John Smith

← Encyclopedia

John Smith died at thirty-four, of consumption, on the seventh of August 1652, in the rooms of a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He had published nothing. The whole of what is now read under his name was assembled after his death from the lectures and college exercises he had delivered to undergraduates — gathered, edited, and given to the press by John Worthington as Select Discourses in 1660, eight years into the grave. A funeral sermon preached over him by Simon Patrick was bound at the back of that volume. The reputation, durable and out of all proportion to the slender output, rests on that single posthumous book and on the impression Smith left in the memory of men who heard him.

He was born in 1618 at Achurch, in Northamptonshire, of parents already past their youth, and came up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1640 and his MA in 1644. Emmanuel had been founded in 1584 as a seminary for the godly, a nursery of the Reformed clergy; it was, by the 1630s, the institutional heart of what would later be named the Cambridge Platonist circle. There Smith fell under the tutelage of Benjamin Whichcote, the elder spirit of that group, whose characteristic emblem was the Candle of the Lord — the verse from Proverbs that the spirit of man is itself a lamp set burning by God, a light by which the divine may be inwardly discerned. From Whichcote, Smith took the conviction that reason and religion are not adversaries, and that the seat of true knowing is the purified soul. In 1644 he migrated across to Queens’ College as Fellow, where he served as Hebrew lecturer and dean, and where he remained until his early death. The few contemporary notices that survive describe a man of unusual learning worn into early frailty by study and want — he had read his way, Worthington implies, through the whole of the Platonic and Neoplatonic corpus, the Greek and Latin Fathers, the rabbinic and Cartesian moderns alike — and a teacher whose lectures were remembered less for their erudition than for the warmth that carried it. He was, by every account that reaches us, the gentlest of the circle, and the one in whom doctrine and devotion seemed least to come apart.

The circle and its two enemies

To stand Smith among his fellows is to see what he was against. The Cambridge Platonists — Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Smith, and a wider penumbra of associates centered first on Emmanuel and later on Christ’s College — were not a school with a manifesto but a milieu with a temper. That temper set itself against two pressures bearing on the English mind at once.

The first was the hard Calvinism then dominant in the universities: a theology of absolute decree, double predestination, and a sovereign will whose commands are good because it commands them and for no reason prior to the commanding. Against this voluntarism the circle urged that the good is intrinsically good, known through the soul’s participation in the divine ideas — the position Plato had defended against Euthyphro, now turned against the Reformed schoolmen. The second pressure was the new mechanical philosophy remaking natural science, the world reconceived as dead matter in fortuitous motion, soon to find its most uncompromising voice in Hobbes. Against this the circle defended an incorporeal, living order — a cosmos animated rather than merely pushed.

What they reached for, in answer to both, was the older Platonism and above all the Neoplatonic tradition: Plato read through Plotinus, and Plotinus read in the Greek. The lineage was self-consciously Florentine. Plotinus had come to the Latin West through Marsilio Ficino, whose versions sat on the circle’s shelves, and through the long current of Renaissance Neoplatonism that ran from Ficino’s Florence into the Protestant north. On that reading, reason and faith were one motion of a single soul; the soul bore a real likeness to its source; and the divine could be known from within, by ascent and purification, rather than reached only by proof from without. Smith’s own recurring word for that knowing was not doctrine but life. Theology, for him, was less a science to be argued than a state to be lived into — and a corrupt mind, however sharp its logic, could not see God clearly, any more than a diseased eye sees the sun.

Among the four senior voices each took the inheritance in a distinct direction. More turned increasingly toward a Christian Kabbalism and a doctrine of the Spirit of Nature; Cudworth built the vast anti-atheist architecture of the True Intellectual System of the Universe and its Plastic Nature, and labored to keep the ancient theology of the Egyptians alive in respectable scholarship after Casaubon had dated the Hermetic books late. Smith did neither. Where a citation of Hermes Trismegistus might have stood in another man’s margin, Smith set Plotinus instead. His apparatus is the most thoroughly Plotinian of the circle’s: the Enneads run through every discourse, with Proclus behind them, Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium near at hand, and Origen, Maimonides on prophecy, and the Talmud drawn in where they serve. He is the Cambridge man who needed no Egyptian sage, because he had the Greek one entire.

The way to divine knowledge

The opening discourse, Of the True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge, carries the whole of Smith’s thought in compressed form, and the others are its consequences. Its argument is that the organ by which God is known is not the discursive intellect but the purified heart — that holiness is itself a faculty of perception. The figure he returns to is the eye. As the healthy eye perceives light by a likeness of nature to what it sees, so the cleansed soul perceives spiritual truth; and as no amount of describing color to the blind conveys what sight conveys in an instant, no amount of argument about God conveys what the sanctified soul knows directly. Divinity, on this account, is to be understood by a spiritual sensation rather than by any verbal description — a formula that became the signature of the man. The knowledge of God is a kind of gnosis: not information held in the mind but a participation of the soul in what it knows, so that the knower is conformed to the known.

