The Life and Work of John Richardson Illingworth, M.A., D.D: As Portrayed by His Letters and Illustrated by Photographs (Classic Reprint)

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Illingworth, Rev. John Richardson". Who Was Who. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2014. doi: 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U187450. Bengtsson, Jan Olof (2006). "Illingworth, John Richardson (1848–1915)". In Grayling, A.C.; Goulder, Naomi; Pyle, Andrew (eds.). The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-975469-4. Ransom, Teresa (2005). Prunella: The Authorised Biography of Prunella Scales. London, UK: John Murray. p.43. ISBN 9780719556975. Fawlty Towers almost didn't happen for Prunella Scales, according to John Cleese". Daily Mirror. London: Trinity Mirror. 8 May 2009. ISSN 9975-9950. OCLC 223228477 . Retrieved 21 July 2015. From 1872 to 1883, Illingworth was a Fellow and Tutor of Jesus College, Oxford, and a Tutor of Keble College, Oxford. [18] He was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 1875 and as a priest in 1876. [19] From 1883 until his death, he was Rector of St Mary's Church, Longworth in the Diocese of Oxford. [18] He was also a Select Preacher of the University of Oxford from 1882 to 1891 and of the University of Cambridge from 1884 to 1895. [18] In 1894, he gave the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford; the series was titled "Personality, Human and Divine". [20] He was made an honorary canon of Christ Church, Oxford, on 6 February 1905. [21] Personal life [ edit ]

Ad hoc: Tesco thinks again as Dotty takes her leave". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022 . Retrieved 9 January 2021. Cantelon, John Edward (1951). John Richardson Illingworth: Philosophical Theologian (PhD thesis). Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 54824068. Great Canal Journeys: how a bittersweet boating show captured viewers' hearts". The Guardian. 21 October 2019 . Retrieved 9 January 2021.John Richardson Illingworth (26 June 1848 – 22 August 1915) was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and theologian. He was a notable member of the set of liberal Anglo-Catholic theologians based in Oxford, and he contributed two chapters to the influential Lux Mundi. [6] [7] Early life and education [ edit ] Illingworth, J.R. (1894). Personality, Human and Divine: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1894. London: Macmillan and Co. Hoskins, Richard (1999). "Social and Transcendent: The Trinitarian Theology of John Richardson Illingworth Re‐Examined". International Journal of Systematic Theology. 1 (2): 185–202. doi: 10.1111/1463-1652.00013. ISSN 1468-2400.

