THE SMITH LECTURE 2019

WILL BE GIVEN BY PROFESSOR KAREN KILBY

ON THURSDAY  5 DECEMBER  5 – 6 p.m. in The Buchanan Lecture Theatre

Followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room, School of Divinity, 6-7.30 p.m.

Death:  a hesitation. Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and the Theological Construal of Death

Professor Kilby is the Bede Professor of Catholic Theology at the Centre for Catholic Studies in the University of Durham. She is a Systematic Theologian who has worked on questions related to the Trinity, evil, and mystery, and published books on both Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. She was one of the editors of The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, has served as the President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, and of the Society for the Study of Theology. She is currently working on a project on the status of suffering in Christian theology, and the relation of love and suffering. Her first academic post was in St Andrews, and she has also taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham.

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The Smith Lectures are named in honour of Margaret and Agnes, a pair of identical twins of Scots Presbyterian origin, born in 1843 in Irvine, Scotland, formidably  well educated thanks to their wealthy widowed father. They learned four modern European languages, and since they were fascinated by ancient languages and cultures, between them they acquired ancient and modern Greek, Arabic, Old Syriac and Hebrew, and embarked on adventurous travel. They became known as Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis on marriages to distinguished men.  James Gibson was a Scottish minster; and Samuel Lewis was librarian and keeper of manuscripts at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Another invaluable contact there was J.Rendel  Harris, a Quaker scholar who himself had undertaken successful hunts for ancient manuscripts.

The sisters’ marriages were brief, just three years in each case, and to abate their grief somewhat, in 1892 the sisters embarked on a carefully prepared visit (equipped with photographic equipment to copy manuscripts) to the library of St Catherine’s Monastery in the desert near Mount Sinai in Egypt. Not the first to recover priceless documents there, they themselves first discovered a wadge of text, the top layer of which Agnes published as ‘Select Narratives of Holy Women’, with underneath what became known as the Lewis Syriac Gospels. This was only the beginning of truly formidable accomplishments in the discovery and publication of many other texts in different locations. For her sharp-eyed discernment of this initial text, Agnes received degrees form Halle; both sisters received degrees from Heidelberg and later from Trinity College, Dublin. The University of St Andrews conferred degrees of Doctor of Laws upon them in 1904. These various doctorates were the first for theological studies conferred upon women by any university in Europe. Thus the Smith Lectures honour Dr Margaret Gibson and Dr Agnes Lewis. See further : Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, ‘A fresh appreciation of the Scholarship of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson’  Medieval  Feminist Forum: Journal for the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 45:no. 1 (2009), 23-49, available on the web as a PDF. Many of their publications are in St Andrews University Library.