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Introduction
It seems to me also that cause and effect do not go together rightly. Sometimes from momentous and powerful causes little and insignificant effects proceed, sometimes none at all; sometimes a busy little cause gives birth to a colossal result.
— Søren Kierkegaard: Either/Or 1
Second causes are a capitulation of the unbelieving intellect with the still believing heart.
— Ludwig Feuerbach: The Essence of Religion 2
The chronological span of this study, from 1866 to 1881, coincides with the third quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign, that high point of British prestige and achievement not only in politics and economics but also in science, literature and art. It was an era of consolidation and expansion, yet also a time of rapid social and technological change. It was a period too of renewed political uncertainty – its beginning conveniently marked by the introduction in 1866 of the Second Reform Bill.3 William Robertson Smith was born in November, 1846, nine years after Victoria’s accession to the throne. He died prematurely on the last day of March, 1894, seven years before the Queen’s reign came to its close. In temporal terms therefore, Smith was a complete Victorian and it is hardly surprising that he shared many of the attitudes and prejudices of his contemporaries. In other respects he was a man born before his time, a Scot who readily embraced modern ways of thinking, and who (unlike men such as John Ruskin or William Morris) relished the increasing pace, vigour and complexity of late nineteenth century life.
Since the story of Robertson Smith’s trial for heresy has been told many times, from a variety of perspectives, no attempt has been made here to duplicate the work of others in that respect, although a summary of the principal biographical sources is given later in this introductory chapter. This study aims instead to explore several of the significant yet less fully researched influences upon his personality and work during his early adulthood – influences which go some way to explaining why this strongly evangelical Christian believer, brought up within an apparently impeccably orthodox home environment, eventually found himself in dramatic confrontation with the pillars of his own Church, was forced out of his professorial chair in Aberdeen, became chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and ended his short life as (in the lapidary words of his simple headstone in Keig churchyard) Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University.
Speaking at Aberdeen University in November, 1946, on the centenary of Robertson Smith’s birth, C.E. Raven observed:
We are still in the biographical, I had almost said hagiological, attitude to him. After this phase, as you know, there comes a period of reaction until he is seen in perspective and the historian can pronounce a verdict. Robertson Smith’s early death, and the momentous events of the subsequent fifty years, have sent him far away from us; the famous case, the famous “ninth edition” are (I fear) now in the lumber-room; and I, for one, am not quite sure whether the museum or the dustbin will be their final resting-place. To appraise the significance of his achievements under such circumstances is not easy.4
Fifty years on, Raven’s sentiments themselves now seem relatively musty. Historians are no longer expected to pronounce magisterial verdicts in the style of Gibbon or Macaulay; and a simple choice between museum or dustbin is judged neither appropriate nor necessary. Definitive reappraisal is less important than careful rediscovery, and to recover or reconstruct fragments from the past seems a worthier task than to pass categorical but often ephemeral judgments upon their value or significance. Most important of all perhaps, the identification in historical research of contingent events as causal factors is treated with greater caution today than was formerly the practice.
Interest in the life and work of William Robertson Smith has never faded, let alone been extinguished,5 and his place in the history of biblical criticism continues to receive honourable yet not uncritical mention in many modern textbooks on the subject.6 His reputation as a founding father in the field of social anthropology has, if anything, remained still higher and Smith’s seminal contributions to that discipline have been widely recognised by its leading exponents.7 To mark the centenary of his death in 1994, an impressive array of scholars met, again in Aberdeen, to exchange views on Robertson Smith’s prolific contribution to Victorian life and scholarship, as biblical critic, pioneer social anthropologist and eminent Semitist.8 Yet, as Robert Ackerman has noted, out of thirty-four essays, none directly addressed the relevance of Smith’s aptitude for mathematics and the physical sciences,9 or considered the influence upon his thinking of the many scientists of distinction with whom he came into close contact during his formative years.10 In particular, none explored the impact on Smith’s work of his exposure to the “scientific method” as practised in the emerging physical laboratories of the time – a method hallowed (in Britain at least) by the revered memory of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, given definitive formulation by William Whewell in the early nineteenth century, and accorded subsequent credibility by the practical application of scientific theory to the discovery of new ways of harnessing the forces of nature. The fact that such discoveries were frequently empirically-based, or that the development of theory very often lagged well behind the pragmatic experiments of such men as Watt, Stephenson, Faraday or Wheatstone, did nothing to diminish the respect accorded to the Baconian principles which underlay the scientific method, as understood and endorsed by the best minds of the mid-nineteenth century.