Great Canal Journeys: how a bittersweet boating show captured viewers' hearts". The Guardian. 21 October 2019. Illingworth's relative Christian orthodoxy distinguished him not only from contemporary idealists in general, but also from some of the other theistic idealists. It also made him turn against the excess of subjectivism and of the emphasis on feeling and individual, inner experience and private judgement in modern liberal theology, against which he sought to uphold the objective authority of the external, institutional life of the church and its dogmas and traditions. His strong aesthetic interests were satisfied by the sacraments and liturgy of the church as much as by the contemplation of nature. Although he accepted the scientific hypothesis of evolution and shared a broad Victorian faith in moral progress, he turned, especially towards the end of his life, against facile progressivism. And although he oscillated between orthodoxy and modern interpretations in his Christology and Trinitology, revelation and the dogma that necessarily followed from it, and the historical fact of the Incarnation, were the points of departure of his philosophy. The concrete particularity of Christ's historical personality is prior to, and controls and restrains, abstract speculation on the nature of God. An answer to the question of God's relation to the world is suggested by the analogy of our own experience as conscious persons of combined transcendence and immanence, but it is the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation that best embrace and express both these complementary aspects. Illingworth, whose books were translated into Chinese and Japanese, was perhaps the most widely influential British representative of a nineteenth-century current of thought which sought to establish a synthesis of characteristic themes of modern idealistic philosophy and Christian theism by focusing on the concept of the person. This tradition of more or less idealistic personalism in philosophy and theology, whose British branch was represented also by A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, J. Seth, H. Rashdall, C.C. J. Webb, W. R. Sorley and others, was first developed through the impulse of F. H. Jacobi's criticism of the pantheistic, atheistic and nihilistic consequences of Enlightenment rationalism, and subsequently through the main systems of post-Kantian idealism developed in Germany in the first years of the nineteenth century by Schelling, by some mainly ‘right-wing’ Hegelians, by the so-called ‘speculative theists’ and others. Although this current seems to have already, at least indirectly, inspired S. T. Coleridge's criticism of pantheism, on which Illingworth also drew, it was mainly in R. H. Lotze's form that it reached Britain, and provided intellectual guidance and inspiration for those who saw in British absolute idealism as well as in naturalism new threats to the status of the individual person, to the truths of religion and morality, and to freedom. A central issue that distinguished the movement of personal idealism was its insistence, against the Absolute idealists, that the Absolute must be understood as personal and identical with the God of theism, that personality is not essentially finite and relative. Illingworth was one among many who cited and developed Lotze's argument that finitude is not a precondition of personality, but rather a hindrance to its full development, and that perfect personality was therefore to be found only in God. Illingworth defended the fundamental theistic position that God is self-contained and independent of necessary relation to creation, turning against the pantheistic position of German idealism and later process theology according to which God realizes himself through the evolutionary development of the universe and is thus dependent on the latter: ‘we might say that His purpose is increasingly realized, but not His person’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 49). But in contradistinction to the personal idealists Rashdall and Sorley, he also rejected the conception of the Absolute as the ‘totality of all existence’, ‘the world-ground together with the world’, ‘God together with creation’, as ‘practically meaningless’, since ‘we can attach no common predicate, beyond that of bare existence, to such an absolute’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 14). He insisted thatHeritage, Stuart (7 November 2016). " 'It's like glimpsing an old couple holding hands': why I adore Great Canal Journeys". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 December 2016. Illingworth was formed by the idealism of T. H. Green but, as he significatively explained, using an analogy with the split in the Hegelian school in Germany, he joined what he called the Greenites of the Right, represented by Seth Pringle-Pattison, and turned against the Greenites of the Left, presumably absolute idealists such as F. H. Bradley and B. Bosanquet. Illingworth shared Green's general idealistic view of knowledge, and the analysis of scientistic materialism as caused by an illegitimate abstraction from the totality of concrete experience. Properly understood, science cannot contradict theology, and philosophy necessarily supplements its empirical hypotheses: although no philosophical system is ever ‘adequate or final’ ( Personality Human and Divine, p. 4), ‘the aim of philosophy is concrete knowledge of the world as a whole. It surveys all the different parts of experience … with a view to ascertaining their mutual relations and total significance; what is the nature of their connexion; what is their meaning as a whole’ ( Reason and Revelation, p. 103). Illingworth shared the Broad Church sensibilities of the kind of liberal theology that was susceptible to influences from the new idealism in that he insisted on the presence of true revelation in other religions. Philosophy must be founded on the whole of ‘the spiritual experience of mankind’, which is ‘the most important element in our total body of experience’ ( The Doctrine of the Trinity, p. 18).

As in the broader current of personal idealism, a realistic element was introduced by the understanding of ultimate reality as individual persons in reciprocal relations, and also by a stronger emphasis on the independent reality of external nature, yet in its retention of the concept of the Absolute, and in its epistemology, its ethics, and its aesthetics, Illingworth's philosophy is clearly idealistic in a broader sense. The religious significance of matter and nature as revealing the presence of divine Spirit, as well as of the indwelling of God in man, were especially emphasized in Illingworth's early works, but in these he already rejected pure immanence and pantheism: ‘Spirit which is merely immanent in matter, without also transcending it, cannot be spirit at all; it is only another aspect of matter, having neither self-identity nor freedom.’ Pantheism ‘is merely materialism grown sentimental’ ( Divine Immanence, p. 69). In Divine Transcendence he turned against R. J. Campbell's radical immanentism and sentimentalism in The New Theology (1907). Noting the increasingly pantheistic use of the term ‘divine immanence’, which threatened moral freedom and blurred the distinction between good and evil, Illingworth regretted his earlier use, in Lux Mundi, of the expression ‘higher pantheism’, and, following Coleridge and the older criticism of pantheism, argued that without the notion of transcendence, ‘we can no longer distinguish between God and the universe except as different aspects of one and the same thing … they are only different ways of describing the same reality, which may equally well be called nature or God’ ( Divine Transcendence, pp. 68–9). Elaborating on such criticism, Illingworth argued, in a way that anticipates the later theological reaction against liberal idealism, that God is ‘our infinite and absolute Other. He is all that we are not’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 16), and that the whole significance of ‘God's indwelling presence or immanence within us … depends upon the fact that God is our eternal Other, and not our self’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 17). Illingworth was critical of mysticism for its obliteration of the distinction between God and man. ‘Man at the centre of his being is not God, but is capable of receiving God ( capax deitatis), while, as the result of that reception, his own individuality, his own “peculiar difference” is not pantheistically obliterated, but divinely intensified’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 18) But he still insisted that both transcendence and immanence were necessary, as correlative conceptions guarding against undue confusion and separation respectively. Illingworth, J.R. (1894). Personality, Human and Divine: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1894. London: Macmillan and Co . Retrieved 12 October 2018.

Ransom, Teresa (2005). Prunella: The Authorised Biography of Prunella Scales. London, UK: John Murray. ISBN 9780719556975.