Religious Truth in the Light of Bi-Logic

The following paper was presented at “God and the Unconscious,” a meeting of the Deep Streams Institute (1), in San Francisco, on October 28, 2000. This paper summarizes some of the themes of a recent book by the same author: The Symmetry of God (1999, London: Free Association Books).

Twenty years ago a parishioner of mine — I am a parish priest in South London — handed me a book and asked me to comment on the mathematical conceptions in it, since my first training was as a mathematician. The parishioner was Gerald Wooster, and the book was The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. I found much of it puzzling, and the psychoanalytic language particularly obscure, as I had no familiarity with it. The mathematics also was often puzzling, and I am still not sure if that is my problem or Matte-Blanco's. However, I also had a strange feeling that I was reading something familiar in another field, that of theology.

Timelessness, omnipotence, paradox, and the co-presence of opposites were all concepts I was intimately familiar with from the great mystics and theologians of the past — and especially the distant past, the pre-Enlightenment past. They sprang from the age of the Christian fathers — the third to sixth centuries, say — and from the generally misunderstood and often ridiculed literature of the Middle Ages. The spirit of Matte-Blanco, I felt, was one which would engage eagerly in debate over the mysterious unity of the persons of the Trinity, or even over the number of angels who could sit on the head of a pin, as the cover of his book suggests. Bi-logic, Matte-Blanco's theory of the two logics of the human mind, seemed to be a tool which could elucidate the structure of these ancient debates.

It is the general practice of authors to write their prefaces when the rest of the book is done, and often in the preface you find important indications of what the book is really about, when the wood is seen at a proper distance from the trees. In the third paragraph of his book, The