1 Pater (1980) p.188. The text is that of the fourth (1893) edition.

2 Published in English as The Will to Knowledge, the first volume being entitled The History of Sexuality. References are to the Penguin edition (1981) of vol.i..

3 Ib., p.47. It is not the intention here to explore the relationship between religion and sex, interesting and relevant as that topic is, given the elements of taboo, inhibition, folk beliefs and professional intrusion which are so prominently common to both areas of human behaviour.

4 As Donald Carswell (1927) wrote in Brother Scots, the Rev. George Macaulay in July,1880, “tabled a mysterious demand that the Presbytery of Edinburgh should sit in camera to discuss a matter of grave import that was unfit for publication”. This referred to Smith’s article of June, 1880, in the Journal of Philology, “Animal worship and animal tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament”. Cf. B&C, pp.381f., for an even more graphic account of Macaulay’s accusation that the article was “fitted to pollute and debase public sentiment … and to destroy all reverence for God and for His Holy Word”.

5 Cf. OTJC, p.228: “… everything in religion is reduced to rule and has some ceremonial expression. There is no room for religious spontaneity”. Cf. also Garbini (1988) p.62: “The whole history of Israel and indeed of the world is seen in a perspective which is meant to highlight the priestly caste of a small group of deportees who want to maintain their ethnic identity …”.

6 WRS goes so far as to say (OTJC, pp.420f.): “… for under Providence the Code of Ezra and the Reformation of Ezra were the means, amidst the general dissolution of the Persian and Hellenic East, of preserving and maturing among the Jews those elements of true spiritual religion out of which Christianity sprang”.

7 Cf. Donald Carswell’s comment on Scottish Presbyterianism generally: “[After the Reformation] the Kirk thus began its career in an attitude of antagonism to the State, which later events served only to intensify and render permanent” (Carswell, 1927, p.57).

8 Foucault (1981) pp.101f.

9 BFER, the Free Church of Scotland’s academic journal, ceased publication in 1883.

10 “Christianity and the Supernatural”: in L&E, p.109. Smith continues: “No one seems to grudge learning, ability, or labour bestowed in the defence of Christianity against unbelievers. We do not seem much interested in the internal development of Christian science”.

11 Paley’s Evidences was followed by his Natural Theology in 1802.

12 Chalmers (1835) vol.i, p.56. For a sardonic assessment of Chalmers, cf. Carswell (1927) p.60: “Head and shoulders above all the other Disruptionists was Thomas Chalmers, a man of teeming brain, furious energy and imperious moody temper”. And WRS dismissed Charles Hodge’s theological textbooks as “the greatest rubbish since Chalmers” (Lilley, 1920, p.75).

13 Cf. ib., p.24: “Both in the reciprocities of domestic life, and in those wider relations, which bind large assemblies of men into political and economical systems, we shall discern the incontestable marks of a divine wisdom and care; principles or laws of human nature, in virtue of which the social economy moves rightly and prosperously onward, and apart from which all would go into derangement; affinities between man and his fellows, that harmonize the individual with the general interests, and are obviously designed as provisions for the well-being both of families and nations”.

14 Ib., p.117. Virtue had a double reward – the inherent pleasure which it brought, and the (separate) “sense of rectitude” which was the product of a divinely-bestowed conscience. For all his expressed contempt for Chalmers’ outdated theology, Smith also accepted conscience as God-given – cf. Lilley (1920) p.67: “The lack of any clear statements [in Bain’s lectures] on the place and power of conscience as an original endowment of humanity was very offensive to him”.

15 The following is representative of Chalmers’ reasoning: “We cannot imagine a more decisive indication of His favour being on the side of moral good, and His displeasure against moral evil, than that, by the working of each of these constitutions, virtue and happiness on the one hand, vice and wretchedness on the other, should be so intimately and inseparably allied. Such sequences or laws of nature as these, speak as distinctly the character of Him who established them, as any laws of jurisprudence would the character of the monarch by whom they were enacted” (ib., vol.i, p.191).

16 Cf. ib, vol.ii, p.126: “… men are led irresistibly to the anticipation of a future state—not by their hopes, we think, but by their fears; not by a sense of unfulfilled promises, but by the sense of a judgment not yet executed, of a wrath not yet discharged upon them”.

17 Cf. Smith’s summing-up (OTJC, p.422): “God has given us intellects to judge of historical evidence, and he has preserved to us in the Bible ample materials for deciding the date of the Pentateuchal laws and narratives by strict historical methods. And as He has thus put it in our power to learn what the actual course of Providence has been, I decline to be led into an a priori argument as to what it ought to have been”.

