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Conclusion: William Robertson Smith’s Legacy

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.
— Walter Pater: The Renaissance1

In the first volume of La Volonté de Savoir,2 Michel Foucault suggests that the topic of sex, seemingly so repressed throughout the Victorian era, was in fact widely open to discussion through a variety of specialised modes of discourse – medical, physiological, psychiatric and pedagogical – which served to disseminate and shape professional attitudes to the subject but which also effectively encouraged a distorted view of human sexuality by “giving rise to a whole perverse outbreak and a long pathology of the sexual instinct”.3 Krafft-Ebing and his colleagues in Germany had proliferated the identification of innumerable sexual pathologies or “heresies” and accorded these reality and recognition through the customary “scientific” procedures of classification and nomenclature. In the light of Foucault’s thesis, obvious parallels may be drawn between the ways in which, on the one hand, specialised and “polymorphous” techniques of discourse served to create power structures for the manipulation and control of sexual practices within society; and, on the other hand, similar strategies of discourse were employed, over a far longer time-scale, by hierocracies for the prescription and regulation of religious practice and ritual.

What is of especial relevance in the case of Robertson Smith is the illustration of the way in which he attempted, throughout his writings, to introduce a new and liberating mode of theological discourse which permitted religious ideas, in all their aspects, to be discussed openly on a plane accessible to the educated laity; to be made relatively free from the constraints and taboos of conventional Victorian discourse; to be confined no longer within the safe limits of traditional language, or restricted to safe academic debate behind closed doors.4 In Foucault’s terms, Robertson Smith was a “point of resistance” within institutionalised religion, “producing cleavages … that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings”. It is of particular interest that, at the heart of the Pentateuchal analysis, as originally set out in the article “Bible” and subsequently amplified in The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, lay an implicit indictment of the religious power structure that was created after the Exile – the development of a priestly legislative programme designed to centralise hieratic control of sacrifice and its associated rituals of purification.5 The traditional worship of the local god at his dwelling-place was abolished. Thenceforth, there would be no place for autochthonous worship and a uniform state religion would be imposed in its place.

It is wholly improbable that Robertson Smith consciously saw his critical work in this light: indeed, he is at pains in his 1880/81 lectures to make allowances for and to avoid direct criticism of the post-exilic Priestly Code,6 yet it is undeniable that his Free Church background, with its sense of national identity coupled with its emphasis on freedom from state interference, helped establish a liberationist cast of thought which WRS brought to bear systematically upon the historical, linguistic and cultural analysis of Hebrew religion and its development.7 As Foucault wrote:

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In a like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for obscure areas of tolerance.8

Smith’s writings gained far wider currency and thus wielded greater power, both through their inherent clarity and also through the notoriety of the heresy libel, than could have been achieved through writings aimed at those select and steadily diminishing readers of The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, who would have simply registered their dissent (if at all) by means of further academic papers.9

The pursuit of change

As Smith himself had observed in one of his early student presentations, nineteenth century theology was “always running into apologetics”10 – and any cursory examination of the review material of the period illustrates the force of his criticism in this respect. Apart from devotional writings and the prolific publication of sermons, the bulk of religious literature in English was of an apologetic nature and still modelled itself upon the paradigms established by Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion in 1734 and William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity in 1794.11 Chalmers’ Bridgewater Treatise of 1835 was thoroughly in this vein and stands as the last great example of the (essentially Deistic) Butlerian tradition. Chalmers adopted a simple yet eminently successful strategy throughout his two-volume work: all the wonders of Nature could be shown to have been adapted by a wise and benevolent Providence to meet the needs and interests of Man; and conversely all the characteristics and attributes of mankind could be seen to have been adapted to benefit from the divinely-established provisions of Nature. Within this convenient framework, Chalmers could range over whatever fields of human knowledge he chose – philosophy, politics, psychology, natural history or science – and draw the desired conclusions. Rather than cover the same ground as Paley, Chalmers’ stated intention was to examine the moral and mental constitution of Man and thereby to prove, “not so much that the mind is rightly constituted in itself, as that the mind is rightly placed in a befitting theatre for the exercise of its powers”.12

