June 6, 1860

"Dean Inge", is understood by the English to refer to William Ralph Inge, (June 6, 1860 to February 26, 1954). This scholar was a fierce defender of Anglicanism. He had a vivid spiritual life and undaunted intellectual probity. As an academic associated with both Oxford and Cambridge, he had no interest in attaining the notoriety of a popular figure. His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article discusses how this nevertheless happened:

In 1911 the prime minister, Asquith, made Inge dean of St Paul's. In many ways he was an inauspicious choice. He hated choral music, which was central to the cathedral's traditions, asking ‘are we quite sure that the deity enjoys being serenaded?’ He found the daily services ‘dreary and interminable’, and was often seen reading a book in his stall. As a modernist he was often at odds with his Anglo-Catholic canons, over whom he had little power..... But Asquith had appointed Inge in order to revive the literary eminence which St Paul's had enjoyed under predecessors such as John Colet, John Donne, and R. W. Church, and in this respect Inge was a great success. His writings attained their widest readership through his weekly columns in the Evening Standard, which ran, with some interruptions, from 1921 to 1946. These articles—on literary and political, as well as religious, themes—were reprinted in collections such as his two volumes Outspoken Essays (1919–22) and Lay Thoughts of a Dean (1926). His 1911 lectures ‘The church and the age’ led theDaily Mail to dub him ‘the Gloomy Dean’, a nickname which stuck, though his newspaper columns were in fact often light, witty pieces. A contemporary joke had it that he was ‘a pillar of the Church of England and two columns of the Evening Standard’.

Dean Inge shared in theological discussions, such as what it means to be partakers of the Divine Nature. Such a question historically involved choosing between essentialisation, substitution, and transformation, to speak in academese. Inge contended that all are aspects of the truth and not mutually exclusive. These subtleties, after Inge became the Dean of St. Paul's, shared cerebral shelf space with pictures like this quote from his diary:

There is probably no Cathedral in which the Dean is more absolutely powerless than at St. Pauls. I soon discovered that my position was that of a mouse, who if he dares to poke his nose out of his hole, finds four cats watching him....