18 In this and other respects, the unacknowledged link with Chalmers is all too evident.

19 Ib., p.369. Smith added that it was “still no ideal law”, but (p.370) “the growth of usage and custom is on the whole upward” – sentiments that are characteristically Victorian..

20 OTJC, p.379.

21 Ib., p.247.

22 Ib., p.249.

23 Ib., p.252: “[Under that system]… the faith with which the Israelite rested on God’s redeeming love had little direct opportunity to express itself in visible acts of homage. The sanctuary was seldom accessible, and in daily life the Hebrew believer could only follow with an inward longing and spiritual sympathy the national homage which continually ascended on behalf of himself and all the people of God in the stated ritual of the Temple”. Smith’s observations may again be validly interpreted as a personal reflection of his own spiritual thirst and as a critique of Free Church ecclesiasticism .

24 Ib., pp.265f. Alfred Cave’s hostile review of OTJC (BFER, vol.xxx, 1881, pp.613-668) should be read for its well-attempted but unconvincing rebuttal of Smith’s arguments on the Pentateuchal chronology.

25 Ib., pp.288f.: “The characteristic of the true prophet is that he retains his consciousness and self-control under revelation”. Smith returns here to his very early work on the psychology of the prophet, “Prophecy and Personality” (L&E, pp.97-108).

26 Ib., p.293: “Spiritual prophecy, in the hands of Amos, Isaiah, and their successors has no such alliance with the sanctuary and its ritual. It develops and enforces its own doctrine of the intercourse of Jehovah with Israel, and the conditions of His grace, without assigning the slightest value to priests and sacrifices”.

27 Ib., pp.315f.

28 Smith had made his views on this clear in the EB⁹ article “Bible” (vol.iii, p.640): “But the spirit of the new Jerusalem had little in common with these [prophetic] aspirations, and in Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, prophecy retains not much of its old power except an uncompromising moral earnestness”.

29 Ib., p.350.

30 Ib., pp.351f. Smith follows the same argument in The Prophets of Israel – e.g. p.368f.: “From one point of view the law of the single sanctuary seems a poor outcome for the great work of Isaiah, and yet … it implied a real step towards the spiritualisation of all the service of God, and the emancipation of religion from its connection with the land and holy places of Canaan”.

31 In Foucaultian terms, this was a “second order judgment” on Smith’s part – see Kendall and Wickham (1999) for a helpful discussion of Foucault’s methodological principles and terminology.

32 OTJC, p.314.

33 “The place of theology in the work and growth of the Church” (March, 1875), in L&E, pp.309-340; e.g. p.315: “… our whole theological literature, even when not apologetic in subject, is impregnated with an apologetic flavour”.

34 Ib., p.317. Smith always insisted that his approach was “rational” yet never “rationalistic” – a fine distinction but one readily understood by his contemporaries, for whom rationalism implied agnosticism, if not atheism.

35 Ib., p.309.

36 Cameron (1987) p.287.

37 Ib., p.253. Cf. pp.249f.: “… the disjunction between the personal and the propositional in revelation and faith”.

38 Ib., pp.261f.

39 Cf. ib., p.267: “In him [WRS] if nowhere else the problematic of secular critical history meeting sacred Scripture must have been acute. His attempted resolution, which he claimed left evangelical faith untouched while giving free rein to Criticism, may best be described as dualistic.”

40 “The progress of Old Testament studies”; in BFER, vol.xxv (1876) p.489: “The only idea of moral and spiritual evolution which is possible to us, is that of evolution in accordance with psychological laws”.

41 OTJC. P.192.

42 Robert P. Carroll, “The Biblical prophets as apologists for the Christian religion: reading William Robertson Smith’s The Prophets of Israel today”: in Essays (ed. Johnstone, 1995) p.152.

43 Ib. (Carroll’s emphasis).

44 Ib., p.151. However, Carroll does less than justice to the degree of change which Smith achieved in terms of theological discourse. To compare his approach, for example, with that of A.P. Stanley’s learnedly latitudinarian romanticising in The History of the Jewish Church (1876) is to realise at once the magnitude of the transformation. Cf. WRS’s benignant review (in L&E, pp.382f. and BFER, vol. xxvi, 1877, pp.779-805) of the third volume of Stanley’s work: it was “more readable than instructive” despite being “accomplished with literary tact and grace, and with a singular felicity of graphic detail and pictorial touches that give living colour to the narrative”.

45 Cf. Carroll (in Essays, pp.155f.) for his commentary on Smith’s inherited socio-cultural prejudices.

46 Smith summed up his aim in “The progress of Old Testament studies” (BFER, vol.xxv, 1876, p.489): “The Bible and the Bible history were still too exclusively looked at from the supernatural point of view. Now the evolution of God’s dealings with man cannot be understood except by looking at the human side of the process”.