Chalmers’ treatise is, in many respects, an attempt to construct a psychological and socio-political text, dealing with the emotions, the will, conscience, and social organisation, while having the ulterior motive of justifying, step by step, each of those human characteristics as a self-evident instance of providential design calculated to promote universal happiness provided the maker’s instructions were followed.13 On that basis, all negative aspects of human behaviour are presented either as divine inducements towards morality or as regrettable lapses committed by a minority of depraved and lost souls. On balance, argued Chalmers, goodness always outweighed evil. Virtue, in any case, always brought happiness, while vice led inexorably to misery: “Virtue is not only seen to be right—it is felt to be delicious”.14 Chalmers’ argument is blatantly circular and depends on the assumption that all sources of satisfaction derive from the bounty of God.15 It is also an unmistakable derivative of orthodox Calvinism, although Chalmers never openly acknowledges that debt in his treatise.16

Less than fifty years later, the publication of Robertson Smith’s first set of public lectures heralded a radically new approach to theology within the English-speaking world. Certainly it remains possible to find in its pages many echoes of traditional Free Church doctrine, terminology and sentiment, but The Old Testament in the Jewish Church reads today (in Foucault’s terms) as a transparently subversive form of discourse, part theological, part scientific and analytic. Not only is its main thesis to undermine and sweep away traditional views on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch but its general tenor carries a repeated repudiation of the systematic and dogmatic theology upon which past generations of Scotsmen (Moderates and Evangelicals alike) had been nourished. In his main argument, Smith’s logic is unassailable as he proceeds step by step, with delicate circumspection allied to complete self-assurance, to outline the evidence for the Graf-Kuenen-Wellhausen hypothesis and to demonstrate thereby the complex sequence of legislation within the Hebrew Bible.17

At the same time, there are indications throughout the text of internal tensions which Robertson Smith was not able adequately to resolve. It was integral to his late Victorian view of evolution as a divinely ordered, ameliorative process that the processes of social and legislative change must of necessity result in beneficial outcomes.18 Hence he was at pains to rationalise the introduction of the Deuteronomic legislation under Josiah – it softened the harshness of ancient customs and was in keeping with the needs of a more civilised society: “The new code, you perceive, marks a growth in morality and refinement”.19 The final legislative innovations (the post-Exilic “Priestly Code” of the Second Temple era) made sacrifice a formal ritual carried out by the select few, yet could be justified, somewhat lamely, as providing “spiritual nourishment to those who were far from the sanctuary”, while the institution of a priest-led liturgy “naturally prepared the way for the New Testament”.20 Here it is difficult to avoid sensing that Robertson Smith was struggling to find some positive features in post-Exilic hieratic practices: ultimately, however, his argument rested on the dogmatic assertion that they paved the way to the new dispensation.

Elsewhere, Smith’s essentially romanticised view of the old popular religion, with all its joyous exuberance and spontaneity, shines through page after page of The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, and he deplores the loss of personal freedom imposed by the centralisation of the sanctuary, the destruction of the old “high places” and the self-aggrandising venality of the new priesthood:

Thus the access of the ordinary Israelite to God is very restricted. He can only stand afar off while the priest approaches Jehovah as his mediator, and brings back a word of blessing. And even this mediate access to God is confined to his visits to the central sanctuary. The stated intercourse of God with His people is not the concern of the whole people, but of the priests, who are constantly before God, offering up on behalf of the nation the unbroken service of the continual daily oblations. This is a great limitation of the freedom of worship. But it is no arbitrary restriction. On the Levitical theory, the imperfection of the ordinary holiness of Israel leaves no alternative open. For the holiness of God is fatal to him who dares to come near his dwelling-place.21

