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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Scales's husband first noticed that she was having minor difficulties when she was performing in a play in 2001. She was eventually diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2014. The diagnosis did not prevent her from taking part in Great Canal Journeys, in which she and her husband spoke openly about her illness. [30] Her declining health led the couple to leave the series in 2019. [31] Interviewed for the BBC in 2023, soon after celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary, West said, with reference to Scales's dementia: "Somehow we have coped with it and Pru doesn't really think about it." [30] Honours [ edit ] Scales voiced the speaking ("cawing") role of Magpie, the eponymous thief in a 2003 recording of Gioachino Rossini's opera La gazza ladra ( The Thieving Magpie). 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 ] 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.

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. Scales is married to the actor Timothy West, with whom she has two sons; the elder is actor and director Samuel West. Their younger son Joseph participated in two episodes of Great Canal Journeys filmed in France. Scales also has a step-daughter, Juliet, by West's first marriage. 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). Illingworth's thought underwent little development. Most of the major themes in his philosophy are introduced in his first major work, the Bampton Lectures on Personality Human and Divine (1894), and his subsequent books, Divine Immanence (1898), Reason and Revelation (1901), Christian Character (1904), The Doctrine of the Trinity (1907), Divine Transcendence (1911) and The Gospel Miracles (1915), restate, expand or refine the basic arguments with only minor modifications and shifts of emphasis. The most important of the latter are the greater stress on divine transcendence and, with the experience of the First World War, on the reality of sin and evil. Illingworth died on 22 August 1915 in Longworth, aged 67, [24] and was buried at St Mary's Church. [25] Selected works [ edit ]In 2000, Scales appeared in the film The Ghost of Greville Lodge as Sarah. The same year, she appeared as Eleanor Bunsall in Midsomer Murders ' "Beyond the Grave". In 2001, she appeared in two episodes of Silent Witness ' "Faith" as Mrs Parker. In 2003, she appeared as Hilda, "she who must be obeyed", wife of Horace Rumpole, in four BBC Radio 4 plays, with Timothy West playing her fictional husband. Scales and West toured Australia at the same time in different productions. Scales appeared in a one-woman show called An Evening with Queen Victoria, which also featured the tenor Ian Partridge singing songs written by Prince Albert. Scales has performed An Evening with Queen Victoria more than 400 times, in theatres around the world, over the course of 30 years. [14] Illingworth, J.R. (1915). The Gospel Miracles: An Essay with Two Appendices. London: Macmillan and Co. In June 1883, Illingworth became engaged to Agnes Louisa Gutteres. [22] They were married at St Bartholomew's Church in Nymet Rowland, Devon, on 2 August 1883. [23] Actor Samuel West, Prunella Scales and Timothy West's son, played Siegfried Farnon in the 2020 remake of the veterinary drama series All Creatures Great and Small.

we can conceive of an Infinite Being as One whose only limit is Himself, and who is, therefore, self-determined, self-dependent, self-identical; including the finite, not as a necessary mode, but as a free manifestation of Himself, and thus, while constituting its reality, unaffected by its change – in other words, as an Infinite Person. ( Personality Human and Divine, p. 92)For Illingworth the term ‘Absolute’ expressed the doctrine of divine freedom. God and His actions are in no way constrained or determined by any objective nature beyond His own free personality: ‘God … does not love because it is His nature to limit Himself, but He limits Himself because it is His nature to love’ ( The Gospel Miracles, p. 157). Illingworth went beyond Lotze by renewing Jacobi's position that a person is not only an ‘independent centre of being’, but also ‘essentially and constitutionally social’ ( The Gospel Miracles, p. 191). Since others are potential parts of a self, dependence on others is not necessarily dependence on a not-self. Human persons are finite and imperfect, but ‘a complete and perfect Person would be one for whom there was no essential not-self, because all essential experience was His own’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 47). This, Illingworth argued, does not preclude but rather points in the direction of such internal relationships within the Godhead, as Illingworth's characteristic ‘social’ interpretation of the Trinity proclaimed. ‘Sociality is … of the very essence of personality as we know it, though limitation is not’ ( Divine Transcendence, p. 49). Illingworth, J.R. (1911). Divine Transcendence and Its Reflection in Religious Authority. London: Macmillan and Co.

Ransom, Teresa (2005). Prunella: The Authorised Biography of Prunella Scales. London, UK: John Murray. ISBN 9780719556975. In 1992 Scales appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Her chosen book was the Complete Works of Shakespeare in German, the Bible in Russian, and a Russian dictionary; her luxury item was "a huge tapestry kit". [24]