47 It is perhaps reasonable to make a comparison here with Galton’s investigation into the efficacy of prayer: both men ostensibly had the same “scientific” aims but Galton approached the task wholly as a sceptic, Smith as a sincere believer.

48 Cf. Cheyne (1893) p.46, citing a passage from Strahan’s biography of A.B. Davidson (Strahan, 1917, p.252): “And another friend relates that in the days before his [Smith’s] tragically premature death his mind reverted several time to his unfinished Aberdeen lectures, and always with one dominant longing to be able ‘to complete his argument’. His argument, remember, Strahan adds, for a distinctive Hebrew and Christian revelation. If there be anything in Scaliger or Casaubon to equal that, I do not know of it”.

49 Cheyne (1893) p.250. The reference is to the publication of Driver’s Introduction to the Old Testament (1891), the textbook which, perhaps more than any other, served to bestow its imprimatur upon the higher criticism in English theology.

50 Cf. Rogerson in Essays in Reassessment (1995) pp.143f.: “Smith’s strategy … was no doubt to undermine approaches to the Old Testament that saw its text as a supernatural phenomenon, whose authors had been passive instruments through whom God dictated, and whose autographs had been providentially preserved from mistakes in the copying process”.

51 M. Douglas, in Essays, p.278. She adds: “[He was]the first to insist that belief is grounded in society. His idea of communication within society was of the straight man-to-man eye-to-eye kind”.

52 J. Rogerson, in Essays p.146; “A [modern] critical translation based on an eclectic text would assist readers to move beyond naïve literalism”. Cf. Clements (1978) p.199: “ … religious education has moved further and further away from a serious reading and exposition of the Old Testament”.

53 In his 1881 BFER review of OTJC, Cave’s opening pronouncement (p.613) was: “This book will have to be numbered among the numerous unsuccessful ‘Apologies’ ” but he conceded that Smith was “eloquent” and cited one passage in particular as “chaste and beautiful” (p.618).

54 OTJC, p.13.

55 Ib., pp.18f.

56 The erroneous belief that WRS’s faith did not influence his conclusions is widespread: cf. Norman McLean’s tribute: “No one can read [Smith’s] works without being struck by his reverence for sacred things—a reverence which, being mingled with confidence that all discovery of truth is in the end a good, never interfered to bias his judgment or check the progress of investigation” ( “Dr Robertson Smith at Cambridge”: The Expositor, 4^th series, vol.ix (1894) p.472).

57 EB⁹, vol.xvii (1884) p.142, s.v. “Mythology”: “Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from ancestors of the civilised races who were in an intellectual state not higher than that of Australians, Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, and other worse than barbaric people”.

58 RepBA, 1874, p.xcii: “Believing, as I do, in the continuity of Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence …”.

59 Coleridge (1997) p.175. The text and punctuation are those of the first edition (1817) of Biographia Literaria.

60 John Tulloch’s attack on Tyndall’s presidential Address in 1874 was much more vehement than his relatively liberal criticism of Robertson Smith in 1878. “The last thing,” wrote Tulloch, “any really scientific man would wish to encourage is that species of presumptuous ignorance which mistakes hypothesis for fact and ‘guesses after truth’ for the truth itself” (Blackwood’s, vol.cxvi, 1874, p522).

61 E.g. Cook (1951) p.11: “He was a combative controversialist: ‘a little controversy does one good’, he said, only a few months before his death, when he was engaged in controversy with [A.H.] Sayce”.

62 “Was the prophetic inspiration supernatural?” – the second of two 1876 lectures by Smith on prophecy, printed in L&E, pp.349-366.

63 Ib., p.366.

64 Cook (1951) p.16.

65 Rel.Sem., p.24.

66 Ib., p.20: “In each sphere great importance was attached to form and precedent, but the explanation why the precedent was followed consisted merely of a legend as to its first establishment. That the precedent, once established, was authoritative did not appear to require any proof”.

67 Pater (1980) p.189.

68 Ib., p.186. Cf. B&C, p.18 and Bruce’s memoir (CUL Add. Mss 7476 M13, pp.11f.). Pater’s epigraph to his “Conclusion” is quoted from Plato’s Cratylus: “Heraclitus says, ‘All things are in motion and nothing at rest’ ”. In a pregnant footnote to the 1893 edition of The Renaissance, Pater wrote: “This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall”.

69 English Historical Review, vol.viii (1893) p.316 (review of Geschichte der Hebräer ii, by Von R. Kittel).