It is hardly possible to remain insensitive nowadays to the subversive flavour of this and similar passages, though whether Smith’s audience was aware of such nuances is by no means certain. Ostensibly, the point of his argument is that the old popular religion was no “mere heathenish corruption of the Levitical system” but long antedated that system and was a fully authentic form of Jehovah worship.22 His underlying message, however, is that when the early religion was superseded something quite irreplaceable was lost – the precious personal contact between God and the ordinary individual. From this deprivation there resulted, said Smith, a deep spiritual thirst such as that so eloquently given expression in Psalm 42: a thirst which could never be adequately slaked under the rigid exclusivity of the imposed Levitical system.23 The new orthodoxy, however, made it plain that all the practices associated with the First Temple were hopelessly flawed:

The sharp line of distinction between layman’s privileges and priestly functions laid down in the Law has its rationale in the theory and practice of atonement. In the [First] Temple we find irregular atonements, a lack of precise grades of holiness, incomplete recognition of the priestly prerogative, subordination of the priesthood to the palace carried so far that Abiathar is deposed from the priesthood, and Zadok, who was not of the old priestly family of Shiloh, set in his place, by a mere fiat of King Solomon.24

A second serious source of tension for WRS lay in the rôle of the prophets and his view of their contribution towards both the Deuteronomic and the post-exilic legislative programmes. As his student work had made plain, Robertson Smith regarded the prophets from Amos onwards as the spiritual élite of the Israelite nation, steadfastly cautioning its people against moral error, social abuse and religious backsliding: those prophets had nothing in common, he insisted, with their soothsaying predecessors, the traditional practitioners of magic, divination and wizardry.25 Nor did the true prophet collaborate or collude with the priesthood as part of the “establishment”;26 Yet the prophets, as the recipients of divine revelation, had to be seen to play a key rôle in the process of religious development and social improvement. Smith’s argument is, once again, a rather tortuous one:

… the [post-exilic] Law presents an artificial system of sanctity, radiating from the sanctuary and extending to all parts of Israel’s life. The type of religion maintained by such a system is certainly inferior to the religion of the prophets … but … could not become the type of national religion until Jehovah’s spirit rested upon all his people, and the knowledge of Him dwelt in every heart… But for the mass of the people [the Law] nevertheless formed a distinct step in advance; for it put an end to the anomalous state of things in which practical heathenism had filled the state, and the prophets had preached to deaf ears. The legal ritual did not satisfy the highest spiritual needs, but it practically extinguished idolatry.27

In other words, the new legislation had, in its ruthless drive towards cultic uniformity, a certain practical influence for good despite its failings, but that is as much as WRS is able to say in its favour. True prophecy, moreover, became dormant after the Exile until its realisation in the new dispensation – indeed, Smith held that post-exilic prophecy went into declension.28 The prophets played no political rôle and “never profess to devise a scheme of political and social reformation …”;29 hence their work was essentially proleptic in value. Although it provided some “practical impulse” through its criticisms of idolatry and social malpractice, it was idealistic and could never be “literally fulfilled to Israel in Canaan”.30

Prejudices and presuppositions

By comparison with his precise and largely incontrovertible analysis of the Pentateuchal chronology, Robertson Smith’s validation of the prophetic legacy was thus much weaker and rested upon the received Judaeo-Christian assumption31 that its meaning could not be truly comprehended until the coming of Christ. Yet Smith himself had carefully warned his audience of interpretative traps set by one’s most deep-seated and cherished prejudices:

… though no one can thoroughly understand the Bible without spiritual sympathy, our spiritual sympathies are commonly bound up with theological prejudices which have no real basis in Scripture; and it is a wholesome exercise to see how the Bible history presents itself to men who approach the Bible from an altogether different point of view. It is easier to correct the errors of a rationalism with which we have no sympathy, than to lay aside prejudices deeply interwoven with our most cherished and truest convictions.32

Smith had tried to face up to this danger before – in his end-of-session lecture in March, 1876 – when he had discussed the limits of scientific research within theology and had demonstrated the folly of attempting to combine apologetics with science.33 As we have already seen, Smith emphasised the primacy of the intellect and the cardinal principle of “the free play of the understanding and of will”.34 Yet religious belief in itself was not intellectual at all; rather, it was intuitive – a matter of the heart rather than the head. Theology, however, required to follow both avenues – “… the prerogative of appealing to the heart as well as to the intellect belongs in peculiar measure to the topics with which theology concerns itself”.35 And that entailed employing two distinct and fundamentally incompatible modes of discourse, the one objective and dispassionate; the other subjective and emotionally-charged. Ultimately, Robertson Smith was as powerless as any of his contemporaries to overcome this logical crux. True objectivity in dealing with the metaphysical or noumenal aspects of theology was impossible for him, given his deeply established and ineradicable commitment to the faith into which he had been born. On issues calling for hard textual and historico-critical analysis, however, he could apply with incomparable skill those principles imparted to him by his favourite teacher, A. B. Davidson of New College.

