Richard De Smet

Richard De Smet, born the 16 April 1916 in Montignies-sur-Sambre (Belgium) and dead the 2 March 1997 in Brussels, was a Belgian Jesuit priest, and missionary in India. As Indologist he became a renowned Sankara specialist.

Born at Montignies-sur-Sambre, near Charleroi in Belgium, he came to India as a young Jesuit student of theology in 1946. Upon completion of his theological studies, he studied Sanskrit in Calcutta under Georges Dandoy, Pierre Fallon and Robert Antoine, all members of the so-called "Calcutta School" of Jesuit Indologists.

Provoked by a talk by Dr S. Radhakrishnan at a meeting of the Indian Philosophical Congress at Calcutta in 1950, where Radhakrishnan claimed that Sankara was a purely rational philosopher, De Smet decided to show that he was, instead, a srutivadin, a theologian who subordinated reason to the revealed (apauruṣeyā) scripture. De Smet went on to do his doctorate on The Theological Method of Samkaracarya, completing it at the Gregorian University, Rome, in 1953. Though he never got round to publishing this thesis, it became famous among Indologists and there are hundreds of copies in circulation.

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