The writer, raconteur and world educator Ninian Smart, who died on January 29th aged 73, was an inspirational professor of religious studies over more than four decades, and a powerful advocate of the study of religion for the enrichment of common humanity.
From beginning to end, he enjoyed a high academic profile. His father was professor of astronomy at Glasgow University, and he had two brothers who also reached professorial rank. Educated at Glasgow Academy, he was in the British army intelligence corps from 1945-'48, where he learned Chinese (via Confucian texts) and had his first extended contact with Sri Lankan Buddhism. He established his prowess in philosophy at Oxford University, graduating in 1949, and subsequently in Sanskrit and Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, at Yale.
After lectureships at University College, Aberystwyth, and London University, he was appointed professor, successively at the universities of Birmingham (1961-'66), Lancaster (1967-'82) and California (1976-'98). He was also visiting professor at Yale, Wisconsin, Princeton, Banaras, Queensland, Otago, Cape Town, Bangalore and Hong Kong.
In the 1960s, Ninian Smart began challenging what he saw as the intellectual hegemony of much contemporary Christian theology. This was done in lectures and publications but, above all, in his appointment, in 1967, to the first professorial chair of religious studies at Lancaster. With his colleagues, he developed this new department, which, unusually, made no assumptions about the religious convictions of its staff, into a teaching and research centre of world renown, attentive to diverse religions and multi-disciplinary in approach, drawing on the full range of social sciences.
Ninian Smart also promoted this spirit of critical openness in relation to religious education in schools. He set out the agenda in Secular Education And The Logic Of Religion (1968), and, a year later, was a founding co-chair of the Shap working party on world religions in education. At the same time, he was appointed director of the British Schools' Council religious education projects (primary and secondary). For the best part of a decade, these projects set about demonstrating a dimensional model for religious education whose academic integrity would outflank the abolitionists. The model became imitable in places as far afield as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and southern Africa.
For much of the last 20 years, Ninian Smart was based firmly in the department of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for part of the time acting as chair and latterly serving as elected president of the American Academy of Religion. His own liberal spirit and sense of justice found a match in the vibrancy of living in America. Thousands of teachers and scholars would acknowledge his inspiration.
The flower-in-buttonhole and smiling anecdote, the rapier mind, the warmth and generosity were his hallmarks. Though he wore his learning lightly, he was the prolific author of more than 30 books, and the epic television series exploring world religions, The Long Search, originally shown in 1977.
Genuinely understanding the world as seen by others was a major priority for Ninian Smart, but he was not content to leave descriptive representation without acknowledging its challenge for the starting point of others. Thus his engagement with Buddhism was always acknowledged as raising questions for and providing insights into Christianity, and, almost incidentally, in relation to his own Anglican/Episcopalian faith.
Just as no religion is an island, so Ninian Smart also argued that no culture and civilisation is without its religion or world view. Failure to realise this can be a threat both to peace and the human imagination. Accordingly, he was keen to demonstrate the loss to philosophy and political science which can arise if religion is not fully understood in its own terms. This is evident from his book, World Philosophies (1999), and his writings on nationalism, Mao, ideologies and modern India.
After his years in California, Ninian Smart had just returned to Lancaster with his Italian wife Libushka (they married in 1954). There had been no promise to reintroduce the peacocks, as in their earlier Lancastrian base (in what he claimed to be the first house ever built of concrete); nor had he made any renewed commitment to stand in Lancaster for the SNP. But he was an inveterate doodler, ever tempted to pen the mischievous haiku, or the article before breakfast on the aesthetics of cricket. He had not grown weary with the world.
Roderick Ninian Smart: born 1927; died, January 2001