This study has a thematic and discursive structure insofar as it attempts to present a picture of the intellectual ferment of the time, particularly in science, literature and religion. More specifically, the two permeating themes are Smith’s espousal of the “scientific method” within his theological research, and his continuing interest, from student days onwards, in the nature of prophecy as exemplified in the Hebrew Bible. The focus throughout is however on William Robertson Smith the man and upon the way in which his personal development was shaped by those numerous individuals with whom he came into contact during his formative years. One decidedly non-hagiographic obituary notice, published one month after his death, commented:
The death of the gifted Arabic Professor at Cambridge has probably set men speculating afresh on the problem presented by his mind.11
The tone of the article is carping and its factual accuracy is weak at several points. Nevertheless, it raises valid questions as to Smith’s temperament which still remain unanswered. How, asked the writer, could WRS have failed to see that his Britannica articles would bring him into direct conflict with the Free Church? How, “unless he were utterly insincere”, could he have “pursued the methods of rationalistic literary analysis while holding the faith of Bibliolatrous superstition”?12 The pseudonymous author, “Scotulus”, accepts Smith’s sincerity but suggests that his intellectual precocity stemmed from “morbid physiological conditions . . . correlative to the degenerative disease of which he has died”. While that quasi-medical diagnosis may be discounted today, along with the writer’s curious adherence to outworn phrenological ideas,13 not all the criticisms advanced by “Scotulus” can be dismissed out of hand. Two in particular remain. The first is put as follows:
How came he [Smith], after realising that not only Biblical literature as a whole but nearly every ostensibly homogeneous section is a structure of various and divergent hands, plans, ideals—how came he still to think that these composites are products of “revelation” and “inspiration” in a sense in which no other or extra-Christian religion is?14
The second, which essentially follows from the first, relates to the assessment of Robertson Smith’s overall achievement. Did Smith’s preoccupation with what “Scotulus” disparagingly terms “detail work” prevent him from reaching significant general conclusions by the inductive process? The Free Review writer certainly believed so:
The slow assimilation of the broad universal logic of human affairs, and of the process of the universe, his faculty never had time for, even though his manifold energetic cerebration was physiologically greater than the mental tear-and-wear of many men with less of the special faculty and more of fundamental sanity . . . Rare indeed is the combination of wide and exact linguistic accomplishment with penetrating and original judgment…15
Those are interesting and pertinent questions which still remain insufficiently explored. The intention, however, is less to elicit “answers” or to seek what Michel Foucault terms “naïve positivity” than to undertake an explorative essay in Foucaultian terms:
The “essay”—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purposes of communication—is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis”, askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.16
The present study begins in medias res, with an account of Robertson Smith’s induction to the scientific world of the day through his affiliation to that extraordinary alliance of scientific creativity represented by Peter Guthrie Tait in Edinburgh, William Thomson in Glasgow and James Clerk Maxwell (then at his family home in Dumfriesshire but soon to be called to Cambridge). Smith’s introduction to the scientific approach had, however, already been fostered both by his own father and by Alexander Bain at Aberdeen University. Chapters III and IV attempt therefore to shed some light upon the nature of Bain’s very important but largely unacknowledged influence, and to link this with Smith’s attempts to apply “psychological laws” to his early work on prophets and prophecy. The outcome is plainly seen in his papers to the New College Theological Society, followed rapidly by a variety of controversial philosophical papers, instigated by Tait, whose strong personal prejudices in philosophical and scientific matters were not always beneficial to the impressionable young student. Chapter V gives an account of the long-running vendetta between Tait and John Tyndall in the context of contemporary scientific issues, leading to Robertson Smith’s personal entry to the fray following Tyndall’s Presidential Address to the British Association meeting at Belfast in 1874. The “Belfast Address” stands at the midpoint of the period covered in this study and in many ways it may be regarded as of even greater significance than the more celebrated duel at the B.A. meeting of 1860 in Oxford between T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the preceding year.
