WILLIAM
RALPH INGE
Christian
Mysticism
Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism
(delivered at Oxford in 1899)
Originally published by
Methuen & Company, Ltd. (November 1899)
Living Age Books edition
(Meridian Books, 1956 July 1956, second printing, January 1960.
Original edition
published seven times.)
[W.R. Inge (1860 – 1954) was the dean of St. PaulÕs Cathedral from 1911 to 1934.] Pp. 4-5.
[4] The phase of thought or feeling which we
call [5] Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all
religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim
consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these
Òobstinate questionings of sense and outward things.Ó We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct,
perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the
frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking
to us. Mysticism arises when
we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents
of our minds. Religious Mysticism
may be defined as the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the
soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realise, in
thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the
eternal in the temporal. Our consciousness of the beyond is, I say, the raw material of all
religion. But, being itself formless,
it cannot be brought directly into relation with the forms of our thought.