著者

三上 章 Akira MIKAMI

出版者

東洋英和女学院大学大学院

雑誌

東洋英和大学院紀要 (ISSN:13497715)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.9, pp.1-19, 2013-03-15

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This article aims to clarify how Platonism functioned in the thinking of John Smith in his theological and philosophical work, A Discourse Concerning the True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge. Smith's Platonism consists not so much in a legalistic and petrified ideology as in incessant motion and ascent, driven by the love of wisdom and the ultimate truth. This basic mentality is reflected in Smith's understandings of "innate ideas" as being by nature resident within everyone's soul and making it possible to know God, of "Divinity" or "Theology" as "a Divine life" rather than "a Divine science," of the seat and place where the divine truth lies as having to be sought within man's soul, not outside of man, of the purification of man's soul as a prerequisite for attaining to divine knowledge, of warning against premature judgments in order not to fall into errors of dogmatism and fanaticism, and of the way of virtue as the formation of virtue and goodness within man's soul, a true living sense of them, and the vision of God with the eyes of a purified intellect (nous). Smith elucidates the ascents to divine knowledge in accordance with the explanation of the Stoic Platonist Epictetus. He shows that a man's soul progresses step by step to the upper dimensions ofcontemplating the truth in parallel with the degrees of the purification of the soul. Ascents start from the stage of an obscure opinion (doxa) to the stage of a more distinct opinion, then proceed to the lower level of science (episte-me-), and ultimately attain to divine knowledge. This is the way upward which is to be trodden by "the true and sober Christian who lives in Him who is Life itself, and is enlightened by Him who is the Truth itself, and is made partaker of the DivineUnction, and knoweth all things." This was nothing other than the way that John Smith, Platonist Christian, trod and that took him to the home above.