George Tyrrell: EII, with a slight accent on Ne/IEE

 

"Gripping men by what is deepest in them — their conscience".

George Tyrrell (1861-1909) is one of Catholic modernism's most prominent figures — the Irish Jesuit who pushed theological reform until he was expelled from the Society of Jesus and eventually excommunicated. His biography and writings provide rich material for typing, because his personality was so consistently expressed across both his intellectual work and his personal conduct.

The EII component feels primary and is visible in everything essential about Tyrrell's trajectory. His entire career was organized around conscience rather than ambition, strategy, or institutional loyalty — his gradual embrace of modernist theology and his refusal to recant under Vatican pressure was driven by genuine moral and intellectual integrity at enormous personal cost (which points out to increased prominence of the weak "static" trait, correlated with a refusal to bend to external influences, in his profile). 

His most influential writings — Lex Orandi, Through Scylla and Charybdis, Christianity at the Crossroads — are remarkable for their warmth toward specific struggling individuals rather than theological abstraction. In fact, he had some respect for scholastic Ti abstract classification and systematization, but himself felt alien to it, writing

God has revealed himself [...] not to the theologian or the philosopher, but to babes, to fishermen, to peasants [...] and therefore He has spoken their language, leaving it to the others to translate it (at their own risk) into forms more aceptable to their taste.

The decade-long engagement with the tension between his intellectual conclusions and his institutional obligations reflects EII's inability to simply release an unresolved moral question and move on (the "constructivist" rigidity of ethical functions).

He returned obsessively to the same fundamental problems: how can an honest person remain within an institution whose official positions he cannot accept? How can intellectual integrity coexist with institutional loyalty? These weren't merely academic questions for Tyrrell but genuine moral torments he couldn't put down.

He triggered a major crisis in his career with his essay, A Perverted Devotion, in which he questioned the Church's attitude towards the doctrine of Hell (and it was the old-style Catholic church, not the current one, where very nice popes express very nice hopes that Hell is empty):

"What may have been originally a love of God's justice, a sympathy with the divine indignation, quickly degenerated into an angry and egoistic vindictiveness... charity had no part in that thought, and faith, next to none; it was a mere outbreak of personal vindictiveness, of the pent-up heat generated by acrimonious controversy."

He's diagnosing a perverted devotion in people like the ancient church father Tertullian with EII's characteristic sensitivity to when genuine moral feeling has been corrupted into something that looks like virtue but serves the ego. The psychological precision here, tracing exactly how justice-love becomes vindictiveness, is very EII.

A pure LII like Bertrand Russell or George Plekhanov would have identified the logical contradiction in the doctrine of hell, worked out its implications with forensic precision, and either resolved it or declared it irreducible. Tyrrell instead went straight to the psychological and motivational texture of how people relate to the doctrine. That's Fi affective empathy operating as an analytical instrument rather than Ti logical decomposition.

The tension-holding rather than outright contradiction is equally characteristic.  The "temperate agnosticism" he advocates is almost a direct description of EII's relationship with unresolved moral complexity. It also explains why the article caused such institutional trouble despite being technically orthodox. A Ti-style analysis that concluded the doctrine was logically incoherent would have been easier to condemn as straightforward heresy. You can condemn a logical argument; it's harder to condemn someone for saying that God probably doesn't want us to feel nothing when doctrine seems cruel.

Contemporary accounts consistently describe him as gentle and personally modest despite the inflammatory content of his theological positions, lacking the aggressive self-assertion that more ILE or EIE-flavored modernists sometimes displayed. Tyrrell wasn't a systematic biblical critic following analytical conclusions past all pastoral concern for their human impact. His comfort with theological ambiguity and uncertainty (even excessive one — the old-type scholastics sometimes had valid criticisms, too) was a reflection of a reasonably strong-valued Ne and a relatively unvalued Ti. His Ne provided the refusal to accept simple unambiguous doctrinal formulations, the wide-ranging connections across philosophical and psychological traditions. 

His closing passage from Christianity at the Crossroads:

"The reason why, fronted by the same data, one man hopes and another despairs, is just a difference of personality, temperament and experience. Hence even those who see eye to eye with the Modernist may not, and in most cases will not, agree with him. But they will respect the hope which they do not share, while those who despise this hope cannot truly understand it."

is quietly very Ne + Fi - Ti: the acknowledgment that hope is a temperamental orientation rather than a logical conclusion, that probabilistic optimism in the face of discouraging evidence is a genuine feature of certain personalities rather than wishful thinking.

While very weak evidence, his appearance on photo definitely fits EII (and doesn't fit IEE).