Tyndall’s address brought to the fore tensions between science and religion which had been latent in both Scotland and England for many decades17 and which are finely exemplified in the writings of Matthew Arnold. Chapter VI contrasts Arnold’s suavitas with the work of less well-remembered protagonists such as W.H. Mallock and presents a view of the wider cultural picture, which gave varied expression to the underlying stresses and anxieties engendered by the apparent decay of religious belief in the face of relentless scientific progress (especially in physics and biology18) allied to the vigorous promulgation of positivist views deriving from Comte. Prominent and influential figures of the day such as John Ruskin, Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison all served in their distinctive styles to engage the public interest in the numerous philosophical, theological and ecclesiastical controversies of the day. So also did the prolific periodical literature of the day – from the pages of Punch to the austere Free Church journal, the British and Foreign Evangelical Review.
By 1869, Smith was beginning make his own contributions to these debates, not least through his reviews of Continental theological literature: a sign of things to come. Still more importantly perhaps, his appointment in 1874 to the Old Testament Review Committee (which involved regular visits to London) established his social and academic credit with the best English theological scholars of the day. Chapter VII examines in detail Smith’s first major paper, “The question of prophecy in the critical schools of the Continent”19 and traces the influence on Smith at this stage of the Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuenen, and of A.B. Davidson, Professor of Hebrew at New College, to whom Smith’s critical approach to the Hebrew Bible owed so much, yet who failed to rally to his former student’s side during his time of trial.
Chapter VIII follows Smith’s career at Aberdeen Free Church College and further explores the development of his thinking as mirrored both in his College lectures and in his correspondence, where it already becomes evident that a conflict was emerging between Smith’s scientific approach to historical-critical questions and his fundamental belief in divine revelation. That dilemma was shared by the great majority of contemporary thinkers in Britain and Chapter IX illustrates several facets of the contemporary debate: in particular, the contributions made by Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley on the rationalist side, the opposition being represented in some measure by the (often highly respected) adherents of spiritualism. The most elaborate attempt to harness science to transcendentalism came with The Unseen Universe, by Tait and Balfour Stewart, who sought unsuccessfully to entice Robertson Smith into collaborating with them.
The outstanding feminine intellect of the Victorian era was George Eliot, and her rôle in stirring the waters of religious debate through her translations of Strauss and Feuerbach is too well-known to need reiteration here. Her relationship with George Henry Lewes, however, establishes a link with Robertson Smith through the interesting correspondence between the two men; and her literary and philosophical significance is examined with reference to her last and perhaps greatest novel, Daniel Deronda, the publication of which coincided with Smith’s rise to notoriety through the issue of his article “Bible” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his consequent trial for heresy at the hands of the Free Church of Scotland. Chapter XI deals with salient aspects of those relatively well-known events, setting them in the context of ecclesiastical debate north and south of the Border.
The repercussions of Smith’s trial are followed up in the subsequent chapter (XII) and are linked to the impact on Victorian thinking of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Smith’s own transition to a wholly evolutionary view of religion is contrasted with the unhappy story of his fellow-Scot, Hugh Miller, and set also against the counterattacks of contemporary theologians.
