Фридрих фон Хюгель: Өмір және діни ойлар

Friedrich von Hügel (born Friedrich Maria Aloys Franz Karl Freiherr von Hügel, usually known as Baron von Hügel; 5 May 1852 – 27 January 1925) was an influential Austrian Catholic layman, religious writer, and Christian apologist. Although classified with Modernists due to his friendships with Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, von Hügel rejected the Modernist theory of belief.

Friedrich von Hügel was born in Florence, in 1852, to Charles von Hügel, who was serving as Austrian ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and a Scottish mother, Elizabeth Farquharson, who was a convert to Catholicism. The young Friedrich was educated privately, and in 1867 moved with his family to England, when he was fifteen, remaining there for the rest of his life. It has been suggested that Count Felix Sumarokov Elston, an ataman of the Kuban Cossacks, was his elder half brother; but as the Count was born in 1820 this is most unlikely, and the Count is more likely to have been his uncle, the son of Hügel's grandfather. In 1873 he married Lady Mary Catherine Herbert (1849–1935), are now located, had awarded him an honorary degree in 1914. Hügel died in 1925. He was buried, beside his mother and sister, with the Benedictines of Downside, beside the abbey. His tombstone in an English country churchyard bears the simple inscription: "Whom have I in heaven but Thee?"

Friedrich von Hügel's major work was The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (1908). Writing in The Manchester Guardian after Hügel's death, William Temple gave his judgement of its value:
It is quite arguable that this is the most important theological work written in the English language during the last half century. Its greatness, like all true greatness in this field, consists in its combination of qualities usually found in separation from each other. It is a masterpiece of detailed critical study, yet it is a massive presentation of fundamental principle. It is a penetrating piece of psychological analysis, while it is also a great achievement in constructive philosophy. The most striking section of it — the introduction — has so deeply permeated the thought of our time that its leading conception has become a commonplace among many who have never read the book, or even who have never heard of it. This leading conception is, of course, the necessity of three elements in any religion which is to be both full and living — the mystical, the intellectual, the institutional. His statement of the necessity of each of these, and of the consequent need to harmonize and balance them, is unanswerable. Hügel's The Mystical Element of Religion is a critical but largely appreciative philosophy of mysticism. Yet, in many ways throughout this work von Hügel counsels the reader of mysticism's potential dangers. The mystical impulse is but one of the three elements that together with the other two constitutes the rich complexity of existence. Hügel cautions: " mysticism would never be the whole of religion; it would become a dangerous error the very moment it claimed to be this whole; but, at the same time, it would be an element essential to religion in the long run and upon the whole, although it would possess its own dangers, its own besetting sins, as indeed also the primitive, naïve type of religion possesses its own different dangers and different besetting sins."

Hügel's "three elements of religion" are his most enduring contribution to theological thinking. The human soul, the movements of western civilisation, and the phenomena of religion itself he characterised by these three elements: the historical/institutional element, the intellectual/speculative element, and the mystical/experiential element. This typology provided for him an understanding of the balance, tension, and 'friction' that exists in religious thinking and in the complexity of reality and existence. It is an organising paradigm that remained central to his project. The effort to hold these sometimes disparate dimensions together is structurally and theologically dominant throughout his writing. His friend George Tyrrell observed, "All life, according to [Hügel] consists in a patient struggle with irreconcilables—a progressive unifying of parts that will never fit perfectly."

In The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, published posthumously in 1979, O'Connor refers often to von Hügel, especially in writing to a correspondent in the process of conversion to Catholicism. A Subversive Gospel by Michael Bruner also examines her Catholicism and Hügel's influence.

With a deep commitment to the life of prayer, von Hügel was an authority on the great mystical writers, particularly of the pre Reformation period, and sympathetic to the emotional and spiritual burdens of humanity, so that he was sought out by many as a counsellor, guide, and spiritual mentor. His authority as a spiritual writer has endured through the posthumous publication of many of his letters: Selected Letters, 1896–1924, 1927, Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a Niece, 1928, and Spiritual Counsels and Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, 1964. The Von Hügel Institute, a research centre for the study of Christianity and society at St. Edmund's College, the University of Cambridge, was founded in 1987, and is named in honour of Friedrich's brother, Anatole von Hügel, the first director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge. A plaque was erected in 1968 by the Greater London Council outside his former home at 4 Holford Road, Hampstead, London, NW3 1AD, London Borough of Camden.