they adore are good friends, who understand each other perfectly and are united by bonds not easily broken.72

Smith’s description of primal religion reflects, in William James’s terms, the predominantly “healthy-minded” character of his religious thinking – always sufficiently “real” in a personal sense (however much idealised) to carry him through the vicissitudes of his own life. Even as his account moves onwards from the “childhood of religion” and the picture grows more sombre, Robertson Smith succeeds in avoiding those feelings of melancholy, pessimism, anguish or existential despair which, as James illustrated abundantly, afflicted both the wavering positivistic agnostic and such hyper-sensitive believers as Bunyan or Tolstoy. Primal religion, moreover, made no distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal,73 and this in part allowed Smith to evade the angst created by those two fundamental philosophic problems which beset most thinking Victorians – whether science could properly investigate the “unknowable”; and whether the supernatural could rationally be affirmed to exist. Indeed, after his vigorous early defence of the supernatural,74 WRS made, as we have seen, progressively fewer references to that topic. While he never wholly abrogated a belief in the supernatural, and while his writings on prophecy and the prophets always presupposed the guiding influence of the Holy Spirit, he recognised that meaningful research, along scientific lines, could only be pursued effectively if it were directed towards the phenomenal:

… the detachment of the invisible life from its visible embodiment is never complete. A man after all is not a ghost or phantom, a life or soul without a body, but a body with its life… And in ritual the sacred object was spoken of and treated as the god himself; it was not merely his symbol but his embodiment, the permanent centre of his activity in the same sense in which the human body is the permanent centre of man’s activity.75

These basic “bonding” rituals between man and his god – once spontaneous, “elastic” and “joyous” – were, for Smith, a natural expression of Darwinian evolution:

The communities of ancient civilisation were formed by the survival of the fittest, and they had all the self-confidence and elasticity that are engendered by success in the struggle for life. These characters, therefore, are reflected in the religious system that grew up with the growth of the state, and the type of worship that corresponded to them was not felt to be inadequate till the political system was undermined from within or shattered by blows from without.76

With the growth of political structures and under the impact of external threat, the simplicity and spontaneity of the old rites gave way to hieratic or monarchic control of institutionalised ritual, sanctioned by post-exilic legislation founded upon an elaborate system of rationalisation. It was one of Robertson Smith’s primary psychological insights – later seized upon by Sigmund Freud – that the practice of a rite emerged before the post hoc formulation of the corresponding belief.77

Smith’s contribution to both sociology and anthropology quickly became widely recognised. Emile Durkheim drew extensively on The Religion of the Semites in his influential exploration into the origins of religion,78 and acknowledged the importance of Robertson Smith’s rejection of traditional explanations of sacrifice:

According to Smith, sacrificial banquets have the object of making the worshipper and his god communicate in the same flesh, in order to form a bond of kinship between them. From this point of view, sacrifice takes on a wholly new aspect. Its essential element is no longer the act of renunciation which the word sacrifice ordinarily expresses; before all, it is an act of alimentary communion.79

So too, Durkheim is explicit in giving Smith the credit for elucidating the fundamental elements of totemism:

Robertson Smith is the first who undertook this work of elaboration. He realised more clearly than any of his predecessors how rich this crude and confused religion is in germs for the future …It is true that the theory of Smith can now be shown to be one-sided; it is no longer adequate for the facts actually known; but for all that it has exercised a most fertile influence upon the science of religion.80

But it was Freud rather than Durkheim who had come first to The Religion of the Semites and who was to make that book the cornerstone of that remarkable theory which, however, mythical in its details, was to shape, in the most profound and pervasive way, the whole of twentieth-century thinking about human development and behaviour. Freud first read Smith’s book in August, 1912, and found it both enthralling and revelatory.81 Indeed, its contents were to provide the final key to Freud’s own understanding of the Oedipus complex, as he graphically describes in An Autobiographical Study:

The chief literary sources of my studies in this field were the well-known works of J.G. Frazer … But Frazer effected little towards elucidating the problems of totemism (not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same totem-clan) and the two elements of the Oedipus complex (getting rid of the father and taking the woman to wife).82

After explaining how he perceived the totem animal to be a substitute for the father and then postulated an “infantile return of totemism”, he goes on:

Not much was lacking to enable me to recognise the killing of the father as the nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of religion.
This missing element was supplied when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work, The Religion of the Semites. Its author (a man of genius who was both a physicist and an expert in biblical researches) introduced the so-called “totem meal” as an essential part of the totemic religion.83

