William R. Inge

By Timothy Austen

  Inge received his education from Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. He returned to Eton as Assistant Master in 1884 and taught classics. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1888, but, harboring doubts, chose to delay his own ordination to the priesthood a few more years. In the same year he was elected Fellow and Tutor at Hertford College, Oxford, a post he strongly preferred to his former position at Eton College. His early scholarship at Oxford focused on Christian mysticism, as did his 1899 Bampton Lecturers.
  Inge left Oxford in 1905 to become vicar of All Saints’ Church, Knightsbridge. In 1907, Inge became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Fellow of Jesus College, both at Cambridge. In 1911, however, he left his academic posts and All Saints’ Church to become Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1917–1918, Inge delivered two Gifford lectures, each on the philosophy of the pagan Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (c. 203–270 CE). He served a number of lectureships in the United Kingdom and the United States and received honorary degrees from the universities of Aberdeen, Durham, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Oxford and St. Andrews.
  To label Inge as an elitist would not be to descend to the level of ad hominem jabs, but simply to diagnose the strength of his unabashed Platonism. In his weekly columns, he criticized democracy in favor of rule by an educated elite (per Plato’s Republic) and opposed welfare “on the grounds that it penalized the successful while subsidizing the weak and feckless” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Here again one notices his belief in eugenics, a field that, while harshly criticized by many, was unfortunately at no want of prominent supporters.
  Inge retired from church ministry in 1934 to a life of writing and study. He wrote over thirty-five books in the areas of mysticism, Christianity, Platonism, ethics and contemporary issues, insisting in them to the church of his day that union of God is a deeply personal, contemplative, and mystical experience that must not be reduced to a mere abstraction or body of teachings.
  His most famous works are Christian Mysticism (Bampton Lectures) (1899); The Religious Philosophy of Plotinus and some Modern Philosophies of Religion (1914); The Philosophy of Plotinus (Gifford Lectures, 2 vols.) (1918); Outspoken Essays (2 vols., 1919, 1922); The Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture) (1920); The Victorian Age: the Rede Lecture for 1922; Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion (1924).

Christian Mysticism, Bampton Lectures, University of Oxford, 1899

Faith and its Psychology, Lecture Series, Cambridge, 1913

Personal Idealism and Mysticism, Paddock Lectures, New York, 1906

The Philosophy of Plotinus, Gifford Lectures, University of St. Andrews, 1917–1919

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