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In the early part of his book on Freud, Paul Ricoeur made a distinction between two types of interpretation of religion, which he called ‘the hermeneutics of recollection’ and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur 1970, p. 27). The former is sympathetic to religion. It assumes that religious consciousness is in touch with something real, and therefore contains some message that can be retrieved or ‘recollected’. By
contrast, the hermeneutics of suspicion assumes that religious consciousness is bewitched by an illusion, so that the aim of interpretation is not to retrieve, but to explain away. Ricoeur famously called Freud ‘a master of suspicion’. Patrick Casement inhabits the charitable mode, more sensitive to the symbolic and indirect language of religion, so belongs to the camp of the hermeneutics of recollection.
Credo? is not a dense academic tome, but a brief, and honest account of his own experience of struggling with, and living through, a deep personal engagement with psychoanalysis and religion. He graduated in anthropology and theology at Cambridge University in 1959 and for some time felt drawn to the priesthood. This aim was engulfed by a personal crisis in his twenties and his huge disillusionment by the Church's insensitive response to it (see pp. 4-6). Four years later, a different sort of earthquake, not personal but collective, occurred within the Anglican Church with John Robinson's (1963) publication of Honest to God.
Robinson, who was Bishop of Woolwich, chaffed at images of God imagined as some version of an Old Man in the Sky, ‘up there’. If, he asked, God is not to be regarded as an additional extra fact, alongside other facts in the world, what is the alternative? Robinson wanted to move towards more difficult descriptions, including Paul Tillich's (1951) depiction of God as ‘the ground of our being’ (see also Emmet, 1964). Many practising Anglicans found this hard to grasp, if not heretical.
Casement gives us some of his own short writings