Reason Turned into Sense: John Smith on Spiritual Sensation

John Smith (1618-1652), long known for the elegance of his prose and the

breadth of his erudition, has been underappreciated as a philosophical

theologian. This book redresses this by showing how the spiritual senses

became an essential tool for responding to early modern developments in

philosophy, science, and religion for Smith. Through a close reading of

the Select Discourses (1660) it is shown how Smith’s theories of

theological knowledge, method, and prophecy as well as his prescriptive

account of Christian piety rely on his spiritual aesthetics. Smith

offers a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural

theology and revelation supplemented by spiritual perception via the

imagination too. The central uniting feature of Smith’s philosophical

theology is thus “spiritual sensation’ broadly construed. The book

closes with proposals for research on Smith’s influence on the accounts

of the spiritual senses developed by significant later figures including

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and John Wesley (1703-1791).