Smith’s Achilles heel is detected by Nigel Cameron, writing explicitly from the standpoint of a “Conservative insider”.36 Cameron rightly identifies the dualism inherent in all Robertson Smith’s writings – the “dichotomy between ‘an intellectual assent’ and ‘an experimental conviction’”37 – and he concludes:

What is clear is that Robertson Smith succeeded in maintaining the “infallibility” of Scripture only by attenuating its sense to such a degree as to empty it of the distinctive meaning with which the theological tradition in which he stood has customarily associated it. The tensions and ambiguities which flow through his writings on the doctrine of Scripture reveal a man who sought to hold together what were inherently divergent ways of understanding revelation, and faith, and the Bible.38

That WRS should have demonstrated such ambiguities is hardly surprising and scarcely reprehensible. As a pivotal figure at a point of rapid and highly radical change in Biblical criticism, it would be remarkable if his scholarship were not characterised by transitional tensions.39 He remained convinced not only that the Old Testament illustrated the evolution of revelation but that this was a process “in accordance with psychological laws” which could ipso facto be elucidated by means of scientific research.40 Nowhere in fact does Robertson Smith effectively achieve that superhuman task. Whenever he moves out of the sphere of historical criticism and touches upon the unfolding of divine revelation, he automatically and unconsciously shifts his mode of discourse from the scientific to the theological. Where the two forms of discourse are interwoven, the result is discordant – as in the following instance:

But the Psalter and the Old Testament in general are to us not merely books of devotion, but sources of study for the better knowledge of God’s revelation. It is a law of science that, to know a thing thoroughly, we must know it in its genesis and in its growth. To understand the ways of God with man, and the whole meaning of His plan of salvation, it is necessary to go back and see His work in its beginnings, examining the rudimentary stages of the process of revelation ….41

Robert Carroll’s severe critique of The Prophets of Israel is pertinent in this respect. Smith’s idealisation of the eighth century prophets led, Carroll argues, to a manufactured history which no more corresponded to the facts than did the Priestly narrative. The 1881/82 lecture series, Carroll observes:

… must have reassured all his listeners that traditional Christian belief had nothing to fear from the new science of the historical interpretation of the Bible—in fact that Christianity had everything to gain from deriving better reasons for the Christian faith from the investigation of ancient religion.42

In spite of his repugnance for traditional and contemporary apologetics, Smith not only emerges (as Carroll duly indicates) as an earnest apologist for the Christian faith but transforms the prophets also into “apologists for the Christian religion in their own way”.43 Smith’s preconceptions – in Foucaultian terms, his “second-order judgments” – led him to make sense out of the confusing medley of prophetic writings by creating his own “metanarrative”, every bit as arbitrary and artificial as the Pentateuchal Priestly narrative itself. In Carroll’s words, “The rejigged text does not produce a historical reading but an ideological one in which the determinative factors are those driving the ideology behind the reading rather than the imagined historical reading”.44 Moreover, it is grossly dismissive both of heathenism and of Judaism – as of course it was bound to be, given Smith’s commitment to an evolutionary progression of divine grace and his own imprisonment within a Victorian imperialist ethos which unquestioningly held to certain stereotyped views on Jews, Arabs, “savages” and primitive culture generally.45

