Book Review

Meeting of minds and dreams

Fr Victor White, OP: the story of Jung’s ‘White Raven’

In Thomist theology, evil is regarded as absence of good, privatio boni, a doctrine never easy to accept. On the other hand, what is the alternative? Are we caught up in a cosmic struggle between two evenly matched principles, one good and one evil? Or should we stick to faith in the goodness of divinely created reality, accepting the corollary that evil is not something positive?

This exchange of letters between Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the founder of analytical psychology, and Victor White (1902-60), the Dominican theologian, brings out with painful clarity the difficulty, and perhaps the impossibility, of bridging the gap between those who accept the doctrine and those who regard it as unintelligible.

Jung knew Protestant religion from inside; his father was a pastor. He became increasingly interested in Catholicism. Hugo Rahner, elder brother of Karl, was among the priests to whom Jung turned for theological advice. In 1945 Victor White initiated the correspondence by sending Jung his recent essays on Jung's psychology and theological matters.

White joined the Dominicans in 1923 and spent most of his life in Oxford. Apart from his collaboration with Jung he is remembered, in God the Unknown and Other Essays (1956), for his emphasis on the apophatic element in Thomas Aquinas' theology of God. The dissertation that he wrote in 1930 on the Platonism of Aquinas he later regarded as anticipating a quasi-Jungian attempt to salvage the sacramental view of the world. Jung was delighted with White's essays, and invited him to the regular conferences that he held in Switzerland, and to stay in the family home.

Much of the correspondence is devoted to telling each other their dreams. The friendship also grew through sharing jokes: White was mischievously delighted when Jung reported that a lecture by Martin D'Arcy, the well- known Oxford Jesuit, was a "flop" ("he's quite a Shadow of mine!").

Never his analyst, Jung gave White much wise counsel. In 1953, on the point of leaving the order, claiming that his "position has become morally impossible and dishonest", White drew a superb reply from Jung, skilfully playing down the melodrama. Three months later Jung wrote again, serenely and supportively. White replied, in May 1954, that he would follow the older man's advice: "the practical upshot is that here I stay". Admittedly he had also consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese system of divination, finding that the result agreed with Jung's advice.

These were troubled years in the history of Catholic theology. Theologians and church authorities, especially in Rome, worried about what they perceived as the negative implications of Jung's psychology for Catholic doctrine. Lammers and Cunningham print a splendid letter of 1958, in which the then prior provincial of the English Dominicans, Hilary J. Carpenter, stalwartly defends Victor White's orthodoxy in response to an inquiry by the Holy Office. An even better letter, from 1959, was written by Carpenter's successor, Henry St John. Authoritatively informed that the Holy Office never explains what is wrong with a book, he writes back to Rome as follows: "I have felt justified in assuring him [White] that since he is not to be told what, in the content of his book, has moved the Sacred Congregation to take this action there can be nothing in it even remotely dangerous to his own faith and morals or to those of any of his readers capable of understanding its subject matter." The book was God and the Unconscious (1952): the action required was that sales should be suspended - in fact the book, which has a foreword by Jung, had been out of print for two years.

Jung's most challenging intervention on the question of evil came out in 1952: his Answer to Job. White was at first delighted ("the most exciting and moving book I have read in years"). Three months later, however, he asks, with a certain bitterness, how Jung could be so dismissive of the privatio boni doctrine. In the March 1955 Blackfriars he published a "merciless" review, in which he accused Jung of bad faith, ignorance and paranoia, as well as arguing once again in favour of the classical Thomist theology of evil as absence of good. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to Jung, regretting that his attack had become so personal.

In May 1955, however, he wrote to say that he now agreed with Jung's opponents. Jung's theological advisers were "Marcionists or polytheists". While insisting on his affection he now proclaims "our ways must part". He was off to be "a very independent Catholic priest in California".

Over a year later he wrote again, reporting attacks in an Italian journal for his "Jungian" views. Jung did not reply until October 1959. Not until March 1960 was White recovered enough from injuries in a motorcycle accident to be able to write to Jung, who wrote back immediately and again shortly afterwards, enclosing a snapshot and wishing he could come to England.

In May 1960, knowing he was dying, White dictated the final two sad letters. It is unclear whether White understood that Jung loved him and appreciated his help in theological matters, and yet remained entirely unpersuaded on the contentious issue. A story of a friendship, the letters show also that what Jung regarded as his scientifically based psychology was never reconcilable with White's metaphysically grounded Thomist theology.

Although Lammers and Cunningham print all the letters that survive, Clodagh Weldon had access to the White papers in the English Dominican archives for her book. Both books are extensively footnoted (among a few slips Lammers and Cunningham describe the eminent theologian Louis Bouyer as a Jesuit: he was an Oratorian).

In calling White his "white raven", Jung drew on their common interest in alchemy. He hoped that in White he would have a theologian who would transform the Western Christian image of God, to include the Shadow. White could never go so far, for his own theological reasons and not because of ecclesiastical pressures on him. These two excellent books leave the reader with questions that are more intractable than ever as Christianity continues to come to terms with other faiths and their radically different concepts of evil.

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