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A Smart Teacher: A Reminiscence of Ninian Smart
Religion (2001) 31, 323–324 doi:10.1006/reli.2001.0386, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
A Smart Teacher: A Reminiscence of Ninian Smart R C Professor of Religion Emeritus, Duke University Ninian asked questions, and questions of questions, and stimulated that questioning in me. He was my philosophy teacher for two years, and briefly my Tutor, at King’s College, University of London, as the Fifties turned into the Sixties and Ninian’s career was, as I realise in hindsight, on the verge of taking off. I was what was known as a theolog, the pretentious but customary abbreviation for a theological student, but I was a strange one. Unlike most of my colleagues, I was not a candidate for the Anglican ministry, nor indeed was I particularly Christian, even by the capacious standards of the Church of England. Having read a misleading book or two on Buddhism, and having attended meetings of the Buddhist Society in Eccleston Square, I considered myself to be a kind of Buddhist in search of the Ultimate Truth—something which was perhaps to be found in a kind of theosophy that I had yet to invent. My questioning attracted friends who began as ordinands but who encountered doctrinal difficulties and declared themselves, at their graduation, atheists. This led to my being questioned by the Dean, but I assured him that I had no hand in their apostasy, for I, on the contrary, had decided to forsake Buddhism and enter the Anglican missionary field in a lay capacity. With my knowledge of Buddhism, it was clear to me, I would convert the whole of Burma, my chosen country, in a decade or two. Fortunately for the Burmese, I could find no openings in the missions at that time. This piece is about Ninian, not about me, and I recount the above only to show that restless questing and discomfort with orthodoxies and standardised expectations which I had as an undergraduate and which, having at length attained the venerable and impotent rank of Professor Emeritus, I am glad to say that I have not lost. Ninian encouraged my inquisitiveness, as much by his style of teaching as by his personal support. Had I not met him in my formative years, I might not have made the academic mischief which I have. I might have matured into distinguished scholarly dullness, bent with honors but unremembered by my own students, in whom I have, like Ninian, tried to encourage academic mischief. The subject which Ninian was supposed to be teaching at King’s was the ‘History of the Philosophy of Religion’, a straightforward assignment designed as the basis for the more advanced ‘Problems in the Philosophy of Religion’, to be taught the following year by the distinguished editor of the Muirhead Library of Philosophy, Hywel Dafydd Lewis. But Ninian could not keep to the script. He would wander off and muse about problems. When we studied Aquinas’ Five Ways, or proofs for the existence of God, he pointed out how none of them worked. The next week he told us why he thought they didn’t work. It had come to him, he said, over the weekend, that they weren’t really proofs at all. They were explanations of why someone like Aquinas found himself believing in God. I was amazed and delighted. So this was what the scholarly life was all about! Not just memorisation and commentary but critical reflection which went on even in the midst of teaching something well known and apparently set in stone in the textbooks. One could question anything. In fact, one must question anything for the academic enterprise to remain viable. 2001 Academic Press 0048–721X/01/040323+02 $35.00/0
324
R. Corless
The mischievous twinkle was not only in Ninian’s eyes. It was also, somehow, in his voice, and in his books, which, scorning the canons of academic literature, are often written in a conversational style, drawing the reader into the fun, asking us whether we really believe all this nonsense—or is it in fact nonsense at all? We are rarely given final answers. We are left to carry on the investigation ourselves. A Dialogue of Religions (London, SCM Press, 1960) is a model of this participatory method. Despite some factual erros, such as the identification of nirvana as an absolute, it is a great book, perhaps in a way Ninian’s greatest, for it unerringly and relentlessly exposes the institutional pomposity and intellectual absurdity of unexamined axis. Two of his own favourites, Reasons and Faiths (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) and Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (London, Allen & Unwin, 1964) may be more polished, but they do not hit as hard, or as slyly below the belt, as does Dialogue, and they do not, in my opinion, work as well as an undergraduate course book or as a vade mecum for interreligious meetings. Ninian would always look the most serious when he was being the most mischievous. Thus in his Gifford Lectures he remarked, in an offhand way, that one would hardly die for Presbyterianism. Surely the dominies in his audience must have thought, he is being abstract. Look at his face. It cannot be that he is referring to us. Offstage, he was still the actor. In a San Francisco restaurant, to which we had repaired during a meeting of the AAR, I mentioned that he was still wearing his name badge. ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘I’ll change it’. Pulling it from its plastic case, he wrote Nikita Kruschev on the blank side and solemnly re-inserted it. The waitress got the joke (it was, after all, San Francisco) and exclaimed, ‘Hi! I know you!’ His proclamation of the Pacific Mind came after some years of questioning what Americans were all about. Their oddities intrigued him. When he advised me to pursue post-graduate study in the U.S.A. rather than in England, he told me how it worked. ‘You take things called courses, d’you see, for which you get something called a credit, and you save these up, rather like saving stamps, and when you have a full book, you sort of turn it in for a degree.’ In Texas he was delighted to discover that it was possible to attend an indoor cookout by going to a barbeque in a climate-controlled stadium. And when he was being wooed, for the first and unsuccessful time, by the University of Wisconsin, he gleefully observed that the more he said ‘No’, the more money he was offered. He entered into the game to see how high the suitor would go. Ninian asked one question over and over: what is religion? Unlike his predecessors, he never gave us the answer. Is religion, for example, power (van der Leeuw), social contract (Durkheim), neurosis (Freud) or myth and symbol (Eliade)? He knew of these answers, he respected them, but he played with them, turned them over and around, and questioned their presuppositions, so that we also can respect them but cannot take them too seriously. We need to enter into the ongoing question. That is Ninian’s distinctive and unique legacy. 591 Daffodil Drive, Benicia, CA 94510, U.S.A.
