"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction"
About this Quote
A backhanded pep talk disguised as anthropology: Inge opens by cutting humanity down to size, then grants us the smallest possible redemption - motion. Calling man "a poor creature" isn’t just piety or pessimism; it’s a strategic deflation of human self-importance at the moment modernity was inflating it. The line reads like a verdict delivered in a half-smile: you are not angels, you are not animals, you are the awkward, unreliable middle.
The ape-to-god spectrum is doing double duty. It borrows the prestige of evolutionary language while keeping one foot planted in theological hierarchy. Inge, a cleric-philosopher shaped by an age of Darwin, world war, and ideological certainty, turns that tension into a usable frame: evolution explains our origins, religion supplies the destination, and moral progress is the bridge we keep failing to build cleanly. He’s not claiming we will become gods; he’s implying we keep pretending we already are.
"Travelling in the right direction" is the sly pivot. It’s faith without triumphalism - the kind you can still utter after watching the 20th century demonstrate how quickly "advanced" societies revert to brutality. The intent is corrective rather than consoling: stop confusing intelligence with virtue, stop treating technological progress as proof of ethical progress. The subtext is a warning to the self-satisfied: history may be bending, but it doesn’t bend on its own, and the traveler is notoriously capable of turning around.
The ape-to-god spectrum is doing double duty. It borrows the prestige of evolutionary language while keeping one foot planted in theological hierarchy. Inge, a cleric-philosopher shaped by an age of Darwin, world war, and ideological certainty, turns that tension into a usable frame: evolution explains our origins, religion supplies the destination, and moral progress is the bridge we keep failing to build cleanly. He’s not claiming we will become gods; he’s implying we keep pretending we already are.
"Travelling in the right direction" is the sly pivot. It’s faith without triumphalism - the kind you can still utter after watching the 20th century demonstrate how quickly "advanced" societies revert to brutality. The intent is corrective rather than consoling: stop confusing intelligence with virtue, stop treating technological progress as proof of ethical progress. The subtext is a warning to the self-satisfied: history may be bending, but it doesn’t bend on its own, and the traveler is notoriously capable of turning around.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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