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Victor White and C. G. Jung the fateful encounter of the White Raven and the Gnostic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Adrian Cunningham
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Extract

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 62 , Issue 733-734 , July 1981 , pp. 320 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Examination of the relationship is also desirable because it has on occasion been badly misunderstood. Laurens van der Post, for instance, (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976 pp 221–2) gives a generally hostile picture of White, and gets his views of the feminine in Christianity and the doctrine of Mary's Assumption quite wrong. Either he has not read White's writings he alludes to on this or he has read them perversely. Whichever, he attributes to White views which are simply the opposite of those he held.

2 Jung, C. G., Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler, vol. I 1906-1950, vol. II 1951-1961Google Scholar (published in 1973 and 1976 respectively), hereafter referred to as Ľ Other references are to materials in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, hereafter cited as ‘CW’. References to White's writings can be traced in the list given at the end of these notes.

3 Jung was fond of citing Cusa in this connexion. As White pointed out, Cusa did not say that God was a coincidence of opposites but that God was ‘beyond’ and beheld in the door of the coincidence of opposites.

4 An excellent account of these difficultites is given by David B. Burrell, in ‘A Psychological Objection: Jung and Privatio Boni’, in his Aquinas, God and Action (1979). He brings out both Jung's shortcomings in philosophical thinking and the intractability of the human experience he is trying to understand, such that one result of Jung's polemic may be to persuade us to restore the powers of evil to their proper place. Burrell stresses Jung's opposition to the liberal ethos dominated by the idea of rational control, in which evil might appear as a lacuna or a mere by‐product of psychological oversight. White touched on this in his final comments on the Job book, “I am profoundly moved by its emotional power, its passionate sincerity, its compassion for the spiritual plight of post‐Christian man, its brilliant flashes of insight” but felt he was wrestling with problems of a past era, memories of cosy Victorian liberal optimism masquerading as Christianity. (1959 a).

5 This is rather different from his view given in the foreword to God and the Unconscious, ‘… apparently the existing empirical material ‐ at least as far as I am concerned with it ‐ permits no decisive conclusion which would point to an archetypal conditioning of the privatio boni.

The following is a list of Victor White's writings relevant to the issues discussed here; there are also passing references in his other papers and reviews of books on psychology and comparative religion which I have not listed.

1941 review: R. Scott Frayn, Revelation and the Unconscious, (Black friars, June).

1942 Frontiers of Theology and Psychology’, Guild of Pastoral Psychology pamphlet 19; revised version in chs 4–5 of God and the Unconscious (hereafter G & U).

1943 review: books by Jolande Jacobi and Rudolf Allers, Black friars, January. Thomism and Affective Knowledge, Black friars, January and April.

1944 a Tasks for Thomists Black friars, March.

b St Thomas and Jung's Psychology Black friars, June.

c Thomism and Affective Knowledge III Black friars, September.

d Walter Hilton, An English Spiritual Guide.

Guild of Pastoral Psychology, pamphlet 31.

e Contribution to H. E. Brierley and others, What the Cross Means to Me, a Theological Symposium.

1945 Psychotherapy and Ethics Black friars August 1945. G & U ch 8.

1947 Anthropologia Rationalis: The Aristotelian‐Thomist Conception of Man. Eranos Jahrbüch XV. This comprises the papers ‘The Aristotelian Conception of Psyche’(G & U ch 6) and St Thomas's Conception of Revelation, a different version appears in Dominican Studies I i (G & U 7).

1948 Analyst and Confessor Commonweal, (G & U 9).

Notes on Gnosticism (Analytical Psychology Club, New York), Guild of Pastoral Psychology pamphlet 59 (G & U 11).

The Unconscious and God (American lectures) G & U 3.

Modern Psychology and the Function of Symbolism Orate Fratres April, and The Life of the Spirit, June 1949.

1949 a Eranos 1947, 1948 Dominican Studies II b Satan ibid.

c The Supernatural ibid.

1950 Devils and Complexes (Aquinas Society Oxford) G & U 10.

The Scandal of the Assumption, Life of the Spirit, November (and in Selection I 1953 ed. Donald Nicholl & Cecily Hastings).

1951 The Dying God BBC G & U 12.

1952 review: Jung Aion Dominican Studies V.

The Unknown God Life of the Spirit August, and (God the Unknown ch. 2). God and the Unconscious.

1955 Kinds of Opposites, Studien zur Analytischen Psychologic C. G. Jung.

Jung on Job Black friars, March and La Vie Spirituelle, Supplement 9, 1956, revised, Soul and Psyche, appendix 5). Two Theologians on Jung's Psychology Blackfriars October.

1956 Guilt, Theological and Psychological in Philip Mairel ed. Christian Essays in Psychiatry.

God the Unknown.

1957 The All Sufficient Sacrifice Life of the Spirit, June (Soul and Psyche appendix 7).

Dogma and Mental Health, 7th Catholic International Congress of Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology, Madrid. Life of the Spirit April 1958.

1958 review: Raymond Hostie, Religion and the Psychology of Jung. Journal of Analytical Psychology January.

1959 review: Jung. Psychology and Religion, West and East (CW 11). Journal of Analytical Psychology, January.

Some Recent Studies in Archetypology Blackfriars, May.

1960 Soul and Psyche.