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INGE, WILLIAM RALPH
(June 6, 1860--February 26, 1954)
English clergyman and writer, was born in Crayke, Yorkshire, the eldest son of William
Inge, a curate and provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and Susanna (Churton) Inge,
whose father was the archdeacon of Cleveland. He was educated at Eton and at King's
College, Cambridge, where his career, as he afterward remarked, was "mainly a record
of scholarships and prizes." After leaving Oxford in 1884 he became a master at Eton,
a position he found uncongenial. In 1888 he was elected fellow and tutor of Hertford
College, Oxford, and in the same year he was ordained a deacon. Inge remained at Oxford
until 1905, when he was appointed vicar of All Saints' Church, Ennismore Gardens, a
position he held for two years.
In 1907 he was appointed professor of divinity and fellow of
Jesus College, Cambridge, and in 1911 Prime Minister Asquith chose him as Dean of St.
Paul's Cathedral in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1934. Throughout his
academic and ecclesiastical careers and during the twenty years of his retirement, Inge
produced a small library of books for both scholars and general readers on theology and
social and political subjects. Apart from his fame as Dean of St. Paul's, he achieved
renown as a columnist for the Evening Standard from 1921 to 1946. Known popularly
as "The Gloomy Dean" for his acerbic views on democracy and modern civilization,
Inge was a skillful and mordant controversialist; but it is for his surprisingly liberal
theological writings rather than his apparently reactionary--in fact
provocative--political positions that he is now remembered.
Inge's major contribution to theology was his investigation
of the place of Christian mysticism within normative belief. In such works as Christian
Mysticism and Studies of English Mystics he defined mysticism, as R. N. Iyer
wrote in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, "as the attempt to realize, in
thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in
the temporal." There was nothing soft about Inge's conception of mysticism; he
grounded it in the philosophical system of Plotinus, the neo-Platonist, and believed,
according to Iyer, "that amor intellectualis dei alone leads up
the pathway of reality." His culminating work on the subject was Mysticism in
Religion, published in his eighty-eighth year. Reviewing it in Christian Century,
Gerald Heard wrote, "Dr. Inge has never put his case with greater persuasiveness. . .
.The interest of this book is the further enlargement and strengthening of his position by
introducing confirmation from the 'perennial philosophy,' his appreciation of the part
that is played by the Sanskrit canon in that eternal gospel which has been revealed not to
one chosen people but to mankind at large."
Principal Works: Philosophy and theology--Christian
Mysticism, 1899; Faith and Knowledge, 1904; Studies of English Mystics, 1906; Truth and
Falsehood in Religion, 1906; Personal Idealism and Mysticism, 1907; All Saints' Sermons,
1905-1907; Faith and Its Psychology, 1910; Speculum Animae, 1911; The Church and the Age,
1912; Types of Christian Saintliness, 1915; The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2 vols., 1918;
Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion, 1924; The Platonic Tradition in English
Religious Thought, 1926; The Church in the World: Collected Essays, 1927; Protestantism,
1927; Assessments and Anticipations, 1929 (in U.S.: Labels and Libels); Christian Ethics
and Modern Problems, 1930; Things New and Old, 1933; God and the Astronomers, 1933; The
Gate of Life, 1935; Mysticism in Religion, 1947.
About: Dark, S. Five Deans, 1928; Dictionary of
National Biography, 1951-1960, 1971; Fox, A. Dean Inge, 1950; Helm, R. M. The Gloomy Dean:
The Thought of William Ralph Inge, 1962; Turner, R. (ed.) Thinkers of the Twentieth
Century, 2nd ed., 1987. Periodicals--Bookman April 1920; Christian Century
September 22, 1948; New Republic November 15, 1922; New York Times February 27, 1954;
Times (London) February 27, 1954.
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