THE SYMMETRY OF GOD

Rodney Bomford was until recently an Anglican vicar in Camber well and a member of the London Bi-logic Group. He has brilliantly and profoundly focussed the insights of the Chilean Freudian analyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, so as mutually to illuminate both modern spirituality and the logical structure and content of religious discourse. The result is an intellectually able and spiritually engaging book of great importance.

The options presented to enquirers trying to make sense of the traditions of Christianity often appear to be two. Either one accepts a conservative approach which sacrifices intellectual integrity in its literal reading of Scriptures and its understanding of doctrinal terms, or one enters a reductionist Weltanschauung in which there is no content in theological discourse beyond or deeper than everyday consciousness and experience. Neither option is adequate because neither proceeds from a plausible philosophical basis in such a way as to address the questions those seeking a spirituality connected to their world but transcending it are actually asking. Bomford rejects this false dichotomy and finds fruitful the language and insights of psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalytical thinking has, of course, deeply influenced pastoral theology and Jung's depth psychology has been incorporated, by Father Slade SSJE among others, into the mystics' spiritual quest for God within the soul or heart or spirit. Bomford writes in a pleasingly diffident style but with considerable authority: "the concept of God and the concept of the Unconscious have much in common and share, to a significant degree, the same kind of reality". "Some believers may find it peculiar or even blasphemous to talk of the Unconscious of God. Yet if God may be described symbolically as having a finger, a hand, an eye and indeed a mind, then symbolically also it seems unreasonable to forbid positing (something analogous to) an Unconscious and a Conscious in that mind." He writes, "If God is to be spoken of at all, if any intimations of the eternal and infinite that humankind receives are to be expressed, then necessarily their expression is paradoxical, symbolic and mythical". Bomford does not equate mythical with fictional. Mythical is neither true nor false: "Myths belong close to the horizon within which all conscious lives are lived...our deepest emotions come from beyond that horizon and these shape our ultimate values, values which determine what truth and falsity are for us. Myth is therefore, within us both communally and individually, at a level logically prior to the distinction between truth and falsity. They participate to a degree in the unchanging eternity of the Unconscious. Part of the journey of faith is to make them more explicit". The author asserts that this may occur dramatically and suddenly in a "conversion experience" or gradually through a long slow process in which someone devotes long meditative attention to their inner myths.

Bomford makes use of literary examples to demonstrate that, "The lunatic, the lover and the poet /Are of imagination all compact". They "apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends", as do also the mystic and the saint. Commonsense reasoning conforms to Aristotelian or asymmetric logic: symmetric logic exhibits three laws, Opposition, Reflection and Rotation. Bomford argues that through the principles of generalisation and symmetry, the 'reasoning' of the Unconscious proceeds to inform a much more subtle understanding of the relation of the person to God.

For example, although Bomford proceeds to show how Matte Blanco's symmetric logic informs each of the five modes of the Freudian metapsychology of the Unconscious (timelessness, condensation, displacement, non-contradiction and the equivalence of fantasy and reality), relating each to theological understanding, I shall only briefly refer to his approach to the idea of timelessness and eternity. Bomford, by the way, is aware of the difficulties attendant upon reifying the "Unconscious" and of the preference of many in the Freudian tradition for speaking instead of "unconscious processes". His analysis remains unaffected by his predilection for speaking of the Unconscious (sic).

Bomford sees a progression, an approach to the ultimate term "eternity", though ante-penultimate and penultimate terms such as the Coincidence of First and Last and the idea of the Everlasting. He quotes the well-known passage in Traherne's "Centuries of Meditation" in setting out his method. Traherne, recalling a vision from his childhood, writes "The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting". To know God is to regain such experiences and to see the world once more with the uncorrupted eye of a little child. Timelessness is an essential quality of such an experience. Without reference to transcendent experience, writes Bomford, belief in God is an arid business. Nevertheless, Christian theologians have offered philosophical reasons for attributing eternity to God but these too have often arisen from experience. Aquinas writes, "Just as the notion of time starts from the notion of the present moment passing, so the notion of eternity starts from the idea of an instant that abides". That is Boethius' definition of eternity as the instantaneously whole and complete possession of endless life. From a Freudian perspective, glimpses of eternity, whatever else they are (q.v. Moses and Monotheism), are glimpses into the Unconscious and Matte Blanco charted the symmetric logic of the Unconscious which can be mapped onto Traherne's experience of timelessness, mapped as signals of transcendence. The result is a rich process of synthesis of the insights of Freud, the poets, the mystics and the theologians, a process of momentous possibilities.

The essence of the irrational logic of the Unconscious is the quest for symmetry. Bomford shows, very persuasively, that this creates the sense of justice, of peace and of beauty, aspects all of what Christians have called the Kingdom of God. Enquirers into Christian spiritual traditions, doctrines and the poetry of God may find throughout this book, that no rejection of reason is required of them. They may find that the quest for justice, the paradoxes of the mystic and the imagery of prayer and liturgy reflect different levels of discourse all tending, as Bomford concludes "to express, in the immeasurably complex variety of the particulars of life, the symmetry of God".