Drawing somewhat uncritically upon Darwin’s concept of the “primal horde” as the archetypal form of human society, Freud identified Smith’s sacrificial killing of the totem animal at times of great communal crisis with the primeval murder of the father by the young men of the clan: from this event stemmed remorse, followed by a collective agreement to practise exogamy rather than commit the incest which had been their basic urge.84 In Totem and Taboo, Freud had been still more laudatory of his inspirational source: WRS “was a man of many-sided interests, clear-sighted and liberal-minded”,85 whose own theory of the totem meal had been founded “on a single piece of evidence … dating from the fifth century a.d.”;86 and he proceeded to give an acute epitome of Smith’s account after setting out the hypothesised link with the Oedipus complex in the following terms:

If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core – not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem – coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis. If this equation is anything more than a misleading trick of chance, it must enable us to throw a light upon the origin of totemism in the inconceivably remote past.87

The most crucial link, however, between Robertson Smith and Freud lay in their common search for the meaning and origin of human guilt and the sense of sin; in this respect Freud (always scrupulous to acknowledge the sources of his ideas) did not consciously recognise the full extent of their joint aim and thus of his real debt to WRS. Within his account of totemism, Smith progressed to the concept of piacular or expiatory sacrifice, wherein the totem animal – the representative or substitute for the god – was ritually killed, not joyously but with great lamentation:

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin. But we must not forget that from the beginning this ritual expressed, however crudely, certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relation between man and man. And the piacular forms, though these were particularly liable to distortions disgraceful to man and dishonouring to the godhead, yet contained from the first germs of eternal truths, not only expressing the idea of divine justice, but mingling it with a feeling of divine and human pity. The dreadful sacrifice is performed not with savage joy but with awful sorrow, and in the mystic sacrifices the deity himself suffers with and for his people and lives again in their new life.88

The final chapter of The Religion of the Semites (“Lecture XI”) was heavily revised and in parts completely rewritten by Robertson Smith prior to the publication of its second edition in 1894, shortly after his death.89 James Frazer, in his obituary tribute,90 quoted the crucial passage which Smith seems to have felt too explicit:

That the God-man dies for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the oldest mystical sacrifices. It was foreshadowed, indeed, in a very crude and materialistic form, and without any of those ethical ideas which the Christian doctrine of the atonement derives from a profounder sense of sin and divine justice. And yet the voluntary death of the divine victim, which we have seen to be a conception not foreign to ancient sacrificial ritual, contained the germ of the deepest thoughts in the Christian doctrine: the thought that the Redeemer gives Himself for His people, that “for their sakes He consecrates Himself, that they also might be consecrated in truth”.91

For once, perhaps, WRS was constrained to compromise. His interpretation of piacular sacrifices, and their connection with Christian ritual, remained quite unambiguous however and was fully understood by Freud, who had read only the revised 1894 edition, together with the article “Sacrifice” in EB9.92 Smith’s exposition constituted for Freud an external, objective proof of the development process at work within human society, culture and religion, and thus a vindication of his personal theories. All that remained for Freud, in Totem and Taboo, was to relate the phenomena described by Robertson Smith to his own hypothesis of childhood development and in particular to those Oedipal fantasies which (Freud held) were an integral component of the emergence of both ego and super-ego within the individual psyche. As a child recapitulated those primal instinctual urges, so they were severely repressed, only to re-emerge unconsciously in the guise of conscience. Going beyond Smith, however, Freud stressed the intrinsically ambivalent nature of both the original rite and its childhood re-enactment. Along with the outward sorrow expressed at the commemoration of the primeval event, there was a corresponding sense of triumph, and this ambivalence was reflected similarly in the child’s rebellion against adult prohibitions, accompanied as it was by both guilt and secret satisfaction.93

It is not entirely profitless to speculate on how Robertson Smith, had he lived to the age of sixty-seven, might have responded to Freud’s use of The Religion of the Semites. There is little doubt that he would have felt gratified by yet further European recognition of his work, though this would certainly have been qualified by an awareness that Freud was both a Jew and an unbeliever. The fact that both writers possessed so much in common – lucid powers of expression, wide-ranging knowledge, penetrating originality of thought and a fertile yet disciplined imagination – is no assurance that they would have become intimate friends: indeed, the reverse would have been Freud’s expectation.94 But they would unquestionably have corresponded politely and expressed admiration for one another’s insights. It is almost certain, however, that WRS would have found it impossible to accept Freud’s theory of childhood sexuality, and it is probable that he would have rejected out of hand the link proposed between childhood fantasies and his own researches into the origins of religion.95 This is an issue which cannot be divorced from the question of Smith’s sexual orientation. For Freud, intense intellectual drive represented a means of sublimating sexual urges and, in his monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, he cites this as a reason for “the atrophy of [Leonardo’s] sexual life (which was restricted to what is called ideal [sublimated] homosexuality)”.96