This is why, for Smith, the bad man cannot be a good theologian. Where reasoning about God runs ahead of the soul’s purity, it produces only an external and lifeless religion — a cold notional assent that leaves the man unchanged. He distinguishes the kinds of knowing carefully. There is the religion of the senses, which never rises above the body; there is the religion of the fancy and the imagination, which dresses God in images; there is the religion of the reasoning mind, which frames true notions but holds them at arm’s length, as a geometer holds a theorem; and above these there is the knowledge proper to the highest part of the soul, in which the truth is not held but had, not concluded but tasted. Only the last is divine knowledge in Smith’s strict sense, and only the last transforms the knower. The ascent to divine knowledge is therefore a moral ascent before it is an intellectual one. Smith maps it after the Platonic and Plotinic pattern: the soul climbs by degrees away from the body and the senses, through self-knowledge and the practice of virtue, toward a fixed contemplation in which it is at last united to its object. At the summit the soul does not so much reason about God as become deiform, taking on the likeness of the divine nous and turning, in the Plotinian manner, toward the One from which all proceeds. The vocabulary is Christian throughout — grace, regeneration, the new birth — but the architecture of the ascent is unmistakably that of the Neoplatonic return, and Smith makes no secret of the debt. His Christianity is a mysticism of inwardness, pastoral as much as metaphysical: he is teaching young men how to be religious, not only how to think about religion.

The further discourses

From this root the remaining discourses grow. Of the Immortality of the Soul argues the soul’s incorporeal and undying nature not chiefly from Scripture or from the schools but from the soul’s own self-experience — its power of reflection, its grasp of eternal and immutable truths, its restlessness amid all finite things — taking the same line that More would elaborate at length and that the Platonic tradition had carried from the Phaedo forward. The soul that can know the unchanging is not itself a perishing thing. Of the Existence and Nature of God turns the same instrument outward: the idea of a perfect being is read as evidence of that being, and the order and life of the world as the trace of an incorporeal mind, against the mechanists who would make matter explain itself.

Of Prophesie is the longest and most technical of the discourses, and the most striking for its sources. Drawing heavily on Maimonides — whose treatment of prophecy in the Guide of the Perplexed Smith had read closely — he describes prophecy as a natural-supernatural faculty graded by degrees, in which the prophetic mind, raised by purity and by the disciplined imagination, receives the divine influx and is fitted to bear it. The prophet is not a passive mouthpiece overborne from without but a soul prepared from within, its rational and imaginative powers brought to so high a pitch that the logos, the divine reason, can speak through them; the degrees of prophecy answer to degrees of the soul’s preparation, and the highest, that of Moses, is set apart. The discourse is, in effect, the doctrine of spiritual sensation extended to its limiting case: prophecy is what the perceiving soul becomes when its perception is perfected.

The last of the great discourses, on the difference between a legal and an evangelical righteousness, carries the same conviction into the moral life. A legal righteousness is outward conformity, the keeping of a law as a debt paid under compulsion, the religion of the servant who obeys for fear of the lash. An evangelical righteousness is the law written inward, become the soul’s own nature and delight, the obedience of the son who loves what he is commanded — the same movement from the external to the inward that governs Smith’s account of knowledge, of the soul, of prophecy, now applied to holiness itself. Throughout, the weight falls always the same way: from the husk to the kernel, from the letter to the living thing, from notion to life.

Text, sources, and reception

Smith left no finished book. The Select Discourses were edited by John Worthington, his contemporary at Cambridge, from manuscripts and from notes of his college lectures, and printed in London in 1660 by J. Flesher for W. Morden; the EEBO-TCP keyed text of that first edition is available through Michigan’s Text Creation Partnership at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A60487.0001.001. A corrected second edition appeared at Cambridge in 1673, and the standard nineteenth-century reprint is H. G. Williams’s Cambridge University Press edition of 1859. The volume gathers ten discourses, the chief of them — on attaining divine knowledge, on the immortality of the soul, on the existence and nature of God, on prophecy, and on the excellency and nobleness of true religion — together with Simon Patrick’s funeral sermon, itself a primary witness to how Smith struck those who knew him.

The foundational modern study of the circle is John Tulloch’s Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1872), whose second volume devotes a full chapter to Smith and remains useful for its biographical and bibliographic apparatus, dated though its liberal-Protestant reading now is; it can be read at https://archive.org/details/a611326202tulluoft. Frederick J. Powicke’s concise The Cambridge Platonists: A Study (London: Dent; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926) is the standard short treatment of the school. The single most influential twentieth-century interpretation is Ernst Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932), translated as The Platonic Renaissance in England (1953), which sets the circle in a continuous tradition of Renaissance Platonism reaching toward the idealism of a later age. For the present state of the scholarship the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a current survey of the group and its sources, supplemented by the Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook, an open digital edition of the circle’s texts directed from Cambridge. Among the four senior figures, Smith is commonly judged the most attractive writer and the most quietly contemplative — the one in whom the Cambridge Platonist temper appears least as controversy and most as the description of an inner life.

For Smith the knowledge of God was never a conclusion to be reached at the end of a chain of reasons. It was a thing seen, by an eye made clean enough to see it — a state lived into rather than argued to, and one that no description could hand to a soul unprepared to receive it. The slim book gathered out of his lectures is the only record he left of that seeing, and it is fitting that it should be slim: the substance of what he taught was, by his own account, the kind of knowing that cannot be set down in a book at all, but only pointed toward, and then had within.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) · Plato — Dialogues (Jowett)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Nous · Gnosis · Cambridge Platonism · Henry More · Plato · Platonism · Marsilio Ficino · Soul · Prophecy · Mysticism · Christianity · Logos