A Smart Teacher: A Reminiscence of Ninian Smart R C Professor of Religion Emeritus, Duke University Ninian asked questions, and questions of questions, and stimulated that questioning in me. He was my philosophy teacher for two years, and briefly my Tutor, at King’s College, University of London, as the Fifties turned into the Sixties and Ninian’s career was, as I realise in hindsight, on the verge of taking off. I was what was known as a theolog, the pretentious but customary abbreviation for a theological student, but I was a strange one. Unlike most of my colleagues, I was not a candidate for the Anglican ministry, nor indeed was I particularly Christian, even by the capacious standards of the Church of England. Having read a misleading book or two on Buddhism, and having attended meetings of the Buddhist Society in Eccleston Square, I considered myself to be a kind of Buddhist in search of the Ultimate Truth—something which was perhaps to be found in a kind of theosophy that I had yet to invent. My questioning attracted friends who began as ordinands but who encountered doctrinal difficulties and declared themselves, at their graduation, atheists. This led to my being questioned by the Dean, but I assured him that I had no hand in their apostasy, for I, on the contrary, had decided to forsake Buddhism and enter the Anglican missionary field in a lay capacity. With my knowledge of Buddhism, it was clear to me, I would convert the whole of Burma, my chosen country, in a decade or two. Fortunately for the Burmese, I could find no openings in the missions at that time. This piece is about Ninian, not about me, and I recount the above only to show that restless questing and discomfort with orthodoxies and standardised expectations which I had as an undergraduate and which, having at length attained the venerable and impotent rank of Professor Emeritus, I am glad to say that I have not lost. Ninian encouraged my inquisitiveness, as much by his style of teaching as by his personal support. Had I not met him in my formative years, I might not have made the academic mischief which I have. I might have matured into distinguished scholarly dullness, bent with honors but unremembered by my own students, in whom I have, like Ninian, tried to encourage academic mischief. The subject which Ninian was supposed to be teaching at King’s was the ‘History of the Philosophy of Religion’, a straightforward assignment designed as the basis for the more advanced ‘Problems in the Philosophy of Religion’, to be taught the following year by the distinguished editor of the Muirhead Library of Philosophy, Hywel Dafydd Lewis. But Ninian could not keep to the script. He would wander off and muse about problems. When we studied Aquinas’ Five Ways, or proofs for the existence of God, he pointed out how none of them worked. The next week he told us why he thought they didn’t work. It had come to him, he said, over the weekend, that they weren’t really proofs at all. They were explanations of why someone like Aquinas found himself believing in God. I was amazed and delighted. So this was what the scholarly life was all about! Not just memorisation and commentary but critical reflection which went on even in the midst of teaching something well known and apparently set in stone in the textbooks. One could question anything. In fact, one must question anything for the academic enterprise to remain viable. 2001 Academic Press 0048–721X/01/040323+02 $35.00/0
324
R. Corless
The mischievous twinkle was not only in Ninian’s eyes. It was also, somehow, in his voice, and in his books, which, scorning the canons of academic literature, are often written in a conversational style, drawing the reader into the fun, asking us whether we really believe all this nonsense—or is it in fact nonsense at all? We are rarely given final answers. We are left to carry on the investigation ourselves. A Dialogue of Religions (London, SCM Press, 1960) is a model of this participatory method. Despite some factual erros, such as the identification of nirvana as an absolute, it is a great book, perhaps in a way Ninian’s greatest, for it unerringly and relentlessly exposes the institutional pomposity and intellectual absurdity of unexamined axis. Two of his own favourites, Reasons and Faiths (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) and Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (London, Allen & Unwin, 1964) may be more polished, but they do not hit as hard, or as slyly below the belt, as does Dialogue, and they do not, in my opinion, work as well as an undergraduate course book or as a vade mecum for interreligious meetings. Ninian would always look the most serious when he was being the most mischievous. Thus in his Gifford Lectures he remarked, in an offhand way, that one would hardly die for Presbyterianism. Surely the dominies in his audience must have thought, he is being abstract. Look at his face. It cannot be that he is referring to us. Offstage, he was still the actor. In a San Francisco restaurant, to which we had repaired during a meeting of the AAR, I mentioned that he was still wearing his name badge. ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘I’ll change it’. Pulling it from its plastic case, he wrote Nikita Kruschev on the blank side and solemnly re-inserted it. The waitress got the joke (it was, after all, San Francisco) and exclaimed, ‘Hi! I know you!’ His proclamation of the Pacific Mind came after some years of questioning what Americans were all about. Their oddities intrigued him. When he advised me to pursue post-graduate study in the U.S.A. rather than in England, he told me how it worked. ‘You take things called courses, d’you see, for which you get something called a credit, and you save these up, rather like saving stamps, and when you have a full book, you sort of turn it in for a degree.’ In Texas he was delighted to discover that it was possible to attend an indoor cookout by going to a barbeque in a climate-controlled stadium. And when he was being wooed, for the first and unsuccessful time, by the University of Wisconsin, he gleefully observed that the more he said ‘No’, the more money he was offered. He entered into the game to see how high the suitor would go. Ninian asked one question over and over: what is religion? Unlike his predecessors, he never gave us the answer. Is religion, for example, power (van der Leeuw), social contract (Durkheim), neurosis (Freud) or myth and symbol (Eliade)? He knew of these answers, he respected them, but he played with them, turned them over and around, and questioned their presuppositions, so that we also can respect them but cannot take them too seriously. We need to enter into the ongoing question. That is Ninian’s distinctive and unique legacy. 591 Daffodil Drive, Benicia, CA 94510, U.S.A.