Freud distinguished three possible outcomes following the standard repression of infantile sexual curiosity: neurotic inhibition; obsessive compulsive neurosis; and “a third type, which is the rarest and most perfect”, in which the instinct of curiosity “can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest”.97 It is possible to see, in this distinction between neurotic and non-neurotic modes of Oedipal transformation, a loose parallel with William James’s categorisation of “healthy minds” and “sick souls”; and it is again obvious that Robertson Smith would have been perceived by Freud as belonging to his ideal “third type”. Nevertheless, Smith’s celibacy must be seen as diminishing the completeness of his life: his attitude to women, even within his own family circle, is benevolent yet slightly patronising and, in his castigation of Middlemarch as a “morally bad book”, one can recognise an unambiguous moral condemnation of George Eliot herself. On this topic, one final comment may be made. In such a precocious child as WRS, possessed from the earliest age of an inveterate and insatiable curiosity, there could hardly have failed to exist a profound ambivalence over his father’s sexual rôle within the household and its relationship to his mother’s chronically poor state of health by the time the eldest son was an adolescent.98 In Freudian terms, Robertson Smith’s resolution of the Oedipal conflict accounts admirably for his later characterisation as a “controversialist” – already established before 1875 with his sallies at Mill, Hutchison Stirling, Bain and Tyndall – and for his bitter fight with the Free Church which had, in a very real sense, nurtured his growth and development. Unconscious aggression towards the father was transformed, by displacement, into an attack upon the elders of the tribe, who were eventually to outlaw him effectively for the commission of an unforgivable offence against their traditional standards, as set out in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Intellectually, Smith would have understood the logic of that process even if an emotional repugnance on his part refused its acceptance. Equally he would have been intrigued yet repelled at the drawing of a parallel between his self-immolation and that of Christ – though such an analogy is valid, on psychological grounds at least.

Freud continued through his later years to look to Smith’s writings for information and stimulation. In his very last book, he returned to topics that would have been of the deepest interest to Robertson Smith – the character of Moses and the origin of monotheism.99 The basis for Freud’s theory again rested upon the application to the individual of that primal event which, both he and Smith believed, had determined the shape of human society and indeed of civilization:

The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of individuals: of supposing, that is, that here too events occurred of a sexually aggressive nature, which left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most part fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came into effect and caused phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure and purpose.100

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud took Smith’s half-withdrawn comparison between the totem killing and the death of Christ much further, and went well beyond the limits that Smith, during his short life-time, would have found acceptable:

Original sin and redemption by the sacrifice of a victim became the foundation stones of the new religion founded by Paul. It must remain uncertain whether there was a ringleader and instigator to the murder among the band of brothers who rebelled against the primal father, or whether such a figure was created later by the imagination of creative artists in order to turn themselves into heroes, and was then introduced into the tradition.101

And Freud proceeded to observe that, while the ostensible aim was “reconciliation with the father” through the son’s death, the result, ironically, was to depose the father and to institute a son-religion: “[Christianity] has not escaped the fate of having to get rid of the father”.102

Sigmund Freud and Robertson Smith were alike deeply moral men. Both, however, were sanguine in temperament; and each, in his characteristic fashion, adopted an optimistic view of social and moral amelioration through the operation of evolutionary processes. As Mary Douglas has remarked:

… [Smith] could show with unrivalled erudition that all primitive religions express social forms and values. And since the moral loftiness of Israel’s religious concepts was above dispute, and since these had given way in the course of history to the ideals of Christianity and these in turn had moved from Catholic to Protestant forms, the evolutionary movement was clear. Science was thus not opposed but deftly harnessed to the Christian’s task.103

Freud too, although growing more bleak in his assessment of civilisation, still saw, in his later days, a glimmer of hope for mankind through the exercise of human reason (the Logos, as he chose to name it):

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant, distant future, but probably not an infinitely distant one. It will probably set itself the same aims as those whose realisation you [believers] expect from your God (of course within human limits – so far as external reality, Ananke, allows it), namely the love of man and the decrease of suffering.104

Top of page Previous chapter Next chapter

Introduction