Outlines of the history of Greek philosophy

In Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), the towers of Canterbury Cathedral standing amid a blitzed city provided a recurrent motif The film’s culmination—and the plot’s resolution—occurred in and around the cathedral, with the protagonists experiencing a series of miraculous interventions, followed by the closing scene of a platoon of soldiers singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” before departing to France Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of one of Frank Newbould’s “Your Britain—Fight for It Now” posters, as well as featuring in Lawrence Whistler’s stained-glass window depicting a fighter airplane at Moreton in Dorset This depiction of churches was not just “deep England” bucolicism Urban scenes were also portrayed, notably in John Piper’s pictures of damaged churches in Coventry, Bath, Bristol, and London Most famously, Her-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/520264

The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and “National Character,” 1918–1945

John Smith (1618-1652), the 17th century Cambridge Platonist, employed the traditional language of the spiritual senses of the soul to develop an early modern theological aesthetic central to his religious epistemology and thus to his philosophy of religion and systematic theology. Smith’s place in this tradition has been under-appreciated by scholars working on the Cambridge Platonists and the spiritual senses. However, as a Christian Platonist, Smith advocated intellectual intuition of Divine Goodness as the key to theological knowledge and spiritual practice. Furthermore, Smith’s theory of prophecy rests on the reception of sensible images in the imagination. In order to demonstrate this the dissertation first presents an interpretive summary of the spiritual senses tradition and proposes a functional typology that registers three uses of noncorporeal perception throughout the history of Christian theology: (1) accounts

Reason Turned into Sense: John Smith on Spiritual Sensation

The encounter between the Christian Churches and Psychology has, for all its evident cultural importance, received little attention from disciplinary historians. During the period between the two world wars in Britain this encounter was particularly visible and, as it turned out, for the most part relatively amicable. Given their ostensive rivalry this is, on the face of it, somewhat surprising. Closer examination, however, reveals a substantial convergence and congruence of interests between them within the prevailing cultural climate, and considerable overlapping of membership. The character of their meeting was, it is argued, determined more by these factors than by fundamental divergences in intellectual and theoretical orientation. Such divergences were diplomatically sidelined, on the religious side, by viewing Psychology as having certain ‘blind spots’ and, on the Psychology side, by invoking the argument that ‘science’ is concerned only with ‘facts’, not ‘values’. Only some hard-line psychoanalyst...

Psychology and the Churches in Britain 1919-39: symptoms of conversion

Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So-called mystical experiences, which some psychologists view as potentially sui generis, provide a test case for assessing whether we can develop an expanded framework for studying unusual experiences across disciplines and cultures. Evidence for the special nature of "mystical experience" rests on the operationalization of a metaphysically untestable construct in two widely used self-report scales: the Mysticism Scale and the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. Consideration of the construct in light of research on alterations in sense of self induced by psychoactive drugs and meditation practices suggests that "positive experiences of undifferentiated unity" are not sui generis, but rather a type of "ego dissolution." To better understand the nature and effects of unusual experiences, such as alterations in the sense of self, we need self-report measures that distinguish between generically worded experiences and the way they are appraised in terms of valence, significance, cause, and long-term effects in different contexts.

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William Ralph Inge

Papers

The philosophy of Plotinus ...

Mysticism in religion

Lay thoughts of a dean

Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages

Christian Mysticism; Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford