William Inge
“The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life.”
William Inge, the future Gloomy Dean of St Paul’s, was an Anglican cleric and scholar of mysticism; his Bampton lectures at the University of Oxford published as Christian Mysticism (1899) were a major touchstone for the study of mysticism. Inge’s account of religious attention and practice, set out in his introduction to the later anthology Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages (1904), is indicative of what Underhill opposed in her preface. Inge emphases the desire for a religious ‘immediacy’ evident in contemporary society and which has replaced a respect for the mediation of religious truth and the institutions that effected that. This new forms of religious engagement is shaped by science. ‘God-consciousness’ and a ‘healthy’ inner life redescribe religious life once marked by prayer, upright living and love of God and the neighbour. The church is no longer, as described in The Thirty-Nine Articles, the ‘visible Church of Christ’, striving to preach the ‘pure Word of God’ and minister the sacraments ‘according to Christs Ordinance’, so much as a setting where congregants’ psyches can be nurtured and strengthened (The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. by Brian Cummings [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], p. 679).
Image: William Ralph Inge, between 1911 and 1934, when he was employed as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Library of Congress. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
