John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) have inspired a wide range of thinkers, including his fellow Cambridge Platonists (More and Cudworth), Latitudinarians (Simon Patrick), Pietists (Henry Scougal), Empiricists (John Locke), Evangelicals (Edwards and Wesley), Romantics (Coleridge), Quakers (Isaac Penington), and contemporary philosophically inclined divines (Douglas Hedley, etc.).
Smith speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”).
In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge ultimately derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a kind of “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. I’m concerned, above all, with the relationship between the theoretical and the practical. Smith is noteworthy for the ease with which he combines the two, and I’m trying to understand him better.
Smith’s first use of the four-fold degrees of knowledge occurs, naturally enough, in his first discourse on the “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge” (1-21) in which he offers his most detailed systematic thoughts on how one reaches such a lofty goal. The discourse is arranged in three sections. In the first, Smith argues, drawing heavily from Plotinus, Origen, and scripture, that Divinity can only be known by “spiritual sensation” for which purification of the heart is an essential prerequisite. Section two addresses a possible objection to the method outlined in section one; namely that “if Divine Truth spring onely up from the Root of true Goodness; how shall we even endeavor to be good, before we know what it is to be so?” (13; cf. Aug. Conf. 1). How, in other words, if the method is essentially moral (and it is; that’s why he is drawn to Simplicius on Epictetus) are we to know the path of virtue without already being moral? Smith’s answer to this is reminiscent of the solution offered by Mencius in the Ru (Confucian) tradition; we have “seeds” of moral knowledge within us already (cf. 19). Smith argues that “there are some Radical Principles of Knowledge that are so deeply sunk into the Souls of men, as that Impression cannot easily be obliterated” (13). Among these principles are the “Common Notions of God and Vertue” (14). These we naturally incline toward even as our souls are “full of the Body” (15). “The more deeply our Souls dive into our Bodies, the more will Reason and Sensuality run into another, and make up a most dilute, unsavourie, and muddie kinde of Knowledge. We must therefore endeavor more and more to withdraw our selves from these Bodily things, to set our Souls as free as may be from its miserable slavery to this base flesh; we must shut the Eyes of Sense, and open that brighter Eye of our Understandings, that other Eye of the Soul, as the Philosopher calls our Intellectual Faculty” (15-16). Finally, in section three, Smith “setting aside the Epicurean herd of Brutish men, who have drowned all their own sober Reason in the deepest Lethe of Sensuality,” moves to categorize the rest of humanity into “Four ranks” following Simplicius’ “Fourfold kinde of Knowledge” (17).
Smith's second explicit reference to the four ranks of human beings comes in his “Discourse of the Immortality of the Soul," where his guide is Proclus on the Timaeus. Here, with Proclus, Smith argues; “χρόνος ἅμα καὶ αἰὼν τὴν ψυχὴν, the Soul partaking of Time in its broken and particular conceptions and apprehensions, and of Eternity in its comprehensive and stable contemplations I need not sat that when the Soul is once got up to the top of this bright Olympus, it will then no more doubt of its own Immortality, or fear any Dissipation, or doubt whether any drowsie Sleep shall hereafter seize upon it: no, it will then feel it self grasping fast and safely its own Immortality, and view it self in the Horizon of Eternity”(99-100; In Tim., II: 124-125 [177f-178a]).
In the Immortality Discourse Smith is offering a “map” of the journey the spiritual person should make from the world of sense, through rational opinion, in scientific knowledge, and finally to intellectual intuition. Turning away from the realm of origination, change, and dissolution and turning toward the realm of unchanging pure being – converting from the ordinary to the enlightened. This is Smith’s way of showing us the way out of the Cave. But, he is aware that only a few of us will ever make it so far. This intellectual conversion is not then a prerequisite for Christian salvation, yet it remains the goal for Smith and in this he is following Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and Simplicius. And he thinks this is the truly Christian life too.
John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”). In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. Above all, the concern here is for the relationship between the theoretical and the practical.