All these strictures on Robertson Smith’s work are valid to some degree but they represent nevertheless a partial and incomplete judgment on the legacy of scholarship which he bequeathed to future generations. All historiography entails a rewriting of history in terms of current understanding and knowledge. Quintessentially, Smith attempted to carry out a phenomenological study of a small but highly-prized segment of human history, in an endeavour to confirm the reality of a progressive self-revelation of the divine purpose.46 It was a deeply sincere and eminently praiseworthy attempt to outflank the inherent impenetrability of the noumenal to all forms of rational investigation, but as such it was bound to fail.47 In the pursuit of his aim, Smith hoped to bring the methods of science into theology, thus bridging that notorious gap between the two disciplines which so troubled the Victorians, while also satisfying his own highly distinctive predilection and aptitude for both areas of study. To the end of his life, Robertson Smith remained almost irrationally optimistic that he would achieve his goal.48

In one respect at least, he was overwhelmingly successful. By applying the principles of the Continental higher criticism with impeccable clarity and assurance, Smith vindicated their rightful place within theological scholarship and ensured that they would become standard techniques within the academic realm of biblical studies. The time was ripe for such change and Robertson Smith’s writings were the catalyst for the paradigm shift. With Pusey’s death and S. R. Driver’s succession in 1883 to the chair of Hebrew in Oxford, Smith lived just long enough to see the first fruits of his work at a national level. Driver had initially remained uncommitted to the higher criticism but by 1893 Smith’s friend and supporter of long standing, T.K. Cheyne, could write:

So now Dr Driver’s long suspense of judgment is to a great extent over. The mystery is cleared up, and we know very nearly where he now stands. If any outsider has a lingering hope or fear of an imminent counter-revolution … he must not look to Dr Driver to justify it.49

In effect then, Smith fully deserves to be credited with introducing (within the English-speaking world) a new methodology into the theological study of the Bible, a methodology firmly based on scientific principles. Henceforth, it was safe to assert that the text of the Bible was neither infallible nor supernatural in origin;50 and the threat of being charged with heresy consequently lost most of its former power to curb perceived deviations from orthodoxy so far as textual criticism was concerned. Yet Robertson Smith held firmly to his belief that, while the text might be, and often was, a fallible and non-supernatural account, it nevertheless did indubitably constitute a record of supernatural revelation. No amount of critical acumen or intellectual effort could add to or subtract from that “fact of faith”. Certain a priori assumptions were literally too sacred to be impugned – hence Smith remained unable to examine his data with wholehearted objectivity, while firmly believing that he was systematically following a scientifically respectable and rigorous inductive process of the kind with which he was familiar from his laboratory days with Peter Guthrie Tait. Revelation, after all, followed psychological laws and WRS aimed to formulate, articulate and disseminate those laws. In practice of course he proved unable to do so. He did furnish his audience and readership with a range of important generalisations which were to stimulate further research in anthropology and psychoanalysis; and those “lower order inductions” could moreover be subjected to further steps in the hypothetico-deductive process in order to confirm or refute their validity. But it was impossible to apply, in truly scientific style, such generalisations to the resolution of other problems relating to the divine mystery. To have devised a new methodology for the critical study of the Bible – admirable though that achievement was – did not constitute a scientific breakthrough in theology itself.

Smith’s contribution to the development of sociology and social anthropology was, by contrast, impressive and lasting. Freud’s tribute has already been noted. Mary Douglas describes WRS as the “founder of religious anthropology”51 and there remains general agreement, for example, that his methodological approach to anthropology was considerably superior to that of J.G. Frazer or E.B. Tylor. In this regard, the questionable nature of some of his conclusions (e.g. on the universality of totemism or the primacy of matriarchy) are matters of relative unimportance. Set within a scientific domain, they stand merely as provisional hypotheses which remain open to subsequent confirmation or disproof. In the domain of religion, the promulgation of similar hypotheses was (and in some quarters still is) felt to be inimical to the substance of faith and, as Smith discovered to his cost, was counted for heresy.