Chapter XIII looks at two lesser-known Victorian figures – John Morley and St George Mivart – whose important contributions to the periodical literature of the day illustrate both the fervour and the pathos of late nineteenth century religious controversy. A brief account of the final stages of the legal process resulting in Smith’s deposition from his Free Church chair at Aberdeen in 1880 leads to a consideration of his remarkable and enigmatic temperament – and in particular to the powerful influence upon his personal development exerted by his father, William Pirie Smith. That in turn introduces a brief survey of Smith’s most celebrated work, The Religion of the Semites, and its part in shaping twentieth century sociological, anthropological and psychoanalytic concepts.
The study concludes with a provisional evaluation of Smith’s importance as a catalyst in the transformation of Western cultural thought and suggests that a life-long dedication to his own ego-ideals – the prophets of Israel – served paradoxically to elevate him ultimately to a place amongst the prophets of modernity.
A note on the biographical sources
All students of Robertson Smith’s life and work are indebted to his joint biographers – John Sutherland Black, one of Smith’s closest friends, and George Chrystal, Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University – for the wealth of detail carefully compiled and recorded by them following his death in 1894.20 By the standard of most biographies of the period, The Life of William Robertson Smith is remarkably free from sentimentality or adulation and certainly does not warrant being classed as “hagiography”. J.S. Black, the principal author, drew extensively on Smith’s correspondence with friends, colleagues and fellow scholars; and that documentation, now preserved in Cambridge University Library, remains a prime source of information about Smith’s ever-widening circle of acquaintances in Britain, America and Europe. Several manuscript accounts of Smith’s childhood life and education are also preserved at Cambridge and make essential reading for an understanding of the unique circumstances under which the young prodigy was reared. Along with Smith’s biography, Black and Chrystal’s companion work, The Lectures and Essays of William Robertson Smith,21 offers ready access to the bulk of his contributions to the periodical literature of the day, together with a selection from his more important lectures.
Carnegie Simpson’s Life of Principal Rainy22 presents an alternative contemporary account of the events surrounding Smith’s trial together with an assessment of his personality. While not wholly free from prejudice, Simpson is commendably even-handed in his treatment of Rainy’s most redoubtable opponent – rather more so, in many respects, than the numerous obituaries which appeared after his death in 1894.23 Subsequent biographical literature on Robertson Smith from the first half of the twentieth century is slight but includes a useful memoir by J.P. Lilley24 and also an intriguingly sardonic essay, “Smith o’ Aiberdeen”, in Robert Carswell’s Brother Scots.25
Stanley Cook’s 1946 tribute to Smith26 marks the end of material based on personal links with Smith and a new era of study began in 1974 with T.O. Beidelman’s monograph, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion,27 remarkable alike for its succinct and comprehensive (but not always trustworthy) biographical résumé and for its authoritative assessment of Smith’s contribution to sociological method. The historical and ecclesiastical context of Robertson Smith’s trial of strength with the Free Church is admirably described by Drummond and Bulloch in The Church in Late Victorian Scotland 1874-1900,28 while Smith’s place in the history of Biblical criticism has been well documented, as already indicated, by John Rogerson, Richard Riesen and Ronald Clements. The majority of contributors to Essays in Reassessment have, from a variety of different perspectives, drawn attention to significant elements of Smith’s personality and upbringing,29 while most recently Gillian Bediako, in Primal Religion and the Bible,30 has made a searching examination of Robertson Smith’s theological development as it influenced his subsequent pioneering work in comparative religion.
The manuscript material
The present study has made extensive use of Robertson Smith’s correspondence, preserved for the most part at Cambridge University Library,31 together with the various manuscript memoirs collected by J.S. Sutherland after Smith’s death.32 Care has been taken to reproduce this material as exactly as possible, with all its abbreviations, spellings and often idiosyncratic punctuation. Smith’s handwriting is always eminently legible, as is that of most of his correspondents, so that there are no more than two questionable readings of single words amongst the quotations used: these are queried, where they occur, within angled parentheses.
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