The “vision of the mind”

It may be useful, finally, to consider what impact Robertson Smith’s life’s work has had upon Christian belief in the course of the succeeding century. His pioneering contribution in bringing theological respectability to the critical study of the Bible is incontrovertible, despite the fierce rearguard action fought in the U.S.A. So far as the influence of his findings upon the broad spectrum of Christian churchgoers is concerned, the harvest must be considered disappointingly meagre. The reading of the Old Testament by believing Christians remains characterised by what John Rogerson describes as a “naïve literalism”52 and, even if one defines Smith’s aims in the most modest terms as the communication to the laity of a fuller and truer understanding of the biblical record, it must be judged that he largely failed to make a permanent impact in that regard. His brilliantly written apologia,53 presented in the introductory lecture of The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, set out his intention explicitly: to study the “human side” of the converse between man and God, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, with the aim of breaking down that barrier to understanding which arose from the prevailing unsystematic, literalistic and primarily devotional reading of the Scriptures – a practice connived at by a ministry which believed that a “safe and edifying exegesis must confine itself to the divine side”. Using his favourite analogy of communication between father and child, Smith had urged:

… we can no more understand the Divine Word without taking [the prophets and the psalmists] into account than we can understand a human conversation without taking account of both interlocutors. To try to suppress the human side of the Bible, in the interests of the purity of the Divine Word, is as great a folly as to think that a father’s talk with his child can be best reported by leaving out everything which the child, said, thought, and felt.54

Robertson Smith’s purpose was transparently plain: it was to begin from where his audience were (in terms of their preconceptions) and to lead them gently as “tender weanlings”, step by step towards a promised land of his own envisioning, by way of an exegetical method from which no uncomfortable fact was excluded and no possible source of illumination banned:

There is no discordance between the religious and the scholarly methods of study. They lead to the same goal; and the more closely our study fulfils the demands of historical scholarship, the more fully will it correspond with our religious needs… I am only laying down a method, and a method, as we have seen, which is in full accordance with, and imperatively prescribed by, the Reformation doctrine of the Word of God.55

That was Robertson Smith’s credo: and it encapsulated all his evangelical fervour as well as his iconoclastic zeal. Yet a discordance did exist – not in the method itself, but in its perceived inapplicability to the divine side of the converse. That remained too sacrosanct, even for a scholar of Smith’s intrepidity, to approach in a purely objective fashion.56 Like J.G. Frazer, Sigmund Freud and the Priestly revisionists themselves, Robertson Smith was a consummate myth-maker. All sought to fashion, in their own distinctive ways, deeply imaginative aetiological accounts of how certain of the most fundamental elements of human behaviour originated and developed over time. In that respect, they may be compared, in purpose and style of discourse, with Charles Darwin. But Darwin’s “myth” proved accessible, for the most part, to hard empirical verification in a way that neither Freud’s nor Smith’s ever could. That fact may have limited their “scientific” contribution to the sum of knowledge but does not thereby diminish their importance in the history of human thought. All myth contains rich veins of vivifying metaphor which are mined in an effort to bestow meaning, unity and universality upon mankind’s recurring encounter with the unknown and the ultimately inexpressible. For the Victorians, including Robertson Smith, “myth” was primitive and, as Andrew Lang put it, “irrational” – a legacy of aboriginal savagery.57 Yet they consistently ignored or consciously rejected the Coleridgean message emanating from scientists such as John Tyndall and Clerk Maxwell – that all creative endeavour demands the use of the imagination and that controlled speculation – “myth-making” – is as fundamental to theology as to physics. When Tyndall and Maxwell turned to the “flaring atom streams” of Lucretius for a concept of the atomic structure of the universe, and when Tyndall eloquently described how imagination must take over when the resolving power of the microscope or telescope fails,58 each was recalling Coleridge’s Miltonic defence of the imagination as mankind’s unique pathway towards an understanding of the ineffable:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in the degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible; yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects, as objects, are essentially fixed and dead.59

Like Tyndall, William Robertson Smith turned always, by virtue of an innate intellectual compulsion, to his own creative imagination – the “vision of the mind” – in order to reach beyond the boundaries of received dogma and traditional assumptions. Both men threatened the bastions of conservatism and each encountered the opprobrium of hostile reaction.60 Both spoke naturally in the prophetic vein but it was Tyndall who more consciously articulated his personal vision of the future, while Smith often seemed curiously unaware of the deeper meaning of the message he was imparting to his contemporaries; and in that regard he perhaps comes close in character to the Hebrew prophets whom he so loved. And yet the two men remained implacably divided – despite their common Protestant inheritance – by the insurmountable barriers raised by their respective childhood and adolescent influences. Robertson Smith’s powerful libidinal ties with his father became progressively displaced upon the Free Church. At the same time, their inherent ambivalence induced a variety of characteristic forms of behaviour (one may legitimately call them defence mechanisms) which were to remain with him throughout his life. He became the renowned “controversialist”61 who pitted himself against the ecclesiastical might of the Free Kirk’s leadership and, by sacrificing himself, won the battle for liberty of expression within the Church. The same fundamental ambivalence, however, required the life-long adoption of a form of mental dissociation or “compartmentalisation”, whereby he might maintain an equipoise between the dictates of faith and the urgings of reason. Smith’s strategy, as we have seen, was to accord them parity within the separate provinces of “heart” and “head” – a kind of epistemological apartheid.

Speaking in 1876 to his students in defence of Abraham Kuenen,62 Smith offered an oblique yet highly revealing indication of his own stance:

In concluding … I wish to speak one word of warning against the inference which some of you may draw, that a man who holds views like Kuenen’s can have no true religion at all… A man’s speculations are often very remote from his practice. They may be better, but they may also be worse. You must never allow yourselves to take a man’s speculative errors as the proof of an absence of personal faith, which often is nourished from a very different source and lives in spite of a blighting philosophy.63

That premonitory “word of warning” was of course spoken in defence of himself as much as of Kuenen. Stanley Cook, delivering an oration on the centenary of Smith’s birth, and speaking then as one of the few remaining individuals to have had personal acquaintance with WRS, summed up thus:

Robertson Smith was admittedly a problem, a paradox. In ’74, in his twenty-eighth year, he defended the Church against Tyndall’s materialism; but if he had not defended the rights of O.T. criticism against the Church we should not be assembled here! He had no sympathy with mysticism or with religious sentimentalism, and certainly none with any thoroughgoing humanism or rationalism.64

Fifty years on, Cook’s paradox may appear less problematical, especially if we seek the answer (as WRS himself proposed) in “the form, not of a speculative theory, but of a rational life-history”.65 Searching for the roots of religion, Smith intuitively turned to the pattern of his own childhood development and upbringing. When he asserted the priority of praxis over theory, and of rules of conduct over their formal explanation, he was unconsciously recalling and mirroring his own early experiences at the manse of Keig – the family rituals of bed, board, worship, hard study and strenuous debate – usages which had become internalised and sacrosanct for him long before he had imbibed their rationalisations.66 Those early rituals were the secure foundation upon which Robertson Smith’s whole life was constituted, and by virtue of their sanctity they remained inviolable. By default, his intellect was dedicated to unravelling those religious and political rationalisations which had developed in ancient Israel and which were laid down within the pages of the Hebrew Bible. Smith never consciously construed his scholarly work as an attack upon his Church or as subversive of its doctrines of textual inspiration and infallibility. Nor should we expect him to have done so. In truth, however, that life’s work was no more than the outward expression of one man’s unceasing intellectual exploration. In his later days, Robertson Smith would not, one feels, have rejected Walter Pater’s sentiments:

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of their forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel or of our own… The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.67

Aesthete, hedonist and pagan, Pater could hardly seem to present a greater contrast than William Robertson Smith. Yet Smith’s favourite boyhood aphorism from Heraclitus – “all things are in flux” – is that with which Pater headed the final chapter of The Renaissance.68 In a review article which Smith wrote in the last years of his life, he concluded with characteristic forthrightness:

A history that treats crucial questions with a timid and uncertain hand cannot possibly be a great book and can hardly be a readable one.69

And that comment may fittingly epitomise Robertson Smith’s life-long commitment to uttering the truth, as he saw it, without fear or favour; presenting his arguments with self-confidence and bold conviction; and articulating these with a lucidity and a sureness of touch which can still beguile the modern reader.